Daniel Khalife was a British soldier who spied for Iran and dreamed of fame

Just after 07:30 on 6 September last year, Skye Vokins was driving along the dual carriageway south of Wandsworth Roundabout, in London.

Scarcely believing her eyes, she saw a man land on the road beneath the rear axle of a delivery truck stopped in front of her car at a pedestrian crossing.

“I saw him drop to the ground and then do a kind of pencil roll,” Ms Vokins recalls.

The man stood up and walked slowly to the nearest pavement.

“I remember him flicking his fringe back and behaving very casually - as if nothing had happened.”

The man was Daniel Khalife, a former British Army soldier who was supposed to be in prison awaiting trial for spying for Iran.

He had just hitched a ride out of HMP Wandsworth by clinging to the underside of the lorry using a makeshift sling made from a pair of trousers.

The next stage in Khalife’s Army career was training as a signaller in Dorset - but his dreams of joining a Special Forces regiment were shattered when he was told he wouldn’t pass the high security clearance needed because of his Iranian heritage.

Within a few weeks of arriving in Dorset, Khalife contacted an Iranian man on Facebook called Hamed Ghashghavi. Ghashghavi had been sanctioned by the USA for allegedly helping to recruit a former US servicewoman, Monica Witt, as an Iranian spy. Khalife knew that.

Khalife made some amateurish mock-ups of secret documents which he sent to Ghasghavi to win the Iranians’ trust and slowly built a relationship with them. He was handed on to a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) who used the codename “David Smith” in his communications with Khalife.

By August 2019, having been in the Army for less than a year, Khalife was collecting £1,500 in a dog poo bag from a “dead drop” in Mill Hill Park, north London.

What Khalife did next was bizarre. He filled out an information form on the website of the Secret Intelligence Service MI6, best known for its fictional officer James Bond.

He told MI6 he had been paid by Iran after passing on false information and said he wanted to be a “double agent”. He did not reveal he was in the Army - and the intelligence agency ignored him.

Disappointed with their reaction, Khalife carried on his life as a young soldier, but stayed in touch with his Iranian contacts.

A year later, in August 2020, Khalife flew to Istanbul, in Turkey. But what happened on the trip is unclear. There seems to have been an intention - at least from the Iranians - for Khalife to travel to the Iranian capital Tehran, but he barely left his hotel, the Hilton Istanbul Bomonti.

Khalife later told Ghashghavi his IRGC handlers had messed up the logistics, but that he had handed something over.

“I delivered a package to them,” Khalife told Ghashghavi in a voice note, “but they haven’t responded to me for about, I think, eight days.”

Khalife's contact in Iran, "David Smith", urged him to be careful, writing on Telegram: “We can work together a lot of years.”

Khalife replied: “Absolutely, I won’t leave the military until you tell me to. 25+years.”

During his time in the Army, including while on a military exercise in the US, Khalife accumulated numerous pictures of secret communications equipment on his iPhone - including computer screens showing IP addresses. It is unclear how many of the photos he actually sent to Iran.

During one conversation with his handlers recorded on his iPad, Khalife said he wanted them to give him espionage training.

“I wanted to have some training from you guys, and I think the best training for me is inside of Iran," he said. “I am one of the most intelligent people - I won an award. I am better than everybody here - I am more intelligent than everybody here.”

The award Khalife was referring to was for best junior soldier in his small squadron, for which he received a cheap trophy.

The training in Iran never happened.

Later that year, Khalife began compiling a list of names of Special Forces soldiers from regiments, including the Special Air and Special Boat Services. Initially he only had surnames and initials, but he found a flaw in the Army’s holiday-booking system that allowed him to look up and photograph soldiers’ first names too. These pictures were later found on his phone.

Clearly happy with the information they were receiving from Khalife, the Iranians arranged a second dead letter drop in October 2021 - this time £1,000 was left underneath a flower pot beside a mausoleum in a west London cemetery.

Soon afterwards Khalife contacted Britain’s spy agencies again, this time the Security Service, MI5. Telephone calls were recorded on 9 November and 22 November 2021.

Khalife didn’t give his name, but did reveal he was a serving solder. MI5 did not recruit him as a “double agent”, instead Khalife was arrested at his barracks on 6 January 2022.

The UK will never know what the most sensitive material Khalife sent to Iran was. Most of the messages he exchanged with his contacts on the encrypted communication app Telegram were deleted. But he does seem to have sent at least two classified documents - one on drones and another on “Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance”.

Even these Khalife edited to make look more significant, changing the “OFFICIAL” classification to “SECRET”, which on one document he misspelled “SECERT”.

“Only he will know why he was doing this,” Commander Dominic Murphy of counter terrorism command said. “I do believe that there is some of this that fitted into his own fantasies - but he caused a substantial amount of damage in doing so.”

Commander Murphy likened Khalife to the self-aggrandising fictional character Walter Mitty, who daydreamed about extraordinary personal triumphs.

“The problem is he was a Walter Mitty character that was having an impact in the real world.”

After his arrest, Khalife was allowed to remain in the Army, though assigned to less sensitive work. But as detectives slowly built the case against him, he could feel the net closing in.

On 2 January 2023, Khalife absconded. The trial heard he left a fake bomb on his desk - it was unconvincing, but realistic enough for the bomb disposal unit to be called out.

He did not go far. When Khalife was re-arrested on 26 January 2023, he was just seven miles from his barracks. Detectives later discovered he had been living in a van kitted out with a bed, a carpet and a portable toilet. They also found £18,000 in cash in the vehicle, some of it counterfeit.

Khalife was charged under the Terrorism Act with making the list of Special Forces soldiers, and perpetrating a bomb hoax. Later, another charge was added under the Official Secrets Act of collecting information for the enemy - in this case Iran.

Ahead of his trial Khalife was held in the vulnerable prisoners unit at HMP Wandsworth, because of fears the serving soldier might be attacked by other inmates.

Fellow inmate Chris Jones - who was acquitted after spending seven months in Wandsworth - remembers Khalife as an “odd sausage” who told him “he was going be famous”.

Khalife managed to get a job helping in the prison kitchen. There he found the kitchen trousers and metal clips used to secure food lockers from rats, which he re-purposed for his escape.

After he was seen dropping from under the lorry in Wandsworth, Khalife made his way to nearby Richmond, where he stole a baseball cap from Mountain Warehouse to conceal his identity.

At this stage he doesn't appear to have had any money. But that evening he made a phone call from a pub, and not long after he had £400 in cash. No-one has yet been charged with helping Khalife, but detectives do not think it was the Iranians who gave him the money.

He left a message for his Iranian contact saying, “I wait”, but got no response.

Khalife spent his first night on the run sleeping rough in Richmond Park. The second he probably spent a few miles away in Chiswick. Then, as the net closed in, he spent a third night wandering the streets of west London.