Episode 358: The Long Arm of Tehran: Proxies, Criminals and State-Backed Threats with Edmund Fitton-Brown
In this episode, we host Edmund Fitton-Brown to explore how Iran projects power beyond its borders through proxies, criminal networks, intelligence services, and deniable operations. Drawing on his experience as a former British Ambassador to Yemen and former senior United Nations expert on ISIS, al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Edmund explains why Iran’s external operations cannot be understood simply through the language of “sleeper cells” or conventional state espionage.
We discuss why Iran’s threat model is increasingly hybrid, asymmetric, and difficult to categorise. From the Houthis’ role in the Red Sea and Hezbollah’s weakened but still significant position in Lebanon, to alleged Iranian-backed plots in the UK, the use of organised criminals, the evolving relationship between Iran and al-Qaeda, and the wider breakdown of international counterterrorism cooperation after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this conversation offers a timely guide to how state-backed coercion, terrorism, proxy warfare, and organised crime now overlap.
Edmund Fitton-Brown is a former British diplomat and counterterrorism specialist. He joined the UK Foreign Service in 1984 and served in several Middle Eastern and European postings, including as British Ambassador to Yemen from 2015 to 2017. He later joined the United Nations Security Council Sanctions Monitoring Team, becoming Coordinator in 2018 and leading work on sanctions and global threat assessment relating to ISIS, al-Qaeda and the Taliban until 2022. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Senior Advisor at the Counter Extremism Project, a RUSI Senior Associate Fellow, and co-host of the CounterPod podcast. His work focuses on Iran, terrorism, proxy warfare, Middle East security and the state-backed threats that blur the boundaries between intelligence activity, organised crime and political violence.
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Transcript
[00:00:01] Edmund Fitton-Brown: I think the Iranians, they want anyone who opposes them, but especially Iranians who oppose them and anyone who’s Israeli or Jewish, they really want those people to be permanently afraid. And of course you can achieve that with a relatively low budget. You know, you might be able to find the right person down a pub in the East End in London, pay them 500 quid to go and rough somebody up.
[00:00:24] Dominic Bowen: Welcome back to the International Risk Podcast where we discuss the latest world news and significant events that impact businesses and organisations around the world. This episode is brought to you by Conducttr. Conducttr software helps you design and deliver crisis exercises without needing a big team or weeks of preparation. You can create a central exercise library with Conducttr Worlds and you can generate reports that support your governance and compliance requirements. So if you want flexible, realistic crisis exercises that are easy to adopt, then Conducttr is worth a look. And I have a quick favour to ask before we start today, if you’re a regular listener, please subscribe and follow the International Risk Podcast.
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[00:01:39] Dominic Bowen: And that matters now more than ever because the UK government says it’s responded to 20 Iranian-backed threats since the start of 2022 alone. And recent cases have sharpened concerns even more. I’m Dominic Bowen. I’m host of the International Risk Podcast where we unpack the topics that really matter. And today we’re examining how Iran’s external operations are evolving, how Iran projects influence and coercion beyond its borders, why criminal surrogates and deniable networks matter and what this means for the United Kingdom and for Europe.
[00:02:10] Dominic Bowen: And our guest today is Edmund Fitton-Brown. He’s a former British ambassador, a former UN expert on ISIS, al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and one of the sharpest voices on terrorism, Iran and proxy threats. Edmund, welcome to the International Risk Podcast.
[00:02:25] Edmund Fitton-Brown: Dominic, great to be with you.
[00:02:26] Dominic Bowen: And whereabouts in the world do we find you today?
[00:02:28] Edmund Fitton-Brown: I’m in Austin, Texas. That’s where I live. Although these days I work in Washington, D.C.
[00:02:34] Dominic Bowen: Fantastic. Well, let’s jump straight into it, Edmund, and there’s a term that we often hear used, and it’s probably gained a lot more notoriety in the last few weeks, is Iranian sleeper cells. Does that clarify the threat, or does it actually confuse and maybe even distort our understanding about what Iran really has in their resources that they have around the world?
[00:02:54] Edmund Fitton-Brown: Well, I think it’s a valid term, and I think one thing it does reflect is that the Iranians are quite tactically flexible. They will use whatever resources they have available. And in a sense, they have to because they have this aspiration to have global impact. You know, it’s a revolutionary state. They’re trying to export the Islamic revolution around the world to the best of their ability, and they do it differently depending on where they are.
[00:03:19] Edmund Fitton-Brown: They have almost been like an imperial power in Lebanon, and they have this sort of huge and very powerful apparatus known as Hezbollah, that works largely for their objectives. But, you know, in the UK or United States, it’s going to be different. They’ve obviously got official capabilities that exist in the UK and in the us, but they’re also very flexible about using really anyone that might be useful. Now, that will include, of course, sympathetic members of the Iranian diaspora, but it may also include people who are sympathetic to their objectives for other reasons, or, as we’ve seen in a number of these cases that you referred to earlier, it can actually involve the hiring of organised criminals.
