Unprepared and Underestimated: How the UK Continues to Ignore Iran's Growing Covert Threat

What people fail to appreciate about Iran’s infiltration of the US and its western allies is that Tehran has developed a template that works – and has put it into practice. The Iranian regime might consider the US’s recent withdrawal of its bombers from the UK’s RAF Fairford as a success. Reporting from the US indicates that a bizarre escapade on the Fairford perimeter, involving three vans with contraband or stolen fuel and detected at midnight, was in fact a wider plot to swarm the base to inflict damage on American strategic assets. Answering the inevitable question of how Iran can mete out damage thousands of kilometres away is something that should have been done a long time ago.

For the UK, the sense of emergency remains entirely absent. Whitehall has for decades viewed the Iran file as a diplomatic challenge rather than a security threat. This possibly stems from an attitude among officials to “understand a little more and condemn a little less”. As a result, however, the UK has long been paying the price – and today its humiliation is freshly clear. The Iranian gameplan is a developed capability that stretches across a number of countries, including the US. But it is the UK where Tehran appears to have found the biggest pool of willing recruits and dupes who are engaged effectively as foot soldiers.

Where I think Tehran is underestimated is that its plots are fully fledged scripted exercises. Think of the Iranians orchestrating these events with the same approach as the writer or producer of a Netflix drama. The intelligence officials who do the plotting and recruitment from Tehran are not just dabbling in the lower reaches of gaming chat forums and messaging channels. There is methodology behind its recruitment and mobilisations. The UK courts are facing multiple cases of people who have been arrested for allegedly targeting Jewish communities and Iranian dissidents in the country. There have been a few convictions, too, with more likely to come out. Given the long lead times of the court process in the UK, there is much more to be revealed, but this will be too late to boost deterrence among the public.

Nonetheless, it is crucial that authorities in the UK demonstrate a grip on the scope and scale of the Iranian threat. This means recognising the sophistication with which Tehran has built up its operational footprint in countries that should be distanced from the regime’s threat. Iran has benefitted from the lack of preventive policing in post-Cold War European countries. Russia allegedly hired two people to attack the home of Keir Starmer when the then-British prime minister was living in Downing Street. The prosecution statement after the trial was mechanical and bland, relating how the investigation demonstrated that the pair had conducted reconnaissance and later returned to photograph the damage.

Iran has exploited Britain’s porous borders to filter its own nationals into the country, using the wave of migration across the English Channel among other routes. It has also been able to tap into divisions in the diaspora, with dual nationals suspected of conducting activities on its behalf. For wider recruitment, it has used connections with criminal gangs, including the Swedish Foxtrot network, to use lethal force in Europe. US President Donald Trump said that the UK was successful in the case of RAF Fairford, in disrupting whatever was planned. The wider challenge for Washington is that the more exposed the US grows, the more it pulls back from its former strongholds, while Iran continues to exploit these gaps.