Iran Is Using Foreign Criminals to Attack Its Critics Overseas

Pouria Zeraati, an Iranian dissident who was living in London, spent nearly two years collecting evidence that the regime in Tehran had dispatched agents to silence him. He received harassing messages almost daily, by phone and e-mail. Masked men staked out his home and stalked his wife on the street. A stranger warned him on Telegram that he had been offered money to harm him. Zeraati reported each threat to the British police, who assured him that he was safe. But he grew worried that his life was in danger. “I felt as though I was my own detective, prophesying my assassination,” he told me.

Zeraati, who is thirty-eight, had arrived in England in 2007 to study mechanical engineering. After graduating, he was hired as a reporter for Manoto, a Persian-language television channel based in London that, at the time, was one of the most-watched in Iran. He quickly rose to prominence with an opinionated style that he modelled after anchors he admired on Fox News and CNN. In 2022, Zeraati started hosting a Friday-night program called “The Last Word” at Iran International, a satellite channel that was attracting attention among Iranians for its scathing coverage of the regime.

Zeraati and I first met over dinner in late 2022. He was polished and charismatic, with dark-brown hair slicked into something approaching a quiff. He told me that his program was reaching people via satellite inside the country, where the government’s censorship had nearly eliminated independent media. Iran International was launched in 2017 with funds from Saudi-British investors. The channel, which is banned inside Iran, refuses to disclose its private donors. And that refusal has given rise to suspicions that the network is part of a media campaign to bolster the Iranian government’s opposition. When I met Zeraati, the “Women, Life, Freedom” protest movement had erupted across the country after the death in custody of Mahsa Jina Amini, a twenty-two-year-old woman who had been detained and beaten by the police for reportedly exposing her hair. Zeraati and his colleagues’ broadcasts featured interviews with anti-regime activists and Israeli officials, and a steady stream of videos from street demonstrations: women burning their hijabs, police beating university students, and crowds shouting “Death to the mullahs’ regime!” In a post on Twitter, Zeraati called for “the destruction of a murderous regime that kills worshippers and children.” He later told me, of Iranian officials, “I don’t bother to hide what I really think of them.”

The Iranian government saw Iran International’s coverage as evidence that the channel and its anchors were weapons in an information war. The country’s intelligence minister, Esmail Khatib, accused the station of being a “terrorist organization.” He said it was operating as an extension of a coördinated “influence operation,” backed by the regime’s regional enemies, to erode confidence in Iran’s government and incite violence at home. Fars News Agency, which is affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, created a poster that said “WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE,” beneath head shots of Zeraati and four other anchors. U.K. police deployed armored vehicles to Iran International’s office in Chiswick after they discovered threats against its staff. Photos of Zeraati’s residence were posted on social media. His wife was followed to her gym by two men on a motorbike who told her, in Farsi, that she and her husband would be killed. Police installed alarms in the couple’s home and moved them temporarily to a safe house.

Zeraati and his wife stopped doing many of their usual activities, such as trips to the grocery store and dinners out with friends. But he didn’t tone down his messaging. In early January, 2023, Zeraati called the regime “the Islamic Republic of filth” after it executed two protesters. His posts about Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah of Iran, veered toward adulation. Zeraati endorsed Pahlavi as “a mature political leader whom Iran needs today,” and his social-media accounts featured photos and videos of crowds greeting the former Crown Prince in Oxford, Brussels, and Jerusalem. Zeraati also flew to Israel and filmed an interview with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the segment, Netanyahu spoke directly to the Iranian people, praising the ongoing protest movement, and he challenged the country’s leaders to “let your people go.” Viewership of Zeraati’s program soared; so did the number of threats.

Soon after, a pair of men wearing medical masks arrived outside Zeraati’s home in Wimbledon. They carried a bat and scissors. His wife filmed the men from their balcony. A neighbor, who spotted the men lingering in a garden behind Zeraati’s building, notified the police, who arrived and arrested them. Investigators later discovered that the intruders were Romanian nationals. One of them, a twenty-two-year-old named George Stana, had travelled to England weeks earlier. Messages recovered from his phone showed that an anonymous handler, nicknamed Em, had directed him to the address. “His flat is number 5,” Em wrote. “Make sure he is alone. Hope you do it today.”

Shortly after the police disrupted the plot, they released Stana, who flew back to Bucharest. But he returned to London a year later, to finish the operation. He stayed in a hotel room with two other Romanian men who had also been enlisted for the job. During the next few weeks, Stana’s sister, Florina, wired the group money to pay for SIM cards, clothing, lodging, and a blue Mazda. The team made a series of short trips to Zeraati’s home to scope out his neighborhood and study his movements.

