Iran embassy staff dash for exit after a day not seen in Australia since World War II

Staff from the Iranian embassy bundled into a car as soon as darkness set in on Tuesday night. The white flash of cameras heralded their exit through the driveway gates. Three men in the back seat sought to block their faces with jackets, turning their heads away from the windows. Another man stood at the building, backlit by a doorway, and waved goodbye.

It was hours after the Iranian ambassador to Australia, Ahmad Sadeghi, had stepped out to visit the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade headquarters in Canberra at the request of the secretary, Jan Adams. He returned with a letter declaring him a persona non grata – an unwelcome person, under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations – and an order that he and three other Iranian officials leave the country within seven days.

It was the first time Australia had expelled a foreign ambassador since World War II.

A shocking discovery had prompted the historic dismissal: that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was responsible for antisemitic attacks on Australian soil that had torn at the country’s social fabric and put the Albanese government under immense pressure.

“ASIO has gathered enough credible intelligence to reach a deeply disturbing conclusion,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed at Parliament House on Tuesday, standing next to ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess and Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw.

“The Iranian government directed at least two of these attacks. Iran has sought to disguise its involvement, but ASIO assesses it was behind the attacks on the Lewis’ Continental Kitchen in Sydney on October 20 last year, and the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne.

“ASIO assesses it’s likely Iran directed further attacks as well.”

The first alarm over foreign interference was sounded on January 21.

A spate of antisemitic vandalism in Sydney and Melbourne had dominated the summer news cycle. Australia’s Jewish community was frightened. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was furious. Australia was being singled out for scathing criticism, and its police and security agencies had no answers.

The December arson attack on the synagogue, in particular, fuelled politically charged accusations from the Coalition, local pro-Israel groups and Netanyahu, that the Albanese government had failed to do enough to tackle the rise in antisemitism.

If the Iranian regime had hoped to terrorise Australia’s Jewish community, the seventh-largest in the world outside Israel, it achieved its goal. If it wanted to sow division between Israel and Australia, two historically friendly nations, it did that too.

“Unfortunately, it is impossible to separate this reprehensible act from the extreme anti-Israeli position of the Labor government in Australia,” Netanyahu said in a post on X in December that marked a period of fast-deteriorating relations.

Albanese called a national cabinet meeting of state and territory leaders to tackle antisemitism on January 21.

That same day, Kershaw issued a rare and striking statement. The AFP commissioner was also being pressured to lay charges against offenders, particularly those behind the synagogue attack.

Without going into specifics, Kershaw raised the possibility that malicious foreign actors were paying criminals in Australia to target synagogues and houses in Jewish suburbs.

“We are looking at if – or how – they have been paid, for example in cryptocurrency, which can take longer to identify,” he said in the statement.

“We are looking into whether any young people are involved in carrying out some of these crimes, and if they have been radicalised online and encouraged to commit antisemitic acts.

“Regardless, it all points to the same motivation: demonising and intimidating the Jewish community.”

At the time, the Coalition called for the government to substantiate such serious claims of foreign interference. It questioned why police would float such a prospect without evidence.

“If a foreign government is responsible, this would amount to acts of state-sponsored terror and one of the most serious national security crises we have faced in peacetime,” said then-opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson.

The AFP’s argument, made in private, was that they were looking for the puppet masters, not the petty criminals at the end of their strings. They said they had strands of intelligence to suggest foreign players were involved, but not enough to make an allegation.

That would take seven more months.

“It’s taken us this long to have the evidence to actually know the Iranians directed these attacks,” Burgess said in the prime minister’s courtyard on Tuesday.

“Our painstaking investigation uncovered and unpicked the links between the alleged crimes and the commanders in Iran’s [Islamic] Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC. The IRGC used a complex web of proxies to hide its involvement … The IRGC are directing, through a series of cut-outs, people in Australia to undertake the crimes.”

Nos Hosseini, a spokeswoman for the Iranian Women’s Association in Australia, described the IRGC as a private army to protect Iran’s supreme leader.

“Its job is to ensure the survival of the regime, not to protect the people,” she said. “It tortures dissidents, censors the internet, runs prisons, engages in proxy warfare.”

She was not surprised by the revelations. Groups representing the Iranian diaspora have been calling for the guard to be designated a terror organisation for years.

“This is what we’ve been warning successive governments about,” Hosseini said. “The IRGC is a well-resourced, well-funded and well-oiled machine that exists to sow discord and spread instability and chaos beyond Iran’s borders.”

