FBI says Tehran still seeks revenge over Soleimani killing

The FBI on Thursday warned that Iran's campaign to avenge the US killing of Revolutionary Guards commander Qassem Soleimani remains active and persistent.

Testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee, the bureau’s operations director, Michael Glasheen, said the FBI has made more than 70 arrests tied to hostile foreign intelligence activity since January.

“Iran continues to plot attacks against former government officials in retaliation for the January 2020 death of IRGC-QF Commander Qassem Soleimani,” he said.

“They also have continued to provide support to their proxies and terrorist organizations throughout the world, such as Lebanese Hizballah.”

Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike near Baghdad airport in January 2020.

The strike, ordered by President Donald Trump, became a defining rupture in the archfoes’ relations and has since been invoked by Iranian officials as justification for long-term retaliation.

Glasheen said the FBI has already disrupted several alleged plots, noting that in October 2024 federal prosecutors charged “an asset of the IRGC” who was allegedly tasked with directing a network of criminal associates to target US officials, including Trump.

The June War factor

Tehran's threat, Glasheen said, extends beyond targeted killings to “periodic surveillance of Jewish and Israeli facilities and individuals inside the United States.

“It is possible the Israel-Hamas conflict and ensuing strikes between Iran and Israel will provoke increased Iranian surveillance of US-based Jewish and Israeli persons,” he told lawmakers.

Israel struck targets inside Iran in June, triggering retaliatory missile and drone attacks that continued for 12 days before a US-brokered ceasefire halted the exchange.

The confrontation marked the most direct military clash between the two rivals in decades and elevated concerns in Washington over Iranian activity worldwide.

Glasheen also described Iran as one of the United States’ most capable cyber adversaries, operating in “a blurred space where criminal groups and state-directed actors often converge.”

Iran is muddling through an economic mess but its luck may run out

Dec 11, 2025, 17:15 GMT

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Shahram Kholdi

As diplomatic horizons narrow and domestic hardships mount, Iran appears to endure less through strategic vision than an ad hoc survival economy backed up by China, Russia and its armed allies abroad.

Its operating model is neither innovative nor cohesive, but a set of pragmatic mechanisms built on three pillars: sanctions-evasion finance, covert oil lifelines and proxy leverage.

Beneath these pillars sits a twin base: China, the economic enabler which buys its oil, and Russia, a fellow bearer of stiff sanctions whose alignment offers diplomatic cover but also commercial competition.

With the aid of these two powers, the Islamic Republic survives not through mastery but through continual manoeuvre.

Understanding this architecture matters because it now shapes a broader convergence in global security. As the United States expands its military buildup in the Caribbean, Iran faces the potential loss of a Western Hemisphere partner long utilised by the Revolutionary Guards Quds Force.

Should Washington succeed in pulling Caracas away from Tehran, one more long-alleged sanctions evasion route may be blocked.

Sanctions evasion

Tehran continues to move funds with notable agility despite the so-called snapback of UN sanctions triggered by Western Europe in October and successive US-led actions to interdict missile and drone procurement networks.

Dubai, Istanbul, Muscat and Baghdad have been named as transit points in US Treasury press releases. Exchange houses and front companies facilitate conversions that allow restricted revenues to re-enter circulation.

Some networks targeted by Western authorities are alleged to have funnelled substantial sums to Hezbollah through opaque trade and currency channels.

These mechanisms define the Islamic Republic’s financial landscape.

Even so, these flows are tributaries. The main current runs east.

Chinese lifeline

The economic centre of the Islamic Republic increasingly lies in Shandong, Shanghai and the harbors of southern China.

Analysts estimate that roughly 80–90 percent of Iranian crude exports ultimately land in China, often routed through ship-to-ship transfers, re-flagged vessels and blends labelled as Malaysian, Omani or others.

These operations appear in tanker-tracking data and in recent investigations highlighting the Revolutionary Guards tightening oversight of a global shadow fleet.

For Beijing, the rationale is straightforward: discounted supplies, insulation from Western price caps and evidence that sanctions enforcement is no longer uniform. For Tehran, the lifeline underscores deepening dependence on a far more powerful state.

Russia’s role differs. Also under sanctions, Moscow competes directly with Tehran for China’s crude demand while simultaneously normalising sanctions-defiance as a geopolitical posture.

Two sanctioned exporters move in parallel: rivals commercially, yet aligned in resisting Western leverage.

Armed allis

Armed groups in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen remain central to Tehran’s deterrence and diplomacy. They function, in effect, as strategic currency.

Western intelligence assessments circulated this year suggest Tehran transferred around one billion dollars to Hezbollah—an unusually high figure under any sanctions regime.

While details of the financial conduits remain incomplete, defence officials say Hezbollah is rearming despite the 2024 ceasefire, while Lebanon’s armed forces lack the capacity to enforce disarmament provisions. This comes as Israel maintains outposts in the country and launches deadly air strikes it says target militants.

In this environment, Iranian support is not merely financial but structural.

The Houthis continue to grow more assertive. Their maritime disruptions and drone activity reflect a movement whose operational confidence increasingly exceeds Tehran’s ability to shape or restrain it.

Europe’s reassessment

Europe, long divided over Iran, has entered a period of strategic recalibration. Tehran’s supply of Shahed-series drones to Russia has shifted its significance from a regional issue to a European security concern.

Western officials now warn that such transfers pose direct risks to continental defence.

Germany’s deployment of the Arrow-3 air-defence system—developed jointly with Israel—reflects the jitters. Senior officials from Ukraine and Israel met last week to coordinate responses to Iran’s expanding missile and drone proliferation.

European scrutiny has also grown over Iranian cultural, religious and financial centres suspected of facilitating sanctions evasion or money-laundering.

What was once treated as a bilateral nuisance is now cast as a collective security challenge.

A strained machinery

Thus stands the Islamic Republic in 2025: its revenues routed through offshore channels, its diplomacy reinforced by Russia, its economy dependent on China, its proxies potent but increasingly difficult to manage, and its domestic legitimacy fragile.

It survives on a framework effective in the short term but vulnerable in the long run.

Historical parallels caution that states relying on improvised economic lifelines and brittle alliances can appear stable until stresses accumulate beyond what the system can absorb.

These comparisons do not determine Iran’s trajectory, but they underline that a state held together by constrained revenues and external dependence is off balance and inherently unstable.