Iran increasingly resorts to assassination plots, intel report shows
Reliance on proxies accounts for high failure rate, according to intelligence officials
The Iranian government has stepped up its efforts to plot assassinations of officials, activists and journalists around the world, including Jews and Israelis, and its efforts show a pattern of increased reliance on murder-for-hire schemes.
Iranian dissidents living abroad are another likely target of those operations, according to a report by Washington Post citing a number of unnamed American, European and Israeli intelligence and government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
It is understood that Iran’s intelligence services show an increasing reliance on paid proxies to carry out their plans, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to career criminals. While the outsourcing is linked to a high failure rate, the interviewed officials said that at some point Tehran's sheer persistence is likely to pay off.
The assassination attempts targeting high-profile figures that were disrupted in the past year alone include a foiled plot on the life of former national security adviser John Bolton in Washington and an operation using an Iranian drug dealer to murder French writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy in Paris. The failed attempt to kidnap Iranian American journalist Masih Alinejad in New York City was also cited as part of the pattern.
The report also cited attempts to kill Israeli business people in Cyprus, including one allegedly overseen by a Russian Azerbaijani citizen that involved a surveillance team made up of Pakistani nationals; and a plan to use assassins recruited in a prison in Dubai to kill Israeli business people in Colombia.