Why Britain won't ban the Iranian terrorists stalking our streets

Telegraph

09-05-2025

Three weeks before special forces stormed the British hideouts of a suspected Iranian terror plot, Vahid Beheshti received an unexpected visit from anti-terror police.
The exiled Iranian journalist, who has been living in a one-man protest camp outside the Foreign Office for more than two years, braced himself for an argument about street sleeping.
But that was not what the officers wanted to talk about. Instead, they gave him and his wife an exhaustive four-hour briefing on security precautions.
'I asked them, 'do you know anything that we don't know?' They didn't say anything directly, but they said 'the level of the risk has been changed, and we need to update you',' Beheshti tells The Telegraph. 'Then I saw the news this weekend and realised what it was about.'
Five men, including four Iranian nationals, were arrested at locations across England last weekend after the security services uncovered a suspected plot to attack the Israeli embassy in Kensington, believed to have been orchestrated by Iran's notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
Counter-terror police arrested a further three Iranian men in London as part of a separate operation. They were detained under section 27 of the National Security Act 2023, which authorises officers to apprehend those suspected of 'foreign power threat activity'.
For Beheshti, who had to flee Iran in 1999, it was a moment of grim vindication.
Since 2023, he has been protesting outside the Foreign Office for Britain to proscribe the IRGC – which has been implicated in the murder and kidnapping of Iranian dissidents and targeting of journalists abroad – as a terrorist organisation.
And last week's raids have super-charged that debate.
The minister and the spy
Members of the Iranian diaspora, Jewish community leaders, and politicians have been demanding the IRGC be listed as a terrorist group for years.
An organisation that plots attacks on foreign embassies and the kidnapping and murder of dissidents does not, they say, deserve to be treated like a legitimate arm of a state and should instead be blacklisted along with the likes of ISIS.
But it is not a one-sided debate.
They are answered by others – including diplomats, ministers and even other Iranian exiles – who fret that proscription would have marginal operational benefit but carry massive diplomatic costs and complicated legal implications.
Rishi Sunak's government considered but ultimately shied away from proscription. Before being elected, Labour promised to go ahead with it but has since fallen silent on the issue.
Only six countries – Bahrain, Canada, Paraguay, Saudi Arabia, Sweden and the United States – have fully banned the IRGC. Israel itself has only outlawed part of the IRGC, but not the entire Corps.
That's because, as in Britain, there are questions around the world over the operational benefits of an official ban.
Current legislation did not hinder Saturday's security operation, after all. The group of five men arrested last Saturday were detained under section 5 of the Terrorism Act 2006, regardless of the IRGC's designation.
'A symbolic step'
So who is right? Should Britain proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organisation? Would such a designation make any operational difference? If so, would the repercussions be worth the cost? Is it worth doing, or is it simply political virtue signalling?
It is a bit of both, says Alistair Burt, a former Conservative Foreign Office minister (with responsibility for the Middle East) who had the job of formally expelling Iran's ambassador to Britain after a mob stormed the British embassy in Tehran in 2011.
'The practical impact is very little. But just because it is a symbolic step does not mean it has no value,' he says.
'There does come a time when you have to say 'enough is enough.' If we're not taking some action how do you defend yourself and persuade hostile states that they cannot act like that?
'It is tricky. We wrestled with it and decided on balance it was better not to proscribe. But maybe the new Government will take a different view.'
Away from the Foreign Office, significant voices argue strongly in favour of a ban.
'I think they should have been proscribed years ago, because they were so active particularly in the pursuit of Iranian dissidents…and their attempts to kidnap and kill and cause mayhem,' says Sir Richard Dearlove, a former head of MI6.
'You will find people in the Foreign Office who will argue that because of our diplomatic relations with the Iranians, our wish for dialogue with them, we should marginalise [a ban].'
Kill and cause mayhem
The IRGC began as a pro-revolutionary militia in 1979 to balance the power of the regular Iranian armed forces.
