Oops is, once again, a CIA term

Rick Gladstone has an article in The New York Times about Iran and our wayward drone:

Seizing on its capture of a downed CIA stealth drone as an intelligence and propaganda windfall, Iran displayed the first images of the aircraft on state television and lodged an official diplomatic protest over its incursion into Iranian airspace.
The 2.5-minute video clip of the remote-control surveillance aircraft was the first visual proof to emerge that Iran had possession of the drone since Iran claimed that its military downed the aircraft. American officials have since confirmed that controllers of the aircraft, based in neighboring Afghanistan, had lost contact with it.
The drone, which appeared to be in good condition, was shown displayed on a platform, with photos of Iran’s revolutionary ayatollahs on the wall behind it and a desecrated version of the American flag, with what appeared to be skulls instead of stars, underneath its left wing.
Broadcast of the footage coincided with Iran’s announcement that it had formally protested  what it called the violation of Iranian airspace by the spy drone. Because Iran and the United States have no direct diplomatic relations, Iran made its complaint by summoning the ambassador from Switzerland, which manages American interests in Iran.
American officials have identified the missing drone as an RQ-170 Sentinel, an unarmed bat-winged aircraft used by the CIA that can linger undetected for hours at fifty thousand feet, far higher than most aircraft can fly, with cameras and other sensor equipment to monitor what is  on the ground below. An RQ-170 was used to gather intelligence for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani safe house  earlier this year.
The loss of an RQ-170 in Iran is a potentially significant intelligence blow for the United States, which has been stepping up efforts to monitor suspected nuclear sites there.  In early November, a United Nations report said that Iran may be actively working on a nuclear weapon and a missile delivery system for it. Iran insists its nuclear program is peaceful; it denounced the UN report as a "fabrication" and a pretext for military intervention by the United States and its allies.
Iran’s leaders, who have been increasingly isolated diplomatically over the nuclear issue, point to the aircraft  as evidence of American hostile intentions toward Iran. On state television, the video clip was narrated by a voice saying that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and army had “collaborated to shoot down the plane”.  The unidentified narrator gave the drone’s  dimensions as 26 meters (about 85 feet) from wingtip to wingtip, 4.5 meters (15 feet) from nose to tail and about one meter (3 feet) in thickness. The narrator also said the aircraft had  “electronic surveillance systems and various radars”  and was “a very advanced piece of technology”.
In what appeared to be an attempt to explain the aircraft’s undamaged appearance, a Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, identified as Amir Ali Hajizadeh, says in the video that the drone “was detected by Iranian radars as soon as it entered Iranian airspace and was brought down by Iran’s military systems with the minimum damage possible”. Nonetheless, it remains unclear how the American controllers of the aircraft lost contact with it and how it ended up, seemingly intact, on the ground in Iran. American officials have not specified where it was lost; Iran’s state-run press has said that it landed near the town of Kashmar, about 140 miles from the Afghanistan border.
RQ-170 flights were among the most secret of the CIA's intelligence gathering efforts in Iran, according to American experts and officials who have been briefed about them.

Rico says it ain't very secret now, is it? The real story of how it ended up in Iranian hands will come out eventually, and will surely prove fascinating...