Israel is not the only target of Iranian assassination threats

The Iranian campaigns, though vastly different in scale, both focus on revenge for assassinations by Israel and the United States of senior Iranian officials or proxies. After the humiliating loss of many top operatives, Iran evidently wants to demonstrate that the assassins will pay a price.

One obvious moral of the story: Assassination is a double-edged sword.

Israel has tried to combat Iran’s reprisals through threats of massive military retaliation; the United States has instead mainly used law enforcement prosecutions of alleged Iranian hit men. Neither approach has stopped the Iranians from seeking revenge.

Israel is now bracing for a threatened attack to avenge the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh during a visit to Tehran last month. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, publicly declared that he had a “duty to seek revenge for his blood” because Haniyeh was a guest of Iran.

The United States faces a continuing string of threatened reprisal killings to avenge the January 2020 assassination of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s shadowy Quds Force. Like Haniyeh, Soleimani was a target of opportunity, killed by a U.S. drone attack while visiting Baghdad.

Trump, then the president, took credit the next day for what he called a “flawless precision strike that killed the number-one terrorist anywhere in the world.” Soleimani “was plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel, but we caught him in the act and terminated him,” Trump said.

Khamenei personally vowed revenge for Soleimani, as he did with Haniyeh. On the anniversary of Soleimani’s death, Khamenei said that “those who ordered the murder” would be “punished.” Iran has conducted repeated assassination plots inside the United States ever since, without success, according to Justice Department documents.

Iran has applied similar methodology in most of these attacks. Iranians or their operatives who traveled to Iran have tried to recruit hit men from gangs or criminal groups. They’ve used complicated tradecraft to try to avoid detection in the United States, but, in each case, they have stumbled into the hands of the FBI.

The latest Iranian counter-assassination scheme was disclosed by the Justice Department on Aug. 6. A Pakistani named Asif Raza Merchant had been arrested the previous month after visiting Iran. Prosecutors charged that he had “orchestrated a plot to assassinate a politician or U.S. government official on U.S. soil.”

The Justice Department arrest warrant for Merchant noted that Iran has “publicly stated the desire to avenge the death of Qasem Soleimani,” and cited an unsuccessful plot disclosed a year before to kill a “former U.S. national security adviser,” probably John Bolton, who had recommended the targeted killing of Soleimani to Trump the previous June.

Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke after Merchant’s arrest of “Iran’s brazen and unrelenting effort to retaliate against American government officials for the killing of General Soleimani.” This year’s annual threat assessment, provided to Congress by the intelligence community, similarly noted that Iran was trying to build networks in the United States to attack former officials “as retaliation for the killing” of Soleimani.

According to Justice Department documents and media reports, the American targets of Iran’s revenge campaign have included many senior officials who were involved in planning the Soleimani operation. The alleged targets include Bolton; Robert C. O’Brien, Bolton’s successor as national security adviser; Mark T. Esper, who was defense secretary at the time; and retired Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, who was the head of U.S. Central Command during this period.

The New York Times has reported that Trump himself was a target of Iranian revenge planning, though it’s not clear whether the former president was one of the people Merchant’s network hoped to attack.

The arrest warrant for Merchant illustrates the bungled attempts to hide the alleged Iranian plots. Merchant’s code name for the assassinations he allegedly tried to organize was “fleece jacket.” He recruited an alleged co-conspirator, who promptly informed the FBI, which sent undercover agents to pose as prospective hit men.

Merchant told his recruits to stash their cellphones in drawers so the devices couldn’t detect conversations, to use burner phones and avoid texting, and to use a string of code words that Merchant unwisely committed to paper and were later recovered by the FBI. To disguise their attacks, the hit teams were to recruit 25 people for phony demonstrations that would distract people after the murders occurred. To arrange payment, they were told to photograph the serial number of a $1 bill and send it to the paymaster as a recognition signal.

The Iranian campaign inside the United States included other targets. According to the Justice Department, members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps plotted to kidnap dissident activist Masih Alinejad in 2021 and recruited an Eastern European hit team of organized criminals to kill her in 2023.

The murkiest operation of all was an attempt to kill an Iranian defector and his wife in Maryland in 2021 described in a December 2023 indictment. An Iranian named Naji Zindashti, known as “Big Guy,” recruited a Canadian member of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang and a Canadian accomplice to murder the defector and his wife for $350,000 plus expenses.

One of the alleged hit men in this case promised that his team would shoot the defector “in the head to make an example.” He pledged to “make sure I hit the guy in the head with AT LEAST half the clip” and “erase his head from his torso.”

In this week when we’re watching a vulnerable Israel prepare for an attack, we should not forget that the United States has been a target zone for Iran, too.