The long reach of a secret army
Recent knife attack on an Iranian TV journalist in London was no isolated event but fits a disturbing pattern, say experts
On Nov. 16, 2022, armed police descended in force on a West London business park, home to leading international brands such as Starbucks and Danone and a sprinkling of media companies, among them CBS, Paramount and the Discovery channel.
To the shock of the thousands of people who work in the dozen modern buildings, clustered around landscaped gardens featuring lakes, a waterfall, cafes and a boardwalk, security barriers were thrown up at every vehicle entrance, pedestrians entering the site were obliged to pass through body scanners and the colorful food trucks on the campus were joined by a fleet of black police armored cars.
One building in particular, home to Persian-language satellite TV channel Iran International, came in for special attention. Security fencing and concrete “Hostile Vehicle Mitigation” blocks were installed around it and armed police and dog handlers patrolled the perimeter.
Earlier that month, Volant Media, which owns the channel, had revealed that two of its British Iranian journalists had been warned by police that there was “an imminent, credible and significant risk to their lives and those of their families.”
Its journalists were accustomed to receiving abuse on social media, a spokesman said, but the threats marked “a significant and dangerous escalation of a statesponsored campaign to intimidate Iranian journalists working abroad.”
Two months earlier, Esmail Khatib, Iran’s intelligence minister, had said Iran International had been categorized by Tehran as a “terrorist” organization and that its “agents” would be pursued.
Sanctions were also announced against the channel and BBC News Persian, both accused of inciting riots and supporting terrorism with their coverage of protests in Iran, triggered by the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested in Tehran for violating Iran’s hijab laws.
On the same day that armed police locked down Chiswick Business Park, Ken McCallum, director-general of the UK’s domestic security service, MI5, said Iran “projects threat to the UK directly, through its aggressive intelligence services.
“At its sharpest this includes ambitions to kidnap or even kill British or UK-based individuals perceived as enemies of the regime.”
Only the previous week, he added, the British foreign secretary had “made clear to the Iranian regime that the UK will not tolerate intimidation or threats to life towards journalists, or any individual, living in the UK.”
But the news that one of Iran International’s London-based journalists had been attacked by a group of men and stabbed outside his home in Wimbledon, in south London, on March 29 showed that the regime remains undaunted in its determination to intimidate dissidents wherever they are in the world.
Pouria Zeraati survived the attack, which left him wounded in the leg — he later released a photograph of himself in hospital, smiling defiantly and vowing to be back on air soon. Back on the airwaves, he said “the show must go on.”
The attack is being investigated by the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command, which says his attackers drove straight to Heathrow Airport and fled the country. Their destination has not been revealed.
The “siege” of Chiswick Business Park, as it became known locally, continued until February 2023, when Iran International announced it was “reluctantly and temporarily” closing its London studios and moving to Washington, DC.
The last straw for the company was the arrest on Feb. 11, 2023, of an Austrian national, who was caught red-handed by security staff while carrying out “hostile reconnaissance” outside its offices.
Magomed-Husejn Dovtaev was swiftly arrested by armed antiterrorist police in a cafe at the business park.
He was charged with terrorism offenses and at his trial at the Old Bailey in December 2023 was found guilty of attempting to collect information “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.” During the trial it was revealed that the Chechen individual had taken a minicab directly to the business park after flying to Gatwick Airport from Vienna. He was sentenced to three years and six months in prison.
The reality, said an Iranian activist living in London speaking on condition of anonymity, “is that Iranian dissidents living in exile know they are increasingly at risk from a regime that has shown it can and will reach out to intimidate, threaten and even kill anyone, anywhere, any time.
“It is also clear that it has no qualms about using foreign and domestic criminals as its weapons of choice.”
The depths to which Iranian operatives are prepared to sink to silence critics became clear in January this year, when the US and the UK jointly imposed sanctions on a network of “individuals that targeted Iranian dissidents and opposition activists for assassination ... at the behest of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security.”
According to the US Treasury, the network was led by “Iranian narcotics trafficker Naji Ibrahim Sharifi Zindashti and operates at the behest of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security.” Zindashti’s gang was responsible for “numerous acts of transnational repression including assassinations and kidnappings across multiple jurisdictions in an attempt to silence the Iranian regime’s perceived critics.”
The scale of the IRGC’s blackops program in one country alone was hinted at in February last year when Assistant Commissioner
Matt Jukes, the head of the Metropolitan Police’s counterterrorism unit, said that police and MI5 had foiled “15 plots since the start of 2022 to either kidnap or even kill British or UK-based individuals perceived as enemies of the regime.”
Only occasionally do such plots make the headlines.
The US believes that IRGC agents engineered the assassination in The Netherlands of Ahmad
Molla Nissi, a 52-year-old activist who campaigned for independence for Iran’s Ahwazi Arabs. Nissi was shot dead outside his home in The Hague in November 2017.
In October 2019 Ruhollah Zam, a journalist living under political asylum in France who ran a popular anti-government website, was kidnapped during a visit to Iraq. After being taken to Iran, he was tortured, subjected to a sham trial and then hanged on Dec. 12, 2020.
In July 2020 Jamshid Sharmahd, an Iranian German activist, was kidnapped while traveling abroad and forcibly brought to Iran, where he has been sentenced to death. On Dec. 13 2023, a federal arrest warrant was issued for Zindashti after he was charged with “Conspiracy to use interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire” — US legal longhand for hiring a hitman.
According to the FBI, Zindashti was born in Urmia, a city in Iran’s northwest, close to the borders of Iraq and Turkiye.
Immediately after the attack on Zeraati in London, a former journalist with Iran International said she had been told by the Metropolitan Police CounterTerrorism Unit “to immediately leave my residence and stay elsewhere until further notice.” Writing on X, Sima Sabet revealed that last year she and her colleague Fardad Farahzad, who is now based in Washington, had been the targets of an assassination attempt orchestrated by the IRGC.
She said the plot was foiled by a “Western security service,” which had obtained “audio and video files in which a Quds Force commander ordered an individual to kill me and Farahzad with a knife.”
The attack on Zeraati was “a serious warning and an extremely troubling act for all journalists and opponents of the Islamic Republic in Britain and other Western countries.”
A wide range of dissidents, journalists, activists and former Iranian officials have been targeted for assassination, kidnapping and hacking operations across numerous countries.