Britain’s Prime Minister Andy Burnham has publicly claimed that a recently uncovered suspected terror plot targeting RAF Fairford, a key Royal Air Force base in Gloucestershire, was “almost certainly” directed from Iran. The explosive allegation has pulled back the curtain on long-running debates over how the Islamic Republic projects coercive power beyond its own borders, at a moment when British security officials are already sounding the alarm over escalating Iranian-linked activity on UK soil.
Just weeks earlier, in early October, two Iranian nationals were formally charged with involvement in a separate alleged plot to attack Jewish community institutions in Manchester. UK authorities confirm the two suspects were in direct communication with an individual believed to be based inside Iran. While both the Manchester and RAF Fairford cases remain active ongoing investigations, security analysts say they align with a 45-year pattern of covert and malign operations carried out by Tehran since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979.
For decades, Iran’s overseas targeting has primarily focused on political dissidents, opposition figures, and groups deemed enemies of the ruling regime, with a documented history of lethal attacks stretching back to the final decades of the 20th century. One of the most high-profile incidents came in 1992, when four Iranian opposition activists were gunned down in an assassination at a Greek restaurant in Berlin, Germany. A subsequent German court ruling formally concluded that senior Iranian political leaders—including then-supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—directly ordered the killings. The verdict triggered a major diplomatic crisis between Iran and multiple European nations, forcing Tehran to revise how it structured and carried out its overseas operations.
In the years following the Berlin incident, Iran shifted its focus away from large-scale public assassinations toward softer, less visible tactics: expanded surveillance, espionage, infiltration of opposition groups, disinformation campaigns, and intimidation of exiled critics. But lethal targeting and state-linked terror have never been fully removed from the regime’s toolbox of overseas influence.
Historically, most Iranian overseas operations were executed by official Iranian intelligence officers acting directly on behalf of the state, with Tehran also leveraging allied proxy groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah to carry out sensitive tasks. Iranian diplomatic missions have also faced repeated accusations that they operate far outside the bounds of traditional diplomacy, with multiple investigations linking Iranian embassy networks to intelligence gathering, surveillance of dissidents, and logistical support for covert violent operations. The most prominent example of this diplomatic abuse came in 2020, when Iranian diplomat Assadollah Assadi was convicted by a Belgian court for his central role in a plot to bomb a large gathering of Iranian opposition activists in France in 2018. The conviction made clear that Tehran still relies heavily on diplomatic cover to facilitate state-directed overseas operations, a core pillar of its longstanding security strategy.
Over the past two decades, however, researcher Ardavan Khoshnood—associate professor in emergency medicine and intelligence studies scholar at Sweden’s Lund University—documents a key evolution in Tehran’s operating model: rather than relying solely on official intelligence personnel or diplomatic staff, Iran has increasingly turned to local criminal networks and intermediaries to carry out surveillance, intimidation, and even lethal attacks on its behalf.
This adaptive approach offers three distinct strategic advantages for Iran. First, local criminal actors already have deep knowledge of their operating environments, pre-existing access to illicit markets, and established underworld networks that let them operate without drawing the same scrutiny that foreign intelligence officers attract. Second, using non-state intermediaries gives Tehran plausible deniability: even when investigators apprehend the direct perpetrators of an attack, tracing a clear line of command back to official Iranian state institutions is extremely difficult. Third, hiring criminal networks is typically cheaper and more flexible than deploying trained intelligence operatives from Iran itself, creating a new, hybrid model that blurs the lines between state-sponsored political violence, organized criminal activity, and covert state action.
High-profile examples of this new model underscore its effectiveness for Tehran. In 2015, Iranian dissident Mohammad Reza Kolahi was assassinated in the Netherlands. Naoufal Fassih, a leading figure in the European illicit drug trade, was later convicted by a Dutch court of hiring hitmen to carry out the killing, with Dutch intelligence noting “strong indications that Iran was involved.” In 2017, Turkish-based Iranian drug trafficker Naji Ibrahim Sharifi Zindashti and his network were implicated in the assassination of Istanbul-based media executive Saeed Karimian, who had previously been sentenced to six years in prison in absentia by a Tehran court on charges of spreading anti-regime propaganda. Zindashti’s network was also tied to the 2019 killing of Masoud Vardanjani, an Iranian cybersecurity defector and former defense ministry official who had become a vocal critic of the Iranian regime before he was shot dead in Istanbul.
In the wake of the latest UK plots, a striking detail has emerged: both the Manchester and RAF Fairford cases allege that Iranian authorities recruited and directed individuals of Iranian background who already reside in the United Kingdom. If these allegations are proven, they demonstrate that Iran’s intelligence apparatus—despite significant losses inflicted by recent conflicts with the United States and Israel—retains intact recruitment networks and the operational capacity to direct hostile activity on European and British soil.
Taken together, these recent high-profile cases paint a clear picture: while Iran’s overseas intelligence operations have shifted tactics repeatedly over the past four decades to adapt to international pressure, the regime has never abandoned its goal of targeting perceived enemies abroad, and continues to evolve its operating model to evade detection and hold onto its ability to project malign power beyond its borders.