The West is failing to take the Iran threat seriously out of “sheer arrogance”, a woman who infiltrated the Tehran regime has warned.

Catherine Perez-Shakdam, a Jewish mother of two who grew up in Paris, concealed her true identity and spent almost a decade posing as an Iran sympathiser, gaining unprecedented access to the heart of the Middle Eastern state and its ruling class.

Her operation culminated in several visits to Tehran at the invitation of the ayatollahs and a rare private audience with Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

Speaking to the Sunday Telegraph at a hotel in central London, she said her experience led her to realise that Iran’s infiltration into the West is far deeper than people believe, despite how open the regime is about their ultimate aim to destroy it.

“There is a network that exists here in the UK, as far as the regime is concerned,” Ms Perez-Shakdam, a journalist, political commentator and Middle East expert, explained, with high ranking members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) constantly going “back and forth” to Iran, under the guise of working for a web of British charities, think-tanks and education centres.

“All these people are part of an ecosystem that literally directly reports back to Iran and takes orders from Iran.”

She added: “This is to direct and gauge the impact of the campaigns that they’re running, tweak the narrative when they need to, change people around, and make new connections. They basically keep tabs on what is going on in the UK and hope to create a very powerful lobby here, which I believe they have done.

“This is dangerous because they want to subvert our democracy and hijack our institutions.

“You’ve seen the way that they’ve hijacked Lebanon, for example, in Syria, Yemen and Iraq. They want to do this everywhere, and we need to understand those countries as being proof of concept that it works.”

But she said down to the “sheer arrogance” of the West, the threat is not taken seriously.

She said:  “We have a sociopath with a gun loaded telling you, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ And we’re looking him straight in the eyes, convincing the people standing behind us, who we mean to protect, that he doesn’t mean what he’s saying.

“It’s this belief that we are immune somewhat through geography. And also this belief that, because we defeated Nazism in World War Two, we don’t have to reckon with it anymore.  But we do, it’s a different form. This is the thing about evil – it doesn’t show up twice with the same face.”

AfriPrime App link:  FREE to download...

https://www.amazon.com/Africircle-AfriPrime/dp/B0D2M3F2JT

Ms Perez-Shakdam moved to Yemen in 2009, and an opinion piece she wrote for the Yemen Observer, criticising US intervention in Iraq, caught the eye of the ayatollahs.

“They reached out to me,” she said, “thinking, ‘Maybe she can come on side. Maybe she could be convinced. Maybe we could use her.’ And it started really, really slowly.”

This led to requests to appear as a commentator on Iran-backed media channels where she was asked to speak on topics such as demonising the presence of the West in the Middle East.

Ms Perez-Shakdam believes this was how she began to be “vetted” by Iran’s network, eventually leading to an invitation to attend a conference in Tehran in 2017.

It was the first of several trips to Iran that year during which, she believed, the Tehran regime wanted to turn her into an “agent” who could be their “chief propagandist” in the UK, where she was living at the time.

Earlier this week, Iran dismissed calls from Sir Keir Starmer and other Western leaders to refrain from attacking Israel. The US, Britain, France, Italy and Germany called on Tehran to stand down in a joint letter, expressing their concern about a regional war if it follows through on its threats to attack Israel directly.

But Nasser Kanaani, a spokesman for the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said: “The declaration by France, Germany and Britain, which raised no objection to international crimes of the Zionist regime, brazenly asks Iran to take no deterrent action against a regime which has violated its sovereignty.”

In the aftermath of the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last month, the Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian said Iran would “never give in to pressure, to sanctions and to bullying, and considers it has the right to respond”.

During one of her trips to Iran, Ms Perez-Shakdam was told about a plot by the regime to “map out” key individuals and organisations in the Jewish diaspora to mark them out for assassinations and attacks. This intelligence was later confirmed by the then security minister Tom Tugendhat.

The “number one” aim of the regime was to “force Jews to leave, to go to Israel, because it’s easier to hit them there in one place”. And secondly to “create a narrative against Jews that their very existence is a danger to your [country’s] national security, therefore you should kick them out”, she said.

“At the time, I was thinking, ‘No one is ever going to buy this. And then, you fast forward to 2024 and you hear things like, ‘They don’t belong here, they should go home’.”

Ms Perez-Shakdam, who is now the executive director of the campaign group We Believe in Israel, said the Iranian regime is using Israel as a Trojan Horse as it is easier to sell an anti-Israel narrative “but really this is the way into its anti-Western message”.

AfriPrime App link:  FREE to download...

https://www.amazon.com/Africircle-AfriPrime/dp/B0D2M3F2JT