In this episode, recorded during a BICOM media briefing, Daniel J. Levy speaks with Jonathan W. Hackett about the global reach of Iran’s intelligence and covert operations. Jonathan explains how the IRGC’s external apparatus evolved after 2009, outlines the shift from professionalised intelligence structures to more erratic and decentralised operations, and assesses the risks posed by Iranian networks. He also discusses the limitations of sanctions and the implications of proscribing the IRGC under UK counter-terror legislation.
Jonathan W. Hackett is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer with 20 years’ experience in signals, HUMINT and counterintelligence, and has served with the National Security Agency, the Defence Intelligence Agency, and Special Operations Command. He is the author of Iran’s Shadow Weapons: Covert Action, Intelligence Operations and Unconventional Warfare and The Theory of Irregular Warfare.
Transcript
(This transcript has been automatically generated by AI — please excuse any potential errors.)
00:00:00:00 – 00:00:25:03
Hello and welcome to the Bike On podcast. I’m Daniel J. Levy, programs manager, and today is 28th October 2025. Just on Sunday, Mossad uncovered an IRGC could sports network, which been targeting Jewish Jews and Israelis in Australia, Germany and Greece. While MI5’s director general recently confirmed that the past year alone had seen 20 foiled Iranian plots in the UK.
00:00:25:05 – 00:00:58:22
The Iranian threat is growing and today we’re joined by Jonathan Hackett for briefing on their external operations. A United States Marine Corps veteran, Jonathan served for 20 years specializing in signals and human intelligence, counterintelligence, agent handling and interrogation with attachments to the National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and special operations units. He also participated in operations around the world and is the author of two recent books, Iran’s Shadow Weapons Covert Action Intelligence Operations and Unconventional Warfare and The Theory of Irregular Warfare.
00:00:58:23 – 00:01:19:17
So, Jonathan, over to you. Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. The opportunity to talk. Yeah. The theory of regular war is that my first book, and that’s more theoretical, obviously, by the title. But the Iran’s Shadow Weapons is the one that, I think the audience might enjoy hearing more about today.
00:01:19:19 – 00:01:39:22
And, that one takes more of a realist approach when we think about states as black boxes operating against each other. I think if we if we want to solve the Iran problem, we have to take a very rational look at it. And that means being honest with ourselves about all of the information available, not just what Iran is doing, but what every other state is doing and how Iran is reacting to.
00:01:39:22 – 00:02:09:08
Those states. And states have long memories and all these kind of things. And, especially looking at Iran versus Israel, there’s a lot of history to that. That’s not just Iran, Israel history, it’s also UK history, US history, Russian history. And Israel came into that later on. But Iran continues to kind of bundle these things together, these states together, and look at them as a monolith, but with nuance, just as Iran also has nuance.
00:02:09:08 – 00:02:39:13
And I think that that nuance is very important if we want to get to the bottom of what’s going on and how do we reduce tension, how do we reduce threat? And of course, to reduce threat, you have to know what the threat actually is. We just talked about the, the 20 detention plots. There’s a long spectrum of what a plot is that could be surveillance just to see what’s going on all the way to assassination and kidnaping planning, which, of course, is, you know, requires more steps.
00:02:39:13 – 00:03:01:04
Essentially, all of those targeting operations require usually surveillance to start. And that’s why surveillance is the easiest thing to catch when we’re looking at what Iran is doing in UK or in Europe or in the United States, and also in other places, like in Latin America, where there’s a lot of Iran surveillance in Africa and that’s when Iran is the most exposed.
00:03:01:06 – 00:03:21:19
But a lot of things are happening that we don’t see, especially in countries like, for example, Senegal or Ecuador or Thailand. And the reason I mentioned those countries specifically is because when we zoom out and look at this as a realist, we have to think about what targeting opportunities does Iran have within the constraints that the world has put on it?
00:03:21:21 – 00:03:50:03
And those countries are countries Iran can travel to. Iranians can travel to without a visa, which makes it much easier for them to go in and out of those countries, to meet with sources, to meet with recruited agents that are sometimes Iranian, sometimes not. Sometimes the children of Iranians. So there’s different target types, but it’s easy to have those third country meetings in places like Singapore or Indonesia versus the actual target country like Israel or the UK or the United States.