[00:04:02] Dominic Bowen: And so, you know, these less than really hidden cells, but more this adaptable network, as you said, about expats and facilitators and spotters and hired operatives, that must be very hard for counterintelligence and counterterrorism experts to actually identify them. If it’s more running kind of like a gig economy, like the Uber drivers, so to speak, that must be very hard for our intelligence agencies to actually spot and counter these threats.
[00:04:27] Edmund Fitton-Brown: I think it is, in a way, because it means that pretty much anybody, you know, any. Any sort of thug could potentially engaged by the Iranians to carry out a particular task. And I think this is also reflected in some of the tasks that they pursue, because, you know, they’re really happy to attack any kind of Jewish target. They’re happy also to attack any kind of Iranian oppositionist target. I know at least one person, you know, who was with Iranian opposition media who was roughed up on the streets.
[00:04:56] Edmund Fitton-Brown: Now, the people who attacked him could have killed him, but they didn’t so to some degree it was sending a message. The flip side of this, of course, is that it’s also you can only do this if you have a very high risk appetite for discovery. And this is the other feature, of course, of the Iranians, is they really don’t care what we think of them. So they don’t care if the director of MI5 stands up and says Iranian state-sponsored violence in the UK is one of my main concerns. They’re not seeking deniability.
[00:05:25] Edmund Fitton-Brown: In a way, they want people to think that they have this reach and that anyone who opposes them might not be safe.
[00:05:31] Dominic Bowen: Well, exactly. And I think that’s a really important element and we might actually come back to that. I’ve been keen you used the example of Hezbollah earlier on and we might come back to that as well. But you and I both had the real blessing of working in Yemen. I was there in 2018 in Sana’a and Saada, and it was just such an amazing experience and I certainly learned a lot.
[00:05:50] Dominic Bowen: Even before I got out of the plane, I realised how little I knew. Now you were there as the ambassador from the uk, what did Yemen teach you in general and maybe even more specifically, what did it teach you about Iran’s networks?
[00:06:02] Edmund Fitton-Brown: So the first thing to say, and this is yo’s full disclosure, is the fact that because of the civil war in Yemen, I was only able ever to visit it once. As ambassador, I went to Aden to present my credentials to President Hadi at the time, this was after he’d been chased out of Sana’a and he had taken refuge in Aden and before he then left Yemen altogether and took refuge in Saudi Arabia. Fortunately, I had extensive experience of visiting Yemen before I became ambassador, because the previous three years, from 2011 to 2014, I was fulfilling a regional role in Dubai and I was a regular visitor from Dubai to Yemen. So I did get to know Yemen pretty well. And it was one of the great regrets of my life was that, you know, having got to know Yemen, having got to know what my circumstances would be there, the residence that I would have had occasional use of, and the office that I would have been using that just before I took over in 2015, the Houthis made it impossible for the embassy to stay any longer and both the British and the US embassies evacuated from the country.
[00:07:09] Edmund Fitton-Brown: So my first challenge as ambassador was to set up my embassy somewhere else. And the somewhere else that we chose was Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. Now, that was partly for practical reasons. As you know, Jeddah used to be the capital of Saudi Arabia. Consequently, both the US and the UK have enormous consulates general there because they used to be the embassies.
[00:07:32] Edmund Fitton-Brown: And so our consulate general in Jeddah is severely underunderutilised. There was a large amount of spare office space and a large amount of spare accommodation space within that secure compound in Jeddah. And so I opened my embassy there, and my US counterpart did exactly the same in the US Consulate General in Jeddah.
[00:07:52] Dominic Bowen: Very interesting. And what did you learn about Iran’s networks and its proxies and how it works through the Houthis in Yemen?
[00:07:58] Edmund Fitton-Brown: When I first took over, we were at a very early stage of figuring out what we thought of the Houthis. You’ll know the history. Of course, for so many people, Yemen is just a bridge too far. They don’t know very much about it. They’ll know about their campaign in the Red Sea and they’ll know that they’ve just launched missiles at Israel in the last few days, but they won’t know a great deal about the history of the Houthi movement.
[00:08:18] Edmund Fitton-Brown: When I came into the job, sort of, I was reading in for it in late 2014, and at that stage, you know, the Houthis had only just taken over Sana’a. You know, they were from the far north. You know, the far north. You were there.
[00:08:29] Edmund Fitton-Brown: That is a pretty hardcore location. They’re very resilient fighters. They also are very proud of their heritage. They consider themselves the heir, heirs of the Imamate, the historic Imamate of Yemen, which, of course, lasted for hundreds and hundreds of years. And they had initially been a thorn in the president’s side, President Saleh, for a whole decade, in fact, before they actually managed to take over Sana’a in 2014.
[00:08:55] Edmund Fitton-Brown: So they have a Yemeni history. They have a strong set of Yemeni national objectives. They really want to recreate the imamat, and they regard their own leader as religiously or spiritually as important as the supreme leader of Iran. So to call them an Iranian proxy is a little bit of a shorthand. It’s not untrue.
