A report published on Thursday by the British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) found that Iran has become a physical and cyber threat to the UK that is nearly on par with Russia.
The report was not a product of current events, having been compiled at a glacial pace over the past several years. In fact, data collection ended long before five Iranians were arrested in May for plotting terrorist attacks and even longer before Israel and the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, so the report might underestimate the threat.
According to the ISC, Iran’s threat to Britons increased significantly after the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising in 2022, during which Iranian dissidents in the United Kingdom stepped up their efforts to influence the Iranian public through online media and television broadcasts.
The ISC report said Iran has made at least 15 known attempts to kill or abduct people in the United Kingdom, including prominent Jewish residents and Iranian dissidents.
“Since the beginning of 2022, there has been a significant increase in the physical threat posed by Iran to those residing in the UK. It has significantly increased both in terms of pace and the number of threats. The threat is focused acutely on dissidents and other opponents of the regime,” the report said.
“Iran is there across the full spectrum of all the kinds of threats we have to be concerned with,” said ISC committee chair Kevan Jones in a statement on the release of the report.
“We remain concerned that the government’s policy on Iran has been focused on crisis management and has been primarily driven by concerns over Iran’s nuclear program, to the exclusion of other issues,” Jones said.
British intelligence added that Iran tends to use “criminal groups that you wouldn’t at all expect” for its dirty work, rather than dispatching Iranian nationals and government agents to the United Kingdom.
The report chided the British government for “firefighting” against Iran’s nuclear program, instead of making long-term plans to deal with assassination, terrorism, and cyber threats. The committee also criticized the government for not employing enough counterterrorism policy makers with an intimate knowledge of Iranian culture and politics, or even a working knowledge of the Iranian language.
The Iranians, on the other hand, appear to understand the British system fairly well. The ISC report noted they have constrained their mischief enough to avoid a major British military or security response.
Iran has also exploited the UK’s reluctance to classify the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the umbrella organization for Iranian terrorism, as a terrorist entity. The United States sanctioned the IRGC as a terrorist organization in 2017 under the first Trump administration.
The ISC urged the British government to reconsider whether it was “legally possible and practicable” to classify the IRGC as a terrorist organization.
Russia is the benchmark for physical and cyber threats due to its penchant for using extremely messy weapons to (allegedly) assassinate people on British soil and for the relentless cyberattacks found to be originating on Russian soil. The ISC was reluctant to say Iran has become fully as dangerous as Russia, but indicated that Tehran is clearly playing in the same league.
Jones, who is also known as Lord Beamish, warned the Iranians have a “high appetite for risk when conducting offensive activity,” and its intelligence services are “ferociously well-resourced with significant areas of asymmetric strength.”
The Iranian regime swiftly denounced the ISC report, issuing a “categorical rejection” of its “unfounded, politically motivated and hostile allegations.”
Tehran said the committee’s findings were “baseless, irresponsible, and reflective of a broader pattern of distortion intended to malign Iran’s legitimate regional and national interests.”
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