00:03:50:05 – 00:04:10:14
And they’ve been doing this for quite some time. And there have been changes in Iran’s strategy over time. But you can’t really change tradecraft. You know, surveillance is surveillance. There are very specific ways to do it. There’s very specific indicators that someone’s doing it. There’s very specific indicators at which point they are in the process when you see it happening,
00:04:10:14 – 00:04:16:19
for example, if we look at, you know, in in the UK, there’s a lot of history in Israel is also a lot of history.
00:04:16:21 – 00:04:36:11
And Iran is trying to look at those states as one target set. But that’s not the target set that the regime wants to actually go after. If it had all the freedom it could have. The number one target that Iran has is Iranians, because Iran is concerned about domestic politics first. And domestic politics in Iran are very contentious.
00:04:36:13 – 00:04:57:18
Very small proportion of Iranians actually want the regime in power, maybe less than 5%. The rest of them have varying political views. But one thing they have in common is they do not want the regime in power. And that’s true for Iranians inside and outside the country. And the regime has done a lot because there’s a lot of freedom in its own country to repress dissidents in Iran.
00:04:57:20 – 00:05:31:04
But when those dissidents are outside Iran, it’s much harder to repress them. And you see this with a lot of these plots in Europe, there are a lot of assassination and kidnaping plots that have luckily been thwarted. But those plots are generally not targeting Westerners always, or Jews always or Israelis always. Usually they’re actually targeting Iranians like the Asma, which is the, Southwestern Iranian dissident movement, or the Kurds, like PJC or the Mujahideen Khalq, which is the number one target of the regime inside and outside of Iran.
00:05:31:06 – 00:05:54:16
And it also helps, has helped in the past to enable some Mossad operations in Israel or in Iran. And the regime kind of links those two actors together. In that sense, there’s other groups like Kamala Jendela, which is the Baluchi movement. All around the world, and the regime basically is working to identify and capture or kill members of these groups.
00:05:54:18 – 00:06:25:02
That is the number one priority of the regime. But in a political realism situation, it’s not just Iran and dissidents, instead it’s Iran and other states. And then there are dissidents between there and Iran has to react to a lot of what the other states are doing. And as far as pressuring and, allowing them to continue. And so a big change we saw, especially in 2009, a lot of these inflection points in Iranian external operations are tied to dissident movements inside Iran.
00:06:25:02 – 00:06:54:17
So, for example, in the late 90s, there was a lot of student protests, the regime change, the way that it was actually doing operations outside the country because of those protests. But the really big change came in 2009 during the Jan Bashi subs, which is the Green Revolution, where many people took to the streets and the regime immediately began shooting people live rounds, killing protesters, capturing protesters, disappearing people, torturing them, making them do forced confessions on television on a wide, wide scale.
00:06:54:17 – 00:07:15:04
And I think we had not seen this before. But until you look back to the very early days of the revolution, this was a very scary time for the regime’s survival, which caused them to change their calculus. And what they did was there was a group called Badger, which in the West we call the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or MlS, but it’s actually called Badger in Farsi.
00:07:15:04 – 00:07:44:06
It’s an acronym. Badger had been doing all these external and some internal operations up to 2009, and the regime saw that Badger was not doing what the regime wanted, which was keeping dissidents completely suppressed. And so they downgraded Badgers position and elevated the IRGC position. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, specifically the intelligence. At first it was a department, then it was elevated up into, a much larger directorate.
00:07:44:08 – 00:08:05:00
And this is a human intelligence and special operations directorate separate from the Quds Force. You know, we see could because of course, in the news a lot, but it’s actually the intelligence Department that we should be more concerned about. Quds force is kind of like the Joint Special Operations Command in the United States or the SAS, and in the UK specifically focused on kinetic outcomes, which are on their own, terrible.
00:08:05:00 – 00:08:32:15
But we think about the broader picture of all human intelligence going on in the background. That gets us to those strikes, or effects. And the Intelligence Department is responsible for almost all of them. In 2009. That’s when the regime elevated that department to now take over national level intelligence operations outside the country, external operations. And you can see a big difference between how Vajra used to operate and how the IRGC intelligence department operates.
