Episode 275 | Inside Iran’s IRGC shadow network

Hello and welcome to the BiCom podcast. I'm Daniel J. Levy, Programmes Manager and today is 28th October 2025. Just on Sunday, Mossad uncovered an IRGC could source network which has been targeting Jewish, Jews and Israelis in Australia, Germany and Greece, while MI5's directs general recently confirmed that the past year alone had seen 20 foiled Iranian plots in the UK. The Iranian threat has grown and today we're joined by Jonathan Hackett for a briefing on their external operations. A United States Marine Corps veteran, Jonathan served for 20 years specialising in signals and human intelligence, counterintelligence, agent handling and interrogation, with attachments to the national security agency, defense intelligence agency and special operations units. He also participated in operations around the world and is the author of two recent books, Iran's Shadow Weapons, Covert Action, Intelligence Operations and Unconventional Warfare and The Theory of Regular Warfare. So Jonathan, over to you. Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it, the opportunity to talk. Yeah, The Theory of Regular War is my first book and that's more theoretical obviously by the title, but the Iran's Shadow Weapons is the one that I think the audience might enjoy hearing more about today. And that one takes more of a realist approach when we think about states as black boxes operating against each other. I think if we want to solve the Iran problem, we have to take a very rational look at it. And that means being honest with ourselves about all of the information available, not just what Iran is doing, but what every other state is doing and how Iran is reacting to those states and states have long memories and all these kind of things. And especially looking at Iran versus Israel, there's a lot of history to that. That's not just Iran-Israel history, it's also UK history, US history, Russian history, and Israel came into that later on, but Iran continues to kind of bundle these things together, these states together, and look at them as a monolith, but with nuance, just as Iran also has nuance. And I think that that nuance is very important if we want to get to the bottom of what's going on and how do we reduce tension, how do we reduce threat. And of course, to reduce threat, you have to know what the threat actually is. We just talked about the 20 potential plots. There's a long spectrum of what a plot is. That could be surveillance, just to see what's going on, all the way to assassination and kidnapping planning, which of course requires more steps essentially. All of those targeting operations require usually surveillance to start, and that's why surveillance is the easiest thing to catch when we're looking at what Iran is doing in UK or in Europe or in the United States and also in other places like in Latin America where there's a lot of Iran surveillance in Africa. And that's when Iran is the most exposed. But a lot of things are happening that we don't see, especially in countries like for example, Senegal or Ecuador or Thailand. And the reason I mentioned those countries specifically is because when we zoom out and look at this as a realist, we have to think about what targeting opportunities does Iran have within the constraints that the world has put on it. And those countries, our countries Iran can travel to, Iranians can travel to without a visa, which makes it much easier for them to go in and out of those countries to meet with sources, to meet with recruited agents that are sometimes Iranian, sometimes not, sometimes the children of Iranians. So there's different target types. But it's easy to have those third country meetings in places like Singapore or Indonesia versus the actual target country like Israel or the UK or the United States. And they've been doing this for quite some time. And there have been changes in Iran's strategy over time, but you can't really change tradecraft. Surveillance is surveillance. There are very specific ways to do it. There's very specific indicators that someone's doing it. There's very specific indicators at which point they are in the process when you see it happening. For example, if we look at in the UK, there's a lot of history and Israel is also a lot of history. And Iran is trying to look at those states as one target set. But that's not the target set that the regime wants to actually go after if it had all the freedom it could have. The number one target that Iran has is Iranians. Because Iran is concerned about domestic politics first. And domestic politics in Iran are very contentious. Very small proportion of Iranians actually want the regime in power, maybe less than 5%. The rest of them have varying political views. But one thing they have in common is they do not want the regime in power. And that's true for Iranians inside and outside the country. And the regime has done a lot because it has a lot of freedom in its own country to repress dissidents in Iran. But when those dissidents are outside Iran, it's much harder to repress them. And you see this with a lot of these plots in Europe. There are