The threat of Iranian attacks inside the United States

“When did Noah build the Ark? Before the rain. Before the rain.”

Nathan Muir, Spy Games

The President says we are monitoring Iranian sleeper cells in this country: “We’ve got our eye on all of them, I think.”

I do not doubt that the President is speaking based on the intelligence provided to him by our law enforcement and intelligence agencies. I also have great difficulty believing that we are anywhere close to knowing where all Iranian agents are in this country, much less being able to monitor their activities and prevent them from attacking targets on our soil.

Let’s begin with this. For four years, President Biden and his cronies kept our borders wide open. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that they erased our borders. Millions of people flooded into the country and then disappeared into the interior.

We do not know where those people are. We do not know who they are. They came without papers. They came with false papers. They walked across the border in many cases without ever encountering a Border Patrol agent. Average people with no background in clandestine operations or training “penetrated” our “border defenses” and set up residence on our soil without any interference from our homeland security apparatus.

Now imagine that in the midst of that madness, you were an Iranian intelligence officer or member of the Qods Force charged with putting teams of saboteurs into the United States for possible use in a future conflict. You had access to the full capabilities of the Islamic Republic. You also had access to the worldwide capabilities of groups like Hezbollah.

You also had at your disposal the support of hostile nations like Venezuela. We have known for some time that Caracas provided Iran and Hezbollah with fully backstopped sets of false identity documents. That means that the Venezuelan government was issuing passports, birth certificates, driver’s licenses, etc., in false names and also that all of those documents were then officially registered in all applicable databases. If somebody in the United States queried Venezuela about your passport, the official response would be that the passport was legitimate and the individual holding it was who they said they were.

How exactly would you determine that the passport holder was, in fact, an Iranian spy? You could not. Not unless you had a source inside Iranian intelligence or the Venezuelan government to tell you what was really going on. Given the catastrophic damage done to CIA and other agencies by Biden and Brennan, the chances of us having such access are effectively nil right now.

All of which means that in all likelihood, we have no real idea how many Iranian cells there are on our soil, what they are up to, or when they may strike. We’d better change that fast, because every indication is that this war is going to drag on and that the Iranians intend to fight it in the realm of unconventional warfare.

Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, announced on Thursday that the Strait of Hormuz would remain closed. He also stated, “The desire of the masses of the people is the continuation of effective and regret-inducing defense.” Khamenei went on to add that Iran is assessing the possibility of opening other fronts as part of the ongoing conflict, “where the enemy has little experience and where it would be highly vulnerable.” These fronts will be activated “if the war situation persists and in accordance with the considerations of national interest,” he said.

I am not sure how much clearer Khamenei could be. We may wish to continue to make this a high-tech fight between opposing militaries. Unless things wrap up soon, the Iranians are taking the war into the shadows.

The smell of such a move is already in the air. This week, Poland’s National Centre for Nuclear Research defended against a cyberattack. This attack targeted the organization’s IT infrastructure, and per Krzysztof Gawkowski, the country’s digital minister, the attack originated from Iran. At roughly the same time, pro-Iran hackers caused a “global network disruption” to a major US medical device maker. This feels like probing activity in advance of something much bigger, perhaps even as part of a coordinated attack on a variety of levels.

The FBI has warned police departments in California in recent days that Iran could retaliate for American attacks by launching drones at the West Coast. How serious that intelligence is remains to be seen, but again, it is indicative of the direction things are going. The federal government is also warning about the possibility of the Iranians working with the Mexican cartels and leveraging their extensive drone capabilities for attacks on U.S. targets. The cartels have been flying drones into the United States for years now, despite our efforts to interdict them.

All of these disparate pieces of intelligence need to be evaluated against this backdrop. The Iranians started a long time ago to put assets on our soil, and they are very good at it.

Maybe the most illustrative case dates back to 2019 and the arrest of two U.S.-based Hezbollah Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO) operatives, Ali Kourani and Samer el Debek, who were tasked with carrying out pre-operational surveillance for potential Hezbollah attacks in the United States and Panama. The IJO is a unit within Hezbollah that works closely with Iranian intelligence and the Iranian Qods Force.

Debek and Kourani lived in the United States. They were here for years. They lived their covers and did everything possible to blend in. At the same time, they were working hard to lay the groundwork for attacks inside the United States. Kourani was directed to identify Israelis in New York who could be targeted by Hezbollah and to find people from whom he could procure arms that Hezbollah could stockpile in the area. Kourani also conducted surveillance of the New York and Toronto airports as well as of the FBI, Secret Service, and U.S. military facilities in New York City.

After his arrest, while being questioned by the FBI, Kourani stated, “I am a member of 910, also known as Islamic Jihad or the Black Ops of Hezbollah. The unit is Iranian-controlled.” He added that in the event that the United States and Iran went to war, his cell would be called upon to act.

Debek and Kourani were here so long and so deeply borrowed in that by the time they were caught, they had both become naturalized U.S. citizens.

We are getting closer and closer every day to the initiation of Iranian-directed terrorist attacks on our soil. We’d better move very fast to get ahead of the game if we intend to prevent significant loss of life and infrastructure damage. The time to move is now, not later.

As the man said. “When did Noah build the Ark? Before the rain.”

Originally published by AND Magazine