Iran has cultivated ties with criminal networks in the West to carry out a recent wave of violent plots in the United States and Europe.

By Greg Miller, Souad Mekhennet and Cate Brown

The Washington Post

LONDON — In the months before his attackers tracked him down, the exiled Iranian journalist had been moved in and out of safe houses by London’s Metropolitan Police, given a secret way to signal rescue units and had monitoring devices installed in his home.

British authorities had done even more to protect Iran International, the London-based satellite news channel that airs the weekly program of the journalist, Pouria Zeraati, and has built an audience of millions in Iran despite being outlawed by the Islamic republic.

Police assigned a team of undercover officers to safeguard the channel’s employees, arrested a suspect caught surveilling the station’s entrances, put armored cars outside its headquarters and, for one seven-month stretch last year, convinced the network to move temporarily to Washington.

None of these measures managed to protect Zeraati from the plot that Iran is suspected of setting in motion this year. On March 29, he was stabbed four times and left bleeding on the sidewalk outside his home in the London suburb of Wimbledon by assailants who were not from Iran and had no discernible connection to its security services, according to British investigators.

Instead, officials said, Iran hired criminals in Eastern Europe who encountered few obstacles as they cleared security checks at Heathrow Airport, spent days tracking Zeraati and then caught departing flights just hours after carrying out an ambush that their victim survived — perhaps intentionally, investigators said, to serve as a warning but not trigger the fallout that would come with the murder of a British citizen.

Iran’s alleged reliance on criminals rather than covert operatives underscored an alarming evolution in tactics by a nation that U.S. and Western security officials consider one of the world’s most determined and dangerous practitioners of “transnational repression,” a term for governments’ use of violence and intimidation in others’ sovereign territory to silence dissidents, journalists and others deemed disloyal.

Iran is using criminal gangs to target exiled dissidents, journalists and human rights activists in the United States, Europe and the Middle East. The Washington Post is investigating a global surge in campaigns of cross-border repression. The previous stories in the series examined Indian assassination plots in North America and China’s efforts to silence critics in an American city.

The United States and other Western governments have struggled to stem this phenomenon. As a result, sanctuary for those fleeing persecution is shrinking on nearly every continent.

Senior security officials said that the use of criminal proxies by governments has compounded the difficulty of protecting those who have sought refuge in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Security services formerly focused on tracking operatives from Russia’s GRU spy agency or Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) now confront plots handed off — often through encrypted channels — to criminal networks deeply embedded in Western society.

In recent years, Iran has outsourced lethal operations and abductions to Hells Angels biker gangs, a notorious Russian mob network known as “Thieves in Law,” a heroin distribution syndicate led by an Iranian narco-trafficker and violent criminal groups from Scandinavia to South America.

This story reveals new details about how Iran has cultivated and exploited connections to criminal networks that are behind a recent wave of violent plots secretly orchestrated by elite units in the IRGC and Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence (MOIS). It is based on interviews with senior officials in more than a dozen countries, hundreds of pages of criminal court records in the United States and Europe, as well as additional investigative documents obtained by The Washington Post from security services.

With hit men it has hired in the criminal underworld, Iran has commissioned plots against a former Iranian military officer living under an assumed identity in Maryland, an exiled Iranian American journalist in Brooklyn, a women’s rights activist in Switzerland, LGBTQ+ activists in Germany and at least five journalists at Iran International, as well as dissidents and regime critics in a half dozen other countries, according to interviews and records.

Other nations have begun to embrace this strategy. India’s security services enlisted criminal groups to kill a Sikh activist in Canada last year and target another in New York, according to U.S. and Canadian officials. Russia, which has traditionally relied on its own agents for lethal operations, turned last year to mob elements in Spain to kill a military helicopter pilot who had defected to Ukraine and then resettled in the Mediterranean.

Iran’s turn to criminal proxies has in part been driven by necessity, officials said, reflecting the intense scrutiny that Iran’s own operatives face from Western governments. The attack on Zeraati avoided these Iran-focused defenses.

“We’re not dealing with the usual suspects,” said Matt Jukes, the head of counterterrorism policing in the United Kingdom and assistant commissioner for special operations with Scotland Yard. He acknowledged that Zeraati’s assailants remain at large more than five months after his stabbing. They have been identified and their travels traced to countries in Eastern Europe but have so far not been detained. Officials said the suspects remain in Eastern Europe and that other security services are cooperating with British authorities, but they declined to explain why the suspects have not been taken into custody.

“What we’ve got is a hostile state actor that sees the battlefield as being without border and individuals in London every bit as legitimate as targets as if [they were] in Iran,” said Jukes. Along with Britain’s domestic spy agency, MI5, the Metropolitan Police have tracked more than 16 plots from the Islamic republic over the past two years, according to British intelligence and security officials, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive and ongoing investigations.

The United States has faced a wave of similar threats, including several that have been detailed in criminal indictments connecting biker gangs in Canada and mob elements in Eastern Europe to planned assassinations commissioned by Iran.

Matthew G. Olsen, who heads the national security division at the Justice Department, said that “Iran is clearly at the top of the list” of states that year after year seek to kill or abduct dissidents and journalists outside their borders. Other nations, particularly China, seek to intimidate or repress diaspora populations, Olsen said, but Iran is consistently “focused on actions at the extreme end of [transnational repression] because of their lethal targeting.”

Iran dismissed the accusations as Western disinformation. “The Islamic Republic of Iran harbors neither the intent nor the plan to engage in assassination or abduction operations, whether in the West or any other country,” Iran’s mission to the United Nations said in a statement. “These fabrications are concoctions of the Zionist regime, the Albania-based Mujahedin-e Khalq terrorist cult, and certain Western intelligence services—including those of the United States—to divert attention from the atrocities committed by the Israeli regime.” >>>