As bombs fell on Iran last month, the U.K. government claimed it had “not participated” in the military action led by Israel and the U.S.
But British spy agencies have a long history of meddling in Iran, with everything from covert influence operations, to secretly selling chemical weapons materials to the regime.
In one case, the U.K. spy agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) even created a network of fake Twitter accounts to secretly monitor Iranian opposition activists – the very people working to remove supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from power.
Coup
British spies have targeted Iran for decades, driven by commercial profit and regional control.
In 1951, when the country’s secular prime minister, Mohammed Mosaddeq, nationalised the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later known as BP), the British ambassador wrote: “It is so important to prevent the Persians from destroying their main source of revenue … by trying to run it themselves.”
Two years later, the U.K. and U.S. secretly backed a coup to oust Mosaddeq and centralise power under a repressive “pro-Western” regime.
Declassified files have since revealed the central role played by MI6, which recruited agents and bribed members of Iran’s Parliament. In doing so, one former spy claimed they spent “well over a million and a half pounds”.
The U.K. and U.S. then supported Iran’s dictator, the shah, for the next 25 years.
By 1979, the Iranian Revolution saw the establishment of the Islamic Republic led by another dictator, Ayatollah Khomeini. But this did not stop British spies from collaborating with the regime when it was in their interests.
For instance, in 1983, British intelligence provided Khomeini with a list of Iranians allegedly working for the Soviet Union. The intelligence was used to round up over 1,000 communists, as many as 200 of whom were executed. Meanwhile Iran’s communist party, the Tudeh, was banned and forced underground.
Secret relations were again exploited in the early 1990s, when MI6 helped supply Iran with materials to make chemical weapons — despite its own ban on such sales.
Britain’s aim was supposedly to use the deals as a way to insert operatives into the Iranian government and gather intelligence about its weapons programmes.
Hellbound and Down 