a lot of assassination and kidnapping plots that have luckily been thwarted. But those plots are generally not targeting Westerners always or Jews always or Israelis always. Usually they're actually targeting Iranians. Like the ASMLA, which is the southwestern Iranian dissident movement. Or the Kurds, like Pijak. Or the Mujahideen-i-Khaalq, which is the number one target of the regime inside and outside of Iran. And Mujahideen-i-Khaalq also has helped in the past enable some Mossad operations in Iran. And the regime kind of links those two actors together in that sense. There's other groups like Kamala, Jandula, which is the Baluchi movement, all around the world. And the regime basically is working to identify and capture or kill members of these groups. That is the number one priority of the regime. But in a political realism situation, it's not just Iran and dissidents. Instead, it's Iran and other states. And then there are dissidents between there. And Iran has to react to a lot of what the other states are doing as far as pressuring and allowing them to continue. So a big change we saw, especially in 2009, a lot of these inflection points in Iranian external operations are tied to dissident movements inside Iran. So for example, in the late 90s, there was a lot of student protests. The regime changed the way that it was actually doing operations outside the country because of those protests. But the really big change came in 2009 during the Jambashi Sabs, which is the Korean Revolution, where many people took to the streets and the regime immediately began shooting people with live rounds, killing protesters, capturing protesters, disappearing people, torturing them, making them do forced confessions on television on a wide, wide scale. We had not seen this before until you look back to the very early days of the revolution. This was a very scary time for the regime's survival. Which caused them to change their calculus. And what they did was there was a group called Vaja, which in the West we call the Ministry of Intelligence and Security or MOIS, but it's actually called Vaja in Farsi. It's an acronym. Vaja had been doing all these external and some internal operations up to 2009. And the regime saw that Vaja was not doing what the regime wanted, which was keeping dissidents completely suppressed. And so they downgraded Vaja's position and elevated the IRGC's position, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, specifically the intelligence. At first it was a department, then it was elevated up into a much larger directorate. And this is a human intelligence and special operations directorate, separate from the Quds Force. You know, we see Quds Force in the news a lot, but it's actually the intelligence department that we should be more concerned about. Quds Force is kind of like the Joint Special Operations Command in the United States or the SAS in the UK specifically focused on kinetic outcomes, which are on their own terrible, but we think about the broader picture of all the human intelligence going on in the background that gets us to those strikes or effects. And the intelligence department is responsible for almost all of them. In 2009, that's when the regime elevated that department to now take over national level intelligence operations outside the country, external operations. And you can see a big difference between how Vaja used to operate and how the IRGC intelligence department operates now. Vaja was much more professionalized. It was more like MI5 or MI6 or the CIA or the FBI had a very defined structure, very defined mission sets, very clear training and selection pipeline. They had very clear targets. They used official and non-official cover. They had embassy stations. They had business commercial use of cover and things like that that were very, very normal in the international sense of things. The IRGC was not like that. The IRGC was relatively sloppier. And you can see that with a lot of the thwarted operations that they've done. In the United States, there were a couple that were almost, you know, embarrassingly poor in execution. And there have been some others as well. In 2012, after Israel targeted some nuclear scientists, the IRGC tried to react to that and it ended up happening where some of the plotters blew off their own legs using homemade explosives. You had people running off in the street and getting hit by cars while they're trying to run away, you know, just kind of these hijinks that are not like it was before 2009. And that's, again, because there's a different organization running the external operations. But at the same time, that doesn't mean that we should worry less. In fact, I would say we should worry more because we have less certainty about what is the IRGC actually going to do because there are a lot more hotheads making decisions now than there were before 2009. There's a lot less ability to predict what the outcome of this surveillance that we might identify would be used for. There's also less reliance on this very clear dichotomy between official and non-official cover. And as I said, that's a very traditional thing that every country