The UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) released a highly anticipated report on Thursday morning, warning that Iran poses one of the gravest state-based threats to British national security, on par with adversaries like Russia and China.
The report highlights Tehran’s escalating willingness to carry out assassinations, espionage, and cyber attacks within the United Kingdom, and calls for a fundamental shift in British strategy toward the Islamic Republic.
The 260-page report draws on classified intelligence and interviews with senior officials across MI5, MI6, GCHQ, the Cabinet Office, and the Home Office.
It paints a detailed picture of Iran’s evolving threat posture, concluding that the Tehran "is a pragmatic actor, often driven more by opportunism than ideology," and increasingly capable of projecting that pragmatism into hostile activity on British soil.
“The Iranian regime’s fundamental objective is to ensure the survival and security of the Islamic Republic,” the ISC said. “It has an acute historic sense of vulnerability. This shapes, directly or indirectly, its actions.”
Since January 2022, at least 20 assassination or kidnapping plots have been identified against UK-based individuals, according to the report.
These operations, aimed primarily at dissidents and critics of the Islamic Republic, mirror tactics Iran has employed across the Middle East and Europe.
"This threat is focused acutely on dissidents and other opponents of the regime. There is also an increased threat against Jewish and Israeli interests in the UK," the report said.
British intelligence officials testified that Iranian operatives have shown a willingness “to attempt assassination within the UK, and kidnap from the UK.”
“The threat of physical attack on individuals in the UK is now the greatest level of threat we currently face from Iran,” the Homeland Security Group told the Committee. “It is comparable with the threat posed by Russia.”
"Since the beginning of 2022, there has been a significant increase in the physical threat posed by Iran to those residing in the UK. It has significantly increased both in pace and with regard to the number of threats."
"Iran is there across the full spectrum of all the kinds of threats we have to be concerned with," the committee chair, Kevan Jones, said in a statement.
UK-based targets and broader goals
According to the report, Tehran seeks to reduce the UK's military footprint in the Middle East, undermine its alliance with the United States and Israel, and suppress criticism of the Islamic Republic—including from exiles and journalists living in the UK.
“Iran and the UK have a complex history,” the report said. “Iran’s leadership perceives the UK to be a significant adversary—a ‘cunning fox’—opposed to the Iranian regime’s values and, as part of the West, seeking regime change.”
The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) Chair echoed these concerns, telling the ISC: “There is a deep suspicion [of the UK] for historical reasons as well as relatively contemporary reasons.”
Espionage and cyber operations
Iran’s espionage activity, the report warns, is “significant” and directed mainly through cyber capabilities but also via human agents. While the UK may sit just below the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia in Tehran’s targeting priorities, intelligence officials warned that this could quickly shift.
“We are a priority target ... for Iran in an espionage sense,” the JIC Chair told the Committee. “Because they regard the United Kingdom as a particularly malevolent opponent of the Islamic Republic and, secondly, because of the role we play in nuclear negotiations and the relationship which we have with the United States.”
Cyber operations are another critical tool in Iran’s asymmetric arsenal, according to the report. It describes Tehran as “an aggressive cyber actor with extensive capabilities,” albeit less sophisticated than Russia or China.
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warned that many British entities are currently not equipped to detect or defend against Iranian cyber intrusions.
“It is essential to raise the resilience bar,” the ISC wrote. “If there is good cyber security and resilience across the UK, then it is less likely that Iran’s cyber-attacks will be successful.”
Policy gaps
The Committee welcomed some steps taken by the UK Government since receiving the draft report in April 2024, including the designation of Iran under the Enhanced Tier of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme and new legal powers enabling the proscription of state-backed entities such as Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
However, the Committee criticized the government for its approach to Iran, saying it has long been defined by short-term crisis management, heavily skewed by the nuclear issue at the expense of broader geopolitical, societal, and regional dynamics.
“The Government's policy on Iran has suffered from a focus on crisis management and has been primarily driven by concerns over Iran's nuclear program—to the exclusion of other issues,” the report said.
“'Fire-fighting' has prevented the Government from developing a real understanding of Iran, with a lack of Iran-specific expertise across Government.”
One critique in the report centered on the absence of Iran-specific expertise across the British Government. “We were particularly struck by one critique: "if you have people running policy in the Foreign Office who don't speak a word of Persian, then that is a fat lot of good, to be honest".
The release of the report comes amid increasing scrutiny of Iran’s influence across Europe. Earlier this week, Italian authorities uncovered a broad network of individuals allegedly working to promote the Islamic Republic’s narrative in Europe.
British intelligence chief Ken McCallum, head of MI5, previously revealed that 20 Iran-backed plots had been disrupted since early 2022.“Iranian state actors make extensive use of criminals as proxies—from international drug traffickers to low-level crooks,” McCallum said last year.
“Whilst Iran favors proportionality in relation to conflict, this is not always achievable or pragmatic,” the Committee wrote. “It wants to avoid a full-scale war. It has therefore focused on the development of ‘asymmetric’ capabilities and a network of aligned militant and terrorist organizations across the Middle East to spread influence and deter potential aggressors.”
The Committee urged the UK Government and its allies to take a firmer stance in making clear that Iran’s hostile activities within the UK are unacceptable.
“We commend the efforts of MI5 and the police in response to what is now a serious threat, and we encourage the Government and its international partners to make it clear to Iran—at every opportunity—that such attacks would indeed constitute an attack on the UK and would receive the appropriate response.”