Today, it is a parallel military organisation with its own land, air, and naval branches, an auxiliary militia for crushing internal dissent and an overseas operations wing. It is so powerful that many observers consider it to now be the Islamic Republic's true armed force.
The IRGC is also believed to run a vast business empire that gives it an effective stranglehold over much of the Iranian economy.
It is its relatively small expeditionary branch, the Quds force, that holds the kidnapping, killing and mayhem portfolio.
The Quds force, which is separate to Iran's official ministry of intelligence and security, has responsibility for curating relations with Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis of Yemen and various militant groups in Iraq.
In the Middle East it has been accused of supplying those Iraqi groups with the shaped explosive charges that accounted for some 20 per cent of American casualties during the US' occupation of the country in the 2000s, running the Iranian intervention in the Syrian civil war and coordinating Hezbollah's various clashes with Israel from Lebanon. Israel lists the Quds, but not the wider IRGC, as a terrorist group.
Beyond the Middle East, the force is believed to have two main targets: Iranian dissidents who could threaten the regime, and Israeli officials and Jewish civilians the IRGC view as footsoldiers of what the Iranian regime calls the 'Zionist regime'.
Its most notorious operation was carried out in 1994, when a suicide bomber drove a van loaded with fertilizer-based explosives into the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, killing 86. Argentinian investigators concluded a South American branch of Hezbollah carried out the attack, but that it was planned by Iran.
Ahmad Vahidi, the commander of the Quds force at the time, is still wanted in connection with the attack.
The threat to Britain
In recent years, Iran's threat in the UK has grown.
Scotland Yard and MI5 say they have disrupted 20 Iranian-connected terror plots in Britain since 2022, many of them apparently run through proxies hired from the criminal underworld.
Not all of those plots have been made public, but at least some of them appear to involve kidnappings or attempted assassinations. They include the 'hostile reconnaissance' of Iran International, a Persian-language television station based in west London.
In March last year, Pouria Zeraati, a journalist with Iran International, was stabbed outside his London home.
Champions of proscription make two arguments. The first symbolic – it sends a firm message to Tehran – and the second operational.
'For me it is a political issue,' says Sir Richard. 'But I think there is a practical element. You can do various things if it is a proscribed organisation – like you can ban them. So if you were to identify anybody who was a member of the organisation in the UK or working for them... you could prosecute them under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.'
Other hostile states, like Russia, tend to post their spies at embassies under diplomatic cover and would face expulsion at worst – although the assets they hire, like the Bulgarians recently convicted of espionage, have no such cover.
There is unlikely to be a formal intelligence station at the Iranian embassy in London, given the scrutiny the mission is almost certainly under. Instead, suspected Iranian operations in Britain have generally been subcontracted out to organised crime groups.
For example, Magomed-Husejn Dovtaev, a Chechen, was convicted of staking out Iran International. Two Romanians were charged in connection with the stabbing of Zeraati.
Because of this, proscription could have a significant deterrent effect, in that it would deter any criminals from working with the IRGC, or at least compel them significantly to increase the price of contracts to compensate for the risk of lengthy jail time and the full might of MI5 being turned against their organisations.
That would in turn raise costs for the IRGC, or even force them to use their own people on major operations, risking exposure of their intelligence networks. That appears to be what happened last weekend.
For Beheshti, however, it is the signal that is the most important element. 'We are constantly sending the wrong signal to the regime, which is that we are weak; we are indifferent. And they are therefore emboldened to escalate terrorist activities inside the UK,' he says.
'We cannot change the regime's nature. The regime only understands one language and that is force.'
Why Britain won't ban
The issue is, there would inevitably be a response to blacklisting the IRGC. And this is where things get complicated.
The first retaliatory action the Iranians would likely take is to shut the British embassy in Tehran, depriving the UK of a presence on the ground, direct access to Iranian officials and the ability to provide consular assistance to UK nationals.