all over the world uses this dichotomy. It was the Vienna Convention of 1961 that made this a legal thing for every country. Everyone does this. The IRGC, though, is using non-official cover a lot more. But they do still use some official cover. For example, Kasim Soleimani had two Black diplomatic passports. Esmel Ghani, the current leader of Quds Force, has three Black passports, diplomatic passports. The head of the Central Bank of Iran has a diplomatic passport that he uses to travel to the United States, to Washington, D.C., to talk to the International Monetary Foundation. You know, so they're at the higher echelons of government and touching into the intelligence department. There are some people still using diplomatic status, but a lot of it is businesses. These either shell companies or what you might call information operations centered companies, you know, like the media. And what they're trying to do is establish a presence in countries and have kind of on-the-shelf plans so that if something happens that they see as threatening, they can pull a plan off the shelf and execute it. So for example, in 2012, when a lot of these plots were uncovered by the IRGC was doing against Israel, a lot of these plots were kind of in the early stages and it wasn't clear what the outcomes were supposed to be. And that's kind of a hallmark of just, you know, mission planning where they weren't quite sure what they wanted to do at the end, but they wanted to have a specific type of operation ready. And then when the target arrived, they just said, "Oh, we want to target this guy." We hadn't thought about that before, but now we want to target this guy. "Well, we have this plan on the shelf. Let's pull it off and execute it." Problem with that is if you're not planning based on what your target ultimately is from the very beginning, you're going to end up making a lot of mistakes. And that's what we see with the IRGC all around the world is making a lot of mistakes, very sloppy. But again, this reflects that domestic political priority change where this, you know, very well-defined apparatus, the Vaja, an institutional intelligence agency just wasn't getting it done as far as smashing dissidents. And as they were subsumed by IRGC, the IRGC did smash dissidents, fit it with a, you know, a big stick, but it's not a very precise method. Now, the problem is, as far as IRGC is concerned, their efficacy is pretty poor, but their operations are more obvious. They leave a lot more tracks, which makes it a little bit easier to not only exploit or neutralize their operations, but also to recruit agents in place, or double agents inside the IRGC, which we've seen Mossad has done with great efficacy, especially in the previous, in the June war. Much of the work on the ground in Iran was not Israeli operatives in Iran. It was Iranians that had been recruited by various entities within Israel to work against the regime. And again, as I mentioned, the regime is not well-liked. And there are probably a lot of people that even work in the regime that don't want to be, they don't want completely aligned outcomes with what the regime wants. Some of them do, some of them don't. Then you've got the Arteche versus the IRGC. The Arteche is the army in Iran. The IRGC is a military force that supports only the regime. And that's an important distinction because the Arteche is a several hundred thousand person strong military force that many of them don't support the regime. But what their mission is, is to support the homeland defense. Whereas the IRGC's mission is to support the regime only, which is this tiny group of folks that are very powerful in the country. And I always say that, you know, if there was a revolution or an invasion of Iran that day or the next day, you'd probably see a lot of Arteche people turning their weapons on the regime. So I only mention that to say that it's kind of a target-rich environment where there are a lot of people that have varying motivations, a lot of Iranians inside Iran, that have varying motivations that are targetable by outside intelligence operations. So the regime knows this. So it makes the regime a lot more concerned about how to tamp down this threat because, you know, imagine if you're working in an office building and the guy right down the hallway from you, you're not sure if he's working with you or against you. And I think that's part of the success of the Mossad operations is that it's not only having kinetic effects, but also spreading a little bit of fear and concern and distrust among the IRGC operatives who I mentioned are already, the decision makers are already a little bit hotheaded. And so that has an even deeper effect on what they're doing, which makes their operations even more exposed many times because they're rushing to get things done, where in the past, Vaja wasn't doing that, you know, using long-term planning and traditional tradecraft. Additionally, another important development. We talk a lot about surrogate forces and proxy forces. That was a lot more of a Vaja controlled thing in the 80s and 90s. And as the IRGC developed with the Quds Force, which is