January 17, 2025
A British soldier with an Iranian-born mother has been convicted in London of spying for Iran. Daniel Khalife, 23, was found guilty by a jury, which deliberated more than 23 hours, of violating Britain’s Official Secrets Act and Terrorism Act by collecting information useful to an enemy Iran.
Prosecutors said Khalife played a “cynical game” by claiming he wanted to be a spy for Britain against Iran after he had delivered a large amount of classified material to the Iranian intelligence service, including the names of special forces officers.
Khalife testified that he had been in touch with people in the Iranian government but that it was all part of a ploy to ultimately work as a double agent for Britain, a scheme he developed from watching the TV show Homeland. “I wanted to utilize my background to further our national security,” he told jurors. Defense lawyer Gul Nawaz Hussein said Khalife’s aspirations to be a James Bond figure were naive, stupid and bordered on slapstick.
He said his client was more “Scooby Doo” than “007.” Despite what seemed like amateurish bumbling, Commander Dominic Murphy, head of counter terrorism at the Metropolitan Police, said Khalife presented a danger. “He’s the ultimate Walter Mitty character,” Murphy said, referring to the fictional character in a James Thurber short story about a meek proofreader who daydreams of daring escapades. “The problem is, he’s a Walter Mitty character that was having an extremely significant impact in the real world.” “We know very well the threat that Iranians pose to the UK’s national security,”
Murphy said, citing 20 Iranian plots, including assassination plans, that have been disrupted by UK authorities. Khalife’s court case had not received much attention until he escaped from a London prison in September 2023 and went on the run for three days. Khalife was working in the kitchen in Wandsworth Prison, in south London, when he strapped himself to the bottom of a delivery truck and got a lift to freedom.
He was ultimately nabbed on a canal path after a three-day search. The jury also heard that Khalife could have endangered Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian dual national then held in prison in Iran, because he gave Iran a fake intelligence document he had drafted saying the UK government was unwilling to negotiate her release. During his trial, Khalife pleaded guilty to the escape, but continued to contest the spying charges.
Justice Bobbie CheemaGrubb said Khalife faces “a long custodial sentence” when he is sentenced. Khalife joined the Army at 16 and was assigned to the Royal Corps of Signals, a communications unit that is deployed with battlefield troops, as well as special forces and intelligence squads. He was told he could not join the intelligence service because his mother is from Iran. He said his family hated the Iranian government. “Me and my family are against the regime in Iran,” he said.
At 17, he reached out to a man connected with Iranian intelligence and began passing along information, prosecutors said. He was given a NATO secret security clearance when he took part in a joint exercise at Fort Cavazos in Texas in early 2021.
British security officials were not aware of Khalife’s contacts with the Iranians until he contacted MI6, the UK’s foreign intelligence service, to offer to work as a double agent. He reached out to MI6 anonymously, saying he had earned the trust of his Iranian handlers and that they had rewarded him by leaving money for him in a London park in a bag used to collect dog excrement.
Khalife said most of the material he provided to his Iranian handlers was information he made up or data available online that didn’t expose military secrets. But prosecutors said some of the army documents were genuine and they used evidence from Khalife’s mobile phones, notes he wrote to himself and surveillance footage to show he gathered and shared classified information.
“He surreptitiously sought out and obtained copies of secret and sensitive information which he knew were protected and passed these on to individuals he believed to be acting on behalf of the Iranian state,” said Bethan David of the Crown Prosecution Service.
“The sharing of the information could have exposed military personnel to serious harm, or a risk to life, and prejudiced the safety and security of the United Kingdom.”