[00:09:19] Edmund Fitton-Brown: They are very, very closely wedded to Iran. And of course, the longer that they’ve been fighting the civil war in Yemen, which, as I say, has been in sort of full flow now since 2014, the more, of course, they have needed external support. They’ve had a lot external support from Lebanese Hezbollah, and they’ve had their main external support from the Islamic Republic of Iran and from the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And so they have gradually been assimilated into what the Iranians call the axis of resistance. But I think you can see already from the last month when Iran has been fighting for its survival, the Houthis spent a very long time looking at this and saying, do we want to do anything about this or do we not?
[00:10:05] Edmund Fitton-Brown: And they will take their decisions on their own basis. They don’t take orders from Tehran, they don’t take orders from the IRGC, but they are sympathetic. And of course, they have now, in a way, entered the conflict. At the very least, they’ve sort of made the gesture of firing missiles towards Israel. Now their missiles and drones have been intercepted and neutralised, and it’s possible that Israel won’t even bother to retaliate because it hasn’t sustained a blow.
[00:10:31] Edmund Fitton-Brown: But the Houthis, you know, you know, you can see that what you’ve got here is a very committed partner of the Iranians and a partner that would also recognise that Iran is the senior partner, much wealthier, much more experienced, much more technically capable, but has a certain amount of independence of action and definitely has a Yemeni agenda.
[00:10:52] Dominic Bowen: And is that relationship between Iran and the Houthis and between Iran and Hezbollah, has that changed at all over the last decade, the nature and the type of relationship that they have?
[00:11:03] Edmund Fitton-Brown: Yes, it has. In both cases, at slightly different paces. I would say that, you know, the Lebanese clock has been operating on a sort of a steady state, really, through until 2024, and, you know, the end of 2024, when you had that dramatic Israeli escalation against Hezbollah, and Hezbollah being sort of completely knocked on its backside by the Israelis. And of course, the. Essentially, that means that now, for the last year and a half, Lebanese Hezbollah has been a kind of a recovery case, which the Iranians have been trying to help recover.
[00:11:39] Edmund Fitton-Brown: The Israelis, the Americans and others have been trying to prevent it from recovering. The Lebanese government has occasionally been emboldened to try to say that Hezbollah can no longer operate as a quasi state. But of course, they’re rather afraid of Lebanese Hezbollah because, you know, this is one of those cases where a militia has become more powerful than the state itself. And, of course, the Lebanese armed forces have got a very, very significant Hezbollah component within them. So the question that the Israelis, I think, are trying to address at the moment, and it looks as if they are going for some level of occupation of southern Lebanon.
[00:12:14] Edmund Fitton-Brown: But, you know, what they’ve been hoping for is that the Lebanese state will step up and actually disarm, defang and ultimately control Hezbollah. And up to now, The Lebanese state has made a number of pronouncements which suggest that it would like to do that, but up to now it hasn’t been conclusive. Best example recently, of course, was them declaring the new Iranian ambassador persona non grata. And the Iranians said, thank you very much, but he’s staying anyway. And you know, that’s, that’s kind of an embodiment of this issue.
[00:12:44] Edmund Fitton-Brown: Can the Lebanese actually sort of grab this guy and throw him out of the country, in which case they have sovereignty? If they can’t do that, then Iran has sovereignty because Iran can send an ambassador and ignore whether the host government actually accepts the ambassador’s credentials. In the case of Yemen, it’s on a completely different timetable. It’s all about the Yemeni civil war. And the longer the Yemeni civil war has gone on, the closer the relationship has grown between the Yemeni Houthis and the IRGC and Iran.
[00:13:14] Edmund Fitton-Brown: And so I would say that they’ve been increasingly integrated into the axis of resistance. And then of course, when they decided that they would support Hamas in the conflict between Israel and Hamas that kicked off in October 2023, then the Houthis sort of took on a more global profile because they had experimented in the past with threatening ships in the Red Sea. But for the first time, they went all in and effectively closed the Red Sea to commercial shipping because ship owners and insurance companies were too risk averse to sort of run the risk that the Houthis would successfully attack and sink or seize a ship. So by doing that, they actually affected the global economy, they affected global supply routes, they forced ships to sail around the southern tip of Africa, and they just generally imposed themselves on international consciousness in a way that they hadn’t really been able to before. And the efforts initially under the Biden administration and the Sunak administration in the UK to reopen the Red Sea were not successful.
[00:14:23] Edmund Fitton-Brown: They were worth undertaking. But the rules of engagement were very restrictive. The Houthis were using quite agile, low budget equipment to threaten ships. And we were sending very high budget, not very agile measures to try to meet that.
[00:14:39] Dominic Bowen: And I think that’s something that a lot of people have really failed to understand about how the US and the UK and I think France was also involved in attacking the Houthis. And the Houthis still maintained resilience. How you’ve got some of the most powerful, intelligent militaries in the world seemingly unable to protect shipping routes through the Red Sea. From your insight on that, how did that happen?