00:08:32:15 – 00:08:57:17
Now, Vajra was much more professionalized. It was more like MI5. Where am I or the CIA or the FBI had a, you know, very defined structure, very defined mission sets, very clear training and selection pipeline. They had very clear targets. They used official and unofficial cover. They had embassy stations. They had business, you know, commercial use of cover and things like that that were very, very normal in the international sense of things.
00:08:57:19 – 00:09:25:10
The IRGC was not like that. The IRGC was relatively sloppier. And you can see that with a lot of the thwarted operations that they’ve done in the United States, there were a couple that were almost, you know, embarrassingly poor in execution. And there have been some others as well, you know, in 2012, after Israel targeted some nuclear scientists, the IRGC tried to react to that, and it ended up having where some of the plotters blew off their own legs using homemade explosives.
00:09:25:10 – 00:09:51:14
You had people running off on the street and getting hit by cars while they’re trying to run away, you know, just kind of these hijinx that are not like it was before 2009. And that’s again because there’s a different organization running the external operations. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean that we should worry less. In fact, I would say we should worry more because we have less certainty about what is the IRGC actually going to do, because there are a lot more hotheads making decisions now than there were before 2009.
00:09:51:16 – 00:10:16:19
There’s a lot less ability to predict what the outcome of this surveillance that we might identify would be used for. There’s also less reliance on the very clear dichotomy between official and non-official cover. And as I said, that’s a very traditional thing that every, every country all over the world uses this dichotomy. It was the Vienna Convention in 1961 that made this a legal thing for every country.
00:10:16:19 – 00:10:40:24
Everyone does this. The IRGC, though, is using non-official cover a lot more, but they do still use some official cover. For example, Kassim Soleimani had two black diplomatic passports. Esmail Ghani, the current leader of good sports, has three black passports. Diplomatic passports. The head of the central Bank of Iran has a diplomatic passport that he uses to travel to the United States to Washington, DC to talk to the International Monetary Foundation.
00:10:41:01 – 00:11:10:02
You know, so they’re at the at the higher echelons of government and touching into the Intel department, there are some people still using diplomatic status, but a lot of it is businesses, these either shell companies or what you might call information operations centered companies, you know, like the media. And what they’re trying to do is establish a presence in countries and have kind of on the shelf plans so that if something happens that they see as threatening, they can pull a plan off the shelf and execute it.
00:11:10:02 – 00:11:32:24
So, for example, in 2012, when a lot of these plots were uncovered by the IRA that the IRGC was doing against Israel, a lot of these plots were kind of in the early stages, and it wasn’t clear what the outcomes were supposed to be. And that’s a that’s kind of a hallmark of just, you know, mission planning, where they weren’t quite sure what they wanted to do at the end, but they wanted to have a specific type of operation ready.
00:11:33:01 – 00:11:49:23
And then when the target arrived, they said, oh, we want to target this guy. We hadn’t thought about that before, but now we want to target this guy. But we have this plan on the shelf. Let’s pull it off and execute it. Problem with that is if you’re not planning based on what your target ultimately is from the very beginning, you’re going to end up making a lot of mistakes.
00:11:49:23 – 00:12:23:17
And that’s what we see with the IRGC all around the world is making a lot of mistakes, very sloppy. But again, this reflects that domestic political priority change where this, you know, very well defined apparatus, the larger an institutional intelligence agency just wasn’t getting it done as far as smashing dissidents. And as they were subsumed by IRGC, the IRGC did smash dissidents, did it with a, you know, they stick, but it’s not a very precise method.
00:12:23:19 – 00:12:56:08
Now, the problem is, as far as IRGC is concerned, their efficacy is pretty poor. But their operations are more obvious. They leave a lot more tracks, which makes a little bit easier to not only exploit or neutralize their operations, but also to recruit agents in place or double agents inside the IRGC, which we’ve seen Mossad has done with great efficacy, especially in the in the previous in the June War, much of the work on the ground in Iran was not Israeli operatives.
