Khalife, 23, gained global attention last year when he escaped from London’s Wandsworth prison for three days while being held on espionage charges.
A former British soldier whose escape from a London prison sparked a massive manhunt in 2023 has been convicted of spying for Iran.
Daniel Khalife, 23, was found guilty on Thursday of violating Britain’s Official Secrets Act by collecting and passing on sensitive information to the Iranian intelligence services. He was cleared of a charge of carrying out a bomb hoax in his military barracks.
Prosecutors at Woolwich Crown Court in London said Khalife had played a “cynical game” by claiming he wanted to be a spy after he had delivered a large amount of restricted and classified material to Iran, including the names of special forces officers.
Khalife testified that he had been in touch with people in the Iranian government but that it was all part of a ploy to ultimately work as a double agent for Britain, a scheme he said he had devised by watching the political thriller television show ‘Homeland’.
“I wanted to utilise my background to further our national security,” Khalife told the jurors during his trial. “I was thinking I could be James Bond or something, like an idiot.”
Defence lawyer Gul Nawaz Hussein said Khalife’s aspirations were naïve, stupid and bordered on slapstick. He said his client was more “Scooby Doo” than “007”.
Justice Bobbie Cheema-Grubb said that Khalife would face a “long custodial sentence” when he is sentenced early next year.
Khalife’s case garnered global attention in September 2023 when he escaped from Wandsworth prison while being held on remand on the espionage charges. He fled by strapping himself to the bottom of a food delivery truck, and went on the run for three days before he was eventually arrested along a canal path in northwest London.
During his trial, Khalife pleaded guilty to the escape, but contested the spying charges.
‘Amateurish’ actions
Khalife joined the British Army at 16 and was assigned to the Royal Corps of Signals, a communications unit that is deployed with battlefield troops, as well as special forces and intelligence squads.
He was told he could not join the intelligence service because his mother is from Iran.
At 17, Khalife reached out to a man connected with Iranian intelligence and began passing along information, prosecutors said. He was given NATO secret security clearance when he took part in a joint exercise at Fort Cavazos in Texas in early 2021.
British security officials were not aware of Khalife’s contacts with the Iranians until he contacted MI6, the UK’s foreign intelligence service, to offer to work as a double agent.
Khalife reached out to MI6 anonymously, saying he had earned the trust of his Iranian handlers and that they had rewarded him by leaving a bag in a north London park that contained $2,000 in cash (€1,895).
He said most of the material he provided to his Iranian handlers was information he made up or documents that were available online and did not expose any British army secrets.
ADVERTISEMENTBritish police said that while Khalife’s actions were “amateurish” and contained elements of “fantasy”, he had harmed the UK’s interested by pproviding “highly sensitive” information to Iran.
“He’s the ultimate Walter Mitty character,” said Dominic Murphy, the head of the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism command, referring to a fictional character who has fantastical daydreams to escape their mundane daily existance.
“The problem is he’s a Walter Mitty character that was having an extremely significant impact on the real world,” Murphy said.
