There is a peculiar category of national humiliation that transcends the merely embarrassing and ascends to something approaching art. Britain knows it well — we once lost the American colonies while simultaneously inventing the sandwich, which historians have ranked as a draw. But Iran, during the extraordinary events of early April 2026, has achieved something we must acknowledge with a begrudging tip of the hat: a propaganda catastrophe so thorough, so layered, so magnificently self-defeating at every turn, that the world can only stand back, pour a proper cup of tea, and applaud.
Two American airmen are alive and home. The CIA ran a deception operation worthy of a John le Carré novel. U.S. Army special operations extracted a wounded colonel from a mountain crevice in southwestern Iran. And through all of it, Iran’s state media was busy announcing simultaneously that the pilots couldn’t have survived, had already been captured, hadn’t been found, should be shot on sight, should be captured alive for a reward, and definitely shouldn’t be mistreated.
This is not a propaganda strategy. This is jazz. And not good jazz.
Five Positions, Zero Credibility, Infinite Audacity
When the F-15E Strike Eagle from the 494th Fighter Squadron was shot down over Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province on April 3rd, Iran’s information apparatus went to work with the energy of a man who has just reversed into a bollard and is now checking all directions simultaneously to see who witnessed it.
Iran’s armed forces announced the crew could not have ejected due to “the massive explosion.” Iranian state TV urged viewers to shoot the crew on sight. The provincial governor offered 10 billion tomans — approximately £48,000, or fractionally less than the asking price of a reasonably specified Volkswagen Golf in Basingstoke — to anyone who captured them alive. The IRGC announced they had already taken at least one into custody. The regional IRGC leadership then denied this. The Iranian armed forces issued a separate statement urging people “NOT TO LET anyone mistreat the pilot.” The governor called the confirmed rescue of the first crewman “a tactic of the enemy.”
These positions were not issued sequentially, as a government revising its assessment in light of new information. They were issued simultaneously, in real time, as a chorus of contradiction so complete it could only have been achieved by a committee with no chairman, no agenda, and a very unfortunate deadline.
As Frankie Boyle might observe: “It’s impressive, in the way that watching a man fall down an escalator is impressive. You keep expecting it to stop, but there’s always another floor.”
The F-35 Incident, or: Counting Is Hard Under Pressure
IRGC spokesman Ebrahim Zolfaghari, addressing a watching world via Press TV, announced that Iran had downed a “second US fifth-generation F-35.” The wreckage photographs, which Iran also published, clearly showed an F-15E — identifiable by the red tail markings of the 494th Fighter Squadron, a unit based at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, England, which is the sort of detail that rather complicates Keir Starmer’s insistence that this is “not our war.”
The F-35 is a single-seat stealth aircraft. The F-15E carries two crew. Iran was searching for two people. Iran had announced they’d shot down a single-seat aircraft. The numbers did not reconcile, and Iran quietly revised the record in the manner of a student who submits the wrong essay and hopes the professor doesn’t compare dates.
This is not a minor slip. Identifying your own kill correctly is rather foundational to the entire exercise of claiming it. One imagines the debrief was awkward.
The Bangladeshi Paraglider: A Masterwork of the Wrong Archive
Unable to locate the actual American colonel — who was at that moment hiding wounded in what U.S. officials diplomatically described as “a mountain crevice,” being tracked by CIA capabilities so classified they are referred to only as “unique capabilities” — Iran’s information networks circulated a video purporting to show “The American pilot in the custody of the Sons of Haidar al-Karrar.”
BBC Verify journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh identified the footage within hours. It was a Bangladeshi paraglider who had accidentally drifted into Pakistani airspace during the India-Pakistan conflict of May 2025. A different nationality. A different conflict. A different country. Eleven months earlier.
Snopes confirmed it as false. The video was removed. The colonel remained in his crevice. The CIA found him. American special forces extracted him. U.S. jets struck Iranian troops to clear the route. Israel cancelled its own planned operations to avoid disrupting the rescue effort.
The Bangladeshi paraglider, for his part, is presumably unaware he briefly served as Iran’s star prisoner of war in a conflict he had no involvement in and was not present for. One hopes he is well.
The Boy Who Cried Shootdown — Then Actually Did It
Perhaps the most quietly devastating element of this entire affair is the wolf problem. According to Stars and Stripes, Iran made at least six false claims of shooting down American aircraft during Operation Epic Fury. CENTCOM denied each one. The day before the genuine shootdown — April 2nd — Tasnim News Agency announced Iran had downed a “sophisticated US-Israeli enemy fighter jet” over Qeshm Island. CENTCOM replied with the exhausted precision of a teacher correcting the same student’s maths for the sixth time: “All U.S. fighter aircraft are accounted for.”
Then, on April 3rd, Iran shot down an F-15E, damaged an A-10 Warthog performing rescue escort duties, and hit two HH-60W rescue helicopters — all in one day.