00:12:56:13 – 00:13:15:13
In Iran, it was Iranians that had been recruited by various entities within Israel to work against the regime. And again, as I mentioned, the regime is not well liked, and there are probably a lot of people that even work in the regime that don’t want to be they don’t they don’t want completely aligned outcomes with what the regime wants.
00:13:15:13 – 00:13:46:13
Some of them do, some of them don’t. Then you’ve got the artist versus the IRGC, the artist is the army in Iran. The IRGC is a military force that supports only the regime. And that’s an important distinction because the artist is a several hundred thousand person strong military force that many of them don’t support the regime. But what their mission is, is to support the homeland defence, whereas the IRGC mission is to support the regime only, which is this tiny group of folks that are very powerful in the country.
00:13:46:15 – 00:14:02:14
And I always say that, you know, if there was a revolution or an invasion of Iraq on that day or the next day, you probably see a lot of people turning their weapons on the regime. So I only mention that to say that it’s kind of a target rich environment where there are a lot of people that have varying motivations.
00:14:02:14 – 00:14:41:02
A lot of Iranians inside Iran have very moderate motivations that are targetable by outside intelligence operations. So the regime knows this. So it makes the regime a lot more concerned about how to tamp down this threat. Because, you know, imagine if you’re working in an office building and the guy right down the hallway from you, you’re not sure if he’s working with you or against you, you know, and I think that’s part of the success of the Mossad operations, is that it’s not only having kinetic effects, but also spreading a little bit of fear and concern and distrust among the IRGC operatives who I mentioned are already the decision makers are already a little
00:14:41:02 – 00:15:04:18
bit hot-headed. And so that has an even deeper effect on what they’re doing, which makes their operations even more exposed many times because they’re rushing to get things done. Where in the past Russia wasn’t doing that, you know, using long term planning and traditional tradecraft. Additionally, another important development, we talk a lot about surrogate forces and proxy forces.
00:15:04:20 – 00:15:31:11
That was a lot more of a controlled thing in the 80s and 90s. And as the IRGC developed with the Quds Force, which is their outside Iran special operations entity, Quds Force also worked with a lot of surrogates. So you had this kind of like divergent, pathway that Bhajan IRGC were taking their surrogate forces, and the Quds Force has these different regional departments.
00:15:31:11 – 00:15:53:21
And the very first Quds Force deployment was in the 19, in 1993 to Bosnia, where the US was actually working with Kus Force Partners, which was the Kosovo Liberation Army and other entities within the Balkans. And you have to think about that was 13 years after the revolution. So because force hadn’t had any surrogate forces before that, Borgia had 13 years to work on that.
00:15:53:23 – 00:16:18:10
Varga. And as we know with the bombings in Buenos Aires, like at the Amir, centre, those were Varga directed operations, not IRGC directed operations. And the reason I mention that is because if you look at the amount of planning that Varga put into that, the amount of distance Varga put between itself and the actors, how difficult it has been to show very clear evidence of many different connections, even though they exist.
00:16:18:10 – 00:16:46:00
It’s hard to actually show that because they put the planning into it, to make it so they could obscure the connection between themselves and the Hezbollah and other operatives that blew up these facilities. And the actual Varga chief of station in Buenos Aires was the one controlling that that attack or those two attacks. And, you know, fast forward to once codes for started doing these things, and the IRGC intelligence Department started doing these things, you don’t see that kind of traditional framework for controlling surrogates.
00:16:46:00 – 00:17:14:09
Instead, it’s more of providing legal aid, providing early training, and then a free hand and kind of letting the surrogates pick their targets, which ends up with a lot of mistakes and kind of thwarted outcomes. And there was one in the United States in 2013 that was thwarted when, a gentleman named our Bob Kerr is a huge car salesman in Texas, tried to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, DC at a restaurant while he eat dinner.
00:17:14:11 – 00:17:33:02
That plot was exposed because there was a DEA source that was working with drug related issues with the United States who saw this, this Iranian gentleman from Texas trying to get weapons and people to assassinate, a diplomat and that that, you know, drug source basically said, I don’t want anything to do with this. And so he told his DEA handler about it.