[00:14:59] Edmund Fitton-Brown: Yeah, it’s a Great question. And the Houthis, of course, if they pride themselves on one thing above all, you know, other than their religious fervour, it’s resilience. You know, it’s that we are resilient. And you probably, I’m sure you had people say to you in Saada, you know, they tried to bomb us into the Stone Age, but we like the Stone Age, where the Stone Age is where we live sort of thing. You know, they are very, very proud of their pain threshold.
[00:15:23] Edmund Fitton-Brown: And so there’s. There’s an element of that. You know, how does the sort of civilised world playing by our modern rules of engagement? You know, we don’t. We.
[00:15:32] Edmund Fitton-Brown: We’re allergic to civilian casualties. You know, how do. How do we actually deal with an adversary that just doesn’t care, like the Houthis? And, you know, one of my favourite anecdotes about dealing directly with the Houthis was when I first was negotiating with them, actually, in Muscat in oman in early 2015. I can still remember a sort of conversation with this group of Houthis who were very uncompromising, very unwelcoming, but, you know, they were willing to talk because, you know, they.
[00:16:01] Edmund Fitton-Brown: As far as they were concerned, the question was, what could they get out of the conversation with me? So they engaged and I tried to sort of make a little bit of sort of getting to know you conversation with them. This is all in Arabic. So it was an interesting test of my Arabic, of 11 hours of hardcore Arabic conversation with these extremely unfriendly and uncompromising people. And I said, you’re sort of motivating a whole coalition to oppose you.
[00:16:24] Edmund Fitton-Brown: And, you know, it’s kind of inevitable that you’re going to lose against this coalition of significant forces. And one of them said, no, no, we’re going to win. And I said, well, you know, just looking at the numbers, looking at the military equipment available, why do you think you’re going to win? And he said, we’re going to win because you care and we don’t. And he said, you care about Yemenis dying.
[00:16:48] Edmund Fitton-Brown: We don’t care about Yemenis dying. Eventually, in this war, enough Yemenis will die that you will be desperate to make peace. And that was their view, and I think that’s still their view. And of course, in a way, that was very much Hamas view during the recent conflict with Israel. So the point I guess I want to make here is the way we were configured against The Houthis in 2024, essentially, let’s say under the Biden administration, when we were trying to reopen the Red Sea, we really were still not playing by their rules.
[00:17:20] Edmund Fitton-Brown: Now, what changed with Trump is, of course, he doesn’t care either. And so the war between the Americans and the Houthis that took place from late March until early May last year was a bit different. The Americans hammered them, and the Houthis really felt that. I think they felt more pain from those seven weeks fighting the Americans than they had from the Saudis during the civil war prior to that. So they were quite anxious to get a ceasefire.
[00:17:48] Edmund Fitton-Brown: And of course, the Omanis obliged and negotiated a ceasefire between the Houthis and the Americans. And then later in the same year, because the Houthis were continuing to attack the Israelis, and the Israelis were going on the basis that each time that the Houthis got an attack through that actually damaged Israel or caused a casualty, that Israel would respond disproportionately, they would inflict 10 times or 50 times the pain on the Houthis, because the idea was to try to re-establish deterrence. Well, the Israelis mounted a strike on 28 August last year. It’s funny how little airplay this really got in the Western media. I mean, people did register it at the time.
[00:18:29] Edmund Fitton-Brown: They understood that the Israelis had mounted a decapitation strike on the Houthi movement in Sana’a on 28 August, but they didn’t really understand quite how much it hurt the Houthis. This is the biggest blow that the Houthis have ever sustained. And I remember being struck, because as somebody who knows the Houthis, I know Mehdi Mashatt very well. I’ve sat in so many rooms where negotiations with Mehdi Mashatt, he is one of the most difficult, unpleasant people that I’ve ever met in my life. So, you know, I don’t yearn for those hours spent with Mehdi.
[00:19:02] Edmund Fitton-Brown: He is now the de facto president of the Houthi de facto administration in Sana’a. And so it fell to him to be the person who communicated with the media after the Israeli strike on the 28 August. And I was waiting and waiting, and he didn’t appear on the 28th. And I would have to check my notes as to whether he eventually appeared late on the 29th or whether it was even the 30th.
[00:19:26] Edmund Fitton-Brown: But it was absolutely astonishing that they couldn’t even organise themselves to make an official statement after that attack. The reason was they didn’t know what to say. Their leadership had been absolutely Decimated. They’d all been gathered in one place. I believe they were all listening to a speech from Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, who’s the leader of the Houthi movement, who wasn’t actually located there, but I believe that they were watching it remotely.
[00:19:52] Edmund Fitton-Brown: But the Israelis knew that they were there. And this was the gathering of senior Houthis and senior members of the Conference Party, which is former President Saleh’s party, which joined the Houthis in a coalition, which was what started the civil war back in 2014, when Saleh decided to side with the Houthis. So all of these top Conference Party people and all of these top Houthi security officials, they were all wiped out in this single strike. They didn’t get Abdelmalek. He’s still going strong.
