National Security Notebook | Number 18, July 26, 2026

Iran Sees the U.K. as a Soft Target 

Ilan Berman 

 

 

Iran may at war with the United States at the moment, but – as every proper Iran-watcher knows all too well – the regime in Tehran sees its fight as being with the broader West, for both ideological and practical reasons. In fact, there’s a veritable mountain of evidence of Iranian attempts to infiltrate and destabilize countries like Germany and France as part of its decidedly hostile foreign policy vis-à-vis democratic societies.

Here’s another example to add to the list. A new expose from London’s Telegraph newspaper maps out that decades-old smuggling routes from the Middle East have expanded in recent years, extending into Europe and carrying everything from guns to drugs to covert operatives. The Iranian regime is a big part of this network, owing to its reliance on covert and substate activity to advance its strategic interests. And the UK has become a key target of Iranian efforts.

The investigation makes the case that, increasingly, the Iranian regime sees such routes as a weapon in their own right - and that it has made infiltrating operatives into Britain a major focus of its efforts. Here’s the key quote (attributed to an anonymous Iranian official):

“At the moment we have people right there in London, revolutionary people who care about the world and the lives of children – they wait for us to tell them what to do.

We have not done that yet but can easily make London unsafe for you if we want. These smuggling routes are more important and useful than the missiles for us. We do not need a missile to target London. It’s easier than that.”

British officials should be treating all this as a real problem, for a couple of reasons.

First, because the UK has just finally designated (or, to use the British terminology, “proscribed”) Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a national security threat using authorities enumerated in the recently passed National Security (State Threats) Act. (My friend Roger Macmillan, a British counterterrorism expert, has a terrific breakdown of that decision and its significance here.) That, in and of itself, makes the UK a heightened target for Iran’s covert activities, which – as the Telegraph article makes clear – are being spearheaded by a division of the IRGC known as Unit 700.

Second, because it’s pretty apparent that Iran has had a great deal of success in leveraging Britain’s ballooning Muslim community, which now accounts for roughly 7 percent of the national population, in its efforts to penetrate the country. Which makes the Iranian infiltration question not simply a foreign policy issue, but a distinctly domestic political one - and raises all sorts of uncomfortable conversations about the soundness of the UK’s current immigration and vetting policies. They are discussions that the British government desperately needs to have… but the ruling Labour government (now under the newly-minted premiership of Andy Burnham) doesn’t seem remotely ready to do so