French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot revealed yesterday that last month’s cyberattack on supermarket fridges and freezers was the work of Shahid Kaveh, the cyber unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). That was followed by today's Wall Street Journal story that US planes have been evacuated from RAF Mildenhall after an Iranian threat.
You’d have to be a Grade A useful idiot of the Iranian regime to be in any way surprised by any of this. The regime has long been a cancer not just on the Middle East but globally, as both the world’s leading funder of terror and as one of the main terrorist actors, especially through the IRGC.
And yet despite the litany of attacks by Iran on the West – direct attacks which threaten our safety – we still treat the regime with kid gloves. Donald Trump’s attack on Iran was correct in conception; the problem was his all too typical refusal to follow through. Just as he left the Iranian protestors high and dry in January – having urged them to “keep protesting” and promising that “help is on its way” – so when he took the correct step of seeking to degrade Iran’s ability to threaten the US and its allies, he suddenly stopped before the job was near finished. Now he has said that any resumption is "highly unlikely".
This is partly because, as the acronym has it, TACO (Trump always chickens out) but mainly because the US was left without any support, other than from Israel. Western nations have repeatedly refused to treat Iran as the enemy it is, even helping to draw up the appalling JCPOA (the nuclear deal) under Obama.
Barot said the IRGC attack on France was "unprecedented in both its scale and its level of aggression". When you look at the history of Iran’s attacks on the West, it’s clear that this latest one is anything but unprecedented. For one thing, dozens of supermarkets across seven other European countries suffered similar attacks. (Gloriously, the BBC report of the news tells us that, “It is not known if the instances are linked”.) Cyberattacks are a long-standing Iranian tool. A large cyberattack on Albanian government systems used malware based on known Iranian tooling. The attacker was later linked to Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security, working under the persona “Homeland Justice”.
And a cyberattack took an unnamed UK power plant offline for four days earlier this year, reportedly the first time foreign hackers have physically stopped a UK energy facility. US energy and water sites, including systems in New Jersey, Alabama and Minnesota, were reportedly hit at the same time. The government confirmed the incident, but also said the energy system was not at risk.
What makes the foreign minister’s comment actually ridiculous is how he intends to respond. France will, he said, "implement sanctions at the European level against all those responsible for this attack." I am sure the IRGC will be quaking in their boots at the latest paltry response by those it attacks.
There have been a series of convictions, for example of an Iranian diplomat in Belgium over the 2018 Villepinte bomb plot, when a “professional quality” bomb was intended to explode at a rally of the exiled National Council of Resistance of Iran at Villepinte, where some 25,000 people had gathered.
Iranian intelligence officials plotted in 2020 and 2021 to kidnap Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad from the US and take her to Iran. In 2022 two Russian mob leaders took $500,000 from the Iranian government to have her killed, and a hired gunman with an AK-47 who waited outside her Brooklyn home. Both men were convicted in March 2025. A third plot in 2024, run by an IRGC asset, hired a Brooklyn man for $100,000, who was then sentenced to 15 years this January. In October 2024 the US also charged an IRGC brigadier general, Ruhollah Bazghandi, over a separate Alinejad plot.
Then in March 2024, Pouria Zeraati, another journalist and a presenter for Iran International, was stabbed in Wimbledon. Two Romanians were convicted of wounding with intent at Woolwich Crown Court on 5 June 2026. Prosecutors told the jury they were proxies for the Iranian government, and described extended surveillance beforehand.
There are so many more of these, not least the assassination attempt on Donald Trump planned by the IRGC and two New York men. The IRGC asset in Tehran behind the plot was said by US prosecutors to have been told “money's not an issue”. He was also said to have been tasked with tracking two Jewish Americans, with $500,000 offered to kill either.
MI5's director general Ken McCallum said this year that MI5 and police have responded to 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots since January 2022, using criminals as proxies. On February 28, 2026 Sir Keir Starmer said that in the previous year alone Iran had backed more than 20 potentially deadly attacks on UK soil. And in 2023 Tom Tugendhat, then security minister, told the Commons that at least 15 credible threats to kill or kidnap people in the UK had been detected in 2022, that Iran had been gathering information on Jews as preparation for lethal operations, and that an IRGC member, Mohammad Mehdi Mozayyani, had worked to carry out a lethal operation against dissidents in the UK.
In October and December 2024 there were arson attacks on a kosher deli in Sydney and the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne, which Australia's domestic intelligence agency ASIO attributed to Iran through a “layer cake” of intermediaries, including organised criminals. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese expelled Iran's ambassador, Ahmad Sadeghi, and three other diplomats, the first expulsion of a foreign ambassador from Australia since the Second World War.
More recently, the four men convicted of the Golders Green arson attacks are thought by the security services to be linked to Iran.
These are a tiny fraction of Iran’s most recent attacks in the West. And yet our response is to do next to nothing. Is it any wonder they keep happening?
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