WASHINGTON ⁠— The U.S. military drone Iran shot down near the Persian Gulf on June 20 likely didn’t stray into Iranian airspace, as the Iranians claimed it had, according to several former senior officials. But had it done so, it would not have been the first U.S. drone to fly into Iran, according to two of those officials.

“Have drones gone into Iranian airspace? Absolutely,” said a retired senior military official. “They have been deliberate [incursions], and they have been accidental.”

Incursions have occurred during the past four years, but “not all that often,” this official said, adding that the encroachments into Iranian airspace had not increased under the Trump administration. “This stuff goes back a long time,” he said.

A former U.S. Central Command official said he was aware of accidental drone incursions into Iranian airspace between 2013 and 2016. “Those one or two instances were by error,” the official said. “Those were innocent circumstances.”

The Iranians did not respond aggressively on those occasions, the former Central Command official said, noting that “communication protocols” existed between U.S. and Iranian forces to mitigate the risks inherent in such episodes. Nonetheless, Central Command took the episodes seriously, according to the former official. “That would warrant at least an emailed notification to the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and through the chairman probably to the [defense secretary],” he said.

Neither the retired senior military official nor the former Central Command official was able to be more specific about when the incursions happened. Without that information, Central Command spokesman Navy Capt. Bill Urban said he unwilling to provide any detailed response to a query from Yahoo News. “If your intention is to report on nonspecific allegations of incursions by unnamed sources, then I am not going to lend additional credibility to your story through further comment,” Urban said.

In addition to the occasional mistaken flight into Iranian airspace, there are strong indications that the United States also deliberately flies stealth drones over Iran to collect intelligence. The clearest evidence of this is a December 2011 incident in which Iran brought down and then displayed a RQ-170 drone that had been flying a secret mission for the CIA through its airspace.

View photos The purported wreckage of an American drone is displayed in Tehran, Iran, June 21, 2019. (Photo: Meghdad Madadi/Tasnim News Agency/Handout via Reuters) More

The missions over the Persian Gulf of the sort flown by the drone Iran shot down on June 20 are the only U.S. drone missions involving Iran that are not classified, according to a former senior Pentagon official. “The only thing I could really talk about without violating classification is the tracks that were being run up and down the coast of Iran,” the former senior Pentagon official said. “Everything else is more or less classified and I can’t really talk about it.”

The CIA drone flights are “a very close-held program,” said a former senior Central Command official. If the CIA was flying drone missions into Iran from airspace controlled by the United States, such as that over Afghanistan, it would give the U.S. military’s Combined Air Operations Center, or CAOC (pronounced “kay-okk”), the minimum information required to ensure that no U.S. military flights interfered with them or crashed into them, according to the former senior Central Command official. That could be accomplished by giving the CIA a window in time and space through which U.S. military would not fly aircraft. “The other agencies might have discrete windows where they’re allowed to fly and then they would have zones where they would operate where U.S. military aircraft would not operate,” he said. “They want to make sure they have complete autonomy to move the platform wherever they want to move it and keep [the military] out.”

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