After President Trump ordered airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, U.S. officials issued urgent alerts about potential terrorist attacks in the United States, including warnings that Tehran could direct sleeper cells to strike.
But when Iran’s government was determined to assassinate Mr. Trump during the 2024 campaign, it did not activate sleeper agents or try to sneak elite operatives into the country.
Instead, an Iranian military commander assigned the job to Farhad Shakeri, an Afghan man living in Tehran, according to a criminal complaint released by the Justice Department.
Mr. Shakeri in turn enlisted two men he’d met in an American prison more than a decade earlier: Carlisle “Pop” Rivera, a self-employed Brooklyn pipe fitter, and his friend Jonathon Loadholt of Staten Island.
Federal agents detected the plot and arrested Mr. Rivera and Mr. Loadholt.
It was just one of several recent instances in which federal prosecutors say the Iranian government tried to hire criminals — including Russian mobsters, Mexican cartel hit men and a Canadian Hells Angel — to carry out violent acts in the United States.
Iran may be seeking deniability by outsourcing its plots to people with no apparent ties to the country. In January, Iran’s president insisted that his government had never plotted to kill Mr. Trump.
But the recruitment of such unfamiliar third parties could also indicate that Iran lacks the network of trained operatives within the United States that Trump officials warn of.
Virtually defenseless against aerial attack, Iran would invite severe retaliation from Mr. Trump.
In an internal email sent after the U.S. strikes in Iran, the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Rodney S. Scott, warned that “thousands of Iranian nationals” had entered the country without authorization in the last several years.
About 1,700 Iranians were arrested at the southern U.S. border from October 2021 through November 2024, according to the most recent official data publicly available.
The data does not indicate how many of those people may have been fleeing persecution or may be opponents of Iran’s government.
Mr. Scott also cited the threat from Iranian “sleeper cells,” as well as Iranian “sympathizers” conducting attacks.
And soon after the American strikes, the Department of Homeland Security announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials had arrested nearly a dozen Iranians accused of being in the country illegally. Among them, the agency said, was a man previously “listed as a known or suspected terrorist” and a man who it said had admitted to having ties to Hezbollah, Iran’s ally in Lebanon.
Iran and Hezbollah have long sought to position agents within the United States for potential terrorist attacks with at least some success, said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. “I don’t think there’s much doubt about that,” he said, adding that the threat of sleeper agents “can’t be discounted.”
Over the past decade, U.S. authorities have arrested a handful of men directly affiliated with Hezbollah. In 2017, two men, one from New York and one from Michigan, were arrested and charged with conducting surveillance of potential targets for Hezbollah attacks, including military, law enforcement and Israeli sites in New York City. Both men had training in military tactics and explosives.
And in May 2023, a New Jersey resident was sentenced to 12 years in prison for receiving military-style training from Hezbollah while scouting a long list of potential targets, including the Statue of Liberty, Times Square and the Empire State Building, with a focus on “structural weaknesses,” according to the Justice Department.
But Mr. Hoffman noted that the recent record of known plots orchestrated by Tehran have not involved Iranian operatives or members of Hezbollah, a group that a top State Department official once branded as “the A-team” of terrorists.
“The incidents we’ve seen in recent years have probably been from the C-team,” Mr. Hoffman added.
A few years before targeting Mr. Trump, for instance, Iran’s government also tried to assassinate his former national security adviser, John R. Bolton — again by recruiting criminals. The plots were meant to avenge the death of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a senior Iranian commander who was killed in a 2020 U.S. drone strike that Mr. Trump ordered.
For the effort to kill Mr. Bolton, a Revolutionary Guards member in Tehran tried to hire what the U.S. government called “criminal elements,” including a U.S. resident whom he had met online, according to the Justice Department.
The plots to kill Mr. Trump and Mr. Bolton reflect a trend of Iranian reliance on criminals for sensitive missions. In 2022, senior Revolutionary Guards officials hired a pair of Russian mafia hit men to kill Masih Alinejad, a journalist and prominent critic of Iran’s clerical regime who left the country in 2009.
The job of murdering an Iranian defector in Maryland was given to a member of the Hells Angels biker gang living in Canada, according to a December 2023 Justice Department indictment.
And for the planned killing of Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States in 2011, Iran turned to an Iranian American man in Texas with ties to Iran’s military leadership — who in turn offered $1.5 million to people he believed were Mexican drug cartel assassins to bomb an upscale Washington restaurant frequented by the diplomat.
Some experts said they worry less about directed agents of Tehran than the threat of “lone wolf” extremists motivated by virulently anti-American propaganda. “The bigger concern is that someone will be inspired to do something,” said Matthew Levitt, a former F.B.I. counterterrorism analyst.
Civil libertarians worry that Trump officials might exploit fears of terrorism to justify further crackdowns on migrants within the United States. Faiza Patel, senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, noted that the Homeland Security Department’s statement about the Iranians arrested late last month included language about a broader Trump administration crackdown on “known or suspected terrorists or violent extremists.”
While the department did not directly accuse the arrested Iranians of terrorist activity, the statement was “of a piece with the administration’s tendency to attach the terrorism label to people without proof,” she said.
The statement also highlighted the fact that one of the Iranians, Ribvar Karimi, “reportedly served as an Iranian Army sniper from 2018 to 2021” and had an Iranian army identification card when he was arrested in Alabama. The significance of his military affiliation is unclear, however, given that all Iranian men from the age of 18 must complete two years of compulsory military service.
Among the Iranians arrested last month was a 64-year-old New Orleans woman married to a U.S. citizen who had been living in America for 47 years, and a Portland man married to a U.S. citizen who has been in the country for more than 20 years, according to The Associated Press.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the recent arrests of Iranians did not reflect a specific operation targeting that nationality. But she added that “it is in the American public interest to know that we are actively enforcing the law to get illegal aliens, including potential threats to national security, out of our country.”
Even though the United States and Iran have reached an uneasy truce for the moment, analysts say the threat remains serious.
Mr. Hoffman noted that Iran initially responded to General Suleimani’s killing with a limited missile attack against U.S. forces in Iraq that caused no fatalities — much like the largely inconsequential missile salvo it fired at American bases in Qatar and Iraq last week.
But soon after that 2020 attack, Iran began plotting to kill Mr. Trump.
“I think, from the Iranian perspective, they’re going to do more at some point,” Mr. Hoffman said. “They definitely subscribe to the aphorism that revenge is a dish best served cold.”
Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting from New York, and Adam Goldman and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
Michael Crowley covers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times. He has reported from nearly three dozen countries and often travels with the secretary of state.
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
The post Amid Warnings of Iranian Terrorism, a History of Failed ‘C Team’ Plots appeared first on New York Times.
