Fears of political killings in US as Venezuela serves as base for Iran

The US faces a significant threat in Venezuela’s cozy relationship with Iran, with enemy nations using the socialist country as a base in the hemisphere to attack America, experts have warned. Fears are rising over the influence Iran has on Caracas as the two regimes strengthen economic and military ties and grow more hostile towards Washington DC.

Last week the FBI Miami launched a manhunt to find Iranian spy Majid Dastjani Farahani (pictured), who the government accuses of looking for allies to kill US officials while operating from Venezuela. Meanwhile four Iranians were charged in 2021 for plotting to kidnap dissident journalist Masih Alinejad from Brooklyn before using a speedboat to take her to Tehran via Caracas.

Experts warned DailyMail.com the brazen acts and strengthening relationships between dictator Nicolas Maduro and America’s enemies could spell doom in the near future. They said the rich-oil nation is being used as an ‘air bridge’ because it is geopolitical gold dust due to it being just 300 miles from the Miami coast in case any world war erupted. The FBI said the Iranian agents planned to lure Alinejad, an American citizen, from her home in Brooklyn to Venezuela, where they would capture and send her back to Iran to face treason charges.

The Iranians had a live feed of her home and researched how to get the author out of New York, according to the charging documents. One of the four researched a service offering ‘military-style speedboats for self-operated maritime evacuation out of New York City, and maritime travel from New York to Venezuela, a country whose de facto government has friendly relations with Iran,’ the Justice Department said. The conspirators, who remain at large, had also plotted to lure a person in the UK and three others in Canada to Iran, an indictment said. They had all also been critical of Iran.

Moreover, in 2022, the Department of Justice indicted several members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard for plotting to kill Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton. The same year, author Salman Rushdie, whose novel ‘The Satanic Verses’ drew death threats from Iran’s leader in the 1980s, was stabbed in the neck and abdomen by a man who rushed the stage as the author was about to give a lecture in western New York. The attacker had expressed sympathies for Iran and admiration for Soleimani on social media. The State Department, meanwhile, told DailyMail.com they are aware of reports that Iran is engaged in lethal plotting against its enemies on other countries’ soil – including dissidents, journalists, former US officials, and former insiders.

‘Iran’s lethal plots and intimidation span the globe, and concerted international action is required to disrupt the plots and hold the Iranian regime accountable,’ a spokesperson said. ‘We take seriously and closely monitor any efforts by Iran to expand its influence or conduct lethal plots in the Western Hemisphere. The Biden Administration has not and will not waver in protecting and defending all U.S. citizens against threats of violence and terrorism. We are working closely with international partners in confronting this shared threat from Iran.’ The links between Iran and Venezuela – which is just a three-hour flight from Miami -have increasingly become more evident, as the Islamic Republic uses the South American nation as a base in the region. ‘The same way Syria was so critical for Iran in terms of it building of a land bridge through the Levant to be able to arm and fund Hezbollah and then later Yemen, Venezuela is an air bridge, a logistical platform in the Western Hemisphere.’

Humire added Iran is using Venezuela ‘to diminish its geographic disadvantage with the United States, being that they understand the US military presence in their neighborhood. They want to threaten the United States in a in a reciprocal way.’ Former Venezuelan military officer Jose Antonio Colina, now in exile in Miami, told DailyMail.com the relationship between Iran and Venezuela represents a threat particularly in the case of a conflict between Tehran and the US. ‘Venezuela, because of its geopolitical and geographical situation, could become an important platform in an eventual conflict between Iran and the US, and it could be an important base for Iran to launch future attacks,’ Colina said. He was not surprised to hear about the FBI’s hunt for Farahani, as he remembers the Venezuelan regime holding events to commemorate Soleimani after his assassination by the US in 2020. ‘That shows the level of understanding between the two regimes,’ Colina added. ‘They are both important enemies of the US looking to destabilize the west.’

