Meet the glamorous broadcaster Irans mullahs cant kill

In July 2022, Masih Alinejad was picking tomatoes and cucumbers in the sunflower-filled backyard of her Brooklyn home when she spotted a burly man loitering on her front porch. He wasn’t there to admire the foliage. Khalid Mehdiyev, part of an Eastern European organized-crime network, had allegedly been hired to kill Alinejad, the Iranian American journalist and human rights activist, in a $500,000 murder-for-hire plot directed by Tehran. Police foiled the plan, arresting Mehdiyev after finding an AK-47, 66 rounds of ammunition and a ski mask in his car. The case highlighted a global threat extending far beyond Iran’s borders.While Tehran’s ballistic missiles, nuclear ambitions and support for proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis dominate news headlines, the Islamic Republic has increasingly pursued activists, journalists and other perceived enemies on Western soil, often by outsourcing violence to local thugs and giving the regime distance and plausible deniability. Security officials call the practice “transnational repression.” Britain’s domestic security agency, MI5, has tracked at least 20 potentially deadly plots linked to Tehran since 2022.Fardad Farahzad knows all too well what it means to report on a regime that seeks to silence its critics. Born in Bandar Anzali, a port city on Iran’s Caspian Sea coast, Farahzad began his broadcasting career as a presenter at the BBC World Service in London.

He now anchors 24 With Fardad Farahzad on Iran International, a major Persian- and English-language outlet critical of the regime.The Islamic Republic’s intelligence minister designated the news channel as a “terrorist” organization in late 2022. Around the same time, in 2022, as protests swept Iran following the regime’s killing of a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini, Farahzad was on the frontlines of the coverage. What he did not know was that the regime was trying to kill him, too. “I learned about it a y...