00:17:33:02 – 00:17:56:17
We were able to stop it. And it was, again, one of those hijinx type operations where there are all kinds of crazy mistakes made along the way and silly decisions from an operational planning perspective. But if you look at the IRGC connection, this was an IRGC operation. You look at the IRGC connection. It was a low level lieutenant colonel in the IRGC that was handling this operation, and it was very little input.
00:17:56:17 – 00:18:15:04
In fact, there were only a few communications between the two of them over the long period of time that this planning was going on. And basically all that happened was an outreach and initial outreach cold contact to Arbabsiar some instructions were given. Arbabsiar said he wanted money. He was, you know, he went to strip clubs. He was an alcoholic.
00:18:15:04 – 00:18:41:03
He had all kinds of issues. And he saw this as his solution to his life problem. And the IRGC was very happy to make him think that they would fix this problem by giving him cash and other things to help him. So he agreed to do it. And there were very few communications after that very decentralized, which maybe to the handler seemed like a good idea because there would be less links between the IRGC and the outcome.
00:18:41:05 – 00:19:01:22
But here we are talking about the direct links between the IRGC. We saw it, and it turned out very badly for that operation. Luckily for us and for the target, nobody was harmed. But, you know, if, if this was a larger operation, this might have gone a lot differently. So in some ways, we’re kind of lucky that budget was sidelined.
00:19:01:24 – 00:19:45:08
And, you know, unfortunately, yes, there are still plots going on. Some people are still being harmed, killed, assassinated, kidnaped. But I think that it’s much less than it would be if Varga was still in charge of these operations overseas. So you’ve got that kind of you could say New Age. Plotting mechanism. But there is another friction going in there, and that is with the Arbabsiar operation, for example, one reason the communication was not great was because it’s hard for Iranian handlers to meet with their sources, to provide tasking and to provide resources to actually carry these operations out because of sanctions, because of travel restrictions, because of movement restrictions.
00:19:45:08 – 00:20:06:01
You know, we have in the United States, the UN headquarters in New York, there’s about a dozen Iranian diplomats working there, some of whom are working there on official cover and unofficial cover, doing things that we wouldn’t want to be doing, but we don’t stop them because of the reciprocity issues. But they’re only allowed to travel 25 miles outside of their home and outside of the UN headquarters.
00:20:06:01 – 00:20:35:20
And we, of course, monitor them. So you can imagine it be pretty tough to go meet with a gentleman in Texas to go coordinate some activity. You have to do it over the phone or over the internet or something like that. So that’s a difficult restriction if you want to do a plot, let’s say in Denmark, which budget actually tried to do it was tough because the only place that could meet them was inside of a Pizza Hut in Luxembourg, because that was the only place that was safe and easy for them to meet with their, UK and, Denmark based sources.
00:20:35:22 – 00:20:58:18
And that was thwarted by the Belgians, actually. So another, difficulty with the freedom of movement. But then you go into places like Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia, like I mentioned. And there are in some of these countries there, there are no visa restrictions. So it’s a lot easier to do planning there. There’s a lot of planning going on in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, as I mentioned.
00:20:58:20 – 00:21:23:04
And then in Africa, you have, you know, the largest, cocaine import location to Africa is in Dakar, Senegal. No surprise, you have Hezbollah financiers living in Dakar, Senegal. You have an Iranian embassy right down there, right next to the, the port, which is not a coincidence. And I mention that because in order to reduce the friction of these operations, you have to have money and you have to have access.
00:21:23:06 – 00:21:46:19
And to get that money in a system where you’re not allowed to participate in the banking networks, it has to be illicit money. So a lot of drug money funds this. A lot of black market activity funds this. And, and also within the regime, the banking system is heavily sanctioned, as everyone knows. But if your economy is sanctioned and you still want to run your country, you’re probably going to look to illicit ways to do that.
00:21:46:21 – 00:22:06:14
And the regime does that by basically using the IRGC as the owner of the black market in Iran. So it’s not illegal to work in the black market. In fact, it is the market. You must operate within, even as a regular, everyday citizen. Maybe you’re a schoolteacher and you want an iPhone, but you can’t buy an Apple iPhone in the Apple Store in Tehran.
