With the Israeli military engaged in a long-range war with Iran, and President Donald Trump weighing whether to commit U.S. forces to a more active role against the terrorist regime in Tehran, the Trump administration is also looking closely for dangers much closer to home.
The FBI under Director Kash Patel is increasingly vigilant against the possibility that sleeper cells — operatives who remain quiet in a target country until ordered into activity — will engage in attacks within the United States, CBS News reported Thursday.
It could be the badly wounded Islamic Republic’s last throw of the dice, an analyst who specializes in Iran told reporters.
“The very fact now that the Iranian regime is volatile, it’s targeted, and it’s highly vulnerable — that’s what actually makes it increasingly dangerous to the West, in that it has nothing to lose it has this about this sense of nihilism, and it affects the rational calculus,” Barak Seener, research fellow with the conservative, U.K.-based Henry Jackson Society, told reporters during a conference call Wednesday, according to the New York Post.
The FBI is focusing on sleeper cells linked to Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terror outfit, according to CBS.
Hezbollah has been a target of Israeli intelligence — including last fall’s spectacular pager bombing operation — but it has sleeper cells in the West, retired Army Lt. Col. Mike Nelson told NewsNation in a report published Friday.
Nelson indicated some Hezbollah agents might have entered the United States through Venezuela — the same country that’s the source of the Tren de Aragua gang that was able to take advantage of the U.S. open border during the Biden administration to set up operations in American cities.
“It seems likely [Hezbollah and Iran] would try to activate sleeper cells in the United States as retaliation if the U.S. joins in the strikes, so it would be prudent for the FBI to be monitoring,” Nelson said, according to NewsNation.
“The Iranian regime wants this to end with them in power, and their primary concern is survival. They do not want the United States to be involved … If they think we are going to get involved, then, one of their options is to attempt asymmetric attacks on the United States. In other words, activating stateside sleeper cells.”
Are there Iranian-friendly sleeper cells in America right now?
The U.S. military has been assisting Israel in defense against Iranian missiles and drones and has a significant presence in the area, but Trump hasn’t announced any decision on further involvement, such as bombing an Iranian nuclear enrichment site thought to be too well fortified for Israel’s military to destroy.
The White House and the FBI did not comment on the CBS report, according to the network.
But there’s a history of Iranian malice at work in the U.S.
In 2011, the Justice Department charged an Iranian-American, along with an Iran-based official in the covert operations unit of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, with plotting to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S.
(The Iranian-American was sentenced to 25 years in prison, according to the New York Post.)
In 2019, a Hezbollah sleeper agent was sentenced to 40 years for spying on U.S. facilities for the terror group, the Post reported at the time.
In 2022, the DOJ announced it had indicted an IRGC operative based in Tehran for trying to orchestrate the assassination of John Bolton, who served as national security advisor in Trump’s first term.
And in 2024, an illegal immigrant at the southern border told Border Patrol medical staff that he had trained with Hezbollah and planned to build and detonate a bomb on U.S. soil.
Iran’s terrorist leadership at this point might think it has nothing to lose, Seener told reporters, according to NewsNation.
“As the conflict in the Middle East escalates and Iran is being targeted, the regime thinks to itself, ‘OK, we are on our last throes, and therefore we will go out with a bang, quite literally,’” Seener said..
“Its calculus will be very different if its survivability is threatened. Intelligence services in the U.S. are working overtime to contend and mitigate risks and threats that can emerge on its domestic soil.
“The more protracted this conflict goes on, the heightened risk for both U.S. forces and assets in the Middle East, but also to U.S. security domestically.”
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