For former US nationwide safety adviser John Bolton, my visitor on the podcast this week, any allegations of Iranian state-sponsored terrorism are to be taken extraordinarily critically.
In August 2022, the US justice division issued an arrest warrant for Iranian nationwide Shahram Poursafi for allegedly plotting to assassinate Mr Bolton.
Happily for him, the individual Poursafi allegedly tried to recruit for the homicide plot was a “confidential human source” engaged on behalf of the FBI.
Mr Bolton instructed me the Iranians have a number of former and serving US officers on their assassination record, however their most valued goal continues to be Donald Trump.
He additionally revealed that “Iran’s terror network is really quite extensive in Europe and the United States”.
It’s this story – together with the revelation to me a number of days in the past by the Pakistani defence minister that his nation has performed the CIA’s soiled work for many years – that jogged my memory there’s a shadowy world of spies, terrorists and undercover operations engaged in a unending soiled struggle throughout the globe.
It is a world that we solely handle to glimpse when the small print emerge of a profitable operation that thwarts the plotters.
Or when, tragically, it’s they who’re profitable.
