Why Trump is on Iran's hitlist

The assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28 has placed President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, on a forever revenge hit list carried by Iran’s world network of militant Shia activists, a former Mossad official has told The Times. It was this revenge motivation which persuaded the US Secret Service to orchestrate the elaborate subterfuge which led to Trump being evacuated from Air Force One through a catering container truck to another plane at Ankara international airport for his flight home, following the end of the Nato summit in the Turkish capital on July 8. Among the mass of intelligence pouring in from all quarters over recent months, it is believed an intercepted conversation or directive from Tehran may have made reference to the option of using a man-portable missile launcher close to the airport when Trump was due to take off on Air Force One. There was a suspected sighting of such a weapon system on that day, according to the New York Times. “The Americans are looking at an enormous amount of information, and if there’s intelligence that suggests somebody, whether the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC] or the Iranian intelligence service or a terrorist group is seeking revenge on Trump for the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, then it has to be taken seriously,” Rami Igra, former Mossad official, said. “Ali Khamenei was a religious leader, the most important personality in the Shia world. There are 250 million people in this world who are Shia Muslim. So there is a huge religious incentive for seeking revenge for the death of their leader,” he said. “It’s most likely that it ws a technological source, rather than a human source, which provided the intelligence. Technological sources are hardcore evidence which would have come from an interception of a conversation or a directive about where someone should be and at what place and time,” said Igra who was head of Mossad’s hostage and missing-in-action (MIA) department. “The US Secret Service never takes chances. They’re not allowed to take chances. Their job is to imagine the worst all the time. Israel always passes on the intelligence it gets, even to unfriendly nations, if it will save peoples’ lives,” he said. He said Iran had a history of carrying out assassinations. “But the only assassination involving the Iranian intelligence service specifically was the attack on the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin against anti-Iranian activists in the 1990s [on September 17, 1992, four exiled Kurdish-Iranian individuals were killed. A German court ruled that top leaders of the Iranian government were involved].” “On the whole, the Iranian intelligence service is not in the business of assassinations. Its speciality is espionage. Israel’s Shin Bet counter-espionage organisation has picked up 30 Israeli spies, recruited by the Iranian intelligence service,” Igra said. Iran has two overlapping intelligence services, the Ministry of Intelligence (MOI), and the IRGC’s own organisation, both of which come under the aegis of the supreme leader. In addition, there is the IRGC’s Quds Force, the overseas operations branch which carries out intelligence-gathering, sabotage and support for Iran’s proxy militia forces throughout the Middle East. Major-General Qasem Soleimani was the head of the Quds Force when he was assassinated by a US armed drone outside Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020. he IRGC intelligence branch has been specially active in recent years, kidnapping Iranian dissidents and attempted abductions of Israeli businessmen. Both the MOI and IRGC are known to be active in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. The US Justice Department revealed that the IRGC was behind an assassination attempt against Trump when he was on the presidential campaign trail in 2024. “It’s no secret that the Iranians have wanted to assassinate Trump and other figures from this first term like Mike Pompeo [then secretary of state], John Bolton [national security adviser], and Brian Hook [special representative for Iran] who were involved in the drone strike that killed Soleimani in 2020,” a former senior US diplomatic official said. “This desire for revenge has been quickened by the Israeli pager assassination plot that decapitated Hezbollah [in 2024], strikes against IRGC figures in Syria before the fall of [President Bashar al-] Assad and the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas in Tehran in 2024, not to mention the decapitation strikes that began the current war with Iran, including the killing of the supreme leader, and many senior leaders of the security elements,” the former official said. “Iran has not had much success, so far, with assassinating western senior leaders, as opposed to regime opponents, but they have demonstrated their reach by going after soft targets like the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires [which killed 85 people in 1994] and [the US air base barracks at] Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996 [when a truck bomb killed 19 American airmen].” “The fact that they have, so far, failed to take out western leaders doesn't mean they will stop trying or that at some point they might not succeed.” The now-confirmed switch in planes at Ankara via the catering truck was not the first time that the US Secret Service has had to use deception to protect the life of the president. President Bill Clinton flew secretly to India and Pakistan in 2000 when a crisis was building over Kashmir between the two nuclear powers. He, too, switched from Air Force One to an unmarked aircraft. Both President George W Bush and President Barack Obama, used decoys and deception to visit, respectively, Baghdad in 2003 eight months after the start of the Iraq war, and Afghanistan to meet US troops in 2010.

Europe having to get used to extreme heat

This is the future and it doesn't look or feel good. Temperatures heading for 40C across the continent and in the United Kingdom, a summer of hot, hot, steamy weather and, in the UK at least, no air conditioning in homes. Outside, there is no wind, just oppressive hotness. This is not the future any of us wants but as the politicians throughout Europe and the rest of the world have failed, failed, failed to do anything serious about climate change, it is now hitting us very severely and there is very little we simple folk can do about it. The terrifying fact is that even if world leaders, including and especially Donald Trump and Xi Zinping, suddenly realise they have to do something, it's all too late. Temperatures have risen this year and will do so again next year and the following year. Green grass will vanish, trees will die, people will die, jobs will go, the world will creak and groan. and yet, still, the wars we now have will carry on as normal. What a future for our children and grandchildren.

