The US government is intensifying a manhunt for an Iranian intelligence operative who the Federal Bureau of Investigation believes has been plotting to assassinate current and former US officials, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The FBI’s Miami field office on Friday issued a public alert seeking information on Majid Dastjani Farahani, a suspected member of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, who the Bureau alleged has been recruiting “individuals for operations in the US, to include lethal targeting of current and former US government officials.”
- Revenge for Suleimani’s Death
The Iranian government has repeatedly vowed over the past four years to avenge the 2020 death of Major General Qasem Soleimani – a commander of Iran’s elite Qods Force – whom the Trump administration assassinated in Baghdad using a drone strike on his convoy.
In 2022, the Department of Justice indicted several members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard for plotting to kill Trump's former national security adviser, John Bolton, who served in the White House in the months leading up to Soleimani’s death.
Aside from Pompeo, the FBI believes Iran is also targeting Brian Hook, Trump's envoy to Tehran.
The US government is currently providing both men with around-the-clock security due to the severity of the threat.
It’s unclear why the FBI issued its warning in Florida. But the US government warned in a Most Wanted notice issued Friday that Farahani speaks Spanish and frequently moves between Iran and Venezuela.
It also said that Farahani was recruiting individuals “as revenge” for Soleimani’s death and to conduct “surveillance activities focused on religious sites, businesses, and other facilities in the United States.”
In December, Farahani was sanctioned by the Treasury Department.
- Iranian Spies
The US Department of Justice convicted an alleged Iranian operative in 2011 of working with Mexican drug cartels to attempt to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s former ambassador to Washington Adel al-Jubeir while he dined at a Georgetown restaurant.
In January, the DoJ indicted an Iranian gang leader for allegedly working with members of the Hells Angels to kill Iranian dissidents living in Maryland.
There’s growing evidence that Iran and its allies are operating aggressively inside the US.
In August 2022, a self-avowed supporter of Iran stabbed the British-US novelist Salman Rushdie at an upstate New York literary festival in a suspected attempt to make good on the religious fatwa Tehran placed on the writer’s head in 1989.
The Department of Justice is still investigating whether the Lebanese-US assailant was acting directly under Iran’s orders.
Last January, the Department indicted three natives of Azerbaijan for allegedly attempting to murder the Iranian-US women’s rights activist, Masih Alinejad, in New York.
US law enforcement said they also derailed a 2021 Iranian plot that aimed to kidnap Alinejad in Brooklyn and spirit her by speedboat to Venezuela.
- Crossing the Red Line
The Biden administration’s backing of Israel in its war against Hamas has significantly raised tensions between Washington and Tehran.
An Iranian-backed militia killed three US soldiers during a January drone strike on a US military base in Jordan, but any Iranian operation that kills a current or former US official, or a political dissident, on US soil could cross a red line that leads Washington to retaliate against Iran directly.
Tehran, in virtually all of its operations against the US – including military strikes and assassination plots – appear to work almost solely through proxies.
United States law enforcement officials assume Tehran would maintain this doctrine in any attack on the Trump-era officials, and Farahani appears to be working along these same lines. This could make proving attribution behind any attack very difficult, these officials said.
Brian Hook, the former US envoy, told a congressional hearing last week that he believed the plots against him continued and thanked US law enforcement for protecting him. “I wish we were in a place that it was not necessary, but that is where we are,” he said.
The Iranian government has made the avenging of Soleimani’s assassination one of its top national security objectives.
Senior members of the IRGC have said in recent weeks that Hamas’s October attack on southern Israel was driven, in part, by this aim.
“The Al-Aqsa Storm was one of the retaliations of the Axis of Resistance against the Zionists for the martyrdom of Qasem Soleimani,” Iranian state media quoted IRGC spokesman, Ramezan Sharif, as saying in December.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi also openly threatened US officials for assassination during his September speech at the United Nations in New York.
“Iran, through all tools and capacities in order to bring to justice the perpetrators and all those who had a hand in this government sanctioned act of terror, will not sit until that is done,” he said. “The blood of the oppressed will not be forgotten.”
