Tehran’s Homeland Option: Terror Pathways for Iran to Strike in the United States

The twelve-day war may be over, but the threat of Iranian reprisal attacks now looms large, and will for the foreseeable future. European authorities exposed plots in Sweden and Germany even as the war was being waged, and Israeli authorities issued a warning over potential attacks in the United Arab Emirates a couple weeks later. Iranian operatives or their agents could also attempt to carry out attacks inside the United States, leveraging what counterterrorism officials have described as a “homeland option” developed over years. Given the U.S. role in bombing Iranian nuclear sites, it should not be a surprise that U.S. authorities quickly issued a terrorism advisory warning at home. Drawing on past cases of Iranian plots abroad, this article explores the regime’s primary available pathways to conduct or enable acts of terrorism in the United States, from deploying government agents, criminal surrogates, and terrorist proxies, to actively inspiring lone offenders in the homeland...

To read the full article, download the PDF on this page or visit the CTC website.