Critics say the Foreign Office is institutionally allergic to closing embassies – valuing them for their own sake and overestimating the value they add in our digitally connected era. Given the heavy restrictions UK diplomats in Iran operate under in any case, would it really make much difference to give our outpost up?
Burt is sceptical that, if it came to the crunch, ministers minded to ban the IRGC would be swayed by Foreign Office resistance. The institution is there to serve the elected government, he argues.
Rather, he says, the issue is that it creates a new problem.
'There are times when it is appropriate. We did it in 2011. But once you cut off diplomatic relations, all you do is start looking for an opportunity to reopen them,' Burt says, referring back to his expulsion of the Iranian ambassador in 2011.
Nicholas Hopton, who was the first British ambassador to return to Tehran in 2015, four years after it was stormed, acknowledges the difficulty in balancing security and diplomacy.
But he strongly disputes the idea that embassies are out of date.
'It's not a case of discounting what the IRGC has done or not, but it is about recognition of the benefits of engaging with Iran by having an embassy in Tehran,' he says.
'Yes, albeit that the embassy is very constrained, it can make an impact. [Iran] is a hostile environment where the security scrutiny and pressures are very intense and real on the embassy team.
'But an embassy can still have an impact through engaging with bits of the regime that we do talk to. We make sure that the UK's policies are better understood, that we understand better the motives behind Iranian policy and action, and that unlike the US or Israel or Saudi Arabia until recently, we have that channel [of communication open].
'Certainly when I was there, we did have an impact. We held the Iranians to account on their commitments under the JCPOA [the original 2015 nuclear deal], we talked about human rights and Iran and its proxies' behaviour in the region. We pushed hard for the release of UK nationals being held illegally. And we tried to build up trade. But that was a different time.'
There is another complication, Hopton points out: 'The IRGC is in reality the national army of the Iranian state.'
Can the rules used against the likes of Al-Qaeda and the IRA really be applied against a sovereign state – including its armed forces?
Should we also list Russia's SVR and GRU intelligence services as terrorist groups because of their involvement in overseas assassinations? That, acknowledges Sir Richard, is an interesting point to raise.
And what of operations run by MOIS, the official, non-IRGC intelligence outfit?
Thousands of Iranians do their national service in the IRGC every year, and never get any closer to terrorism than checking papers on road-side checkpoints.
Smearing them with the life-long black mark of terrorism seems disproportionate, and has in the past made it difficult for genuine refugees. Even the IRGC, argue some commentators, is not monolithic.
Britain's current answer to the dilemma is to sanction specific, individual officers rather than the entire organisation. Other options include proscribing the Quds force alone, or perhaps to find a third way – a legal means to achieve the operational benefits of proscription, without the complications.
There are indications this third way may be the Government's preferred choice. Dan Jarvis, the Security Minister, told parliament this week that the Government has asked Jonathan Hall KC, the Independent Reviewer of State Threats Legislation and of Terrorism Legislation, 'to review the parts of our counter-terrorism framework which could be applied to modern day state threats, such as those from Iran.'
This will include 'specific consideration to the design of a proscription mechanism for state and state-linked bodies, providing more flexibility than is offered under the existing powers,' Jarvis said.
Beheshti has no truck for this kind of nuance, however.
Two years ago, the IRGC lured a close friend and fellow exile to Iraq, spirited him across the border, and hanged him, he says. The Iranian diaspora is so thoroughly infiltrated that he is careful about anyone he does not know.
Both Conservative and Labour governments have, he adds, shown the same 'naivety' in the face of that kind of threat.
'I don't know what's going on in the Foreign Office,' he says. 'First, they [the Government] make lots of promises, but as soon as they get to Foreign Office, they change their mind.'
'I don't understand what's going on in this building, but the moment they get in there, they change their mind, and something stops them, and that's why I've been here for 804 days.'