[00:20:23] Edmund Fitton-Brown: And they didn’t get Mehdi Mashatt. He’s still going strong. And, you know, many others are still going strong. But ever since then, there has been a gradual revelation of exactly who was killed during that strike. And this has been revealed by various acknowledgments of somebody’s death months after they died.
[00:20:42] Edmund Fitton-Brown: So this has been happening since September, October, November, December, that you suddenly see somebody being mourned and acknowledged, and when you check that person’s electronic footprint, you realise that they vanished from the face of the Earth on 28 August. So the Houthis are not quite as resilient as they would have us believe. They understand the importance of propaganda. And if they can really demoralise their enemies, because we all throw our hands up and say, these guys are so tough, we’ll just never beat them, that’s half the battle from their point of view. Now, I think what they’re going to discover, to their discomfort, is that the next time that they do really start off in earnest, whether it’s, you know, with a sustained campaign against Israel or whether it’s another campaign to shut down the Red Sea, this time, I think the Israelis will have geared up their intelligence in the intervening period and they’ll know what to hit.
[00:21:33] Edmund Fitton-Brown: And, you know, that may well be the end of Abdul-Malik, who is a really important figure in the Houthis. He’s been the leader of the movement now for 20 years. He’s highly effective and charismatic, and it isn’t entirely obvious who would replace him. So I think that the Houthis would have a big problem if Abdul-Malik were removed from the battlefield. And, of course, the other point is that I think if they try to close the Red Sea.
[00:21:55] Edmund Fitton-Brown: Again, I think that the Americans will take the battle to the Houthis, because the Americans cannot accept a situation where both the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea are effectively closed and oil prices go through the roof. And I think that begs the question of what the Houthi intent is. Right now. They have made a gesture in support of the Iranians, but it may be that they are not ready to escalate.
[00:22:18] Dominic Bowen: And if we look at Iran’s external model over the last decade or so, it’s really shifted from relying on this classic intelligence operative and ideological proxies like Hezbollah and the Houthis, towards this more hybrid, layered external operations. And historically, Iran’s operations were run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, Al Quds Force and the Ministry of Intelligence. And political assassinations, armed smuggling and sabotage activities were, to a degree, quite effective. But I think in the last 10 years, that’s really changed and this move towards criminals and proxies. So can you help us understand why has this move towards criminal groups, surrogate actors and deniable networks changed what’s occurred?
[00:22:59] Dominic Bowen: Why is that Iran’s default model in countries like the United Kingdom and across the European Union?
[00:23:05] Edmund Fitton-Brown: I think it is the fact that they have recognised that different environments will reward different approaches. So it depends on what you’re trying to achieve. You know, if you think about it, it’s pretty remarkable that they tried to kill Trump. You know, I mean, that is an amazing thing to try and do. Of course, we’re talking about when Trump was in opposition between the two Trump administrations.
[00:23:27] Edmund Fitton-Brown: Even so, a former president to be assassinated would be huge because, of course, you know, the threat remains against the number of people who were previously associated with. With the Trump one. So, you know, someone like John Bolton is in a pretty difficult situation because he’s fallen out with Trump, doesn’t have protection of the nature that he probably needs. And, you know, as far as the Iranians are concerned, you know, his card is marked. So there’s an element there of them sort of almost taking a leaf out of the Israeli book, because, you know, the Israeli approach to terrorists who attack them is that file will not be closed until this person has been actually, you know, eliminated.
[00:24:02] Edmund Fitton-Brown: And I think the Iranians, they want that element of deterrence. They want anyone who opposes them, but especially Iranians who oppose them, and anyone who is Israeli or Jewish, again, is sort of a special target from their point of view. They really want those people to be permanently afraid. And, of course, you can achieve that with a relatively low budget. You know, you might be able to find the right person down a pub in the East End in London, pay them 500 quid to go and rough somebody up.
[00:24:30] Edmund Fitton-Brown: So I guess what they’ve recognised is that asymmetric warfare is really multidimensional and it’s asymmetric in every respect. Different levels of tradecraft and different types of operatives are going to be appropriate for different types of operations. And it’s true that the MOIS still has a high level of capability. The IRGC and the ijc, Quds Force likewise, although, you know, these organisations have taken a lot of attrition over the last month. But nevertheless, these are still formidable organs of state and they’re going to carry out the most sensitive operations.
[00:25:04] Edmund Fitton-Brown: You know, one of the things that’s interesting that has evolved over recent years and was to some degree was an unforeseen consequence of two things. One was the US assassination of Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul in 2022. And then, of course, 7 October 2023. Both of these things have impacted the relationship between Iran and al-Qaeda. And so when Zawahiri was killed, it meant that the surviving number two, the person who then became the leader of al-Qaeda, Saif al-Adel, he is in Iran and has been in Iran for many, many years now.
