The Newsroom
Sima Sabet was reading the news when MI5 told her someone was coming to kill her.
It was not the first time. Sabet — a presenter at Iran International, the London-based Persian-language news channel — had been living under armed protection since 2022, when British intelligence informed her that the Islamic Republic’s external operations unit had dispatched an operative to assassinate her. She continued broadcasting. The detail assigned to her grew. She moved apartments. She varied her route to the studio. She read the teleprompter through bulletproof glass.
Her colleague Fardad Farahzad received the same warning. So did other members of the editorial team. The threat was not abstract — in the preceding years, the IRGC had successfully assassinated or abducted Iranian dissidents in Turkey, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates. The unit responsible had a designation: IRGC Unit 840, the external operations division tasked with eliminating threats to the regime that existed beyond Iran’s borders.
In January 2026, as the regime massacred its own citizens behind a total internet blackout, Iran International became the primary conduit through which smuggled footage, leaked documents, and witness testimony reached the outside world. The channel verified and broadcast the evidence that the regime’s blackout was designed to suppress. Its audience inside Iran — reached via satellite television that no internet blackout could touch — heard what state media would not tell them.
The regime’s response was consistent with its doctrine: if you cannot silence the information, silence the people who transmit it. The information war has no borders. Journalists are enemy combatants.
In January 2026, the United Kingdom and the United States sanctioned members of IRGC Unit 840 for the plots against Sabet and Farahzad.1 The sanctions acknowledged what the regime had demonstrated through action: it considered a television presenter in London to be as dangerous as an armed insurgent on the streets of Tehran.
The Bureau
Unit 840 was not improvising. The Islamic Republic has maintained an extraterritorial assassination program since its founding — one of the most extensive and sustained campaigns of state-sponsored murder in modern history.
The program’s logic is doctrinal: the revolution has no borders, and neither do its enemies. Anyone who threatens the Islamic Republic — a dissident, a journalist, a former official who knows too much — is a legitimate target regardless of where they live. The operational arm evolved over decades, from the chain murders of the 1990s (intellectuals and writers killed inside Iran by rogue intelligence agents) to the Mykonos restaurant assassination in Berlin in 1992 (four Kurdish-Iranian opposition leaders shot dead, a German court implicating Iran’s highest leadership) to the twenty-first-century campaigns that targeted the diaspora as a strategic threat.
The methods adapted to the era. In the 1990s, it was pistols and knives wielded by agents with diplomatic cover. By the 2020s, the toolkit included:
Hired criminals. In 2021, the FBI disrupted a plot to kidnap Masih Alinejad — a journalist and activist living in Brooklyn — from her home in the United States.2 The operation, directed by an Iranian intelligence officer, employed private investigators and members of an Eastern European criminal network to surveil Alinejad’s house, photograph her daily movements, and plan an extraction route to Venezuela, where she would be transferred to Iran. A second plot to assassinate her was disrupted in 2022.
Lured abductions. Ruhollah Zam, a journalist who ran the Amad News Telegram channel — a key information source during the 2017-2018 protests — was lured from France to Iraq in 2019 under the pretext of a meeting with an Iraqi cleric. He was abducted by Iranian intelligence, taken to Tehran, subjected to a show trial, and executed in December 2020.3
Diplomatic cover. Jamshid Sharmahd, a German-Iranian activist living in California, was abducted in 2020 — likely from the UAE — and transported to Iran. He was convicted of “corruption on earth” and executed in October 2024.4
The pattern is consistent: identify, surveil, isolate, and either kill or abduct. The geographic range is global. The message to every Iranian journalist and activist abroad is explicit — there is no safe distance.
The Reach: Since 1979, Iran has conducted assassination or abduction operations in at least 12 countries across 4 continents. In 2021-2024 alone, US and UK authorities disrupted plots targeting journalists and activists in New York, London, and Wimbledon.
The Clearinghouse
The regime’s assassination doctrine exists because of what Iran International, and the broader diaspora media ecosystem, actually does. Understanding the threat requires understanding the function.
Iran International was founded in 2017, broadcasting in Persian from studios in London. By January 2026, it had become the single most important clearinghouse for user-generated content from inside Iran — the place where smuggled footage went to be verified, contextualized, and broadcast to millions.
