Daniel Khalife: Jailbreak soldier turned spy who betrayed UK is jailed for 14 years

A former British soldier, who spied for Iran during his time in the army, has been jailed for 14 years and three months.

Daniel Khalife, 23, obtained nationwide notoriety when he mounted an audacious escape from a south London prison, where he was being held in the run up to his trial.

Khalife was serving in the British Army when he “exposed military personnel to serious harm” by collecting sensitive information and passing it on to a handler for the Iranian state.

He was paid in cash for the secret information, which included the names of some key personnel serving in the UK’s special forces.

Prosecutors said Khalife played “a cynical game” by claiming he wanted to act as a double agent to help British intelligence services. In reality, he gathered “a very large body of restricted and classified material”, some of which he passed on to his Iranian handler.

Among some of the communications recovered by investigators, were messages in which the young soldier told his contacts he would stay in the military as long as they wanted, more than 25 years, if required.

His defence team described him as “more akin to Scooby Doo, than 007” – the image of a “hapless” character, who meant no serious harm.

However, Counter Terrorism Police described Khalife as the “ultimate Walter Mitty character that was having a significant impact on the real world”.

After his arrest, he told police he had wanted to offer himself to UK security agencies all along, having emailed MI6 as early as 2019.

He joined the Army in 2018, two weeks before his 17th birthday, and served with the Royal Corps of Signals.

His efforts to join special forces had been turned down because of his part Iranian heritage. His mother was British-Iranian, his father was a British and Lebanese dual national.

Within months of joining the military, Khalife was making efforts to reach out to the Iranian state. He contacted Iranian national Hamed Ghashghavi on Facebook, a man who had been sanctioned by the Americans for previous attempts to recruit a US servicewoman as a spy for the Middle East state.

After slowly building up a relationship, he was handed to a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). By August 2019, Khalife was sent £1,500 in a money drop at a park in north London.

In 2021, Khalife secretly gathered the names of serving soldiers, including those in the special forces.

He took a photo of a handwritten list of 15 of them, having been sent an internal spreadsheet of promotions in June 2021.

Prosecutors believe he sent the list to Iran before deleting any evidence.

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At his sentencing hearing, his defence counsel Gul Nawaz Hussain KC said: “What Daniel Khalife clearly chose to do was not born of malice, was not born of greed, religious fervour or ideological conviction.

“His intentions were neither sinister nor cynical.”

Hussain said it was “born out of professional disappointment”.

Khalife claimed he wanted to prove his bosses wrong after being told his Iranian heritage could stop him working in military intelligence.

He told jurors that he came up with his elaborate double agent plot after watching the Television spy thriller Homeland.

He first contacted the Secret Intelligence Service MI6 in 2019. A year later, he flew out to Istanbul in Turkey to meet his handlers.

It is unclear what Khalife delivered to the Iranians during that trip.

He had previously expressed a desire to be properly trained in espionage by his handlers, but that does not appear to have taken place.

During his time on deployment with the army in the United States, the young soldier accumulated numerous pictures of sensitive communications equipment, including IP addresses.

It is not not known how many photographs were sent to the Iranians, but the trial heard how during his US deployment, his handlers were in weekly communication with him.

In November 2021, he made an anonymous call to the MI5 public reporting line. He confessed to having been in contact with Iran for more than two years.

The young servicemen did not give his name, but told MI5 he was a serving solider. He was arrested at his barracks a couple of months later.

In September 2023, while on remand and awaiting trial, Khalife escaped from Wandsworth prison in south-west London.

While working in the prison kitchens, he cut up a pair of prison issue trousers and used them as a sling to cling to the underside of a food delivery truck.

The audacious escape grabbed nationwide attention, as a huge manhunt was launched to find the escaped terror suspect.

Over three days, he managed to evade authorities. He bought food and clothing after obtaining hundreds of pounds, and a mobile phone.

After numerous sightings, he was eventually caught on a canal towpath in north west London by a counter terrorism detective, who pushed him off the stolen bike he was riding.

In November, jurors at Woolwich Crown Court found that Khalife had breached the Official Secrets Act and the Terrorism Act.

He was cleared of a charge of preparing a bomb hoax at his former barracks in Staffordshire. Khalife pleaded guilty to escaping from prison.