Iran is a ‘threat’ to British Jews, cautions former MI6 chief

“Security services are well aware of this problem,” he added.

The IRGC “could be reporting on [Iranian] opposition movements” and “on people within the Iranian diaspora” in the UK, he said. “Their reach is quite significant. And the IRGC are pretty good at that sort of stuff.”

Dearlove also identified a specific threat to Britain’s Jewish community posed by the IRGC. “There is a threat, there is a problem,” he said, “whether it's the inspiration of radicals who are going to attack the Jewish community, or whether it's organising demonstrations which intimidate the Jewish community and encouraging those”.

The former spy chief said that Iranian agents may be stoking some of the more aggressive anti-Israel demonstrations happening in Britain. “I haven't got clear-cut evidence, but this is exactly what Iran would be doing,” he said.

“The IRGC has a long reach, particularly where you have Muslim Shia communities which are sympathetic and to an extent are behaving in a way which is pro-Iranian. And there are one or two mosques – certainly in London – which have been identified as having that characteristic,” he said.

He believes the authorities have been too soft on pro-Palestine protests. “As a long-serving intelligence officer, I'm disgusted by what I've seen in terms of Hamas-supporting demonstrations in the UK, which are clearly very, very intimidating,” he said. “The government hasn't nearly taken a tough enough line.

“In my view, we should have been like the French and banned them,” he added.

Dearlove described Iran as “the primary destabilising force in the Middle East” and said it was astonishing that successive British governments hadn’t proscribed the IRGC as a terrorist organisation.

“I just don't get why we haven't done so. It is the agency through which Iran has conducted what I would call ‘arm’s length warfare’. The Quds Force is part of the IRGC, and they've made an absolute fundamental aspect of Iranian policy using this agency to destabilise and interfere in the affairs of other countries.”

He added: “I know the Foreign Office arguments for not banning the IRGC, but it should have been identified as a terrorist organisation a long time ago.”

Dearlove is also critical of what he called “the Foreign Office line” when it comes to dealing with Iran more generally. “There's almost a sort of apologia, to an extent; I just absolutely don't go along with that at all.”

“If we see the end of the theocracy in Iran, one way or another, the Middle East will look rather different and will be less of a geopolitical problem and less of an existential threat to Israel,” he said.

Asked why his views differed so sharply from other parts of the British establishment, Dearlove said: “I'm not a diplomat. I'm a pragmatist ... I think I've had a very different career when it comes to geopolitics than the average diplomat. You know, I'm used to talking to some quite surprising people.”

Israel has already dealt a significant blow to Iran’s capabilities since the start of the war in Gaza, he said. “The Iranian alliance to destabilise the Middle East and to reach out into more distant areas, has been very, very seriously disrupted and taken down.”

He described Israel’s operation last year to supply Hezbollah leaders with booby-trapped pagers as a “pretty remarkable achievement and very cleverly conceived”, adding that it had contributed to a “near-demolition” of the group.

“I know people have objected to it on grounds that it was a sort of indiscriminate attack. But frankly, the people who were carrying the Hezbollah pagers were the command structure of Hezbollah and to take them apart, as was done, was pretty extraordinary,” he said.

The former MI6 chief also suggested that in the chaos caused by the operation, Israeli intelligence officers would have picked up even more vital information about the proscribed terror organisation and how it operates.

“The moment the pagers weren't working, they all would have picked up their mobile phones. So, the Israelis would have had an absolute harvest of intelligence, because they would have been talking to each other on their mobile phones”.

Dearlove also revealed that, shortly after he retired from MI6, he was invited to Israel as part of security discussions following the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war. He insisted with a smile that he "couldn't go into detail" about why he was there, but said that the Israelis “really got their act together” after that war in confronting the threat posed by Hezbollah.

He said that Sunni Arab powers such as Saudi Arabia were aware of the threat to regional stability posed by Iran, giving a diplomatic opening for normalisation with Israel.

“The Sunni Arab leadership have realised this, that the Middle East’s best hope of controlling Iran and maybe getting a reasonable regime in Iran in the future is the alliance between the US and Israel … and that would be a very positive step forward,” he said.

Dearlove suggested that broader recognition of Israel within the Middle East could also open the door to closer relations with the UK. “Certain UK governments have been very nervous about being too closely associated with Israel for obvious political reasons,” he said – although “in some respects, we have always had a closer relationship with Israel that people might realise.”

An expansion of the Abraham Accords – the normalisation agreement between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain Morocco and Sudan – to include other Sunni countries “could be very, very good for the Middle East,” he said. “If that were to grow I think that Grant Shapps’s idea is something that I could support.”

Shapps, a former defence secretary, argued in the JC this month that the UK could pursue closer defence ties with Israel in the wake of uncertainty over US commitment to Europe’s security.

Dearlove said he perceives Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “a difficult political partner, not just for the West but for other Arab countries” and that “there are aspects of Netanyahu coalition which make those relationships very tricky and very difficult”.

Nevertheless, he said, institutional ties between Israel and Sunni Arab countries were growing and could weather political disruption. “As I well know, there are heads of organisations who are talking to each other and cooperating to a surprising degree, even when things look bad,” he said.

The cooperation of the US, UK and Sunni Arab nations to defend Israel from Iranian rockets, drones and missiles last year was “an expression of the political reality in a way that you won’t necessarily see expressed in other respects,” he said.

But getting to that reality is far from simple. In the medium term, Dearlove sees potential crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme.

“The Trump administration is going to take an extremely tough line with Iran,” he said. “Trump and Israel together are not going to allow Iran to develop a nuclear capability. So, somewhere down the road, there is probably a point of crisis over this issue.

“I would go as far as to say I link the existence of Iran's continuing pursuit of a nuclear capability with the survival of the theocratic regime. So, if there eventually is an Israeli-American move against this capability – if the Iranians don't give it up themselves – I think that there is a crunch point,” he warned.

“I think that we are heading for a crisis,” Dearlove said. “If Iran continues to refine its [highly enriched uranium], if it continues to make progress towards a nuclear capability, if it weaponises its warheads, we are heading for a crisis.”