[00:25:39] Edmund Fitton-Brown: It’s one thing to have the al-Qaeda number two in Iran, and it’s a very different thing to have the al-Qaeda number one in Iran. And this has broken down the misunderstanding or the suspicion that used to exist between al-Qaeda, which is a Sunni extremist global jihadi group, and Iran, obviously, which is the leading Shia power in the world. And then, of course, the 7 October 2023, it kind of formed everybody up into a we’re supporting Gaza, we’re supporting Hamas, we’re opposing Israel, we’re opposing the forces of global arrogance, we’re opposing the. The west, we’re against America and Britain. And that also further broke down that misunderstanding or that that hostility that used to exist between al-Qaeda and Iran.
[00:26:24] Edmund Fitton-Brown: And of course, you know, in the Yemeni arena, where al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula used to be part of the government coalition that was fighting the Houthis, there is now a truce and even collaboration between al-Qaeda and in the Arabian Peninsula and the Houthis and Edmund.
[00:26:41] Dominic Bowen: I’ll take a moment just to remind our listeners that if you prefer to watch your podcast, the International Risk Podcast is always available on YouTube. So please do go to YouTube and search for the International Risk Podcast. And if you like our content, please subscribe, maybe even share it with a friend and do like it. This really is important for our success. Now, Edmund, how serious is the Iranian threat inside Britain?
[00:27:03] Dominic Bowen: I mean, MI5 has publicly referenced, as I mentioned earlier, 20 Iranian-backed plots since 2022. And just in March2026, the National Security Act case involved alleged surveillance of Jewish-linked targets across London. What are you seeing? How concerned should people in the UK be about the threat from Iran?
[00:27:20] Edmund Fitton-Brown: Well, I think they should be concerned, yes, definitely. Not least because of this breakdown in the barriers between different extremist groups. The fact that you could imagine an al-Qaeda attack now potentially facilitated by the IRGC or by MOIS. So we should be concerned about that. The UK is vulnerable to Islamic extremist attacks.
[00:27:44] Edmund Fitton-Brown: A lot of them have been disrupted, are still being disrupted by our security services and our security services and our police are very good. You know, there was that terrific disruption in Manchester not that long ago. So, you know, I think we have reason to be grateful to the security services for keeping us safe. But those threats exist and sooner or later the attacks will happen. Some of them may be directed against the Jewish community, but you know, actually these people will attack any vulnerable target.
[00:28:12] Edmund Fitton-Brown: And it won’t necessarily be, for example, you know, against the Ministry of Defence or against some sort of defined symbol of the British state. It can just as easily be, you know, a bomb in a concert hall or something of that kind. Or of course, you know, the classic ramming attack in a vehicle. So we know that this can happen. I think one of the things that I’d love to help people to understand and I wish that the British public could get their head around this and the British media could get their head around this.
[00:28:40] Edmund Fitton-Brown: We have lived with periods of severe terrorist threat in the past and I don’t mean al-Qaeda, I mean the ira. You know, there was a time when the IRA was regularly attacking targets in Britain. They almost succeeded in killing Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister. And wastepaper bins were removed from railway stations because of the risk of an improvised explosive device going off. Somehow or other we very quickly forgot what it was like to live with that threat.
[00:29:09] Edmund Fitton-Brown: And then we became, I think, overly risk averse because there was a period after 9 11. And of course I don’t mean to minimise how huge 9/11 was as a shock to the US, a shock to the whole West. The fact that al-Qaeda could potentially massacre 3,000 people in a single attack could actually alter the skyline of one of the great cities of the world. You know, that was serious, without a doubt. But we did overreact to it because there was a point within the decade that followed 9/11 where we really started to treat counterterrorism as if it was more important than every other form of national security put together.
[00:29:49] Edmund Fitton-Brown: There was a time when we were more worried about al-Qaeda and then perhaps a little bit later about ISIS, because in the next decade we were still very much in that obsession with counterterrorism. We thought that was more important than Russia and China and North Korea and counter proliferation and environmental issues and public health issues and all the rest of it all put together. And to my mind, we should always have been better than that. We should have been able to run systems that were mutually reinforcing. So, you know, if you’re dealing with one form of threat, it may also help you deal with other forms of threat because there will be synergies.
[00:30:27] Edmund Fitton-Brown: That’s to do with also military spending and defence doctrine where you want to make sure that your balance between conventional forces and special forces is correctly calibrated to meet the full range of threats that you may face. We’ve had, I don’t want to say overcorrection, but, you know, a dreadful correction issue recently. Recently when people suddenly lost interest in counterterrorism and said, oh, now it’s all about Russia, it’s all about China and, you know, then you suddenly find that all that money that you spent, all that investment in defence, suddenly doesn’t look like it really works against the threats that we now face. And of course it’s particularly embarrassing at the moment as we scratch our heads about whether we’re willing to and also whether we’re capable of contributing to the American war effort or at least to keeping the peace in places like the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. So I think there was a time, let’s say 10 years ago, when we probably were overestimating the threat at that point.
[00:31:22] Edmund Fitton-Brown: If you remember 2017, there were three low budget attacks that happened in very quick succession in London, where the number of casualties was very small. I think in the three attacks put together, total number of casualties was still in single figures. If I remember correctly, when we’re comparing that with what happened on 7/7 or even the Bataclan, you know, the sort of the ISIS directed marauding attacks in Paris, where you were talking about dozens or hundreds, or in the case of 9 11, thousands of casualties. The fact is that at that stage we had basically contained the threat and we had the appropriate level of defence against the threat. And since then there’s been a certain amount of disinvestment from counterterrorism and the threat may be climbing again.