their outside Iran special operations entity, Quds Force also worked with a lot of surrogates. So you had this kind of like divergent pathway that Vaja and IRGC were taking their surrogate forces. And the Quds Force has these different regional departments. And the very first Quds Force deployment was in 1993 to Bosnia, where the U.S. was actually working with Quds Force partners, which was the Coastal Liberation Army and other entities within the Balkans. And you have to think about that was 13 years after the revolution. So Quds Force hadn't had any surrogate forces before that, Vaja had 13 years to work on that. Vaja, as we know with the bombings in Buenos Aires, like at the EMEA Center, those were Vaja directed operations, not IRGC directed operations. And the reason I mentioned that is because if you look at the amount of planning that Vaja put into that, the amount of distance Vaja put between itself and the actors, how difficult it has been to show very clear evidence of many different connections, even though they exist, it's hard to actually show that, because they put the planning into it to make it so they could obscure the connection between themselves and the Hezbollah and other operatives that blew up these facilities. And the actual Vaja Chief of Station in Buenos Aires was the one controlling that attack or those two attacks. And fast forward to when Quds Force started doing these things and the IRGC Intelligence Department started doing these things. You don't see that kind of traditional framework for controlling surrogates. Instead, it's more of providing legal aid, providing early training, and then a free hand and kind of letting the surrogates pick their targets, which ends up with a lot of mistakes and kind of thwarted outcomes. And there was one in the United States in 2013 that was thwarted when a gentleman named Arbab Ciara is a youth car salesman in Texas tried to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington DC at a restaurant while he ate dinner. That plot was exposed because there was a DEA source that was working with drug-related issues with the United States who saw this Iranian gentleman from Texas trying to get weapons and people to assassinate a diplomat. And that drug source basically said, "I don't want anything to do with this." And so he told his DEA handler about it and we were able to stop it. And it was again one of those high-jinks type operations where there are all kinds of crazy mistakes made along the way and silly decisions from an operational planning perspective. But if you look at the IRGC connection, this was an IRGC operation. You look at the IRGC connection, it was a low-level lieutenant colonel in the IRGC that was handling this operation. And it was very little input. In fact, there were only a few communications between the two of them over the long period of time that this planning was going on. And basically all that happened was an initial outreach, cold contact to our Bob CR. Some instructions were given. Our Bob CR said he wanted money. He went to strip clubs. He was an alcoholic. He had all kinds of issues. And he saw this as his solution to his life problem. And the IRGC was very happy to make him think that they would fix his problem by giving him cash and other things to help him. So he agreed to do it. And there were very few communications after that, very decentralized, which maybe to the handler seemed like a good idea because there will be less links between the IRGC and the outcome. But here we are talking about the direct links between the IRGC. We saw and it turned out very badly for that operation. Luckily for us and for the target, nobody was harmed. But if this was a Vaja operation, this might have gone a lot differently. So in some ways, we're kind of lucky that Vaja was sidelined. And unfortunately, yes, there are still plots going on. Some people are still being harmed, killed, assassinated, kidnapped. But I think that it's much less than it would be if Vaja was still in charge of these operations overseas. So you've got that kind of, you could say, new age plotting mechanism. But there is another friction going in there. And that is with the Arbaxar operation, for example, one reason the communication was not great was because it's hard for Iranian handlers to meet with their sources, to provide tasking and to provide resources to actually carry these operations out because of sanctions, because of travel restrictions, because of movement restrictions. We have in the United States, the UN headquarters in New York, there's about a dozen Iranian diplomats working there, some of whom are working there on official cover and unofficial cover, doing things that we wouldn't want them to be doing, but we don't stop them because of reciprocity issues. But they're only allowed to travel 25 miles outside of their home and outside of the UN headquarters. And we, of course, monitored them. So you can imagine it'd be pretty tough to go meet with a gentleman in Texas to go coordinate some activity. You have to do it over the phone or over the internet or something like that. So that's a difficult restriction. If you want to