Ex-CIA chief says agency ran deception op to rescue airman from Iran

Former CIA station chief Dan Hoffman said on “The Sunday Briefing” that an agency deception campaign could have helped draw Iranian forces away from a missing U.S. airman, offering new insight into the mission that resulted in a daring rescue behind enemy lines.

It was reported that the CIA tried to fool the Iranians into believing the United States was preparing for a maritime rescue, Hoffman said, when in reality the aviator was exfiltrated from the mountains.

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Smoke rises after explosions hit the northeast, west and central areas during Israeli attacks in Tehran, Iran, April 1, 2026. (Tolga Akbaba/Anadolu)

The CIA also helped track down the missing airman and enemy forces, he said.

“The CIA was there to track down [the airman’s] location… And then at the same time, the CIA is tracking the Iranian security forces, their movements, their efforts to find and locate our aviator. And then, at the same time, carrying out this deception operation, an extraordinary operation.”

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A US F-15 fighter jet reportedly crashed over Iran’s Khuzestan province on April 3, 2026. (EarthStar Geography)

“I’ve heard of looking for a needle in a haystack. I think it’s more like a needle in a stack of needles. Extraordinarily difficult,” Hoffman said.

His comments follow the rescue early Sunday morning of a US Air Force weapons systems officer (WSO) who had ejected from his F-15E fighter jet over Iran. The WSO spent approximately 36 hours in hiding. Hoffman said he would have to rely on the skills he learned at the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school.

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On the intelligence side, Hoffman said the strategy could have been much simpler. The CIA just needed to spread the fake news where it knew Iran would hear it.

“The CIA would have sought to find the communications channels that we know can exploit and that the Iranian security forces are listening to. Iran has a fairly developed cyber capability. And what we would have done is simply provide information, some of which is true, to establish the bona fides of the channel that we were using, and then this deception operation would have been conducted through that channel,” Hoffman said.