The channel’s editorial process during the January blackout operated on a war footing. Footage arrived through multiple channels: encrypted messaging apps via the Psiphon network, physical transfers from kolbar couriers reaching Kurdish media outlets, and direct submissions from Starlink users in the brief windows before their terminals were jammed. The editorial team cross-referenced the footage against known protest locations, verified timestamps against the blackout timeline, and consulted with human rights organizations before broadcasting.
The channel served a dual function. Outward, it provided the international community with documentation of what was happening inside Iran — footage that CNN, the BBC, and Al Jazeera then amplified to global audiences. The CNN broadcast of January 15 that showed DShK machine guns firing on crowds was sourced through Iran International’s verification pipeline.
Inward, it provided Iranians themselves with an alternative to state media. Iran International broadcast via satellite — frequencies that no internet blackout could touch. During the twelve days of total digital silence, satellite television became the only non-state information source available to tens of millions of Iranians. Families who could not reach the internet could still point a satellite dish at the sky and hear what the state was hiding.
This is why the regime considered a London journalist a strategic threat equivalent to an armed combatant. Iran International was not reporting the news. It was breaking the information monopoly that made the massacre possible.
The Old Frequencies
Satellite television was not the only blackout-proof technology. Two institutions — BBC Persian and Voice of America’s Persian service — deployed a technology that predates the internet by half a century: shortwave radio.
Shortwave signals travel thousands of kilometers by bouncing off the ionosphere. They cannot be blocked by cutting undersea cables or filtering domestic internet traffic. They require no terminal that can be raided, no app that can be banned, no IP address that can be blocked. A shortwave receiver costs less than ten dollars. Millions of Iranians own them.
During the January blackout, BBC Persian and VOA increased their shortwave broadcast hours, beaming news — including verified footage descriptions and casualty reports — directly into Iranian airspace. The technology was analog. The content was verified. The reach was continental.
Blackout-Proof Technologies
Satellite TV (Iran International, BBC Persian, Manoto): Requires satellite dish — visible but functional during internet blackout | Shortwave radio (BBC Persian, VOA): Requires only a receiver — invisible, unjammable at current scale, continental reach | Psiphon Conduit: Requires internet connection — degraded but partially functional | Starlink: Requires terminal — 80% degraded by electronic warfare
The regime had invested billions in controlling the digital information space. Shortwave radio — a technology from the 1920s — bypassed the entire apparatus. The irony was structural: the more sophisticated the regime’s digital censorship became, the more valuable pre-digital technologies became as countermeasures.
BBC Persian’s role came with its own complications. Reports surfaced that the Iranian regime had leveraged visa access — offering entry permits to BBC correspondents in exchange for editorial restraint on certain topics. The extent to which this influenced coverage during the January crisis remains disputed, but the structural incentive is documented: access journalism creates dependencies that authoritarian regimes exploit.
The Paradox
On March 29, 2024, Pouria Zeraati — an Iran International journalist — was stabbed outside his home in Wimbledon, south London. He survived. The attack was attributed to agents linked to the Iranian regime.5 It was one of several physical attacks or plots against Iranian diaspora media figures in 2023-2024.
The regime intended these attacks to silence. They achieved the opposite.
Every assassination attempt against Iran International staff generated international news coverage that amplified the channel’s profile and credibility. Sima Sabet, Fardad Farahzad, and Pouria Zeraati became known to audiences who had never heard of Iran International. The channel’s audience grew. Its fundraising expanded. The UK government’s decision to sanction IRGC Unit 840 members was directly precipitated by the threats against Iran International staff — transforming an editorial operation into a diplomatic crisis.
The paradox is structural: assassination is a tool designed for the shadows. It works when the target disappears and no one notices. It fails catastrophically when the target is a public figure whose disappearance would be the biggest story in the Persian-language media ecosystem. Killing Sima Sabet would not silence Iran International — it would make her the Neda Agha-Soltan of the diaspora, a martyr whose face would be projected on buildings in London, Berlin, and Washington.
The regime understood information warfare well enough to build a twelve-day blackout. But it did not understand the paradox of attacking journalists in open societies: every threat proved the channel was telling the truth. If Iran International were broadcasting lies, the regime would amplify them, not try to murder the broadcasters.
Think about what it means to sit down at a news desk knowing a government has sent someone to kill you for reading a teleprompter — and to read it anyway. That is the cost of the information you consume for free.
