What just happened
- Protesters against Macron’s pension reforms staged France’s biggest May 1st demonstrations in 30 years.
- America’s TV and film writers went on strike over pay for the first time in 15 years.
- Princess Anne said a slimmed-down British monarchy didn’t sound like a good idea.
Iran is using crime gangs and terror groups as hit squads on the streets of London. Their aim: to silence enemies of the Tehran regime with the blunt force instrument of murder.
Police and MI5 claim to have foiled more than 15 plots to assassinate or abduct individuals in the UK since January last year. There have been at least another 18 Iranian schemes to kill or kidnap people in the UK since the Islamic revolution of 1979 – eight of them resulting in the death of the target or an Iranian agent.
So what? There is only one known record of an attempted prosecution of an Iranian agent or proxy – in February this year, according to a Tortoise investigation released today. Otherwise the hit squads appear to have evaded the law or shrugged it off. The numbers point to
- The Iranian regime’s relentless pursuit of critics on UK soil;
- Britain’s failure to bring the perpetrators to justice despite considerable success in disrupting their plots; and
- the risk that vital sources of independent news on Iran’s pro-democracy movement can be intimidated into silence even in a supposedly free country.
History happening. The death in custody last year of Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian woman arrested by morality police for the way she was wearing her headscarf, has triggered the most sustained and widespread anti-regime protests in Iran in 40 years. For Iranian media abroad the protests have been the biggest story in decades and the regime is trying to shut it down.
Warnings 1. Counter-terrorism police officers first visited Aliasghar Ramezanpour in January 2022. They warned the executive editor of Iran International, a TV news channel in southwest London, of a “credible and imminent” threat to his life from the Iranian government.
The police officers advised Ramezanpour to move to a safehouse. He declined, saying it would make his work impossible. Iran International broadcasts by satellite in Persian, and its coverage of unrest in the Islamic Republic has been highly critical.
Last November, Ramezanpour received his second threat-to-life warning from counter-terrorism police officers. He again declined to move to a safehouse, but now moves around with a personal security guard. British authorities surrounded his office building with a steel fence, concrete barriers, armed guards, and armoured vehicles. But the threats didn’t stop. In February, Ramezanpour’s editorial staff had to vacate the building. It has been empty ever since.
Warnings 2. Iran International isn’t the only Persian-language newsroom in London that the Iranian government has threatened. Journalists at BBC Persian and Manato TV have spoken to Tortoise about similar warnings from counter-terrorism police, including one about the possibility of children being kidnapped from their school.
Counter-terrorism officers at the Metropolitan Police, who work with MI5, call this “hostile state activity.” It has become a more important part of their policing work, with threats mainly coming from Russia, China and Iran.
Iran started it. While Russia started targeting individuals in the UK relatively recently, Iran began right after the 1979 revolution. In 1980, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Hadi Khorsandi, a satirist who made a joke about Mohammed. It predates his killing order against Salman Rushdie, over The Satanic Verses, by almost a decade.
When the Metropolitan Police visited Khorsandi to warn him of the threat, their best advice was to never be on time for an appointment.
“A half-hour delay is one Iranian tradition I always observe,” Khorsandi told them.
One officer shook his head and said: “Then God help you, because your killers are Iranian, too.”
Impunity. The reasons the UK hasn’t prosecuted plotters are varied. Sometimes authorities have intelligence of a plot, but not evidence, which is required by a criminal court. Sometimes a criminal case is dropped to solve a consular case and bring a British hostage in Iran back home. What’s clear is that Tehran is writing its own rules of engagement and riding roughshod over Britain’s.
Weak banks
The Biden White House has been content to let regulators and JP Morgan clean up the First Republic Bank mess. That may soon look complacent. JP Morgan, America’s biggest bank, grew even bigger at the weekend with its $10.6 billion purchase of most of First Republic, ostensibly drawing a line under a simmering banking crisis that had already killed off Silicon Valley Bank and the New York-based Signature Bank so far this year. Unlike those failures, First Republic’s didn’t involve the US Treasury or the Fed, so taxpayers are insulated from the damage. But they won’t be for long if Berkshire Hathaway’s Charlie Munger is right that the entire sector has been weakened by commercial real estate loans turning bad from the combined effects of Covid (working from home) and online shopping. The ‘who’s next?’ question is very much alive.
Beware my AI
Artificial intelligence software could be smarter than humans much sooner than expected, changing the world in unforeseen ways and leaving billions of people unable to tell what’s true. If this was just another tech bro doing performative anxiety it might warrant no more than a shrug, but it’s Geoffrey Hinton, “godfather of AI” and for ten years the biggest neural networks brain at Google. He’s now resigned to be able to speak freely about the perils of what he’s created, starting in the NYT. Definite echoes here of Oppenheimer and the Bomb, although there’s another reason for Hinton to be resigning. He’s 75.