do a plot, let's say in Denmark, which Baja actually tried to do, it was tough because the only place that could meet them was inside of a Pizza Hut in Luxembourg because that was the only place that was safe and easy for them to meet with their UK and Denmark-based sources. And that was thwarted by the Belgians, actually. So another difficulty with the freedom of movement. But then you go into places like Latin America and Africa and Southeast Asia, like I mentioned, and there are no, in some of these countries, there are no visa restrictions. So it's a lot easier to do planning there. There's a lot of planning going on in Malaysia, Highland, Indonesia, Singapore, as I mentioned. And then in Africa, you have the largest cocaine import location to Africa is in Dakar, Senegal. No surprise, you have Hezbollah financiers living in Dakar, Senegal, and you have Iranian embassy right down there right next to the port, which is not a coincidence. And I mentioned that because in order to reduce the friction of these operations, you have to have money and you have to have access. And to get that money in a system where you're not allowed to participate in the banking networks, it has to be illicit money. So a lot of drug money funds this, a lot of black market activity funds this. And also within the regime, the banking system is heavily sanctioned, as everyone knows. But if your economy is sanctioned and you still want to run your country, you're probably going to look to illicit ways to do that. And the regime does that by basically using the IRGC as the owner of the black market in Iran. So it's not illegal to work in the black market. In fact, it is the market you must operate within, even as a regular everyday citizen, maybe you're a school teacher and you want an iPhone. Well, you can't buy an Apple iPhone in the Apple store, Tehran. You have to buy it from an IRGC controlled shop. And you have to pay a price on that. So most iPhones are three or four times the price in Iran. But if you're in Tehran, you'll see many iPhones brand new. You'll see many Audis, you'll see many BMWs and Mercedes, which are not supposed to be imported to Iran. But there are many ways to get around this, like taking the vehicle apart just a little bit. So there is about an inch between each piece of the car. And once it enters the country, just putting all those pieces together and now you have an Audi. And there are many other ways that this is done. And this is all to generate income for the IRGC and for the regime. Some estimates say that the Ayatollah Khomeini is one of the richest people on earth, which is a strange statement because isn't the country heavily sanctioned and aren't the banks cut off and etc. Well, when you have a black market economy as your economy, you can pretty much maximize your profits in any way that you want, especially in an authoritarian regime that controls that black market. And if you look at his wealth increasing over time, there are actually a couple of inflection points where his wealth skyrocketed. One of those was when the United States pulled out of the P5+1 nuclear agreement, and the sanctions came back. And then more recently, additional sanctions came back. And both of those events caused his income to increase because sanctions don't affect the ruling elite, sanctions at least in a negative way. Sanctions affect everyday people because how else can they, if they can't participate in the banking system, how else can they get cash to go buy chicken or water or gasoline, right? So it's benefiting the regime to put these sanctions on. And the IRGC is taking those profits, using it to buy new centrifuges for their nuclear facilities, using it to pay sources inside Europe and inside the United States to do surveillance, as we were talking about. And that goes to targeting priorities and where they're putting their money at to actually target people in different ways. There's kind of two baskets of targets that they're putting this money against. The first basket is kind of kidnapping and assassination targets. And the second basket is human targets that they can use for later. And on the kidnapping side, number one is, as I said, dissidents. And in the United States, Masi Ali-Nijad is a key example. She was a very vocal Iranian dissident. They've tried to kidnap her twice. They tried to kill her once. There's a lot of backstory. She's written a book called "The Wind in My Hair," which describes her time in Iranian prison. In Europe, you have the Mujadini Holocaust, I mentioned. Some of them are in Sweden and Denmark. Some are in the UK and other places. And an interesting side note, a few years ago, or up until a few years ago, France and Germany actually had agreements with the Iranian government that Iran could do operations inside of those countries, as long as they didn't target French or German citizens, respectively. I haven't seen that that has been abrogated, but it seems that it's been reduced at least. But it's just an interesting side point about the way that states act as black boxes, as I mentioned at the very beginning. The second target area within kidnapping and assassination