00:22:06:16 – 00:22:24:17
You have to buy it from an IAG c controlled shop, and you have to pay a price on that. So most iPhones are 3 or 4 times the price in Iran. But if you’re in Tehran, you’ll see many iPhones brand new, you’ll see many Outis, you’ll see many BMW and Mercedes, which are not supposed to be imported to Iran.
00:22:24:19 – 00:22:44:04
But there are many ways to get around this, like taking the vehicle apart just a little bit. So there is about an inch between each piece of the car. And once it enters the country, just putting all those pieces together and now you have an Audi. And there are many other ways that this is done, and this is all to generate income for the IRGC and for the regime.
00:22:44:06 – 00:23:06:11
Some estimates say that the Ayatollah Khomeini is one of the richest people on earth, which is a strange statement because isn’t the country heavily sanctioned? And aren’t the banks cut off and etc.? Well, when you have a black market economy as you as your economy, you can pretty much maximize your profits in any way that you want, especially in an authoritarian regime that controls that black market.
00:23:06:13 – 00:23:32:06
And if you look at his wealth increasing over time, there are actually a couple of inflection points where his wealth skyrocketed. One of those was when the United States pulled out of the, P5 plus one nuclear agreement, and the sanctions came back. And then more recently, additional sanctions came back. And both of those events caused his income to increase because the sanctions don’t affect the ruling elite, the sanctions, at least in a negative way.
00:23:32:08 – 00:24:01:01
Sanctions affect everyday people, because how else can they if they can’t participate in the banking system? How else can they get cash to go buy chicken or water or gasoline? Right. So it’s benefiting the regime to put these sanctions on. And the IRGC is taking those profits, using it to buy new centrifuges for their nuclear facilities, using it to pay sources inside Europe and inside the United States to do surveillance, as we were talking about.
00:24:01:03 – 00:24:22:11
And that goes to targeting priorities and where they’re putting their money out to actually target, people in different ways. There’s there’s kind of two baskets of targets that they’re putting this money against. The first basket is kind of kidnaping and assassination targets, and the second basket is human targets that they can use for later. And on the kidnaping side, number one is, as I said, dissidents.
00:24:22:11 – 00:24:40:09
And in the United States, Marcy Alinejad is a key example. She was a very vocal Iranian dissident. They’ve tried to kidnap her twice. They tried to kill her once. There’s there’s a lot of backstory. She’s she’s written a book called The Wind in My Hair, which describes her time in Iranian prison. In Europe, you have the mujahideen.
00:24:40:11 – 00:25:04:03
As I mentioned. Some of them are in Sweden and Denmark, some are in the UK in other places. And it’s interesting. Side note, a few years ago, or up until a few years ago, France and Germany actually had agreements with the Iranian government that Iran could do operations inside of those countries as long as they didn’t target French or German citizens, respectively.
00:25:04:05 – 00:25:21:21
I haven’t seen that that has been abrogated, but it seems that it’s been reduced at least. It’s just an interesting side point about the way that states act as black boxes. As I mentioned, at the very beginning, they’re not the second target area within kidnaping and assassination is they’re looking for gaps to exploit the economy for illicit facilitation.
00:25:21:22 – 00:25:40:08
You look at the UK, for example, there’s a lot of anti-money laundering activity that the UK government is doing to try to stop this from happening. But it’s very tough when you have a decentralized, unofficial banking system like a hawala network or something like this. That’s it’s very hard to follow because it’s based on word of mouth and trust.
00:25:40:10 – 00:25:58:07
So it’s very hard to follow where that dollar went because it’s usually not the same dollar. It’s usually the idea of a dollar moved across a ledger from another ledger. But the dollar physically didn’t go anywhere. So that’s that’s pretty tough. And the regime’s using that system to fund its activities in these countries, in the UK, in the EU.
00:25:58:09 – 00:26:28:14
And a third priority, as I mentioned, is, Jewish and Israeli citizens. And in some ways, that’s a reaction to the the issues between Iran and Israel. And in other ways, this is a target of opportunity because the regime feels embarrassed or weakened or exposed by all the successes of Mossad over many years, including this past year, especially, and they might want to score a victory for their own domestic consumption to show like, oh, we’re not so weak.
