U.S. Jet That Crashed In Afghanistan Was No Ordinary 'Spy Plane'

[Elderberry]

Radio Free Europe By Ron Synovitz 1/29/2020

When a U.S. Air Force jet crashed on January 27 on a remote plain south of Kabul, killing at least two crew members, it was initially described by the governor of Afghanistan's Ghazni Province as a civilian passenger plane.

Since then, international media have variously described it as a "modified private business jet," a "spy plane," an "electronic surveillance" aircraft, and a hub for "WiFi in the sky."

It was one of just four Bombardier E-11As that were purchased by the U.S. Air Force and "outfitted with a suite of signals intelligence and signals transfer capabilities" known as the Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (BACN), Aboulafia says.

GlobalSecurity.org, a U.S. based security think tank, says the U.S. Air Force developed the E-11As BACN payload in response to "communications shortfalls" that led to a 2005 battlefield disaster for U.S. forces in northern Afghanistan.

The U.S. military has rejected Taliban claims that its fighters shot down the E-11A in Ghazni Province, saying the cause of the crash is still under investigation but that there is no sign it was shot down.

Rather than a widespread field of debris, the footage shows the plane's upright fuselage still connected with the tail section -- suggesting it had made a crash landing rather than being downed by a rocket or antiaircraft fire.

More: https://www.rferl.org/a/afghanistan-crashed-us-jet-spy-plane/30405496.html

[TomSea]

A U.S. Plane Crashed in Afghanistan. Why So Many Believed a CIA Chief Was On It.
Kimberly Dozier

A combination of bad weather and Taliban gunfire kept U.S. and Afghan forces from reaching the site for more than a day. By the time the U.S. military put out a brief statement saying that the downed plane carried two U.S. Air Force pilots, the dubious story had spread around the globe.

After a couple of fringy Iranian and pro-Kremlin news outlets reported that Michael D’Andrea, head of the CIA’s Iran Mission Center, was onboard the E-11A communications jet, the story was picked up in The Daily Mail, a major British tabloid, and a second British newspaper, The Independent, carried the news of D’Andrea’s alleged demise to London, albeit with some skepticism. While the Pentagon confirmed to TIME on Friday that there were only two Air Force officers on the plane, none of the official public statements say they were the only passengers. And the CIA has refused to comment on whether D’Andrea or any other CIA personnel were onboard.

The U.S. military says it could not have gotten the news out sooner. But the Iranian version of events that circulated in the information vacuum had people inside and outside the U.S. wondering who to believe. The Trump Administration’s now-familiar pattern of slow, incomplete and sometimes disingenuous responses to events has ground down public and internal trust of its messaging and created an opportunity for adversaries like Iran and Russia to spread disinformation and sow confusion among allies and U.S. officials. The wrong information can spread about an event whether it happened on a remote Afghan mountainside or a maximum-security American compound. “If false reports are not authoritatively or convincingly disproven, they can take on a life of their own,” James Cunningham, former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan told TIME. “Once that happens, it’s very hard to undo that.”

Read more at: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/a-us-plane-crashed-in-afghanistan-why-so-many-believed-a-cia-chief-was-on-it/ar-BBZx184

One is not going "tin foil hat" if they found the whole episode a bit odd. Remember,  first reports were that an Afghan airliner crashed. So, this whole episode was a bit unusual and with everything that has happened this year?