It’s understandable that the focus of coverage of Israel’s strikes on Iran, and the Iranian regime’s response, has been entirely on the potential regional consequences of Israel’s mission to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability. But although this may seem more like a version of Neville Chamberlain’s infamous ‘quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing’ than an issue of immediate relevance to British national security, it is most definitely the latter. It is vital to our national security that Israel succeeds.
For one thing, Iran operates hit squads in the UK with the explicit aim of assassinating British citizens it deems to be enemies. It’s said that the best way to ensure something remains secret is to mention it on the floor of the House of Commons. It sometimes seems that this is exactly what happened in 2023 when the then security minister Tom Tugendhat gave MPs details of how the police and security services had detected at least 15 ‘credible threats’ to kill or kidnap UK citizens and residents in 2022. Iran, he said, had been gathering information about Jews as a ‘preparation for lethal operations’.
The IRGC uses the same techniques as Isis and al-Qaeda to develop and radicalise UK-based regime supporters
In his statement, he named an IRGC member Mohammad Mehdi Mozayyani, who had ‘worked to conduct a lethal operation against Iranian dissidents here in the United Kingdom’. Iran International, an Iranian opposition television station, was forced to close its London office because the threat to its staff was so serious. Last month, three alleged Iranian spies appeared in court charged with targeting UK-based journalists so that ‘serious violence’ could be inflicted on them.
The import of Mr Tugendhat’s statement has been widely ignored, not least by the government in which he served and the current Labour government. Neither has proscribed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the terror arm of the regime.
In a subsequent interview with the Jewish Chronicle, one of the few outlets to cover the Iranian presence in the UK, Tugendhat said:
We have very clear intelligence about the activities of hostile regimes in the UK and we keep a very close eye on what their agents and those close to them are doing. We know that the Iranians are using non-traditional sources to carry out these operations, including organised criminal gangs. They are paying criminal gangs to conduct surveillance. Basically, the Iranians are using crooks based in Britain to spy for them… We have been seeing threats and Iranian operational activity directed against them [Israeli and Jewish targets in the UK]. I do not issue these warnings lightly.
The director general of MI5, Ken McCallum, has said that Iran’s ‘aggressive intelligence services’ are actively planning terrorist attacks on British soil, calling it ‘the state actor which most frequently crosses into terrorism’. Last October MI5 said it had foiled at least 20 regime-backed terror plots in the UK since 2022.
But it is not just Iranian terror operations that pose a threat to UK safety. The regime is also behind an extensive network of organisations, mosques and student bodies that are a more insidious concern. There is, for example, no bar on alleged links with the IRGC, so the Islamic Centre of England (ICE) has been able to operate as a charity with impunity. This is despite being described last year by the then chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Alicia Kearns, as the IRGC’s ‘London office’.
It had an official warning by the charity commission after holding a vigil to honour the IRGC terror mastermind Qasem Soleimani after he was assassinated in 2020. It was also ordered to scrap a rule in its constitution requiring one trustee to be a representative of Iran’s Supreme Leader – which the regulator said created a conflict of interest and demonstrated an ‘apparent lack of independence’. The ICE says it is a:
Purely religious and cultural organisation, which provides various services to the local communities… It is an independent charity regulated by British law, which is totally funded by the local beneficiaries. The majority of the trustees, donors, and attendees are British citizens. Indeed, this charity is nothing to do with politics, while we strongly believe that the politically motivated lobbies are trying to drag the charity into their political disputes.
The Islamic Student Association of Britain has hosted online talks at the Kanoon Towhid Islamic centre in west London with senior IRGC commanders. One of these was Saeed Ghasemi, who said in his talk in 2021 that if Soleimani had not been killed, ‘we could have taken over one after another the European countries you are studying in’. A former chair of the association has said that
Islamic Students Associations have never had any direct or indirect affiliation to the IRGC or any army, government or security group anywhere in the world and neither have I… Islamic Students Associations have never held any physical gathering/seminar/conference…with any of the falsely accused individuals.
Astonishingly (well, rather predictably given our repeated failure to take this form of the Iranian threat seriously) at least six charities with alleged links to Iran or the IRGC have been funded by the British taxpayer as part of the pandemic furlough scheme. One, the Islamic Centre of England, received £109,476 in 2020 and £129,556 in 2021.
The key point is that the IRGC uses much the same techniques as Isis and al-Qaeda, utilising a network of mosques, charities and centres to develop and radicalise UK-based regime supporters. One such organisation was exposed for hosting online IRGC commanders who called on British students to join the IRGC to ‘bring an end to the lives of Zionists and Jews across the world’.
The security services do a valiant job in seeking to uncover and foil terror plots. But they have been let down – as have all of us – by a political class which has refused to proscribe the IRGC, which would make all of the above illegal. Even now, as Israel is doing the West’s work for it, our PM and Foreign Secretary cannot bring themselves to offer a word of actual support. Even though, as we have seen, the threat Iran poses to UK security is real – and growing.
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