ARLINGTON, Va. — American defense officials expressed surprise this week after a mission to rescue a downed Air Force weapons systems officer in Iran succeeded despite the involvement of the CIA, sources confirmed today.

“We were absolutely thrilled to find the colonel and bring him home safely,” Brig. Gen. Jarven Walker said in a press briefing. "Especially considering the complexity of the operation and the CIA doing everything it could to fuck it up.”

According to defense officials, CIA personnel inserted themselves into planning meetings shortly after learning a U.S. aircraft had been shot down.

“We’d been working the problem for hours,” one official said. “Then CIA showed up and announced they had breaking intelligence that a jet had been shot down. Which, to be fair, was new information to them.”

After presenting what sources described as “extremely confident summaries of things already on Twitter,” CIA officials reportedly urged the Pentagon to pause rescue efforts in favor of “developing additional options," such as capturing an Iranian soldier and inserting a feeding tube into his rectum.

“They kept asking if we could destabilize something while we were out there anyway,” the source said. “Then they suggested we might be dealing with moderate rebels. So naturally they recommended arming everyone in the area just to be safe.”

The CIA’s assessment concluded that local forces were “potentially hostile, potentially friendly, or possibly neutral,” a finding officials described as “comprehensive.”