After he escaped from a London jail last year, strapped by a sling made from trousers to the underside of a food-delivery truck, Daniel Khalife spent three days on the run, evading a nationwide manhunt launched by Britain’s embarrassed authorities.
On Thursday the former British soldier was found guilty of spying for Iran after a trial that revealed the bizarre activities of a young man who claimed he was partly drawn to the world of espionage by watching the Emmy-winning drama “Homeland.”
At Woolwich Crown Court, Mr. Khalife, 23, was convicted of collecting information useful to an enemy — in this case the government of Iran — but cleared of a charge of planting fake bombs in his military barracks.
Mr. Khalife had contested the spying charges, claiming he wanted to work for the British intelligence agencies as a double agent.
Perhaps a more convincing defense, however, was the amateurishness of his efforts to become a spy. Gul Nawaz Hussein, who defended Mr. Khalife in court, described his client’s aspirations as naïve, stupid and bordering on slapstick, adding that it was more “Scooby Doo” than “007.”
Certainly, Mr. Khalife made spying look less glamorous than in the movies. On one occasion his Iranian handlers sent him to a park in north London to collect around $2,000 left in a bag for dog excrement, prosecutors said.
Mr. Khalife pleaded guilty to the audacious prison escape in September 2023 — a breakout that exposed embarrassing flaws in prison security.
A huge manhunt ensued, with airports and other travel hubs on high alert. After three days, a police officer pulled him from a bicycle on a canal towpath about 12 miles from Wandsworth jail, in southwest London, where he had been held.
But in his own mind, the prison break had proved his abilities as an undercover agent. “I was finally demonstrating what a foolish idea it was to have someone of my skill-set in prison,” he told the court. “What use was that to anyone?”
Whatever his motives, Mr. Khalife did pass documents to the Iranians, in one case visiting Turkey to meet a contact, and prosecutors dismissed his claims that he wanted to be a double agent as “a cynical game.” Instead, they contended that he had gathered “a very large body of restricted and classified material.”
Joining the British Army aged 16, Mr. Khalife was a member of the Royal Corps of Signals, a communications unit, but was rejected for intelligence work because his mother is from Iran.
The following year he reached out to a man connected with Iranian intelligence and began passing information, according to prosecutors.
Mr. Khalife gained NATO security clearance when he took part in a joint exercise at Fort Cavazos, Texas, in 2021, and British security officials remained unaware of his contacts with the Iranians until he told them himself.
Claiming to have earned the trust of his Iranian handlers, he anonymously emailed MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service.
Ignored by that agency, Mr. Khalife turned to MI5, the domestic spy network, in November 2021. It informed the police and Mr. Khalife was arrested in January 2022 and released on bail. He was, he claimed, inspired to make a fake defection to Iran by watching “Homeland,” starring Claire Danes and Damian Lewis, on Netflix.
In January 2023 he was reported missing by his army unit and, when his room was searched, the police found what they said appeared to be a potential explosive device, along with a note indicating that Mr. Khalife had left for fear of criminal charges. Later that month, he was arrested in Staffordshire, charged and sent to the prison from which he made his escape.
The court heard that, while in the army, Mr. Khalife had gathered the names of 15 serving soldiers — including some from the special forces — though he denied sending the list to the Iranians and claimed to have given them mostly fake information.
Most of the messages he exchanged with his contacts were on the encrypted app Telegram and were deleted.
But prosecutors said some of Mr. Khalife’s army documents were genuine, and presented evidence from mobile phones, notes he wrote to himself, and surveillance footage.
“He surreptitiously sought out and obtained copies of secret and sensitive information which he knew were protected and passed these on to individuals he believed to be acting on behalf of the Iranian state,” Bethan David, of the Crown Prosecution Service, said in a statement on Thursday.
The trial also heard that Mr. Khalife could have endangered Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian citizen who was held in Iran for six years, by sending a fabricated intelligence document to Iran that said the British government was unwilling to negotiate her release.
Sentencing is scheduled for Dec. 12. Dominic Murphy, head of the counterterrorism command at the Metropolitan Police, said in a statement on Thursday that the threat to Britain from “states such as Iran is very serious, so for a soldier in the army to be sharing sensitive military material and information with them is extremely reckless and dangerous.”
Mr. Khalife, he added, “claimed that he wanted to help the U.K.’s security by becoming a so-called ‘double-agent’ but the reality we uncovered is that he simply put U.K. security at great risk by what he was doing.”
For his part, Mr. Khalife still seemed to visualize himself in the glamorized world of undercover espionage depicted in “Homeland” and other fictions.
“I had seen one of the characters in the program had actually falsely defected to a particular country and utilized that position to further the national security interests of that character’s country,” he explained of one of his plans.
Mr. Khalife told the court he was a “patriot,” adding: “I do love my country. All I wanted to do was help.”
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