It was not the only plot to assassinate Trump during the US election but, had it succeeded, it could have changed the world more than any other event of the past six months.
That’s because it was not the act of some lone wolf but a state-sponsored conspiracy by Iran concocted as an act of cold-blooded revenge – at least, that’s according to US Department of Justice charging documents unveiled by a New York court last week.
Farhad Shakeri, an Afghan-born fixer who once lived in the US but is now based in Tehran, is accused of accepting money from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the private army of the Iranian regime, to surveil and then plot Trump’s killing in early October.
The Revolutionary Guard are Iran’s increasingly aggressive and sophisticated intelligence and guerilla warfare arm whose nefarious influence extends to many Western countries including the UK and United States.
Their apparent attempt to assassinate a US Presidential candidate on American soil will be interpreted in many quarters as an act of war.
Had the plot succeeded, it would have sent shockwaves not just through US politics but around the world, possibly dragging America directly into the war already raging between close ally Israel, Iran’s proxy network, and the puppet-masters in Tehran.
On the face of it, it would be easy to assume Iran’s motivation for attempting to kill Trump last month was out of fear of what his impending election would mean for the Iranian regime.
Trump was no friend of Tehran during his first term, ripping up the nuclear deal signed by predecessor Barack Obama – which gave sanctions relief in return for not developing a nuclear bomb – and pursuing a ‘maximum pressure’ campaign instead.
That meant crippling sanctions on Iranian oil which the regime uses to finance its activities, which is thought to have deprived the ayatollah and his mullahs of tens of billions of dollars of income per year.
Trump’s team had made no secret of ‘maximum pressure’ returning if he won the election, briefing journalists that foreign ports and traders who handle Iranian oil would be hit hard.
As one former staffer told Politico, reimposing sanctions are ‘a day one foreign policy priority’ for Trump.
But, as the court documents reveal, the IRGC expected Trump to lose.
Indeed, Shakeri was told that, if he couldn’t have Trump killed by October 14, he should wait until after voting was finished because he would be easier to get once out of power.
The real reason for the plot, the FBI says, was as revenge for the killing of General Qassem Soleimani, head of the IRGC’s feared Quds Force who was blown to bits in a US airstrike on Baghdad Airport back in January 2020.
Trump ordered the strike amidst spiralling tensions between US forces in Iraq and Iran-backed proxy groups that had already killed an American contractor in a rocket attack on the Iraqi capital. It was feared Soleimani was in Iraq to orchestrate more strikes.
The grey-haired Iranian general was widely seen as the second-most powerful man in Iran at the time, behind only the ayatollah.
He was the architect of Iran’s proxy network – which includes Hamas and Hezbollah – and orchestrated almost every significant attack on US forces in the Middle East over the preceding two decades.
In revenge for his death, Iran fired a clutch of rockets at a US airbase as a show-of-force that failed to kill any American soldiers, but vowed greater vengeance on an unspecified date some time in the future.
It seems they intended that date to fall between October 7 and October 14 this year and were willing to pay a high price to make it happen.
Shakeri allegedly told the IRGC that killing Trump would cost a lot of money, and they responded ‘we have already spent a lot of money… the money’s not an issue.’
It implies this is not the first time they put a price on Trump’s head, and it is certainly not the first time they have tried to carry out the assassination of perceived foes in the West.
Back in 2018, an Iranian diplomat working in Austria was accused of orchestrating a plot to bomb a rally in Paris organised by an exiled opposition group – the National Council of Resistance Iran – and which was due to be attended by Trump ally Rudi Guiliani.
Assadollah Assadi was accused of using his diplomatic position to smuggle bomb components to Luxembourg on the orders of Iranian intelligence, where he passed them to a couple to carry out the attack.
Fortunately the trio were arrested before the plan went ahead, and Assadi was eventually sentenced to 20 years in jail in what became a major political embarrassment for Tehran.
That did not stop the regime’s plotting, however, it merely caused them to change tactics.
Instead of using its own agents, Iran began tapping into overseas criminal networks to carry out its threats – much the same way it uses proxies for its wars in the Middle East.
In October this year, the director of British domestic security agency MI5 said his spooks had foiled no less than 20 Iranian plots threatening to kill UK citizens and residents since 2022.
He said: ‘Iranian state actors make extensive use of criminals as proxies – from international drug traffickers to low-level crooks.
‘Last December a man was jailed for reconnaissance he had carried out against the then-headquarters of the Iran International media organisation.’
Iran International, a UK-based Iranian news station critical of the regime, was ultimately forced to shutter its London office after cops warned they could not keep its journalists safe.
It seems Iran tried to leverage that same kind of network to carry out Trump’s killing.
Rather than infiltrate the US with home-grown assets, the IRGC turned to Shakeri – a former criminal – to do their dirty work.
Born in Afghanistan, Shakeri emigrated to the US as a boy but ultimately spent 14 years in a New York jail for robbery where he inserted himself into a network of Iranian guns-for-hire.
He was released in 2008 and returned to Tehran, but maintained contact with his American ‘friends’. When the IRGC asked him to target Trump, it was this network he turned to.
Fortunately, Shakeri and his network failed – had they succeeded, the repercussions would have been felt the world over.
Nobody in the Biden administration or Trump camp has spelled out exactly what the response would have been, but Washington could not have let the killing go unanswered.
It seems reasonable to expect that Biden would have removed guardrails currently imposed on Israel’s strikes against the Iranian regime.
The President is thought to have stopped Benjamin Netanyahu from hitting Iran’s oil facilities and nuclear strikes during a recent tit-for-tat missile exchange – guardrails which could easily have been removed.
But more likely, America would have wanted to impose a direct cost on the regime itself and has a huge arsenal of naval and air power currently lurking in the region with which to do it.
The USS Abraham Lincoln – a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier with dozens of fighter-bombers on board – is currently lurking in the Gulf of Oman, just off the Iranian coast.
Eight destroyers are spread out between the Gulf, the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean, each bristling with advanced missiles including Tomahawks that could be used to attack Iran directly, and anti-air missile to swat away anything Iran fired back.
Lurking beneath the waves and loaded with yet more missiles is the USS Georgia, while stationed around the region are hundreds of additional aircraft including F-22 Raptors, F-15Es and F-16s.
As if that weren’t already enough, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered additional destroyers, fighters and B-52 heavy bombers to deploy to the region just last week.
All of which could be used to launch a devastating attack on Iran.
Potential targets would include the oil and nuclear facilities the Iranians wanted to hit, but also members of the regime, IRGC units and bases, and Iranian proxy groups in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
And that would threaten to drag America directly into fighting which is already threatening to consume the region, as Israel battles Hamas and Hezbollah in Gaza and Lebanon respectively.
America has so-far tried to keep the pot from boiling over, but had Iran succeeded in killing one of the presidential nominees, Biden may have felt he had no choice but to respond – and risk kicking off a bloodbath that could well have led to WW3.
Now that Trump is headed for the White House once more, one can only wonder what response the Iranian attempt on his life will provoke.
Chris Pleasance is host of the Mail’s YouTube series War on Tape and Battleboard