State Secrets: Hiring Criminals for Assassinations (and more)
The intersection of state and criminal threats
Hello, Insight Monitor subscribers. A special welcome to our new members! We’re just about to hit the 6,000 subscriber milestone! I appreciate all of you who have subscribed and shared this newsletter with your friends and colleagues. Today we have an article examining the intersection of state and criminal threats. This will be a growth area for understanding foreign interference and how states advance their threat activity, so be sure to read and share to stay current on illicit activities and how they’re financed.
In recent years, the lines between organized crime and state-backed threats have increasingly blurred, particularly in cases of foreign interference. While this is not an entirely new development (the intersection of state threats and criminal elements has a long history throughout the Cold War and beyond), states are now more frequently employing criminal entities to carry out targeted killings, acts of intimidation, and other forms of interference. Iran has led the way with quite a number of assassination attempts, kidnappings, and intimidation activities against political dissidents and activists and using criminal organizations to do their dirty work. However, India has also played this game in the United States and Canada.
The Swedish intelligence agency (Säpo) recently confirmed that Iran has employed local crime rings to attack Israeli and Jewish targets, particularly Israeli embassies in Europe, following the events of October 7th. In one instance, the leader of the Foxtrot organized crime group was recruited by Iranian agents (in Iran) after fleeing Türkiye in an effort to evade international law enforcement. Iranian authorities arrested and recruited him, and had him direct his criminal organization on their behalf.
This is far from the only case of this type of activity. Read to learn more about the intersection of state and criminal threats (and their financing) and how to counter this evolving issue:
In 2015, Mohammad Reza Kolahi Samadi was assassinated in the Netherlands. He had previously been sentenced to death in Iran after being accused of planting a bomb in 1981. A suspected Iranian intelligence agent was convicted of hiring two known criminals to kill Samadi. Iran has also been accused of ordering the attempted assassination of a Spanish politician, Alejo Vidal-Quadras.
Iran’s intelligence service was also recently accused of hiring Canadian Hell’s Angels to kill political dissidents in the United States. In response, in January of 2024, the US and the UK jointly sanctioned Iran’s transnational assassinations network.
Iran provides funding and direction directly to its criminal proxies, likely through drug smuggling and the activities of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The IRGC is widely believed to control narcotics distribution inside Iran, which makes them prime candidates to interface with other criminal entities. In particular, Iran-based nacro-trafficker Naji Ibrahim Sharifi-Zindashti is believed to be “intertwinted” with Iran’s foreign interference efforts (transnational repression). Iranian security forces protect Zindashti and his criminal network. This network has been “linked” to murders in the UAE, Canada, and Türkiye.
India has also been accused of using criminal proxies to carry out its assassination orders in the United States and Canada. In the US, an officer in India’s intelligence service (RAW) was accused of attempting to assassinate a US citizen and was also involved in the death of a Sikh activist in Canada last year. He used a hired hit team to try to kill a US citizen and succeeded in hiring a different hit team to kill a Canadian Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Four Indian nationals are accused of murder and conspiracy for killing Nijjar in British Columbia. They are all believed to be connected to the Lawrence Bishnoi gang, a criminal group from northern India that has spread into North America. The US job cost $100,000 and was going to be paid for in cash.
While money might change hands for particular assassinations and jobs, criminal networks can also be compensated for their services through protection by state security forces, allowing criminal empires to grow and thrive.
Other areas of state and non-state threat intersection exist as well. For instance, the Chinese government has been accused of providing subsidies to companies openly trafficking illicit synthetic drugs, and that “wholly state owned” companies are involved in drug trafficking. The US Select Committee on the CCP noted that the fentayl crisis has helped CCP-tied organized criminal groups become the world’s premier money launderers and has enriched the PRC’s chemical industry. While China’s refusal to address this issue might be profit motivated, there is no question that the fentanyl crisis has had a devastating impact in North America.
States use criminal elements to create plausible deniability for their actions and to acquire expertise and resources (like weapons). Without criminal networks, states would have to use their intelligence assets to conduct interference and assassination activities, putting their assets at risk of imprisonment and prosecution. This has been the case for North Korea, which has used its own agents in attempted (and successful) assassination attempts. Using state agents could also open countries up to detection if they were to try to bring a new asset into the country for a particular job, as many of the countries engaged in significant foreign interference and transnational repression are the subject of ongoing intelligence and national security investigations.
The intersection of state and non-state threats complicates investigations because it requires information and intelligence to be shared across very different threat streams and likely different classification levels. It also requires somewhat different knowledge and skills from investigators. State threats require in-depth knowledge of geopolitics, while criminal threats often require more localized knowledge. These investigations might also require sharing and coordinating across different jurisdictions and sharing information with local law enforcement, all of which come with bureaucratic hurdles and concerns about information security and intelligence sharing.
One way to track this kind of activity is through financial intelligence. Criminals are profit-motivated, which means that they want to be paid and have access to their wealth. Denying them either of these things removes some of their motivation for conducting interference and assassination activities on behalf of their state sponsors. On the other hand, states can use their resources to hide the source and use of these funds by using official accounts at embassies and consulates or even moving large amounts of cash into and out of countries through diplomatic pouches.
Using criminal actors to conduct state interference activities is a tried and tested strategy. Expect states to continue these efforts — and for states with little concern about being caught, they might even become more overt about using criminal actors.
Do you want to learn more about financial intelligence and how to use it in research, investigations, and analysis? Our financial intelligence fundamentals course is for you! This course is perfect for people new to financial intelligence and seasoned professionals. Enroll today!
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