Secret Service caters for Donald Trump

Donald Trump is a big guy, so being shuffled into a catering container for his switch to another plane for a getaway from Ankara the other week must have seemed somewhat undignified. But he was under orders from the Secret Service. They wanted him to leave the Nato summit in Ankara by a method that at all costs evaded the possible threat of an Iranian missile hitting his normal plane, Air Force One. Of course it's the responsibility of the president's Secret Service detail to decide what's best for him, but it was certainly unusual for the president of the United States to be exited by subterfuge from a Nato country to return home. But this is the world we live in, or to be more precise, this is the world western leaders have to face when there are malign states intent on targeting them. It is true, of course, that Iran's own leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed on the first day of the US/Israel war which began on February 28th, and targeting Trump in revenge is something which the US intelligence services have been aware of since that decapitation strike. It's another reason why any peace deal between the US and Iran is highly unlikely while Trump is in the White House. Trump's "catering" experience at Ankara airpoprt will go down in history as one of the more quixotic evacuation procedures used to keep the president safe.

Is Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei in charge after all?

Despite facial disfigurements and other injuries to his body and his hideaway never-seen existence, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei who took over as Iran's supreme leader when his father was killed on the first day of the US/Israel war with Iran, seems actually to be in charge and making decisions which others are obeying. He seems to have taken the hardest-possible line on doing any sort of deal with the US and appears determined to put his stamp on the future of Iran. While the military in the shape of the commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, are the visible leaders of the country, the disabled supreme leader is still issuing orders. How it is being done is difficult to guage but clearly the courier system he is suspected of using from his command bunker is working effectively. Mojtaba, I am sure, has one driving motivation for taking the toughest line with the US. He blames Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, for the assassination of his father, the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He no doubt wants revenge and the best way, I giess, is for him to put so much pressure on Trump by hanging on to the Strait of Hormuz, that the US will just give up. Whatever happens in the next few weeks, Iran's control of the strait is not going to be conceded in any future deal, if there is ever a deal. Mojtaba may have vanished into his bunker somewhere, but he is alive and dictating the terms for what he will see as Trump's surrender.

Will Venezuela be Trump's only triumph?

The way things are going wrong for Trump in Iran, Gaza and Ukraine, it may turn out that when he leaves office in January 2029 he will have only one foreign success story to his name and for his legacy. Mind you, even the Venezuela venture hasn't exactly worked out well for the people. American Delta Force commandos swept in by heliopter in the dead of night and captured the dreadful President Nicolas Maduro and his wife in their pyjamas and took them back to the US for trial on drugs charges. But has that meant a transformation for the Venezuelan people, with oil money back in the treasury coffers to be spent on housing and social welfare and better living standards? Definitely not. And quite what the arrangement now is between Washington and Caracas over how the country is to be run remains somewhat cloudy. Anyway, the whizzo military operation to seize Maduro was without question a coup for Trump. But that's all he has to boast about. Everything else has gone wrong. Gaza is still in a mess with Israel and Hamas locked in anger and retribution, Iran is a hopeless case with no end in sight to an intractable impasse over the Strait of Hormuz and everything else, and the war in Ukraine is a for-ever conflict. Not much to write home about for a president who vowed to end all wars.

Netanyahu says no to Trump's Hamas disarmament plan

It has taken him more than a week but now Benjamin Netanyahu has come out and said he rejects the Hamas disarmament peace plan announced with such fanfare by Donald Trump. Well, of course he has. Netanyahu will never agree to any plan which stipulates that Israeli troops must withdraw from Gaza in a phased programme while Hamas throws a few weapons on a pile. The Trump plan is doomed. Hamas agreed to disarm but only on the understanding that Israel would totally withdraw from Gaza. But Netanyahu's future as prime minister rests on him being able to claim victory over Hamas which, in his mind, means the terror organisation must be seen to be disarmed of all weaponry BEFORE he orders any of the Israel Defence Forces to start leaving the Gaza Strip. Currently the IDF controls and occupies more than half of the territory. Now, of course, this will give Hamas the excuse to say to Trump, 'sorry, we're not going to disarm while the IDF refuses to leave Gaza'. Bang goes Trump's dream. It may be a ploy by Netanyahu to stir things up and force Hamas to adopt a different approach. But it seems more likely that between now and the elections in Israel in October, Netanyau is not going to give an inch on Gaza or Hamas.

Iran is going to set new rules for the Strait of Hormuz reopening

It might seem as if a deal between Iran and Oman over the management and administration of the Strait of Hormuz is going to lead to the instant reopening of the chokepoint and a return to the flow of shipping to pre-Iran-war levels. No such luck. Tehran has a much broader concept in mind which will become clear very soon. To further humiliate President Trump, it looks like the Iranian negotiators want the reopening of the strait to be directly linked to every word in the now-maligned Memorandaum of Understanding signed by the US and Iran om June 17. That would mean the US agreeing to lift the naval blockade, allow full exporting of Iranian oil and the unfreezing of financial assets. Iran believes it to be in the ascendancy over the US, so the imminent Iran/Oman arrangement which is bound to include a facility for charging shipping companies for services rendered, will be dependent on a much broader deal with the US, before the strait is fully reopened. This will be the worst outcome for Trump and a huge victory for Tehran. How on earth did it get to this point?