[00:32:07] Edmund Fitton-Brown: It may be climbing partly because of the 7 October attack on Israel and the Israeli campaign in Gaza. So you then end up with a rather different kind of threat landscape. People, I think, have got very tired of the fact that you’ve got these sort of endless vexatious demonstrations and marches taking place. Well, those are also to some degree direct directed against the Jewish community. There’s some intimidation going on there and some cover, if you like, for terrorism against Jewish targets of the kind that we saw being attempted and in fact, in one case carried out in Manchester.
[00:32:41] Edmund Fitton-Brown: And of course that takes us to the Bondi Beach attack in Sydney, where you had a clearly antisemitic attack, but it was ISIS inspired and the gunmen who carried out that attack had visited the southern Philippines shortly beforehand. Southern Philippines is a place where, of course, there is an ISIS presence. So we might even be looking there at an attack that was not just ISIS inspired and inspired by anti Semitism that has been running rampant in Australian society, as it has in Britain as well, and elsewhere in the West. But it may also mark the re emergence of an ISIS-facilitated attack, which of course can then often be more serious, because both the tradecraft and the quality of the armoury that’s used may be much more serious if it is properly planned.
[00:33:32] Dominic Bowen: Yeah, no, thanks very much for that, Edmund. And just for clarity, in 2001, eight people were killed by terrorism in the UK. In 2002 it was two people. In 2003 it was another two people. The biggest was in 2005 when 57 people were killed, including 52 on the 7 July London bombings, which is of course a terrible attack.
[00:33:52] Dominic Bowen: And you’ve certainly worked on some really interesting things. You led the United Nations team responsible for sanctions and threat assessments against ISIS, against al-Qaeda and of course the Taliban as well. How did that experience change the way you think about the relationship between terrorism and state interests and proxy actors?
[00:34:12] Edmund Fitton-Brown: Yeah, that’s a really great question. I mean, it was definitely a major learning experience for me in a number of ways. I mean, I had dealt with counterterrorism before, but for the first time I was trying to deal with it entirely in an international setting and trying to manage difficult partners, and in some cases partners who were not partners at all who were actually part of the problem. And of course, I was also was there during a period when international relations were in a state of Flux. When I arrived in 2017 in that job, I would say that the Security Council and its committee that was dealing with our issues, ISIS, al-Qaeda and the Taliban, was functioning really well.
[00:34:58] Edmund Fitton-Brown: There was quite a high level of agreement between the key countries on the Security Council. And in particular, you know, it was not always straightforward, but we could work constructively with Russia and China as well as with Britain, France and America. And even though there were some really chronic disagreements between especially Russia and America over Syria, sometimes that would cause a problem within our team, because if we were trying to deal with, say, for example, any kind of reference to the Kurdish forces, forces in Syria, who the Turks considered to be terrorists associated with the Kurdish pkk, and from the Russian point of view, they would both agree with the Turks on that, but they would also see them as being a terrorist force because they were opposed to Assad, whereas from the American point of view, they were the key ally in containing ISIS in that part of Syria. So I watched that all play through and evolve. And of course, I watched the defeat, defeat of ISIS, because, you know, I joined in 2017.
[00:36:00] Edmund Fitton-Brown: They were defeated in Iraq in 2017, and then they were defeated finally in Syria in March of 2019. So that period, my first two years, effectively, we were watching as their caliphate was first reduced and then ultimately erased in 2019. And that, of course, affected the threat. It also affected the way that ISIS was structured because it moved them from being a geographical entity in the Middle east to being a sort of a caliphate of the mind, a virtual caliphate, a global caliphate, with its online propaganda being absolutely central to what they do, and then delegated authority to these various regional networks. So ISIS in Nigeria, ISIS in Somalia, ISIS in Afghanistan.
[00:36:47] Edmund Fitton-Brown: It was also an extraordinary time in al-Qaeda towards the end because of the fact that the Taliban took over Afghanistan one year before my time with the UN came to an end. So 2021, we saw the Taliban take over Kabul and the rest of Afghanistan, and of course, they remain allied to al-Qaeda. So it changed the prognosis for al-Qaeda. But the seminal moment in my time was when the Russians launched their full-scale invasion of Ukraine, because really, since February 2022, you can say that the Security Council has become dysfunctional. It’s no longer possible to agree even on sort of motherhood and apple pie.
[00:37:30] Edmund Fitton-Brown: Now Russia and America will disagree about everything. Or Russia and France and Britain on one side and Russia and China on the other side will disagree about absolutely everything. Everything. And so that has also affected the counterterrorism landscape. And so what has become really interesting to me was when ISIS Khorasan, which is the ISIS network that is sort of headquartered around Afghanistan, they launched two major international attacks in quick succession.
