The FBI is looking for an Iranian spy who is accused of plotting to assassinate former Trump officials, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
According to an FBI alert, Majid Dastjani Farahani travels often between Iran and Venezuela and speaks several languages, including English.
Farahani is a suspected member of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security and has been recruiting people in the U.S. for missions.
Iran is targeting Trump-era officials because it is still obsessed with getting revenge for the U.S. assassination of Major General Qasem Soleimani during Pompeo's tenure.
This is not the first time Iran has sought to kill an American official on U.S. soil.
It’s unclear why the FBI issued its warning in Florida. But the U.S. government warned in a Most Wanted notice issued Friday that Farahani speaks Spanish and frequently moves between Iran and Venezuela. The U.S.’s Department of Justice convicted an alleged Iranian operative in 2011 of working with Mexican drug cartels to attempt to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s former ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, while he dined at a Georgetown restaurant. In January, the DoJ indicted an Iranian gang leader for allegedly working with members of the Hells Angels to kill Iranian dissidents living in Maryland.
Iran's obsession with revenge overrides any common sense. It has been looking for satisfaction constantly, and if it ever succeeds, it will find itself in a shooting war very quickly.
The Justice Department indicted several members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard for plotting to kill former National Security Advisor John Bolton. Pompeo and former Iran special envoy Brian Hook are getting around-the-clock protection, according to the FBI.
There’s growing evidence that Iran and its allies are operating aggressively inside the U.S. In August 2022, a self-avowed supporter of the Islamic Republic stabbed the British-American novelist Salman Rushdie at an upstate New York literary festival in a suspected attempt to make good on the religious fatwa Tehran placed on the writer’s head in 1989. The Department of Justice is still investigating whether the Lebanese-American assailant was acting directly under Iran’s orders.
Last January, the DoJ indicted three natives of Azerbaijan for allegedly attempting to murder the Iranian-American women’s rights activist, Masih Alinejad, in New York. U.S. law enforcement said they also derailed a 2021 Iranian plot that aimed to kidnap Alinejad in Brooklyn and spirit her by speedboat to Venezuela, a close ally of Iran’s.
It's not likely that Iran is pining for a full-scale war against the U.S. However, absorbing some punishment from the U.S. military would raise the stature of the Iranian leadership in the eyes of the people and help them forget their misery for a little while.
Meanwhile, Iran is not going to give up its dreams of revenge. We only need to look at what happened to Salman Rushdie. Thirty-three years after the publication of "The Satanic Verses" and the issuance of a fatwa against him, a man who wasn't even born when the book was published stabbed Rushdie.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member