At the heart of the Daniel Khalife trial has been the question: is he an amateurish fantasist who convinced himself he was playing a game of chess with spies, or a consequential character in the global world of espionage?
The answer, the police have said, is a bit of both. They believed Khalife to be inept in many regards. Khalife’s own barrister, Gul Nawaz Hussain KC, said he was “hapless” and “sometimes bordering on the slapstick” – more Scooby-Doo than 007.
But detectives also built up evidence of a young man who was able to mount the prison escape that sparked a huge manhunt last year, and one whose actions in the employ of Iranian security services may have materially affected people’s lives.
Now, a jury has convicted Khalife of working as an asset for Iranian spies while serving as a British soldier as he sought to evade capture. He had already admitted escaping from Wandsworth prison as he awaited trial.
“It is difficult to disentangle [Khalife’s] ego – the fantasy he created, the money he earned, and his inability to understand the damage he was causing here,” Commander Dominic Murphy of Scotland Yard’s SO15 counter-terrorism unit told reporters, when asked about Khalife’s motivation to work for Tehran. “Put it all together and it is a mixed picture. And it is a picture of Daniel Khalife.”
For his part, Khalife told the jury he had sought to cultivate his Iranian intelligence contacts to help British security services. He claimed he mainly fed his handlers either fake information, or real documents that were already in the public domain. And, once he had their trust, he had wanted to work as a double agent for the British. The breakout, he said, was to demonstrate the folly of locking up someone with his talents.
Here was a man who really was spying for Tehran, a jury has found. He was passing his handlers information that, while often fake, could easily have put the British-Iranian former prisoner in Tehran Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe at risk, police say. And, at the same time, here was a man who thought he would be able to secure his recruitment by British intelligence by ringing MI5’s front desk.
Here was a man who was able to gather the names of special forces personnel and to subsequently break out of a prison. And, at the same time, here was a man who thought he could play the security apparatus of one nation off against that of another by sending a message on the “contact us” section on MI6’s website.
Khalife’s own defence to the spying charges was that the way he acted was “crazy perhaps, hare-brained in some respects”, but that he had at least avoided “betraying or hurting anyone, other than himself”.
The 23-year-old also admitted breaking out of Wandsworth prison in south-west London by harnessing himself to the underside of a food delivery lorry in September 2023. He was being held there on remand.
Then again, perhaps he did not need to be quite as resourceful as might be thought to carry out his escape. The driver of the van on which Khalife stowed away told the jury he was allowed to leave the site, even though it was known a prisoner was missing. And an inspection later found dozens of failures, describing a facility in crisis, where management could not even account for prisoners during the working day.
Khalife said he initially planned only to arouse suspicion of an escape so he could be moved to a higher-security wing, where he would feel safer in prison. But, when his efforts apparently failed to provoke suspicion among senior prison staff, he concluded a blunter instrument was needed to get their attention: an actual escape.
During the trial, the court heard Khalife made contact with Iran in April 2019, about seven months after he had joined the British army shortly before his 17th birthday. The court heard he contacted Hamed Ghashgabi, an Iranian intelligence officer who had been placed under sanctions by the US, over Facebook.
Prosecutors said he started handing his Iranian contacts information the following month. Khalife has said he produced “fake documents” to help convince the Iranians to trust him. They included a made-up letter supposedly from the then defence secretary, Ben Wallace, to the head of MI6 with a “set of orders … in regards to Iran”. Another was a fake letter from the former Tory MP Penny Mordaunt to a senior naval figure describing “the use of unarmed submersible technology to further the UK’s interest in the Middle East”.
Other documents fabricated by Khalife – some of which contained spelling mistakes – included one titled “Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe intelligense [sic] options” that prosecutors said could have endangered her, and another with a Ministry of Defence header called “Iran’s nuclear ambitions”.
About three months after first speaking to Iranian agents, Khalife tried to contact the UK’s foreign intelligence service, MI6. He would go on to also try to contact the domestic security service, MI5, in November 2021.
But not before travelling to Istanbul to “deliver a package” to Iranian intelligence, discussing an internal military system with a contact and taking a photo of a handwritten note of 15 troops – including some serving in the Special Air Service (SAS) and Special Boat Service (SBS). Prosecutors said he continued to pass information to Tehran until January 2022. Repeatedly instigating contact with his handlers was a feature of Khalife’s case, police have said.
About a year later, with the net closing around him, he went awol from his army unit.
Whatever officers thought of his attempts to play the spy game, they have not taken the threat they believe he posed – and that states such as Iran continue to pose – lightly.
“He describes the Iranians as incompetent and unprofessional. That is not our experience. We have disrupted 20 plots – including some assassination plots,” said Murphy. “Since 2018, states threats work has gone from 5% to 20% of SO15’s work. I cannot say there have been wholesale changes [to the way the threats from foreign states are policed], but we are alive to it. And Daniel Khalife highlights why.”
Detectives believe they know who Khalife’s handlers were, though they do not know who was handling the dead drops in London parks for Tehran. They continue to investigate that. And, while they do not believe Iran helped him while he was on the run – even though Khalife tried to make contact – police are looking into who got £400 to him to help him sustain himself. His family are not in the frame, detectives have stressed.
While they admit they had no real idea where Khalife was for the first 36 hours of his stint on the run, officers described several near-misses. “The Thames Valley police detention at the train station, I was watching the live footage of that and I was convinced it was Daniel Khalife,” said Murphy.
“We thought we had found him in the garden of a house near Richmond Park, and we raided a relative’s house. He slept in Richmond Park on the first night but I think he was literally roaming the streets, trying to avoid police. He probably didn’t sleep and had reached the point of utter exhaustion [when he was caught].”
Questions remain over how much more damage Khalife would have been able to do had he not in effect shopped himself to MI5 – police were totally unaware of his activities until then. Murphy added: “There is no way of knowing everything Daniel Khalife exposed.” To that extent, at the very least, police consider him a consequential character in the global world of espionage.