is they're looking for gaps to exploit the economy for illicit facilitation. You look in the UK, for example, there's a lot of anti-money laundering activity that the UK government's doing to try to stop this from happening. But it's very tough when you have a decentralized, unofficial banking system, like a Huala network, or something like this. It's very hard to follow because it's based on word of mouth and trust. So it's very hard to follow where that dollar went because it's usually not the same dollar. It's usually the idea of a dollar moved across a ledger from another ledger, but that dollar physically didn't go anywhere. So that's pretty tough. And the regime's using that system to fund its activities in these countries, in the UK, in the EU. And a third priority, as I mentioned, is Jewish and Israeli citizens. And in some ways, that's a reaction to the issues between Iran and Israel. And in other ways, this is a target of opportunity because the regime feels embarrassed or weakened or exposed by all the successes of Mossad over many years, including this past year especially. And they might want to score a victory for their own domestic consumption to show like, oh, we're not so weak, look what we can do. And they're probably doing a lot of these operations. I think in the last five years, there was two dozen plots thwarted. And I think in 10 years, it's something like double that 50 plots thwarted in the UK alone. And a lot of these plots, as I mentioned, are kind of on the shelf plots, just waiting for an opportunity because you need an opportunity for a threat to materialize. And they've done the surveillance, they've done this planning, and they're waiting for, let's say, a high level Jewish person that they can attack. And they don't really care who it is, they care more about the doing of it, because that will show that they can. In France and in Germany recently, I believe in the last two years or so, there were two prominent members of Jewish communities there that there were targeting attempts all the way up almost to execution. It was very close to execution. And those are both stopped by the French and the German authorities. And notably, those Jewish citizens were citizens of those countries. So as I mentioned before, it's possible that France and Germany thwarted that because they're not Iranians that were being targeted due to that agreement from many years ago. And then a fourth kind of category is that just Westerners generally writ large. And this is again, opportunism. It's about trying, not results. So even if the plot doesn't succeed, the fact that it was started is enough for domestic consumption, because they're not looking to score international points to show the world that they can do an assassination. This is not what they're trying to do. They're trying to show the few domestic supporters that they have, that they still have some strength. So that's the kidnapping and assassination block. And then you've got the human block, which is targeting usually dual citizens or children of Iranians like Daniel Khalifa. And there was also a British soldier in Afghanistan who was working for a British general back during the war in Afghanistan who had made phone calls to the IRGC and was trying to basically work for them. So sometimes it will be the IRGC reaching out to these folks. Sometimes it'll be those folks reaching out to the regime. And it's for varying, varying motivational reasons. Sometimes these are unwitting contacts and sometimes they're winning contacts. It's kind of a wide array. But again, the IRGC is kind of sloppy with it. So it's relatively speaking easier to identify and either exploit or neutralize. And as a human collector myself, I would say you should almost always try to exploit because you can do so much more with a double agent than you can do with a dead agent. So that's just my two cents. And then the UK threat broadly, the big problem I would say right now is following the money, because if you can turn off the money spigot to the regime, you're going to, you're going to stop a lot of this operational planning. And the regime is relying on a lot of UK based banks, US based banks, Dubai based banks, Swiss banks to move like real legitimate banks that everybody uses. They're using those banks to move a lot of dollars and a lot of pounds and a lot of euros to different places. So they can, they can make this illicit shadow economy move. And if we can find a way to intercept that banking system that will continue affecting how they're, they're working. And it's not about sanctions. It's more about targeting the actual inputs and the outputs and stopping them rather than just blanket sanctioning the entire economy. Because by blanket sanctioning, you're kind of pushing people up against the wall and they're going to make some crazy decisions they wouldn't otherwise make. But if you can relieve the pressure off, off the population and only pressure the regime, you might have some more favorable outcomes. And another thing in the UK as well as the information domain. So there are a few media outlets that they go both ways. Some outlets are controlled