By combining security intelligence with the AFP’s investigations, and liaising with foreign powers, ASIO pieced together a clearer picture of why and how Australian suburbs had been targeted in a series of antisemitic attacks.

In Sydney, a former Nomads bikie gang chapter president, Sayed Moosawi, has been charged over the arson attack on Lewis’ Continental Kitchen in Bondi. He has been released on bail. Court documents show he calls himself “James Bond”.

Those related to the Melbourne synagogue firebombing include three men, aged 20, 20 and 21. The latest arrest was made just five days ago, raising the prospect that authorities gained key evidence recently. Melbourne tobacco wars kingpin Kazem Hamad is now suspected by ASIO of conspiring with foreign spies to carry out the Melbourne attack.

Burgess was still tight-lipped about the perpetrators on Tuesday, saying investigations were ongoing. But he disclosed that investigators had identified what he called a “layer cake” of operators.

At the top was the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. At the bottom, the alleged perpetrators carrying out crimes in Australian suburbs. In between were so-called “cut-outs”: overseas facilitators and co-ordinators, ultimately directed by the revolutionary guard, who eventually tasked Australians with antisemitic acts.

“They tap into a number of people, agents of IRGC, and people that they know in the criminal world, and work through there. So it’s a series of chains,” Burgess said.

“There’s an organised crime element, offshore, in this. But that’s not to suggest organised crime are doing it. They’re just using cut-outs, including people who are criminal and members of organised crime gangs to do their bidding or direct their bidding.”

Iran has repeatedly been linked to terror plots and violent incidents in foreign countries. A US State Department note from 2021 states that Albania, Belgium and the Netherlands had all arrested or expelled Iranian diplomats over terror plots in their countries. Denmark recalled its ambassador from Tehran in 2018 after learning of an Iran-backed plot to kill an Iranian dissident in Denmark.

Nor is it the first time Iran has been accused of recruiting criminal gangs overseas. Last year, US authorities charged three men with plotting to murder an Iranian defector in Maryland with the help of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang.

Burgess acknowledged the revolutionary guard had form in “going after dissidents or anything they consider a threat to the regime in other countries”.

“But this is particularly unique to Australia, having a crack at our social cohesion,” he said. Some of the alleged perpetrators took part because they were paid, but it was not a money-making scheme.

“This tore at our social fabric. It was aimed at messing with social cohesion in Australia … from threatening and intimidating behaviours to direct targeting of people, businesses and places of worship. Iran started the first of those, but not all of those are directed by Iran, in our view.”

Burgess delivered this assessment to the federal government on Monday. It set off an urgent chain of events.

The National Security Committee of Cabinet – Albanese, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and seven other ministers – met for about an hour on Monday afternoon. They discussed Burgess’ advice and decided to expel the Iranian ambassador, as well as to list the revolutionary guard as a terrorist group.

Timing was critical. The government was keenly aware that Australian diplomats in Tehran would be at risk if Iran’s ambassador in Canberra was expelled while they were still in the country. So six Australian diplomats and two of their dependents flew out of Tehran that night.

Then on Tuesday, Ahmad Sadeghi, Iran’s top diplomat in Canberra, was called into the DFAT Secretary’s office in the Canberra suburb of Barton.

Australian officials had rebuked Sadeghi last August after he used social media to call Israel a “Zionist plague” and described Hamas’ commitment to wipe out Israel as a “heavenly and divine promise”. He was called in again in October, for labelling Hezbollah’s assassinated leader a “blessed martyr” and lashing out at what he labelled “the vile entity of the Zionist regime”.

The opposition had called for his expulsion over the past 12 months, and Albanese condemned Sadeghi’s comments. But the government defended his continued presence in Australia because it kept communication channels with Iran open.

That changed this week. “There is no doubt that these extraordinary and dangerous acts of aggression orchestrated by a foreign nation on Australian soil have crossed a line,” Wong said.

“And that’s why we have declared Iran’s ambassador to Australia persona non grata, as well as three other Iranian officials, and they will have seven days to leave the country. This is the first time in the postwar period that Australia has expelled an ambassador. And we have made this decision because Iran’s actions are completely unacceptable.”

Albanese made the revelations public just half an hour after the ambassador received his letter. He informed Opposition Leader Sussan Ley around the same time. “We spoke about it in a bipartisan manner, in question time,” Ley told radio station 3AW.

“It is one of the most egregious acts of foreign interference against our nation, well, since the darkest days of the Cold War.”

ASIO has made clear that it is likely Iran was behind more antisemitic attacks. Tuesday’s revelations were shocking enough, but the full story has yet to be told.

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