The Iranian government has ramped up its efforts to kidnap and kill Western Iranian government officials, activists and journalists around the world, including the United States, according to government documents and interviews with 15 officials in Washington, Europe and the Middle East who they spoke to the newspaper.Washington Post“.
Among those targeted by Tehran, according to government officials and documents, are former senior US government officials and Iranian dissidents who have fled to the United States, Britain, Canada, Turkey and Europe.
The targeted list also included media organizations critical of the Iranian regime and civilians who were Jewish or had ties to Israel.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they discuss sensitive information, said Iran’s intelligence and security services had relied heavily on proxies to carry out their plans, offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to thieves , drug dealers and other criminals to carry out the operations.
The officials added that Tehran’s move to use agents may have caused some operations to fail, as it was prone to some kind of malfunction, and in some cases the hired men appear not to have followed orders at all.
But officials say Iran’s insistence on moving forward makes it more likely it will end up killing a prominent dissident, journalist or Western government figure, and this could eventually lead to a direct confrontation with Tehran.
Officials confirmed that Iranian security services have carried out several assassinations abroad since the clerics came to power four decades ago.
They added that between 2015 and 2017, Tehran assassinated at least three dissidents in Western Europe, including an Iranian Arab activist who was shot dead in front of his home in The Hague.
Dutch authorities have accused Iran of being involved in other assassination plots and bomb attacks in Europe.
In 2018, an Iranian diplomat working in Vienna was arrested and charged with recruiting Iranians living in Belgium to plant a bomb during an opposition Mujahedin-e-Khalq rally in Paris.
The documents and officials confirmed that the pace of Iranian plots has increased dramatically over the past two years.
Among the assassination attempts confirmed by Western security and law enforcement agencies, one targeted former US National Security Advisor John and another kidnapped Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad in New York City .
As well as multiple attempts to kill British citizens and other UK residents, and an operation in which an Iranian drug dealer was used to kill French journalist Bernard-Henri Levy in Paris.
There are also attempts to kill Israeli businessmen in Cyprus, including one believed to have been overseen by a Russian-Azerbaijani national and in which a surveillance team made up of Pakistani nationals participated.
There is also a plan to use conscript assassins in a Dubai prison to kill Israeli businessmen in Colombia, according to the newspaper.
Officials said the Iranian plots were driven by a number of factors: Levy was targeted by a Revolutionary Guards Quds Force unit, possibly due to his international reputation as a global thinker who is often critical of of the Iranian regime.
The officials added that the Quds Force used an Iranian drug dealer who recruited others to assist in the assassination and was paid $150,000.
The newspaper stressed that Iran wanted to send a message from the attempted kidnapping of Masih Alinejad from his home in Brooklyn that is focused on scaring Iranian exiles by showing that they are not safe anywhere outside of Iran.
Officials and experts said, “Plots directed against American citizens are also motivated by revenge for the killing of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani” in a US attack near Baghdad airport in January 2020.
Several Iranian agencies have been involved in the plots, including the Ministry of Intelligence and Security as well as the Quds Force and the IRGC Intelligence Organization.
But officials and experts said the orders for attempted kidnappings or assassinations abroad came from senior government officials.