by the regime and communicating to the UK. Others are controlled by people in the UK seeking regime approval support approbation. And then that latter example is kind of like there were some during the time that ISIS or Daesh was rising. There were a lot of like quote unquote affiliates around the world. They were actually not affiliated with ISIS and they wanted ISIS to say that they were, they were affiliated. So sometimes you'll see, for example, there's some Bahraini dissidents in UK supported in, in some ways by the regime, but also kind of shouting to the regime, like please give us legitimacy. But then you have others like Al-Mayadeen, which is a Lebanon based media outlet that sometimes transmits in Hebrew and English and Arabic. And this is kind of long been connected to Hezbollah, long connected to Iran. So there's some like different ways that these media organizations are trying to access UK. And what they're trying to do is actually communicate with Shia communities and people within those communities that have not necessarily fully become on board with these ideas that these, these outlets are pushing. And what they're trying to do is gain new support, not necessarily maintain old support. And we've seen this for a very long time, especially with the Bahraini Shias. There's, there was two groups in the 1980s that the regime really cultivated. And, and of course, during the Arab Spring, those, those groups again, and their offshoots rose up. So this is not like a new development. But it is something to be completely aware of and to understand that it's not a monolith. And there's not just one target and not just one audience. There, there are many audiences and many targets and that the dynamics of reaching them are quite varied. And there are a lot of aspirational outsiders in kind of these, these liminal spaces, let's say, for example, in Nigeria, there's actually a huge Shia population relatively speaking in Africa, in African terms, that wants the regime to support it. And the regime has been very hesitant because even within internal Iranian documents that I've seen that have been translated, the regime is uneasy about supporting that Shia group in Nigeria, because it's actually considered too extreme for the regime to support. So that's kind of an interesting point that there are some groups that actually want to belong to this, this global IRGC footprint and the IRGC is hesitant, which is just another thing to think about as far as exploitation and neutralisation. So I'll leave it at that, Daniel, if you want to turn it over to questions. Yeah, so thank you for that really interesting first question from me, though, before we open to the floor. There's been a lot of chatter in certain circles in the UK about prescribing the IRGC under counter-terror legislation. Could you possibly comment on that specifically with maybe some insight on whether or not that would be effective in curtailing their activities? Sure, yeah. The first thing that comes to my mind is analogising that to the United States when the US did that. 2007 was the very first time the US sanctioned the IRGC, not the whole thing, but parts of it. And if you look at a graph of economic gains within the black market, that is when the IRGC began growing financially. And the more sanctions we put, so up till 2017, we had something like 700 plus distinct sanctions on the IRGC. And you put those sanctions as they grow, overlapping an economic chart, there's a direct correlation between the growth of their financial gains. Because again, sanctions and prescription work well against democratic states and democratic organizations. They don't work so well against authoritarian groups that are able to either squirm out of those prescriptions or create new branches that are called something else that law doesn't necessarily apply to that new thing, at least right away. And so I think it would require a probably broader strategy of maybe overt attempts at engagement or reduction, you know, face to face and covert actions to reduce their potency. And what I'm talking about specifically is if you look at 2015, right before we signed the nuclear agreement P5 plus one, there was that very democratic, you know, off ramps given approach to the regime to get toward that output. But at the very same time, the United States, Israel and other countries were working on the Stuxnet virus inside the nuclear program, basically a two primed approach where one approach was viewable to everyone. And the other approach was there in case that that visible approach didn't work out. And I think that's probably a smarter way to attack this problem, rather than just a single overt prescription, because the IRGC is very crafty. And just because what they do is not called the IRGC does not mean they're not doing the same things, you know, it's something by any other name. So I would want to see more depth beyond prescription prescription could be fine. But I want to see more attached to that to make sure that the effect you'd have the desired effect that you started with. Thank you very much. We will now stop recording and move over to audience questions.