UK Parliament releases Iran report
Intelligence and Security Committee highlights policy differences and intelligence co-operation with US
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The UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee has today released a report on Iran, the third it has produced on perceived state threats to the UK, following those on Russia in July 2020, and China in July 2023.
Like its precursors, the Iran report has suffered a significant delay between completion and publication, presumably while waiting for sign-off from the UK Government.
Andrew Defty notes that it was ‘completed before Trump’s re-election but the experience of the previous Trump administration hangs heavily over this report.’ One key conclusion is that ‘since the US’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement in 2018, the Iranian nuclear threat has increased’ (p.5).
In a heavily redacted chapter on international partnerships, the committee questioned whether the US intelligence relationship represented interdependence or over-reliance (p.160). Responses from the Foreign Secretary and the intelligence agencies were predictably bullish about the value of US liaison and the UK’s contribution to it. MI6 said that ‘the relationship between the agencies is mature enough that we will keep sharing, even when our policy positions are not aligned, and that is as true for *** … and the Americans’ (p.165).
The report also predates the October 7 attacks, the subsequent conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon, and Israel’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear programme. One might well expect that its judgements about Iran’s ‘network of complex relationships with militant and terrorist groups’ (p.41) are now somewhat moot. The UK intelligence community appears prescient in emphasising that ‘these destabilising tactics have not entirely deterred Israeli or US attacks’, although the judgement that they have ‘strengthened Israeli-Gulf alignment’ may have been overtaken by events (p.42).
One section that will have enduring interest for spook-watchers contains a portrait of Iran’s two main intelligence services, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) and the Intelligence Organisation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC-IO).
Both the Intelligence Community and our External Experts made clear that there is significant competition within the Iranian security architecture. This applies to the Iranian system as a whole as well as its intelligence organisations. The JIO described the Iranian system as “complex and fractured … [with] all sorts of feuding and different power centres competing and jostling for position”.29 The JIO also told the Committee that this fragmented nature presented a challenge to the Intelligence Community’s understanding (p.17).