[00:38:00] Edmund Fitton-Brown: And one of them was in Kerman, the city of Kerman in Iran, and the second one was in Moscow. It was the Crocus City Hall attack. Both of them mass casualty attacks, both of them, you know, properly ISIS planned and facilitated. And in both cases, the Americans had preemptive intelligence of the attacks. And to their enormous credit, the Americans went to the Russians and they went to the Iranians and they said, we have intelligence that ISIS is planning to attack you.
[00:38:33] Edmund Fitton-Brown: And if the Iranians or the Russians had taken those warnings seriously, those attacks might have been prevented. But in both cases, because of this extreme international turbulence and mistrust that exists nowadays, the assumption in Iran was that this was just a disruptive piece of disinformation and the same assumption from the Russians. And of course, then the attacks happened, and in both cases the Iranians and the Russians tried to pin the blame on anyone except ISIS. So the Iranians said it was the Israelis and the Russians said it was the Ukrainians. But of course, eventually it became undeniable that it was ISIS who had done both attacks.
[00:39:15] Edmund Fitton-Brown: Now, that’s interesting because I would say during the earlier time that I was working for the un, first of all, there’s no doubt that the US would of course have done the same thing. They would not have hesitated to pass pre-emptive intelligence to the Iranians and to the Russians, and the Russians for sure would have acted on it before everything went so horribly ugly, after they decided that they were going to go all in on Ukraine with the Iranians, it’s harder to say. The Iranians have been in a state of acute paranoia for such a long time, and they’ve been state sponsors of terrorism for such a long time. And therefore it’s hard to know when I was dealing with the Iranians, obviously, because I was working for the Security Council and for the United Nations, I was willing to talk to anybody. I would talk to anybody who was a state actor.
[00:40:02] Edmund Fitton-Brown: You know, I wouldn’t go and talk to the Houthis themselves because they’re a sub-state actor, they’re not recognised by the United Nations. But Iran is a member state of the United Nations, it’s recognised by the United Nations. And I had regular interactions with the Iranians. And on a number of occasions we talked about the possibility of, of me visiting Iran to get a briefing from them on their perception of the terrorist groups that we were Dealing with. They could have talked to us about ISIS, they could have talked to us about the Taliban, they could have talked to us about al-Qaeda.
[00:40:33] Edmund Fitton-Brown: But it turned out that in the end they just weren’t willing to receive us. And I think the reason for that was essentially they knew that they had much of the al-Qaeda leadership in Iran. They knew that if we came, we would ask that question and, you know, then we would interpret what they said and we would write a report in which we either called them liars or we said, well, you know, reading between the lines of what the Iranians said, you know, we’re confident that the reports from other member states that much of the al-Qaeda leadership is hosted in Iran are true. So, yeah, it was, it was interesting, but we made sense of it. We wrote a lot of reports which I think were influential in terms of the way that the international community understood the threat.
[00:41:15] Dominic Bowen: Well, thanks for showing that, Edmund. And maybe just in the last 30 seconds, a question that we ask all guests on the International Risk podcast is when you look around the world, what are the international risks that concern you the most?
[00:41:27] Edmund Fitton-Brown: Well, I’m very concerned about Russia. I think that we need to stop them in Ukraine because if we don’t, I think then they will turn their attention to the Baltic states and then we have the issue of how functional functional is NATO and are we actually potentially drifting towards a world war? So that, that’s got to be number one. I do remain very concerned about China as a long-term strategic challenge. I don’t want to call China a threat.
[00:41:50] Edmund Fitton-Brown: In the end, China is so integrated into the global economy that I think eventually the Americans and the Chinese are going to have to make sense of each other and, you know, and everybody else is going to have to sort of, you know, work around that as well. I think a zero-sum game where China and America try to cut each other’s legs off, I don’t think it makes any sense. So I think we have, you know, a, we have to avoid that, but B, I think we will avoid it. And then Iran, I mean, you just have to say that this war, I think now that the US has grasped the nettle, I think it’s very important that we try, if we possibly can, to secure the removal of the Islamic Republic and give Iran back to the Iranian people.
[00:42:24] Dominic Bowen: Well, thanks very much for explaining that, Edmund and certainly some significant international risks that you mentioned. And thanks very much for coming on the International Risk podcast today.
[00:42:32] Edmund Fitton-Brown: Most welcome, Dominic. Thank you very much.
[00:42:34] Dominic Bowen: Well, that was a great conversation with Edmund Fitton-Brown and I really appreciated hearing his insights on Iran’s external operations, on the threat picture inside the United Kingdom and across Europe, and of course, the challenge of responding to increasingly complex state-backed threats. Today’s podcast was produced and coordinated by Edward Penrose. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening and we’ll speak again in the next couple of days.
[00:42:57] Dominic Bowen: Thank you for listening to this episode of the International Risk Podcast. For more episodes and articles, Visit theinternationalriskpodcast.com Follow us on LinkedIn, Bluesky and Instagram for the latest updates and to ask your questions to our host, Dominic Bowen. See you next time.