Iran
has emerged as a twofold concern for the United States as it nears the end of
the presidential campaign.
Prosecutors
allege Tehran tried to hack figures associated with the election, stealing
information from former President Donald Trump’s campaign. And U.S. officials
have accused it of plotting to kill Trump and other ex-officials.
For
Iran, assassination plots and hacking aren’t new strategies.
Iran
saw the value and the danger of hacking in the early 2000s, when the Stuxnet
virus, believed to have been deployed by Israel and the U.S., tried to damage
Iran’s nuclear program. Since then, hackers attributed to state-linked operations
have targeted the Trump campaign, Iranian expatriates and government officials
at home.
Its
history of assassinations goes back further. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution,
Iran killed or abducted perceived enemies living abroad.
A
look at Iran’s history of targeting opponents:
A history of hacks
For
many, Iran’s behavior can be traced to the emergence of the Stuxnet computer
virus. Released in the 2000s, Stuxnet wormed its way into control units for
uranium-enriching centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, causing them
to speed up, ultimately destroying themselves.
Iranian
scientists initially believed mechanical errors caused the damage. Ultimately
though, Iran removed the affected equipment and sought its own way of striking
enemies online.
“Iran
had an excellent teacher in the emerging art of cyberwarfare,” wryly noted a
2020 report from the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in
Saudi Arabia.
That
was acknowledged by the National Security Agency in a document leaked by former
NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2015 to The Intercept, which examined a
cyberattack that destroyed hard drives at Saudi Arabia’s state oil company.
Iran has been suspected of carrying out that attack, called Shamoon, in 2012 and
again in 2017.
“Iran,
having been a victim of a similar cyberattack against its own oil industry in
April 2012, has demonstrated a clear ability to learn from the capabilities and
actions of others,” the document said.
There
also were domestic considerations. In 2009, the disputed reelection of
hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sparked the Green Movement protests.
Twitter, one source of news from the demonstrations, found its website defaced
by the self-described “Iranian Cyber Army.” There’s been suspicion that the
Revolutionary Guard, a major power base within Iran’s theocracy, oversaw the
“Cyber Army” and other hackers.
Meanwhile,
Iran itself has been hacked repeatedly in embarrassing incidents. They include
the mass shutdown of gas stations across Iran, as well as surveillance cameras
at Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison and even state television broadcasts.
Hacks offer low costs and high
rewards
Iranian
hacking attacks, given their low cost and high reward, likely will continue as
Iran faces a tense international environment surrounding Israel’s conflicts
with Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran’s enrichment of uranium to near weapons-grade
levels and the prospect of Trump becoming president again.
The
growth of 3G and 4G mobile internet services in Iran also made it easier for
the public — and potential hackers — to access the internet. Iran has over 50
major universities with computer science or information technology programs. At
least three of Iran’s top schools are thought to be affiliated with Iran’s Defense
Ministry and the Guard, providing potential hackers for security forces.
Iranian
hacking attempts on U.S. targets have included banks and even a small dam near
New York City — attacks American prosecutors linked to the Guard.
While
Russia is seen as the biggest foreign threat to U.S. elections, officials have
been concerned about Iran. Its hacking attempts in the presidential campaign
have relied on phishing — sending many misleading emails in hopes that some
recipients will inadvertently provide access to sensitive information.
Amin
Sabeti, a digital security expert who focuses on Iran, said the tactic works.
“It’s
scalable, it’s cheap and you don’t need a skill set because you just put, I
don’t know, five crazy people who are hard line in an office in Tehran, then
send tens of thousands of emails. If they get 10 of them, it’s enough,” he
said.
For
Iran, hacks targeting the U.S. offer the prospect of causing chaos, undermining
Trump’s campaign and obtaining secret information.
“I’ve
lost count of how many attempts have been made on my emails and social media
since it’s been going on for over a decade,” said Holly Dagres, a nonresident
senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who once had her email briefly hacked by
Iran. “The Iranians aren’t targeting me because I have useful information
swimming in my inbox or direct messages. Rather, they hope to use my name and
think tank affiliation to target others and eventually make it up the chain to
high-ranking U.S. government officials who would have useful information and
intelligence related to Iran.”
Iran’s killings and abductions
abroad
Iran
has vowed to exact revenge against Trump and others in his former
administration over the 2020 drone strike that killed the prominent Revolutionary
Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad.
In
July, authorities said they learned of an Iranian threat against Trump and
boosted security. Iran has not been linked to the assassination attempts
against Trump in Florida and Pennsylvania. A Pakistani man who spent time in
Iran was recently charged by federal prosecutors for allegedly plotting to
carry out assassinations in the U.S., including potentially of Trump.
Officials
take Iran’s threat seriously given its history of targeting adversaries.
After
the 1979 Islamic Revolution, its leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini signaled
how Iran would target perceived enemies by saying, “Islam grew with blood.”
“The
great prophet of Islam, he had the Quran in one hand, and a sword in the other
hand — a sword to suppress traitors,” Khomeini said.
Even
before creating a network of allied militias in the Mideast, Iran is suspected
of targeting opponents abroad, beginning with members of Shah Mohammad Reza
Pahlavi’s former government. The attention shifted to perceived opponents of
the theocracy, both in the country with the mass executions of 1988 and abroad.
Outside
of Iran, the so-called “chain murders” targeted activists, journalists and
other critics. One prominent incident linked to Iran was a shooting at a restaurant
in Germany that killed three Iranian-Kurdish figures and a translator. In 1997,
a German court implicated Iran’s top leaders in the shooting, sparking most
European Union nations to withdraw their ambassadors.
Iran’s
targeted killings slowed after that, but didn’t stop. U.S. prosecutors link
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to a 2011 plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to
Washington. Meanwhile, a suspected Israeli campaign of assassinations targeted
scientists in Iran’s nuclear program.
In
2015, Iran signed a nuclear deal that saw it greatly reduce its enrichment in
exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Two years later, Trump was elected
pledging to unilaterally withdraw America from the accord. As businesses backed
away from Iran, Tehran renewed a campaign of targeting opponents abroad, but
this time capturing them and bringing them to Iran for trial.
Belgium
arrested an Iranian diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, in 2018 and ultimately
convicted him of masterminding a thwarted bomb attack against an exiled Iranian
opposition group. Iran also increasingly has turned to criminal gangs for some
attempts, such as what U.S. prosecutors have described as plots to kill or
kidnap opposition activist Masih Alinejad.
Among
those targeted after Soleimani’s death was former U.S. national security
adviser John Bolton. The U.S. has offered a reward of up to $20 million for
information leading to the capture or conviction of a Revolutionary Guard
member it said arranged to kill Bolton for $300,000.
An
FBI agent quoted Guard Gen. Esmail Ghaani as saying in 2022 in a court filing,
“Wherever is necessary we take revenge against Americans by the help of people
on their side and within their own homes without our presence.”