00:26:28:14 – 00:26:49:19
Look what we can do. And they are probably doing a lot of these operations. I think in the last five years there were two dozen plots thwarted. And I think in ten years it’s something like double that. 50 plots thwarted in the UK alone. And a lot of these plots, as I mentioned, are kind of on the shelf plots, just waiting for an opportunity.
00:26:49:21 – 00:27:23:03
Because you need an opportunity for a threat to materialize. And they’ve done the surveillance, they’ve done this planning, and they’re waiting for, let’s say, a high level Jewish person that they can attack and they don’t they don’t really care who it is. They care more about the the doing of it, because that will show that they can in France and in Germany recently, I believe in the last two years or so, there were two prominent, members of Jewish, communities there that there were targeting attempts all the way up almost to execution was very close to execution.
00:27:23:05 – 00:27:44:10
And those are both stopped by the French and the German authorities and notably those those, Jewish citizens were citizens of this country. So, as I mentioned before, it’s possible that France and Germany thwarted that because those were not Iranians that were being targeted due to that agreement from many years ago. And then a fourth kind of category is that just Westerners generally writ large.
00:27:44:12 – 00:28:08:02
And this is, again, opportunism. It’s about trying not results. So even if the plot doesn’t succeed, the fact that it was started is enough for domestic consumption because they’re not looking to score international points to show the world that they can do an assassination. This is not what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to show the few domestic supporters that they have that they still have some strength, you know?
00:28:08:04 – 00:28:30:2
So that’s that’s the kidnaping and assassination block. And then you’ve got the Humint block, which is targeting usually dual citizens or children of Iranians like Daniel Halifax. And there was also a British soldier in Afghanistan who was working for a British general back during the war in Afghanistan, who had made phone calls to the IRGC and was trying to basically work for them.
00:28:30:22 – 00:28:54:14
So sometimes it will be the IRGC reaching out to these folks, sometimes will be those folks reaching out to the regime. And it’s for varying very motivational reasons. Sometimes these are unwitting contacts and sometimes they’re willing contacts as kind of a wide array. But again, the IRGC is kind of sloppy with it. So it’s relatively speaking, easier to identify and either exploit or neutralize.
00:28:54:16 – 00:29:18:23
And as a human collector myself, I would say you should almost always try to exploit because you can do so much more with a double agent than you can do with a dead agent. So that’s just my $0.02. And then, you know, the UK threat broadly, the big problem, I would say right now is following the money, because if you can turn off the money spigot to the regime, you’re going to you’re going to stop a lot of operational planning.
00:29:19:00 – 00:29:39:17
And the regime is relying on a lot of UK based banks, US based banks, Dubai based banks, Swiss banks took to like real, legitimate banks that everybody uses. They’re using those banks to move a lot of dollars and a lot of pounds and a lot of euros to different places. So they can they can make this illicit shadow economy move.
00:29:39:19 – 00:30:00:10
And if we can find a way to intercept that banking system, that will continue affecting how they’re working. And it’s not about sanctions, it’s more about targeting the actual inputs and the outputs and stopping them rather than just blanket sanctioning the entire economy. Because by blanket sanctioning, you’re kind of pushing people up against the wall and they’re going to make some crazy decisions they wouldn’t otherwise make.
00:30:00:12 – 00:30:27:00
But if you can relieve the pressure off of the population and only pressure the regime, you might have some more favorable outcomes. And another thing in the UK, as well as the information domain. So there are a few media outlets that they go both ways. Some outlets are controlled by the regime and communicating to the UK. Others are controlled by people in the UK seeking regime approval, support, approbation.
00:30:27:02 – 00:30:53:16
And then that latter example is kind of like there were some during the time that ISIS or Daesh was rising. There were a lot of like quote unquote, affiliates around the world that were actually not affiliated with ISIS, and they wanted ISIS to say that they were they were affiliated. So sometimes you’ll see, for example, there’s some Bahraini dissidents, some in the UK, supported in some ways by the regime, but also kind of shouting to the regime like, please give us legitimacy.
