DEEP DIVE — For years, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has tried and failed at all sorts of half-baked schemes to eliminate enemies living in the United States. And despite its past failures, Tehran hasn’t abandoned its most ambitious plot yet — to assassinate former and future President Donald Trump, in retaliation for approving the drone strike that killed Iranian general Qassim Soleimani on January 3, 2020.
That’s the bottom line coming from multiple sources, high and low. A career criminal-turned-Iranian operative named Farhad Shakeri, an Afghan expatriate who spent his teen and young adult years in the U.S. and committed a brutal armed robbery and kidnapping on Long Island at age 20, has been charged with leading a murder-for-hire team of ex-cons to kill people opposed to the regime in Iran. According to a federal complaint filed on November 8, Shakeri served 14 years in a New York prison, was deported from the U.S. as a criminal alien in 2008, bounced around the Mideast, Turkey and South Asia, where he bungled an attempt at heroin trafficking, and wound up in Tehran, where he signed on as an IRGC asset. A few months ago, according to the complaint, Shakeri was “tasked by the regime to direct a network of criminal associates to further Iran’s assassination plots against its targets, including President-elect Donald Trump.”
The most damning evidence comes from Shakeri himself, who spoke with FBI agents on cellphone calls from Iran, where he said he’s now living. In a series of cellphone interviews with the agents between September 30 and November 7, he boasted that a senior IRGC officer had tasked him to come up with a plan to assassinate Trump. Shakeri said that when he observed that killing the ex-President “would cost a ‘huge’ amount of money,” his IRGC handler replied, “We have already spent a lot of money…so the money’s not an issue.” Shakeri said he took that to mean that Iran “was willing to continue spending a lot of money in its attempt to procure [Trump’s] assassination.”
The Shakeri puzzle
Shakeri’s story defies logic in some respects. Why would he take the FBI’s calls and rat out the IRGC, one of the world’s most merciless organizations? And why do so in Tehran, a place where people are executed for much less?
Shakeri told the FBI agents he was willing to talk to them in the hope of negotiating a lighter sentence for one of his prison buddies. That wasn’t a smart move for many reasons. To name one: if his friend was in state prison, the FBI, as a federal agency, would have no power to offer leniency.
Why would an Iranian agent blunder in these ways? FBI agents experienced in counter-terrorism cases say that the IRGC isn’t always screening for critical thinking skills when it hires people to do its dirty work. An FBI agent wrote in the criminal complaint against Shakeri, “In recent years, the threat posed by the Government of Iran and its intelligence services has evolved. Rather than solely engaging in lethal operations themselves, Iranian intelligence services have outsourced certain assassination plots to organized crime groups and violent criminals.”
Still, it’s baffling that the IRGC would allow Shakeri to talk to the FBI about plots to kill Trump, or other Iran adversaries, or anything else. Why wasn’t he being monitored, and why wasn’t his access to the outside world tightly controlled?
“Frankly, that does not make much sense,” Dr. Patrick Clawson, director of the Iran policy program at the Washington Institute, a think tank specializing in Middle East policy, told The Cipher Brief. But he added, Iran isn’t known for impeccable tradecraft.
“The reality is that the IRGC, like many large bureaucracies, has got all kinds of independent power centers, which aren't necessarily well informed about what others are doing,” Clawson said. “I suspect that he was freelancing it, without instructions from the top leadership of the IRGC. It's not like the IRGC central command got together and said, let's have a plan for what Shakeri’s going to do. I think it was just disorganized, the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing.”
While it seems incongruous that a regime known for its harsh treatment of its own citizens would lack discipline, Clawson said, “We've had all kinds of episodes in which hot dog IRGC Navy captains buzzed around U.S. ships, and we saw no indications whatsoever they had the authority to do it. They were doing it on their own. There’ve been a fair number of other episodes in which it seemed the IRGC local commanders did some things which seemed rather odd, and it wasn't because of a conscious decision on the part of the top leadership of the IRGC. It's just because as an organization, it has a lot of different branches that do whatever the heck they feel like.”
Michael Eisenstadt, a former U.S. Army military analyst specializing in Persian Gulf and Arab-Israeli security affairs, now director of the Washington Institute's Military and Security Studies Program, says that operational secrecy simply isn’t a priority for Tehran. Rather, the regime seems determined to put its power and reach on display, to intimidate and threaten.
“I think we often overrate the importance of deniability for Iran in their operations,” Eisenstadt told The Cipher Brief. “What they're often looking for is not really deniability… Very often they don't really try to wipe off their fingerprints from operations that they're engaged in.” For example, he said, Iran provided its proxies in Iraq with weapons that were clearly marked, made in Iran, to fight the U.S. in Iraq between 2003 and 2010.
More recently, Eisenstadt said, “they've been telegraphing,” perhaps as a way to show their own public that they are striking back at the U.S. “Their intent is to get back at President Trump, as well as other senior officials who were involved in the decision-making [to kill Soleimani] at the time…. It's important for them to be seen as not taking the death of Soleimani lying down, especially in light of the recent blows they've suffered with other IRGC generals being killed in Syria and Lebanon.”
