A July 10 report by the British parliamentary committee that oversees the United Kingdom’s intelligence agencies, including Mi5 and Mi6, revealed that Iran is targeting British Jews for killing and kidnapping in the U.K.
Intelligence agencies told the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament that physical threats by Iranian Intelligence Services (IIS) against U.K.-based individuals has “significantly increased recently both in pace and with regard to the number of threats.”
The committee’s report, which offered a comprehensive survey of Iranian threats posed to U.K. interests worldwide, found at least 15 such cases since the start of 2022.
While most physical threats are directed against dissidents or media organizations in the U.K. that Iran views as in opposition its regime, they also included “Jewish individuals of prominence as well.”
Making it more challenging for British spy agencies to counter these hostile operations is Iran’s use of third parties.
“It is not typically Iranian nationals that are conducting the operations themselves,” Mi5 told the committee.
“There are sometimes Iranian nationals but quite often they use other nationalities. They use criminal groups that you wouldn’t at all expect to be involved in this kind of activity and they are effectively just mercenaries. They are hired for money to do the operational activity for the Iranian state,” Mi5 said.
Sometimes the criminals who are recruited are themselves not aware of the purpose of their activity.
Outside of the direct physical threat to U.K. individuals, Iran also carries out what Iran calls “cognitive warfare,” which means spreading the Iranian narrative in the U.K.
Iran does this through its intelligence services, state media, foreign ministry and Iranian-funded organizations.
“They use different platforms—both overt and covert—such as traditional media, social media and networks of purportedly ‘independent’ news websites, to spread their own narratives in the U.K.,” the report said.
However, the overall impact of these efforts have had “a negligible effect on U.K. public opinion and decision-makers, including in relation to U.K. elections,” the committee found.
Iran also works to radicalize British university students, mainly through online talks hosted by the Islamic Students Association of Britain (ISA).
Speakers who were Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officers espoused anti-Semitic and violent opinions and urged students to support attacks.
The ISA denied ties to the IRGC, but the report noted that media reported that the ISA’s former chairman had recently met with the Iranian Supreme Leader.
