By Rohit Kachroo

The Spectator

‘It was Friday afternoon, around 2.45. I came out of the house and was going towards the car on the driver’s side,’ Pouria Zeraati says casually. Zeraati – a presenter at the London-based TV station, Iran International – is recounting what was probably an Iranian state-sponsored attack. ‘I was approached by a man who pretended to be someone asking for £3. The second man then approached. They held me strong, very firmly, and the first person stabbed me in my leg.’

Zeraati is talking on his first day back at work since he was knifed on Good Friday in Wimbledon. It’s still too painful for him to sit down, so we’re standing for our conversation. He finds it uncomfortable to walk too, so for support he’s perching against the plastic desk on the set of his weekly chat show as he describes what happened.

‘Those three, four seconds are moments I’ll never forget, because from the point I saw the knife in his hand until he stabbed me in my leg, all I was thinking was where he was going to hit.’ He was overcome, he says, with the worry: ‘Is he going to cut my throat?’

After the initial shock, it took Zeraati a few minutes to consider what hadn’t happened. The attackers hadn’t tried to take his wallet, his keys, his electronic devices or anything else. He suspects they wanted to wound him but not kill him. This was a warning, not an ordinary violent mugging. He concluded that he was targeted because of who he is – a high-profile figure on a television channel well-known for telling the truth about the Iranian regime.

Iran International broadcasts around the world from its studios in London and Washington DC. In November 2022 Iran’s minister of intelligence declared it a terrorist organisation. The same month an Iranian news agency sponsored by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) published ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’ posters featuring some of its presenters, including Zeraati.

The Metropolitan Police has still not revealed the motive it believes to have been behind the attack – although by assigning its counter-terrorism unit to lead the investigation, it made some of its initial suspicions immediately clear.

Scotland Yard did confirm that Zeraati’s attackers vanished straight after the assault. They travelled to Heathrow to board flights abroad. Detectives haven’t specified which country they travelled to, or where they are thought to be now.

A sudden escape was also part of the plan to assassinate two of Zeraati’s colleagues in the autumn of 2022. In that case, spies working for the Iranian regime hired a people-smuggler to find gangsters in London willing to kill a former Iran International presenter, Sima Sabet, and a current presenter, Fardad Farahzad, in exchange for $200,000 and a new life, possibly in Iran. The plotters code-named the pair ‘the bride and the groom’ when discussing ways to kill them in order to show critics of the regime that they could be attacked anywhere in the world and ‘at any time’.

The spies sent down commands to plant a car bomb close to the channel’s studios at a business park in west London. Over the following month, their plans evolved and eventually they gave orders to the people-smuggler to ‘simply stab [the presenters] using a kitchen knife’ at locations close to their homes. Potential sites were scoped out.

At the end of last year, I uncovered the plot and spoke to the people-smuggler turned double agent. ‘Ismail’ showed me WhatsApp messages and voice-notes he received from his regime handlers. Sabet and Farahzad had no idea they’d been targeted until I contacted them.

One option Ismail discussed with his Iranian commanders was for him to be taken to Iran via Syria shortly after the attack in London. ‘We can pave the way for you to live well and move easily from Syria to Iran without the need for passports or documentation,’ he was told by his chief handler. ‘I will send a ship to take you to Syria, and from there to Iran.’

Much has been made of Iran’s use of proxies abroad, in relation to the escalation of the war in the Middle East: militia groups in Iraq and Syria, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. They’re all connected to, but not controlled by, Iran. The network has given the Iranian regime the power to act beyond its own borders, giving Tehran plausible deniability when missiles are fired from Yemen at commercial vessels in the Red Sea, for example, or when US military facilities in the region are attacked.

It now appears the same arm’s length approach is being deployed against individuals abroad – Tehran’s perceived enemies in London, across Europe and in the US.

The state organisation behind the ‘bride and groom’ plot was Unit 840, the branch of Iran’s intelligence service responsible for carrying out assassinations abroad. It, in turn, is part of a secretive body called IRGC-IO (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Intelligence Organisation), an agency established 15 years ago which answers directly to the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

Having restructured its security services to pursue victims abroad, the Iranian regime hasn’t stopped there. It is reshaping the murder-for-hire market in the US, parts of Europe and elsewhere, to fulfil the same objectives, reaching into the criminal underworld and offering life-changing sums to people who carry out operations on its behalf. ‘Under this model, the Iranians can call the shots but don’t need to do the dirty work,’ a senior US official tasked with countering Iranian threats tells me.