Protecting prominent Americans - and sending a message to Tehran
Soon after Soleimani was killed, Tehran threatened other Americans involved in Iran policy, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Iran envoy Brian Hook and national security adviser John Bolton. In the wake of the threats, all were given Secret Service protection, which they retain today, even though they’ve been out of government for years.
The Biden administration increased Trump’s Secret Service protection last July, after a Pakistani man named Asif Merchant, who had recently been in Iran, showed up in New York and pitched an acquaintance on a scheme to assassinate Trump. The acquaintance called the FBI, became an informant, played along and introduced Merchant to some supposed hitmen, who were actually FBI undercover agents. A criminal complaint filed against Merchant on July 14 charged him with running a murder-for-hire scheme. It described his enthusiasm for the grisly details of the planned hit, “planning potential assassination scenarios on the napkin and quizz[ing] the [informant] on how he would kill the target in the various scenarios…[He] repeatedly asked the [informant] to explain how the target would die.”
The “target” went unnamed in the complaint, but multiple news stories revealed him to be Trump. The Pakistani told the informant he was authorized to pay at least $100,000 for the hit on Trump, and he thought Tehran would pay them “up to one million dollars through the criminal scheme,” court documents said.
Following up on this threat, in September the Biden administration sent a message to the regime in Tehran, according to a November 15 story in the Wall Street Journal. The U.S. message declared that threats against Trump constituted a top-tier national security issue, and any attempt on his life would be considered as an act of war. On October 14, the Journal reported, Iran replied with assurances that it wouldn’t seek to kill Trump, but “repeated Tehran’s accusation that Trump had committed a crime by ordering the killing of Soleimani.”
Norman Roule, a former National Intelligence Manager for Iran at the Office of Director of National Intelligence, told The Cipher Brief that Iran’s message was not at all reassuring.
“It's part of their propaganda campaign to demonstrate their reach,” Roule said. “The Iranians didn't say they don't conduct terrorism, they will never conduct terrorism. They just said they're not conducting this particular batch of terrorism… The threat is still out there.”
Which may be why, on November 17, Iran’s state-owned Islamic Republic News Agency ran a message of its own, tailored to reassure Iran’s domestic audience – at least that part of it that wanted retribution. The headline left no doubt where Iran’s crosshairs were fixed: “Iran not to let up on efforts to punish Martyr Soleimani’s assassins: Source.”
The accompanying IRNA story asserted that “Iran is unwavering in its resolve to take action against the perpetrators of Soleimani's assassination. General Soleimani and senior Iraqi commander al-Muhandis were assassinated in a terror attack by the U.S. army near Baghdad on January 3, 2020, at the direct order of the then-U.S. President Donald Trump.”
Beyond Trump, other assassination plots
Iran-watchers believe that the IRGC will persist in trying to infiltrate killers into the U.S., to attack not only Trump but also others who have spoken out against the regime in Tehran. Prominent Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad, a regime critic who lives in Brooklyn, had been surveilled by several other IRGC agents, assets and Russian mobsters-for-hire, according to the FBI. The bureau said Shakeri agreed to arrange her murder, enlisting two ex-cons from his network, and offering them $100,000 for surveillance work and $1.5 million for assassinating her. They stalked her, exchanging expletive-laced messages about how to kill her without getting caught and how to make sure they got paid. Shakeri balked at advancing money for the murder, badgering them by text, “I wish you can take care of it already. I have everything covered… Just do it son, I'll handle the rest.” The FBI arrested the two ex-cons before they could carry out the assignment.
Shakeri also said his IRGC handler had other jobs he wanted done: the surveillance and killing of two Jewish American businessmen who supported Israel, for $500,000 per murder; and the targeting of “Israeli tourists in Sri Lanka, and to plan a mass shooting event in approximately October 2024.” When Shakeri told the FBI about that threat, the State Department and Israel issued travel warnings for Sri Lanka’s Arugam Bay, a resort on the Indian Ocean popular with Israeli surfers. Most Israeli tourists heeded the warnings and left immediately. Sri Lankan police arrested three people suspected of association with the threat, including a criminal associate of Shakeri.
In the past, the IRGC hasn’t shied away from outlandish scenarios. In 2011, Manssor Arbabsiar, an Iranian-American businessman based in Texas, offered a Mexican cartel henchman $100,000 to go to Washington and blow up Georgetown’s Cafe Milano, a glitzy, VIP-packed watering hole, in order to kill then-Saudi Ambassador Adel Al Jubeir.
Luckily, the cartel henchman happened to be an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration, so he alerted his DEA contact in Houston, who handed him over to FBI agents, who set up undercover meetings that traced the trail back to the IRGC in Tehran. Arbabsiar pleaded guilty to murder-for-hire, confessed, described the grandiose scheme in lurid detail and is now serving a 25-year sentence. Today Al Jubeir is Saudi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs.
When the news of that plot broke, Clawson said, “Iran experts said, that's got to be bullshit,” but then “the guy who was accused came forward in open court and said, yep, that's what happened. So the Iranians have acted sometimes like amateurs.”
The Shakeri case and the Trump plot evoked similar disbelief, at first.
“The whole story is so odd that many people who work on Iran thought, this can't possibly be true,” Clawson said. But Shakeri’s admissions to the FBI made agents believe that it was all too true, and that the threats were likely to shadow Trump, and other American officials, for years to come.
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