Britain has a long history of spying on Iran

The British government has spent decades trying to undermine the government in Iran, whilst simultaneously selling it chemical weapons and spying on opposition activists.

Despite this, the UK government has claimed it has not participated in military action led by Israel and the US.

UK meddling in Iran

In 1953, the UK helped the US to engineer a coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister.

Why? Because Mossadegh decided to nationalise the operations of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later British Petroleum) in 1951.

Of course, the UK government saw nationalisation as a threat to its strategic and economic interests, i.e., it would lose money. However, it needed support from the US.

So only two years later, the UK and US secretly backed a coup to remove Mosaddegh and centralise power under a repressive “pro-western” regime.

The operation was codenamed TPAJAX by the CIA and Operation Boot by MI6.

The archived CIA documents include a draft version of the coup, titled:

Campaign to install a pro-western government in Iran

The objective of the campaign was:

through legal, or quasi-legal, methods to effect the fall of the Mosaddeq government; and to replace it with a pro-western government under the Shah’s leadership with Zahedi as its prime minister.

According to Declassified UK, MI6 spent well over £1.5m. It:

recruited agents and bribed members of Iran’s parliament.

The coup installed the US and British-backed dictatorship under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and supported him for the next 25 years. His regime oversaw decades of repression, human rights violations, and torture.

Declassified CIA documents also show how the British government then attempted to block the release of information related to its own involvement in the overthrow during the 1970s.

More meddling

The 1979 Iranian revolution established the Islamic Republic. Ayatollah Khomeini, another dictator, led this. However, British spies continued to collaborate with the regime when it was in their interests.

In 1983, British intelligence gave Khomeini a list of Iranians supposedly working for the Soviet Union. In response, he rounded up over 1,000 communists and executed up to 200 of them. Iran’s communist party, the Tudeh, was banned and forced underground.

Once again, in the early 1990s, MI6 helped supply Iran with materials to make chemical weapons. This was despite its own ban on such sales.

All along, Britain aimed to insert operatives into the Iranian government and gather intelligence on weapons programs.

GCHQ cyber-warfare on Iran

In 2009, Israel and the US attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities with the Stuxnet computer virus — a notorious digital weapon. Reports suggest that British agencies also played a role, risking a new Chernobyl.

However, British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) intercepted phone calls in 2007. These proved that Iran had stopped working on its nuclear program four years earlier.

Additionally, a specialist GCHQ unit called the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) targeted the “general population” of Iran between at least 2009 and 2011. It worked by:

discrediting the Iranian leadership and its nuclear programme, causing disruption to the nuclear programme, conducting human intelligence operations online, and counter-censorship campaigns.

To make matters even worse, documents leaked in 2014 show that British spies used a URL shortening website called lurl.me to send innocent-looking links to Iranian citizens. This allowed them to gain access to their IP addresses, emails, and social media pages.

JTRIG was attempting to encourage dissent while using their personal information gained through sketchy links to monitor them.

Around the same time, GCHQ was also using honeytraps, spoof email addresses, changing the outcomes of online polls and amplifying particular messages on YouTube.

According to documents published by WikiLeaks, GCHQ:

long advocated that it work with NSA and the Israeli SIGINT Service (ISNU) in a trilateral arrangement in prosecuting the Iranian target.

Iranian nuclear deal

The UK remains a member of the Iran nuclear deal, despite the US leaving in 2018. This should restrain British spies; however, many have found quiet workarounds.

One example includes MI6 smuggling an Iranian nuclear scientist into the UK via the English Channel in a dinghy.

According to Declassified UK:

Iran was later named as one of the two main targets of a new unit called the National Cyber Force, run jointly by GCHQ and the Ministry of Defence. Set up in 2020, its tactics included launching “covert operations” against IT networks and trying to “influence hostile actors”.

And in May this year, the government announced that the unit would work alongside a new Cyber and Electromagnetic Command, to “put the UK at the forefront of cyber operations”.

Meanwhile, a GCHQ base near Iran has undergone major construction work. Satellite imagery analysed by Declassified last year showed building work at the site in Oman, the pro-British autocracy located between Iran and Yemen.

With the UK’s imperialistic history of collusion with the US and Israel over Iran plainly laid out, it’s hard to believe it’s pathetic, evasive claims now.

Already, UK military bases are buzzing with moving US warplanes, and Starmer is spinning the UK’s ‘defensive’ role while greenlighting the US using the UK’s overseas airbases.

The UK has been deeply involved in destabilising the region for decades — for oil and gas and other capitalist colonial bullshit. Therefore, the government can hardly claim to be a bystander in this illegal, unprovoked bombing campaign — it’s an active participant.

Feature image via Ministry of Defence/ Wikimedia Commons