Examples include a case revealed in January, when US federal officials said two Canadian members of the Hells Angels biker gang had plotted to kill Iranian dissidents living in Maryland. The Iranian organisers reportedly agreed to pay $350,000 for the job plus a further $20,000 to cover expenses.

US federal prosecutors have also charged members of an east European criminal organisation for conspiring to assassinate Masih Alinejad, a longtime critic of Iran’s head-covering laws. It’s alleged that the three had planned to coax her out of her New York home by asking her for flowers, before shooting her. She was well-known for sharing flowers from her garden with neighbours.

Two years ago, the US charged an Iranian man with attempting to hire a hitman to kill John Bolton, a former national security adviser in the Trump administration, for $300,000.

At the start of this year, in co-ordination with America, the UK government imposed sanctions on Unit 840, the group behind the attempt to kill Alinejad. Earlier this month the US Department of the Treasury said that its parent organisation IRGC-IO ‘has established itself as a domestic and international unit focused on targeting journalists, activists, dual Iranian nationals, and others who oppose the abuses and human rights violations perpetrated by the Iranian regime’.

There appear to be no set rules for the methods Iran uses to find the criminals to do its work abroad, except to avoid the obvious. Biker gangs and people-traffickers are better able to operate away from the gaze of counter-terrorism police than politically motivated ideologues. Little has been publicly disclosed about the regime’s methods beyond that.

But the recruitment of Ismail, the man who was hired to carry out the ‘bride and groom’ murders, reveals some increasingly familiar patterns.

It began with a legitimate commercial deal which grew into something more sinister. In one of a series of conversations, Ismail told me he first encountered senior regime figures several years ago through his day job in the Middle Eastern shipping industry. In 2016 he negotiated a deal with Muhammed Abd al-Razek Kanafani, a senior Iranian government official, to work on a shipping project. ‘I sent him the contract which was the beginning of our relationship,’ he says. ‘It was about maritime works like ships, crewing, things like that.’

But Kanafani approached him again in 2021 with a different request. He was aware that Ismail had been supplementing his income by smuggling people and goods across the region. Ismail offered Iran another route into the criminal underworld. So they asked him to plan several assassination plots across Europe. The plot to kill Iran International presenters in London was their third request, and came after they’d enquired whether he had any criminal contacts in the UK to carry out an ‘important mission’. Ismail’s account has been verified by multiple western intelligence sources.

Tehran’s methods are a contrast to the actions of Russia in Salisbury in March 2018, when Sergei Skripal, a former military spy, and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with Novichok. Two alleged agents, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, were sent over to carry out the attack. They claimed to have been in the UK for an innocent visit to Salisbury Cathedral, a thin alibi they shared during an interview on Russian state television.

But there’s evidence that Russia, like Iran, is looking more closely at the idea of hiring local gangsters to target its enemies abroad, rather than putting its own spies at risk. Only last weekend, a senior British security source warned that western intelligence agencies suspect a series of industrial fires at western military-related industrial sites are connected to Russia. They believe Moscow is hiring gangsters, as well as far-right extremists, to carry out such attacks.

For Tehran, and maybe for Moscow too, there’s risk and opportunity from this way of operating. Creating complicated chains of command which begin in an office in Iran but could end with a gangster, or even a petty criminal, on the streets of London, might increase the chances of a plot being foiled by a domestic intelligence agency. No wonder Tehran’s success rate for assassinations abroad seems to be so low.

But there’s another consequence of this method. At any time, Iranian spies are likely to be working on a significant number of plots abroad, alongside local criminals who know very little about the politics of Iran, but who know where to procure weapons, how to evade detection, and how to escape. In growing parts of the criminal underworld, an offer from Iran is likely to be the most lucrative they receive. Irresistible, perhaps.

WRITTEN BY
Rohit Kachroo is global security editor at ITV News.