U.K. Faces Rising Threat From Iranian Plots, Intelligence Committee Says

Britain faces a rising threat from Iranian espionage and assassination squads, a parliamentary intelligence committee said on Thursday, in a report that also warned of a growing risk from Iran to Jewish and Israeli targets on British soil.

The Intelligence and Security Committee is made up of nine elected and unelected members of Parliament, and scrutinizes the work of Britain’s secret services. It has access to senior figures in the intelligence world and to classified information.

The report published Thursday, based on two years of interviews with British intelligence officers and classified documents, described a sharp increase in the physical threat posed to Iranian dissidents living in Britain. It said there had been at least 15 attempts to murder or kidnap British nationals or individuals based in Britain since the beginning of 2022.

The committee finished taking evidence on the Iranian threat in 2023 but even then — before tensions heightened to their current level in the Middle East — it identified an increased risk to some Jewish and Israeli organizations in Britain. MI5 was quoted in the report as saying this was particularly the case “where those individuals or targets are seen as undermining the Iranian regime.”

Kevan Jones, the chairman of the committee and a member of the House of Lords, where his title is Lord Beamish, said that the government should make clear to the government in Tehran that there would be consequences for any such aggression.

“The Iranian regime is fiercely anti-Israel and anti-Jewish,” he told The New York Times on Thursday. He added that “the threat to the Jewish community in the U.K. and U.K. nationals is mirrored across the world as well.”

MI5, Britain’s domestic security service, told the committee that Iranian espionage activity was directed toward Israeli or Jewish entities in Britain “in order to preposition and prepare for any hostile activity required by the Iranian regime.”

The report said that in 2020, MI5 investigated a British-based network of agents run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, which was reportedly gathering intelligence against Israeli or Jewish targets. MI5 “sought to disrupt” the network, the report said, and several people were later arrested under the Official Secrets Act. Some information in the report was redacted for security reasons.

Running to almost 250 pages, the document outlines a “full spectrum of all kinds of threats” from Iran, including assassination and kidnapping, espionage, cyber-interference and intimidation. The sharp increase in Iran’s activities in Britain was “driven mostly by the insecurity of the Iranian regime,” MI5 and government ministers told the committee. The report said that Iran perceived attacks on dissidents as necessary to defend the regime, regardless of where its critics were based.

In a speech last year, Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, Britain’s domestic security service, said that, since January 2022, the security services had responded to 20 Iranian-backed plots that posed potentially lethal threats to British citizens and residents. Several targeted journalists working for Persian-language TV channels.

While the threat posed by Iran was “less strategic and on a smaller scale than Russia and China,” the report said, it should not be underestimated because it was both “persistent and unpredictable.”

If Iran launched an offensive cyber attack, the petrochemical industry, utilities and finance sectors “could be at risk,” it said.

It also said that while close British cooperation with U.S. intelligence agencies was a significant asset, it was also “a potential vulnerability,” adding that “if this arrangement were to cease it is doubtful whether the intelligence community would be able to respond to the Iranian threat anywhere near as effectively.”

Jeremy Wright, the committee’s deputy chairman, said that Britain’s response to the Iranian threat was too often ad hoc and crisis based. He added: “We think something more strategic is appropriate and you need to invest to make that happen.”