Having been disbelieved six times, Iran’s seventh announcement was treated by much of the world with the scepticism it had so carefully cultivated. The genuine military achievement — and it was, technically, a genuine military achievement, in the same way that the stopped clock is genuinely right twice daily — landed with the credibility of a man who has spent the week telling you his grandmother is dying to get out of social obligations, and whose grandmother has then actually died.
The lesson, as Jack Dee would recognise, is that credibility, once spent, does not refund.
The Bounty That Would Not Cover School Fees
The governor of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province offered 10 billion tomans for the capture of the crew alive. The Iranian state television anchor called them “Zionist-American pilots” while announcing the prize. Armed tribesmen mobilised into the mountains. Locals drove private cars to the crash site. Mehr News Agency published footage of “brave locals firing at U.S. helicopters.”
The bounty converts to approximately $60,000 to $70,000 at current exchange rates — or, in sterling, somewhere in the region of £48,000 to £55,000. That is to say: not enough to purchase a detached property anywhere in England, not enough to cover two years of school fees at a middling independent school, and approximately what a Londoner might spend on a two-bedroom flat deposit in Slough, if they were feeling optimistic about Slough.
The colonel, wounded, evaded all of them for over thirty hours in mountainous terrain before U.S. forces extracted him. The bounty went unclaimed. The civilian manhunt dispersed. The $60,000 remains, presumably, in the provincial budget.
Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf’s Contribution to the Record
Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf posted on X, with what must have felt at the time like tremendous timing:
“After defeating Iran 37 times in a row, this brilliant no-strategy war they started has now been downgraded from ‘regime change’ to ‘Hey! Can anyone find our pilots? Please?’ Wow. What incredible progress. Absolute geniuses.”
He posted this before the rescues were confirmed.
Both crew members were subsequently confirmed rescued. Trump posted “WE GOT HIM!” on Truth Social at approximately 5 o’clock on Easter morning. The post ran to several hundred words and included the phrase “HAPPY EASTER TO ALL!” in capital letters.
Ghalibaf’s post remains on X, preserved in amber, visible to anyone with a browser and fifteen seconds to spare. The internet’s particular gift is that mockery, once issued, must be lived with in perpetuity. Ghalibaf’s tweet aged in the manner of a forecaster who has promised sunshine on the morning it snows: meteorologically, it’s interesting; politically, it’s a permanent exhibit.
The Lakenheath Problem Keir Starmer Would Prefer You Not Dwell On
The F-15E that was shot down — the one that precipitated the most dramatic combat search-and-rescue operation in recent American military history — was assigned to the 494th Fighter Squadron “Panthers,” based at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk. Deployed to Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, yes, but home-based in England, operated from British soil under the longstanding arrangements that allow American forces to use British bases.
Prime Minister Starmer has said, with the confidence of a man reading from a card, that “this is not our war.” A YouGov poll found that only 8 per cent of British voters supported joining U.S. and Israeli airstrikes. Jeremy Corbyn called it “illegal, unprovoked and unjustifiable.” Labour MP Brian Leishman described Trump as a “megalomaniac sociopath,” which is not the standard diplomatic register but does represent a certain directness.
The plane that started all of this flew from a British base. Only 8 per cent of Britons knew they wanted to be involved. Forty-seven per cent said Starmer had handled the war badly. Steve Reed told Parliament that a vote was unnecessary because there is “no precedent.” The Stop the War Coalition marched. Lindsey German called on Starmer to “break with the US entirely.”
Meanwhile, American Pararescuemen — motto: “That Others May Live” — were performing hoist extractions under fire over Iranian mountains from helicopters based, ultimately, in Suffolk. Britain’s non-involvement has rarely been so geographically inconvenient.
What Actually Happened, For Those Keeping Track
On April 3rd 2026, an F-15E Strike Eagle from the 494th Fighter Squadron was shot down over southwestern Iran during Operation Epic Fury — the American military campaign against Iran that began on February 28th. Both crew ejected safely. The pilot was rescued hours later by Air Force Pararescuemen in HH-60W helicopters, supported by HC-130J aircraft and an AC-130J Ghostrider gunship. The weapon systems officer, identified only as a colonel, evaded Iranian forces for over thirty hours whilst wounded, hiding in mountain terrain, before CIA operations located him and U.S. Army special operations extracted him on the night of April 4th to 5th. Israeli forces cancelled planned strikes to avoid compromising the rescue effort. American jets conducted strikes on Iranian forces during extraction. President Trump announced the rescue Easter morning with characteristic restraint. Iran, which had simultaneously declared the crew dead, captured, missing, and to be shot, watched both men return home. The bounty went uncollected. Ghalibaf’s tweet remained. The Bangladeshi paraglider remained, one assumes, safely in Bangladesh.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
SOURCE
https://medium.com/@londons.prat/trump-wins-again-labour-is-furious-adb1984a40e2
