A former soldier accused of spying for Iran spent ‘well over a year’ gaining trust of an agent he approached over Facebook, a court has heard.
Daniel Khalife, 23, found Hamed Ghashgavi through looking at a list of individuals sanctioned by the US government and approached him on the social media platform.
‘I made contact with him and I explained to him my job, I kind of blagged everything, I was like oh I do this, that, that. It took well over a year for them to finally trust me,’ Khalife said.
He told police he had always wanted to work in intelligence and was devastated when he was told his Iranian-Lebanese heritage meant he might not pass the vetting.
Instead he decided to launch his own operation, meeting agents in a park and a cemetery to receive payments and flying out to Istanbul for a meeting.
Khalife said he got ‘a bit of a thrill’ out of trying to be a double agent, but struggled to gain the Iranians’ trust until he started making fake top secret documents and told them he worked for a ‘Gucci’ unit in the British Army.
Daniel Khalife, who is accused of spying for Iran, spent ‘well over a year’ gaining trust of an agent he approached over Facebook, a court has heard
Khalife joined the army at 17 before going on to serve as a computer network engineer with the Royal Corps of Signals, the British Army’s communications arm
Khalife, from Kingston, South West London, is accused of collecting secrets from the Royal Signals Regiment which he handed to an Iranian agent using the name ‘David Smith.’
After he was charged under the Official Secrets Act, Khalife escaped from Wandsworth prison under a food catering van. He was re-captured three days later after a nationwide manhunt.
Khalife was originally arrested by police on January 6 last year after twice emailing MI6 and then calling MI5 twice anonymously to tell them what he had done.
Following his arrest, he told police: ‘I wanted to be a double agent, I wanted to be kind of the middle man in contact with Iran. I’ve always hated Iran I hate the f**king government. I’m not even joking, I hate it so much, I hate all of them.
‘It might be immature, a bit crazy the way that I’m thinking but I thought I could make a difference.
‘I almost thought that I was smart enough to kind of do it myself and I don’t really care what anybody says but I did. I made contact, I’d love to see somebody else do that.’
Khalife had been told he was unlikely to get developed vetted in order to work in his dream job, offering signals support for the special forces and ‘all the cards on the table kind of just went off, all the chess pieces.’
After that, he told the police: ‘I don’t want to be here, I’m not interested in just sitting on a f**king radio all day. I’m better than that. I know it sounds a bit narcissistic but I felt like I was better than everyone else.’
Khalife said working in intelligence was ‘all I’ve ever wanted to do’ and added: ‘I wanted to prove that I could do it myself and it was a bit of thrill.’
The 23-year-old had been in jail on terrorism charges after allegedly plotting a fake bomb hoax at his army barracks at MoD Stafford and a charge of passing material to the Iranian Intelligence Services
That had been his goal ‘since I was a baby’ he said, adding: ‘I would go on like the MI6 website and I would like do the little quizzes that they had.’
Khalife said he made fake documents to hand over adding: ‘I know it sounds like crazy, you’ll probably think what that hell is this guy but from the start the whole intention was to make contact with the security service. I wanted to be a double agent.’
Khalife said he saw that was ‘the only way where I could do this work without getting the security clearance, because it’s a bit of a grey area.’
The documents led the Iranian agent to ‘finally believe me’ but then they wanted to know which unit he worked for.
‘I made it up and said like a really Gucci unit. I got given a letter saying congratulations for finishing your course, so I made an exact copy but I put that Iwas in like some Gucci unit – terminology that we use for a special, specialised unit.
‘From there they really started to believe me.’
Khalife denies committing an act prejudicial to the safety or interests of the state,
eliciting information about members of the armed forces, and escaping from lawful custody and the trial continues.
Khalife said he began to realise he needed help but MI5 did not return his calls: ‘I only intended to this for like a month on my own, before making contact and it’s been two, three years and it’s just been so f**ked.
‘You know you’re so detached from everybody because you’re doing it all on your own. I’m not looking for sympathy or anything but all I wanted was just some help.
‘You know you’ve got whole intelligence agency, the whole of the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guard] and you’re f**king left here and I’m getting nothing in return. I’m calling MI5 and they’re not calling me back.’
He told the police that he was ‘just itching for you guys to do this because I didn’t want to carry on anymore.’
Khalife’s alleged escape from Wandsworth – which he denies – sparked a nationwide manhunt lasting several days
‘Mate I just turned 20, I was this f**king teenager mate. Everyone was going to night clubs and I’m sat there with a f**king intelligence officer screaming at my ear, telling me that he wants me to go to Iran and I’m thinking about if they’re going to kill me or not.
‘I didn’t know what to do. At that point where they didn’t call me back I thought I can’t call them again I was embarrassed.’
In a second interview he added: ‘All of the plans I had to work in the intelligence community in this country, that is what I wanted and it just didn’t work out.
‘I didn’t really have any other plans, what else could I have done? I contacted MI6, I contacted MI5, what am I going to do, dial 999?
‘I didn’t know what to do, I was just so f**king stuck and then this happens, which I was expecting actually. I had so much proof to give them if they just called me back.’
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