The Islamic Republic of Iran has shifted from relying primarily on its own agents and diplomats to systematically hiring criminal networks across Europe, North America, and beyond to hunt, intimidate, and attempt to kill exiled critics, journalists, and activists. This is not speculation. It is the operational model documented by Western intelligence services, court records, and major investigations.

01 The Model: Cheap, Deniable, and Expandable

A diplomat or IRGC officer operating abroad is visible, expensive, and risks diplomatic fallout if caught. A gang member is none of those things. He is low-cost, replaceable, and provides the regime with plausible deniability. The recruiter can sit in Tehran or Istanbul. The broker can operate from Scandinavia or Turkey. Weapons and surveillance can be arranged locally. The trigger-puller can be a Romanian, a Canadian Hells Angels member, a Swedish teenager, or a post-Soviet mobster who has never set foot in Iran.

This approach has become institutionalized. Western agencies, including the UK’s MI5, have tracked dozens of Iran-linked plots in recent years that rely on criminal intermediaries rather than formal intelligence officers. The pattern includes:

• Hells Angels members in Canada contracted — via an Iran-based narcotics trafficker — for a high-payment hit on an Iranian defector and his wife living under assumed identities in Maryland.
• Eastern European criminals hired for the stabbing of an Iran International presenter outside his London home.
• Swedish criminal networks, including the Foxtrot group, used for attacks and intimidation linked to Iranian direction; the United States later sanctioned the network.
• Russian “Thieves in Law” figures and other organized crime actors involved in plots against Iranian-American journalists and activists in New York and elsewhere.
• Additional cases involving surveillance, attempted abductions, and violence against women’s rights activists, LGBTQ activists, and other regime critics in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Britain.

British authorities have disrupted multiple lethal plots. MI5 and other services have publicly described the physical threat to dissidents in the UK as one of Tehran’s highest intelligence priorities. Similar warnings have come from Dutch, Swedish, German, and American officials.

02 Why the Regime Chose Criminals

After repeated exposures of Iranian “diplomats” and Quds Force operatives in Europe, the cost of direct operations rose. Outsourcing to criminals solved several problems at once:

• It reduces the risk of clear attribution and expulsion of Iranian officials.
• It exploits existing underworld logistics — weapons, safe houses, local knowledge, and willingness to use extreme violence.
• It allows the regime to keep pressure on the diaspora without committing its own limited cadre of trained operatives.
• It blurs the line between state terrorism and ordinary organized crime, complicating Western legal and political responses.

The same networks have also been directed at Israeli and Jewish targets in Europe, showing that the method is not limited to Iranian dissidents. The core objective remains the same: silence critics, instill fear in exile communities, and demonstrate that distance from Iran does not equal safety.

03 The Human Cost and the Political Reality

Journalists at outlets such as Iran International have lived under police protection, moved between safe houses, and still been attacked. Defectors and activists have been forced into hiding or constant security measures. Families of targets live with the knowledge that a paid criminal may be watching them. This is state repression exported through the black market.

Tehran’s denials are routine and predictable. The evidence — court documents, sanctions designations, intelligence assessments, and the consistent pattern of cases — does not support those denials. The Islamic Republic has long used assassination and intimidation as tools of statecraft. What has changed is the preferred delivery mechanism. Criminal gangs have become an extension of the regime’s external security apparatus.

Western governments face a clear choice: treat these plots as isolated street crime, or recognize them as deliberate, outsourced state violence. The latter requires sustained pressure on the networks, the facilitators, and the regime that pays them.