On a Friday in March, 2024, at around 3 P.M., Zeraati was leaving home for his weekly commute to Iran International’s studios. As he walked to his car, a nineteen-year-old Romanian man, Nandito Badea, came up to him and asked him for “three pounds.” At the same time, another Romanian, David Andrei, approached Zeraati from behind. One of them grabbed Zeraati while the other plunged a knife into his right leg three times. The two men ran, laughing, to the blue Mazda that was waiting for them, and Stana, who was driving, sped away. Zeraati lay collapsed in the street. Neighbors who overheard the scuffle arrived to help. A construction worker fashioned a tourniquet out of a tool belt to stanch Zeraati’s bleeding. Meanwhile, the three Romanians ditched the van, chucked their clothing into a garbage bin, and ordered a taxi to Heathrow Airport. They boarded a flight to Geneva and then another to Bucharest.

The plot against Zeraati is part of a widening campaign by the Iranian government which involves hiring criminals—Russian mobsters, Hells Angels bikers, and even Swedish teen-agers—to attack its detractors and sow fear among Iranians in exile. Because these operations draw from the criminal underworld, the Iranian regime can deny any involvement. “Hired criminals are cheap, and they know how to blend in,” Colin Clarke, the executive director at the Soufan Center, a global-security think tank, told me. “And Iran doesn’t seem to care if these guys get caught or can’t get the job done.” Even a foiled plot can spread fear among the diaspora. “Sometimes terrorism isn’t about body counts. It’s about who is watching.”

The Iranian regime has been killing troublesome exiles since the Islamic Revolution, in 1979. Its agents have been accused of murdering dozens of people living abroad. One of the most dramatic attacks took place in Berlin in 1992, when Iranian agents gunned down a group of Kurdish opposition leaders while they were dining at a Greek restaurant. Police arrested the murder suspects. German prosecutors said that the men were sent by senior members of the Iranian regime, including the Supreme Leader. Later, an international arrest warrant was issued for Iran’s intelligence minister, Ali Fallahian.

The German prosecution ushered in a period of relative quiet. The pace of plots picked up in 2009, following nationwide protests against the regime. Authoritarian governments “fear their own people,” Ray Takeyh, an expert on Iran at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me, and that fear “becomes much more acute during periods of vulnerability.” Iran has increasingly relied on hybrid threats as it has confronted a series of of humiliations: a U.S. drone strike, in 2020, that killed Qassem Suleimani, the leader of Quds Force, I.R.G.C.’s élite special-forces-and-intelligence unit; another wave of nationwide protests in 2022; the near-destruction of Iran’s overseas proxies; and an almost uninterrupted cycle of attacks from Israel and the United States since last June.

“The more setbacks Iran experiences at home and in the region, the more attractive these fairly cost-free operations become,” Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. Levitt maintains a digital map that tracks Iranian-backed plots abroad since the country’s revolution. Over the past five years, he has recorded more than two hundred—nearly double the number documented from 1979 to 2021. Many have targeted dissidents or journalists whom the regime accuses of aiding its enemies and fomenting unrest in Iran. “Unless Western governments find a real way to increase the costs, the regime will continue to get away with kidnapping, conducting surveillance, and ultimately trying to murder people on their soil,” Levitt told me.

One such operation was foiled in 2021, when a team of gunmen, including a member of the Hells Angels, used an encrypted-messaging service called Sky E.C.C. to orchestrate the assassination of two Iranians living in Maryland. Federal prosecutors said that, at the behest of the Iranian government, the attempted murder was coördinated by a serial criminal named Naji Sharifi Zindashti, who lives in Tehran. The U.S. Treasury Department and British officials imposed sanctions on Zindashti and his associates for directing “heinous operations” against Iranian dissidents. The hits, which were never carried out, were consistent with a growing trend of Iran-hired “groups trying to murder U.S. residents on U.S. soil,” Suzanne Turner, the assistant director of the F.B.I.’s Counterintelligence Division, said. In 2022, an Azerbaijani man armed with an AK-47 arrived at the Brooklyn home of an Iranian American activist, Masih Alinejad, with orders to kill her. The would-be assassin was arrested by police and led investigators to two members of a Russian mob network who had enlisted him on behalf of Iran.

Law-enforcement agents in Europe began to notice a similar pattern: a court in Germany convicted a man of trying to burn down a synagogue in the city of Bochum in 2022. He was sent by a former Hells Angels member who lived in Iran. In 2023, a Chechen-born man flew to London and filmed the exterior of Iran International’s newsroom headquarters. He was arrested by the police and convicted of spying for a terror plot against the network.

“Criminals can obtain false documents, cross borders, rent safe houses, arrange cars, move money, and disappear,” Phillip Smyth, a researcher who tracks Iran’s proxies, told me. The use of local criminals, who don’t have any affiliation with Iran, forces European governments to “invest more in domestic security,” and demonstrates that “any crook can wreak havoc” in diaspora communities, Smyth said. The tactic also makes it difficult for investigators to link the plots to the Iranian regime. According to Western governments, the operations are coördinated by agents in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Ministry of Intelligence. The United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have sanctioned members of a specific I.R.G.C. unit, known as 840, that has a long history of ordering covert operations in Europe.

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