By Ismail Salami

Preposterously bizarre as it is, the head of MI6 foreign intelligence agency John Sawers made a rare appearance before Britain’s civil servants in London on Friday and warned that the Iranians are ‘determinedly going down a path to master all aspects of nuclear weapons; all the technologies they need,’ and that they will by 2014 acquire a nuclear bomb.

Apart from his political fallacy concerning Iran nuclear energy program, he smugly owns up to the MI6 covert operations in Iran which the British government had denied for years. The superspy’s confession to MI6 covert operations in Iran comes at a time when a few weeks earlier, a book claims that the nuclear assassinations in Iran were orchestrated and carried out by Mossad agents.

There is a Persian fictional character innocently known as Uncle Napoleon in Persian literature who readily discerns the hand of Britain behind any social or political chicanery which takes place in Iran. An initial evaluation of such an attitude might strike one as somewhat illogical or even ludicrous but when you scrutinize all the available evidence with a critical eye, you will concur that Uncle Napoleon enjoys a bittersweet sense of the true nature of the British government.

Back to his Excellency Sir John Sawyers, one cannot help smiling with some considerable degree of amusement especially when one sees how he boasts that the MI6 men prevented Tehran from developing nuclear weapons earlier and that without intervention, Iran may have gone nuclear as early as 2008. 

Britain’s black ops in Iran range from carrying out assassination attempts to sabotaging and staging coup d’état.

Perhaps the first instance of MI6 black ops in Iran dates back to the early fifties when MI6 spymaster Colonel Monty Woodhouse was serving in the spy agency. In that capacity, he engineered the notorious Operation Boot with the intention of overthrowing the government of Mohammad Mossadegh, the Iranian politician who had a penchant for nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in favor of restoring the British-friendly Shah of Iran to his throne in 1953. Monty Woodhouse personally flew guns into Iran from Baghdad aboard an RAF aircraft. He then “bought Iranian rials for sovereigns and – at a secret rendezvous in the Tehran suburbs – handed the cash to one of two mysterious Iranian brothers to help finance plans for the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh.” In fact, the government of Mossadegh was overthrown through an inauspicious liaison of MI6 and CIA.

In 2010, Iranian Intelligence Ministry revealed that they had arrested four MI6-linked terrorists in the western city of Marivan. These British elements were behind five assassinations in 2007 and 2008 in Iran. The detainees said they had been promised USD 20,000 for every assassination. They reportedly received instructions from their commander Jalal Fattahi in Sulaimaniya, Iraq. Fattahi, who was also a commander with the terrorist Komala group, resides in London and has, on the strength of the detainees’ testimonies, conducted a number of assassinations in western Iranian cities since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The detained individuals, Bakhtiar Me’mari, Hajeer Ebrahimi, Loqman Moradi and Zanyar Moradi, also belong to the Komala group. Founded in 1967, the Komala group, purportedly defunct now, is a Kurdish separatist group which garnered international attention for their sabotage and terrorist activities within Iran. Apart from conducting terrorist operations inside Iran, they are also responsible for helping the despotic Saddam regime attack and kill Iranian combatants during the Iran-Iraq war. The terrorist Komala group works under the aegis of the MI6.

In 2010, the British Foreign Office vehemently dismissed the claim, and said, "There is a long history of baseless Iranian allegations against the UK. This is just the latest," a spokesman said.

"The UK does not support or encourage terrorist activity in Iran, or anywhere else in the world, and this claim will be seen as what it is: another in a long line of slurs against the United Kingdom from the government of Iran."

Interestingly, earlier in the week, the head of MI6, John Sawers, had emphasized the importance of covert ops in Iran, and said, "Stopping nuclear proliferation cannot be addressed purely by conventional diplomacy. We need intelligence-led operations to make it more difficult for countries like Iran to develop nuclear weapons."

As the Persian saying goes, "the wall of denial is high."

Further to that, the British government has been collaborating with the Mossad agents on a plot to topple the Iranian government. In this murky business was involved Adam Werritty, a close friend of former British Defense Secretary Liam Fox who resigned when the scandal was made public. Liam Fox’s right-hand man Werritty who speaks Farsi after a broken fashion was said to "have regularly met Iranian dissidents, Israeli spies and right-wing US groups with an interest in destabilizing President Ahmadinejad."

Apparently, he had been briefed by MI6 after returning from overseas trips. Werritty reportedly worked closely with right-wing neoconservative groups in the US to push ahead with his anti-Iran sabotage plot.

Confession to black ops within the Iranian soil is an absolute source of shame for the British government, an egregious invitation to military invasion by the Zio-Americans and the knowledge of it is a bitter reality which will rankle in the Iranian collective memory for all the time to come.

So true was Uncle Napoleon’s mantra, "The Brits are to blame."

– Dr. Ismail Salami is an Iranian writer, Middle East expert, Iranologist and lexicographer. He writes extensively on the US and Middle East issues and his articles have been translated into a number of languages. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.