Aside from Pompeo (pictured), the FBI believes Farahani was also targeting Brian Hook, Trump’s envoy to Tehran, the agency told Semafor. Both Pompeo and Hook are currently under around-the-clock security due to the increased threat level. Farahani was sanctioned by the Treasury department in December, which claimed he works for Iran to ‘aggressively target and stifle opponents and dissenting voices.’ The relationship between Iran and Venezuela goes back to the first years of Chavez’ regime, with the two nations bonding over their anti-democracy views as well as the exploration for uranium in Venezuela. The allyship has continued to grow despite Chavez’ death in 2013 as Maduro has continued his agenda.

The two countries, both similarly sanctioned by the US, expanded cooperation through a swap that provides Venezuela’s state-run oil company PDVSA with light oil for refining and diluents to produce exportable crude grades. PDVSA in return supplies Iran with Venezuelan heavy oil and fuel. ‘All their [U.S.] conspiracies against us have failed,’ former Iranian president Hassan Rouhani said in a meeting with Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro in 2019. ‘Iran and Venezuela have always supported each other in all international and political arenas and will continue to do so.’ By 2013, US intelligence officials were raising the alarm about Iran using Venezuela as a getaway for hostile activities in the region. ProPublica reported that the previous year, Iran and Venezuela’s spy agencies had set up a joint intelligence program.

In one of the meetings, ‘Venezuelan spymasters agreed to provide systematic help to Iran with intelligence infrastructure such as arms, identification documents, bank accounts and pipelines for moving operatives and equipment between Iran and Latin America.’ Iran and Venezuela, both original members of OPEC, then signed a 20-year accord boosting economic and military cooperation in 2022 during one of Maduro’s many visits to Tehran. China and Russia, on their part, have also taken advantage of Venezuela’s shaky relationship with the US to use the nation in their anti-US agenda. Just last month Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reaffirmed the Kremlin’s support for Maduro. Unconditional Russian and Chinese support has allowed Venezuela to circumvent crippling economic sanctions, imposed primarily by the US. ‘Venezuela and Russia are two countries that are victims on the international stage of the illegal, irrational, illegitimate application of unilateral coercive measures,’ said Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil last month.

However, he said, both countries ‘have woven a close relationship, a functional, structural relationship that allows us today to show concrete results to our people.’ Iran has sent various war weapons to Caracas, which have been paraded by the Venezuelan military. Meanwhile Moscow began transporting strategic bomber aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons to Venezuela as far back as 2018. Vladimir Putin has sent Russian troops Venezuela at different times, including in 2018 to help Maduro subdue protests supporting then interim president Juan Guaido as Venezuelans fought to overthrow the regime. ‘Iran works within this alliance, this autocratic alliance, China, Russia, North Korea, they’re all building joint capabilities and interoperability,’ Humire told DailyMail.com. ‘When they talk about changing international order, that’s what they’re talking about. They’re talking about changing the way trade is done, changing the way human rights are looked at.’

Humire added that China uses Iran to do much of its bidding in the western hemisphere in order to protect its own diplomatic relations with Washington. ‘Iran does the dirty work for China in Latin America, a lot of things that China doesn’t want to get caught doing, because they don’t want to be antagonistic directly to the U.S. or others,’ the global security expert said. ‘Iran will do it because Iran has no political capital to lose.’ Venezuela, which has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, has gone from being the richest Latin American nation to representing the largest displacement of people in the world.

More more than 7.7million people have left the nation – even more than Ukrainians and Syrians. It’s a rare case of massive migration from a country that is not at war but has seen one of the most extreme fortune reversals in recent history after the socialist takeover 20 years ago. Venezuela was friendly to the US for most of the 20th century, providing its crucial oil reserves as the US engaged in wars in the middle east. But that relationship slowly deteriorated after Chavez (pictured) won the presidency in 1998, as the regime became more openly authoritarian, jailing and exiling critics, and not allowing free and fair elections.

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