Retired Head of MI-6 on Britain’s Tepid Response to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps 

Sir Richard Dearlove (an incongruous name, given his former profession) is the former head of MI-6, the Secret Intelligence Agency that handles threats to the U.K. from abroad. In a recent interview, he spoke of his dismay that the British government still has not banned the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist group. He delivered his thoughts here: “Iran is a ‘threat’ to British Jews, cautions former MI6 chief,” by Lorin Bell-Cross, Jewish Chronicle, March 21, 2025:

Iranian agents represent a threat to Britain’s Jewish community as well as to critics of the regime living in the UK, a former head of MI6 has said, suggesting that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) should be proscribed as a terrorist organisation.

In an interview with the JC, Sir Richard Dearlove said that Israeli operations against Iran and its proxies had degraded its capabilities in the Middle East and beyond, but that the nuclear issue could still trigger a crisis.

Dearlove also said he was “disgusted” by demonstrations in support of Hamas, which he said the British authorities had dealt with too softly.

The 80-year-old former spymaster, who was the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service for five years ending in 2004, said: “there is a problem with Iran supporting radical Shia clerics in the UK and therefore there is the possibility that some of these Shia groupings may harbour extremists and terrorists.”

“Security services are well aware of this problem,” he added.

The IRGC “could be reporting on [Iranian] opposition movements” and “on people within the Iranian diaspora” in the UK, he said. “Their reach is quite significant. And the IRGC are pretty good at that sort of stuff.”

Dearlove also identified a specific threat to Britain’s Jewish community posed by the IRGC. “There is a threat, there is a problem,” he said, “whether it’s the inspiration of radicals who are going to attack the Jewish community, or whether it’s organising demonstrations which intimidate the Jewish community and encouraging those”.

The former spy chief said that Iranian agents may be stoking some of the more aggressive anti-Israel demonstrations happening in Britain. “I haven’t got clear-cut evidence, but this is exactly what Iran would be doing,” he said.

“The IRGC has a long reach, particularly where you have Muslim Shia communities which are sympathetic and to an extent are behaving in a way which is pro-Iranian. And there are one or two mosques – certainly in London – which have been identified as having that characteristic,” he said.

He believes the authorities have been too soft on pro-Palestine protests. “As a long-serving intelligence officer, I’m disgusted by what I’ve seen in terms of Hamas-supporting demonstrations in the UK, which are clearly very, very intimidating,” he said. “The government hasn’t nearly taken a tough enough line.

“In my view, we should have been like the French and banned them,” he added.

Dearlove described Iran as “the primary destabilising force in the Middle East” and said it was astonishing that successive British governments hadn’t proscribed the IRGC as a terrorist organisation.

“I just don’t get why we haven’t done so. It is the agency through which Iran has conducted what I would call ‘arm’s length warfare’. The Quds Force is part of the IRGC, and they’ve made an absolute fundamental aspect of Iranian policy using this agency to destabilise and interfere in the affairs of other countries.”

Sir Richard Dearlove says he is “disgusted by what I’ve seen in terms of Hamas-supporting demonstrations in the UK.” They are all over the place, these massed mobs of Muslims and leftists, with their keffiyehs, and Palestinian flags, and chants calling for Israel’s destruction — “From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free”— so that it can be replaced with a 23rd Arab state, and for violence against Jews — “Intifada Now” — and sometimes carrying out violent attacks on those counter-demonstrators who dare to wave an Israeli flag or otherwise quietly display their support for the embattled Jewish state….

The IRGC plotted the murder of two U.K.-based Iranian journalists unfriendly to the regime in Tehran. It hired a people smuggler, who for $200,000 was supposed to organize and carry out the killings. The plot targeted Fardad Farahzad, a current presenter at the Persian-language news channel Iran International, and a former presenter at Iran International, Sima Sabet. The plot was foiled because the hired killer, a people smuggler named “Ismail,” instead became a double agent working for a Western intelligence agency, possibly MI-6 or the CIA. Recently another plot by the IRGC made headlines in New York. The IRGC wanted to silence a well-known Iranian journalist, Masih Alinejad, who on social media has been encouraging Iranian women and girls to post photos of themselves with their hair flowing free, without hijabs. This plot, too, was foiled; the two hired assassins from eastern Europe have just received long prison sentences. The IRGC has yet again showed that it is a terrorist organization, determined to frighten Iranian dissidents abroad into silence or if those terror tactics fail, to murder them.

Dearlove knows that the IRGC has agents who have tried to kill Iranian dissidents both in the U.K. and in the U.S., and that, despite its failures, it continues to hatch such plots. These murder plots abroad are reason enough, he suggests, for the U.K. government to declare the IRGC to be a “terrorist organization.” Will he be heeded? Or will the British government wait until some Iranian dissident is killed on the streets of London before it does what it should have done decades ago, and formally outlaw the IRGC?