00:30:53:18 – 00:31:25:07
But then you have others like, iodine, which is a Lebanon based media outlet that sometimes, transmits in Hebrew and English and Arabic, and this is kind of long been connected to Hezbollah, long connected to Iran. So there’s some like different ways that these media organizations are trying to access UK. And what they’re trying to do is actually communicate with Shia communities and people within those communities that have not necessarily fully become on board with these ideas that these these outlets are pushing.
00:31:25:09 – 00:31:46:18
And what they’re trying to do is gain new support, not necessarily maintain old support. And we’ve seen this for a very long time, especially with the Bahraini Shia. There’s there was two groups in the 1980s that the regime really cultivated. And of course, during the Arab Spring, those, those groups again, and their offshoots rose up. So this is not like a new development.
00:31:46:20 – 00:32:08:03
But it is something to be completely aware of and to understand that it’s not a monolith and there’s not just one target and not just one audience. There are many audiences and many targets, and that the dynamics of reaching them are quite varied. And there are a lot of aspirational outsiders and kind of these, these, liminal spaces.
00:32:08:03 – 00:32:29:11
Let’s say, for example, in Nigeria, there’s actually a huge Shia population, relatively speaking, in Africa, in African terms, that wants the regime to support it. And the regime has been very hesitant because even within internal Iranian documents that I’ve seen that have been translated, the regime is uneasy about supporting that Shia group in Nigeria because it’s actually considered too extreme for the regime to support.
00:32:29:11 – 00:32:48:13
So that’s kind of an interesting point that there are some groups that actually want to belong to this, this global IRGC footprint. And the IRGC is hesitant, which is just another thing to think about as far as exploitation and neutralization. So I’ll leave it at that. Daniel, if you want to turn it over to questions. Yeah.
00:32:48:13 – 00:33:10:04
So thank you for that. Really interesting first question from me, though, before we open the floor. There’s been a lot of chatter in certain circles in the UK about proscribing the IRGC under counter-terror legislation. Could you possibly comment on that? Specifically with maybe some insight on whether or not that would be effective in curtailing their activities? Sure.
00:33:10:04 – 00:33:28:02
Yeah. The first thing that comes to my mind is analogize that to the United States when the US did that, 2007 was the very first time the US sanctioned the IRGC, not the whole thing, but parts of it. And if you look at a graph of economic gains within the black market, that is when the IRGC began growing financially.
00:33:28:04 – 00:33:54:12
And the more sanctions we put. So up until 2017, we had something like 700 plus distinct sanctions on AGC. And you you put those sanctions as they grow, overlapping a economic chart. There’s a direct correlation between the growth of their financial, gains, because, again, sanctions and prescription work well against Democratic states and Democratic organizations. They don’t work.
00:33:54:12 – 00:34:22:15
So well against authoritarian groups, that are able to either squirm out of those prescriptions or create new branches that are called something else, that we that that law doesn’t necessarily apply to that new thing, at least right away. And so I think it would require a probably broader strategy of maybe overt attempts at engagement or reduction, you know, face to face and covert actions to reduce their potency.
00:34:22:15 – 00:34:53:01
And what I’m talking about specifically is if you look at 2015, right before we signed the nuclear agreement, the P5 plus one, there was that very democratic, you know, off ramps given, approach to the regime to get toward that output. But at the very same time, the United States, Israel and other countries were working on the Stuxnet virus inside the nuclear program, basically a two pronged approach where one approach was viewable to everyone, and the other approach was there in case that that visible approach didn’t work out.
00:34:53:03 – 00:35:23:03
And I think that’s probably a smarter way to attack this problem rather than just a single overt prescription, because the IRGC is very crafty. And just because what they do is not called the IRGC does not mean they’re not doing the same things. You know, it’s, something by any other name. So I would want to see more depth beyond prescription prescription could be fine, but I’d want to see more attached to that to make sure that the effect you’d have, the desired effect that you you started with.
00:35:23:09 – 00:35:28:19
Thank you very much. We will now stop recording and move over to audience questions.