For decades, the US and its allies have painted Iran as the world’s biggest sponsor of state terrorism – invoking its Islamic rulers’ supposed revolutionary fanaticism and determined support for militant proxies.
Now a long-standing but mainly latent threat is coalescing, with the war waged on the country by the US and Israel, to raise the risk of an attack on American soil to levels unseen since the murderous al-Qaida assaults of 11 September 2001, experts say.
In an election year, opponents of Donald Trump are warning that such an event could rebound to his advantage – providing him with a pretext to crack down on critics by declaring a state of emergency or even cancelling November’s congressional midterm elections.
Two attacks on Thursday alone illustrated the heightened dangers.
One person was killed and two others wounded when a gunman yelling “Allahu Akbar” opened fire in a classroom at Old Dominion University in Virginia. The shooter was later identified as a former national guardsman who had previously admitted trying to provide material support to the Islamic State.
In Michigan, a Lebanese-born US citizen rammed a truck into the Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield Township, before being shot dead by security guards. The attacker, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, had lost two brothers and a niece and nephew in an Israeli raid on Lebanon this month.
This week’s events followed a deadly attack on 1 March in which a man wearing clothes with an Iranian flag design and bearing the words “property of Allah” shot two people dead and wounded 14 in a bar in Austin, Texas, before he was fatally shot by police.
While there is no direct evidence linking the incidents directly to Iran, analysts say an “asymmetric” attack ordered or inspired by Tehran in response to the US-Israeli military action is a real and present danger.
At the same time, instability at the FBI and Department of Homeland Security has left the US underprepared.
Matthew Levitt, a counter-terrorism specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said threats from Tehran were escalating even before the current campaign began on 28 February – as Iran sought revenge for last June’s 12-day war, which saw US strikes badly damage its nuclear facilities, while Israel killed a spate of senior commanders.
US authorities are believed to have discovered and stopped 17 Iranian-inspired plots in the past five years. Some of these had a “Keystone cops” quality, Levitt said, but that did not lessen the threat level.
“The fact that many of the plots do not seem particularly capable doesn’t mean that they won’t ultimately succeed,” argued Levitt, the author of a detailed study, entitled Tehran’s Homeland Option. “We need to get it right every time, they need to get it right once.”
Iran is likely to “pull out all the stops” not only to raise the costs of the war to the US and preserve the Islamic regime, but also to avenge the killing of its most powerful figure, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who died in an Israeli strike on the war’s opening day.
“Once the war ends, the threat is maybe not as immediately acute, but it’ll hang over us,” Levitt said. “There’ll be a tail to this because from the Iranian perspective, all kinds of lines have been crossed. They will want to exact a cost to try and raise a level of deterrence so that people think two and three times before initiating another round.”
The clerical regime is already believed to have plotted to kill Trump and two senior officials from his first administration – Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, and the ex-national security adviser, John Bolton – in revenge for the US assassination of Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds force in January 2020.
A Pakistani national, Asif Merchant, was convicted in a court in New York on 6 March of plotting to murder US officials, including Trump, at the direction of the Revolutionary Guards.
Last week, Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council and one of the regime’s most powerful surviving figures, appeared to renew the threat against Trump, telling him: “Watch out for yourself – lest you be eliminated!”
The comment followed Trump’s threat to intensify strikes on Iran if it blocked the strait of Hormuz, something it now claims to have done.
Reports in recent days suggest that Iran may have tried to activate “sleeper cells” in the US.
On the day the war started, a Farsi-speaking man was heard on short-wave radio reading out what was believed to be a cipher code, a time-honored method used by spy agencies such as the CIA and KGB to contact undercover agents.
Analysts have expressed skepticism about the “sleeper” agent threat, although one man, Ali Kourani, a naturalized US citizen originally from Lebanon, described himself as such to investigators after being accused of plotting to strike targets in New York for Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia group that is widely seen as Iran’s proxy.
“When the FBI asked him, under what circumstances would he expect to be called upon to act on the pre-operational surveillance he’d done all over New York City and elsewhere, he said definitely if the United States was ever in direct conflict with Iran,” said Levitt, who testified in the case. Kourani received a 40-year jail sentence.
“He also talked about if the United States was involved in assassinating senior Hezbollah or Iranian leaders, and these are all in the rear-view mirror at this point.”
Threats are also likely to take the shape of criminal surrogates – which Iran tried to use in an unsuccessful plot to murder a US-based Iranian journalist, Masih Alinejad, and in the attempts against Bolton and Pompeo – and Iranian-inspired lone actors.
John Donohue, a former assistant head of intelligence in the New York police department and a fellow at Rutgers University, said the existential threat posed to the Iranian regime by US and Israeli attacks might drive it to deploy long term assets it has paid to have in place in the US.
“The long-term investment of the Iranian regime in building its capabilities externally can’t be underestimated,” said Donohue, who recalled Iranian operatives being arrested for scouting landmarks in New York for possible attacks.
“If you look at the history of the attempts of the Iranian regime against American interests, you don’t see small, limited types of events. They’re looking for mass-casualty assets.
“They tend to be very deliberative and strategic in how they do things. [But] now, with great concern over the survivability of the regime, does that cause them to be less strategic? Does that cause them to be more reflexive and ad hoc? That’s the real question.”
Observers question the readiness of the FBI and homeland security department to meet a stepped-up Iranian threat.
Fledgling agents at the FBI’s training academy have been re-deployed as uniformed police officers in Washington DC on instructions of the bureau’s director, Kash Patel, Donohue said.
Meanwhile, vital homeland security surveillance functions have been temporarily mothballed thanks to a partial DHS shutdown after Democrats refused to continue funding the department unless reforms were made to how Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents operate.
“Readiness is a huge issue,” said Colin Clarke, executive director of the Soufan Center, a group studying global security. “[The administration] have diverted resources away from counter-terrorism and toward immigration enforcement. We’ve shifted longtime terrorism experts to other portfolios, like China, Russia, emerging tech. This is ramping up at the same time that we’re the least prepared to deal with it.”
It is also happening at a time when Trump is desperately seeking to avoid a Republican defeat in November’s congressional midterms, with a series of polls showing sinking approval ratings and low support for the Iran offensive.
Writing on Substack, the historian Timothy Snyder warned that a terrorist attack could work in Trump’s favor and might even explain his reasoning for launching the military action.
“A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provoke a terrorist attack inside the United States,” Snyder wrote. “This would provide Donald Trump with a pretext to try to cancel or ‘federalize’ the coming congressional elections.
“Self-terrorism might not have been the initial aim; but as time goes by, and failures and atrocities mount, its appeal will grow. Trump could think that he has much to gain; the war itself makes terrorism more likely.”
The argument was bolstered by Steven Cash, executive director of the Steady State, a group of retired national security officers concerned about the US’s authoritarian drift under Trump.
“We’ve used our technological and economic advantage to kill thousands of Iranians and religious leaders, including the [chief] ayatollah [Khamenei]. We’ve destroyed whatever capability of both defense and deterrence that they would have through what we would consider appropriate military means, and we’ve left them with nothing else,” he said.
“Of course there’s going to be retaliation – it’s a rational response on their part. It may be that this is what Trump’s interested in. He has spent a year trying to convince Americans that we are facing a terrible domestic threat.
“Suddenly this unprecedented and unprovoked attack on another country – probably in violation of the constitution and international law – is going to create the very conditions that he unsuccessfully tried to convince us would justify extraordinary powers of the presidency.”
