Threat of Iranian attacks on UK now comparable to Russia, watchdog warns

The threat of physical attacks by Iran on the UK now matches that of Russia, a watchdog has warned.

Parliament’s intelligence and security committee said the threat from Iran has increased “significantly” since 2022 and was“persistent” and “unpredictable”, in a report published on Thursday.

Citing examples of 15 attempted murders or kidnappings of British nationals or UK residents by Iran, the committee said the physical threat posed by the country is “comparable with the threat posed by Russia”.

Committee chairman Kevan Jones, the former Labour MP now known as Lord Beamish, warned that Iran has “a high appetite for risk when conducting offensive activity” on foreign soil. “Its intelligence services are ferociously well resourced with significant areas of asymmetric strength,” he said.

Lord Beamish said the committee was particularly concerned about the rise in physical threats against dissidents and other opponents of the Iranian regime in the UK, with assassination used as “an instrument of state policy”.

The report comes after hundreds of MPs and peers, including ex-Labour leader Lord Kinnock, called on Sir Keir Starmer to ban Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) after three Iranian men were charged with spying in London.

A letter, seen by The Independent, read: “Appeasing this faltering regime betrays democratic values, emboldens its repressive policies, and undermines global security as Tehran continues its nuclear ambitions and terrorism.”

Lord Beamish’s committee urged the government to consider whether it was “legally possible and practicable” to proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organisation and make a full statement to parliament on the issue.

The report also warned that the nuclear threat from Iran had increased since the US pulled out of a key international agreement in 2018, arguing de-escalation “must be a priority”.

The review from the nine-member committee, which scrutinises the work of Britain’s intelligence agencies, only covers the period up to August 2023, with its publication delayed by last year’s election.

From the beginning of 2022 to the end of the committee’s evidence-gathering, the report found there had been at least 15 attempts by Iran to murder or kidnap British nationals or UK residents.

The committee urged the government to make clear to Tehran that such attempts would “constitute an attack on the UK and would receive the appropriate response”.

Lord Beamish added: “Iran poses a wide-ranging, persistent and unpredictable threat to the UK, UK nationals and UK interests.

“As the committee was told, Iran is there across the full spectrum of all the kinds of threats we have to be concerned with.”

Since August 2023, the international picture has changed with the outbreak of war following Hamas’s attack on Israel in October of that year.

The war has seen Iranian proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah weakened, while last month the US and Israel carried out airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities over concerns Tehran was close to developing a nuclear weapon.

But the committee insisted that, despite these changes, its recommendations remained “relevant”.

The committee warned that, while Iran had neither developed a nuclear weapon nor decided to produce one by August 2023, it had taken steps towards that goal in recent years.

It found that Iran had been “broadly compliant” with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that limited its nuclear ambitions.

But since the US, under Donald Trump, withdrew from the deal in 2018, the threat of a nuclear Iran had increased, and Tehran “had the capability to arm in a relatively short period”.

It also warned that the UK remained a target for Iranian espionage, which it found was “narrower in scope and scale” and “less sophisticated” than the threat from Russia and China.

And while Iran had engaged in political interference activity, it said this had had “a negligible effect”.

But the report cautioned that Iran-backed cultural and educational centres, such as the Islamic Centre of England, could be being used to “promote violent and extremist ideology”.

The committee said it was also “essential” to “raise the resilience bar” on cybersecurity across the UK in the face of Iran’s willingness to carry out digital attacks.

Regarding the government’s response to the Iranian threat, the committee warned that policy had “suffered from a focus on crisis management” over Iran’s nuclear programme and lacked “longer-term thinking”.

It also criticised a “lack of Iran-specific expertise”, saying there was “seemingly no interest in building a future pipeline of specialists”.

One witness told the committee: “If you have people running policy in the Foreign Office who don’t speak a word of Persian, then that is a fat lot of good.”

The committee also noted that the UK had sanctioned 508 entities and 1,189 individuals relating to Iran by August 2023, but urged the government to reconsider whether sanctions “will in practice deliver behavioural change or in fact unhelpfully push Iran towards China”.

But it welcomed the decision to place Iran in the “enhanced tier” of the new Foreign Influence Registration Scheme, placing extra burdens on people acting on Tehran’s behalf in the UK.