The Evidence Keepers
The journalists were the most visible targets. Behind them stood a quieter infrastructure — organizations whose function was not to broadcast but to document, with the precision required for eventual prosecution.
1500tasvir — named for the approximately 1,500 people killed during the November 2019 blackout — operated as a distributed verification network. Footage that reached the diaspora through Psiphon nodes, Starlink windows, and physical smuggling was received through encrypted channels, geolocated using image metadata and satellite imagery, authenticated through cross-referencing with witness testimony and social media records, and published with forensic notation. The network’s methodology was modeled on practices developed by Bellingcat and the Syrian Archive — open-source intelligence techniques applied to human rights documentation.
The Abdorrahman Boroumand Center worked on a longer arc. Founded in 2001 and named after a murdered Iranian opposition leader, the ABC maintained the Omid Memorial — a comprehensive database of individual case files for every documented political prisoner, execution, and disappearance since 1979. The January 2026 dossiers were compiled in real time: names, dates, locations, methods of death, chain of command evidence. The explicit goal was to build an evidentiary record for transitional justice — the cases that would be prosecuted if and when the Islamic Republic faces accountability.
Together, 1500tasvir and the ABC performed the function that the blackout was designed to prevent: the creation of a permanent, authenticated record. The regime could suppress real-time information flow. It could not prevent the eventual reconstruction. Every fragment of footage that escaped the blackout — every SD card from a kolbar’s backpack, every degraded Starlink upload, every satellite image of a freshly disturbed cemetery — entered a documentation pipeline designed to survive the regime itself.
The massacre happened in the dark. The record is being assembled in the light.
The Honest Ledger
The diaspora media ecosystem is not a neutral observer. Iran International was founded with Saudi Arabian funding — a fact the regime uses to delegitimize its reporting and one that genuine media critics note raises questions about editorial independence.6 The channel’s coverage, while forensically rigorous on the January events, operates within a geopolitical context where Saudi interests and Iranian opposition interests sometimes converge for different reasons.
BBC Persian’s structural dependency on access journalism creates real editorial vulnerabilities. VOA operates as a US government-funded broadcaster, which the regime exploits to frame all diaspora media as instruments of foreign policy rather than journalism.
The assassination attempts against journalists are unambiguously criminal — no editorial bias justifies murder. But the broader media ecosystem is not a simple story of truth versus propaganda. It is a contested information space where multiple actors — including state-funded broadcasters, exile political factions, and intelligence agencies — pursue overlapping but distinct agendas.
The evidence preservation work of 1500tasvir and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center operates on a different plane. Their function is forensic, not editorial. The methodology — geolocation, metadata verification, cross-referencing, chain-of-custody documentation — follows international standards designed for exactly this purpose. Whether the footage was first broadcast by Iran International or BBC Persian is irrelevant to its evidentiary value once it has been independently authenticated.
What the assassination doctrine reveals is the regime’s own assessment of what threatens it most. Not sanctions, which it evades. Not military strikes, which it survived. Not satellite internet, which it jammed. The thing the Islamic Republic fears most is a camera that it cannot turn off, operated by a person it cannot reach, broadcasting to an audience it cannot control. The information war has no borders — and the regime has told us, through the assassins it dispatched and the journalists it targeted, that this is the war it believes it is losing.
This article is part of The Digital Siege. For the technology supply chain behind the blackout, see The Splinternet. For the diaspora network that pierced the information blockade, see The Psiphon Army.
Footnotes
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Iran International, “US And UK Issue New Sanctions For Iran’s Militants Abroad,” January 2026; The Guardian, “Sanctions Will Not Stop Iran Killing and Kidnapping on UK Soil, Officials Warned,” January 2024 ↩
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INSS, “The Institutions Responsible for Carrying Out Iranian Terrorism,” Chapter 4, July 2025 ↩
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INSS, “The Institutions Responsible for Carrying Out Iranian Terrorism,” Chapter 4, July 2025; Reuters, “Iran Executes Dissident Journalist Ruhollah Zam,” December 2020 ↩
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The Guardian, “Sanctions Will Not Stop Iran Killing and Kidnapping on UK Soil, Officials Warned,” January 2024 ↩
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Iran International, “Iran International TV Host Stabbed In London Attack,” March 29, 2024 ↩
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Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, “How to Cover a Country Cut Out from the Internet? The Battle to Report on Iran from Exile,” 2026 ↩