Iranian sleeper agents have infiltrated the US. Now ex-FBI boss warns of imminent terror attacks on American soil … and exactly how they will strike
A former FBI boss has issued a stark warning over fears Iran could activate sleeper agents in the US to carry out terror attacks on American soil as vengeance for Saturday’s bombardment.
Chris Swecker, an assistant FBI director in the mid-2000s, said Hezbollah and other Iran-linked groups may feel they have nothing left to lose after Trump unleashed Operation Epic Fury this weekend.
Swecker told the Daily Mail: ‘We’ve got a cornered animal here, and if ever we’re going to see attacks on the United States, this would be the catalyst for that.’
‘It’s a tinder box right now,’ Swecker said. ‘You’ve got the leadership of Iran in a state of desperation.’
He added that while Iran-linked sleeper cells may previously have hesitated out of fear of US retaliation, that might no longer be the case after the joint US and Israeli strikes this weekend.
He urged the FBI and the intelligence community to ‘be on their toes’ and ‘assume there are plans ongoing’ for a terror attack in the US.
Former FBI assistant director Chris Swecker told the Daily Mail that Iran-linked sleeper cells could carry out terror attacks on American soil
Swecker said Iranian leadership was in a ‘state of desperation’ after US-Israeli airstrikes on Saturday
An agency official said that FBI counterterrorism and counterintelligence teams are on elevated alert across the country. The FBI did not confirm how long the terror alert will remain in effect.
Swecker told the Daily Mail there was ‘no question’ that sleeper cells linked to Iran exist in the US.
‘We know that they’re mainly here to raise funds through different frauds,’ he said. ‘Food stamp frauds, SNAP fraud. Just various crimes.’
Swecker, who led the FBI’s Charlotte, North Carolina, office from 1999 to 2004, said he encountered these cells during his time at the bureau.
‘We saw them disseminating propaganda, raising funds, training out into remote areas with shoulder weapons and relying on their training as former militia,’ Swecker said.
Swecker stressed that he does not have current intelligence now he has retired, but based on his experience ‘sleeper cells are lying in wait for an order.’
‘These people would be awakened to act and morph from financing cells, for example, into committing violence,’ Swecker said.
He said possible terror attacks on American soil are unlikely to be highly sophisticated.
The US and Israel struck Iran in the morning hours of Saturday, which Swecker said could remove the ‘impediment’ for sleeper cells to carry out attacks on American soil
Smoke rises following an explosion in Tehran, Iran, after the US-Israeli joint airstrikes
US President Donald Trump announced the airstrikes on Iran around 2.30am ET Saturday and promised to ‘raze their missile industry to the ground’
‘I’m sure they have been paying attention to what has happened in this country over the last five or six years with decidedly low-tech attacks by lone wolves,’ Swecker told the Daily Mail.
Swecker cautioned that an organized operation leading to terror attacks could take place.
‘I just think you have to plan for that,’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘They are a militia. They are organized. They are state-sponsored.
‘If ever we’re gonna see something happen, it would be at a time like this where we see conflict over and direct attacks against Iran,’ Swecker said.
He compared the possibility of Iran-linked sleeper cells striking inside the US to the September 11 terrorist attacks.
‘9/11 was a failure of imagination, right?’ Swecker told the Daily Mail. ‘It was a failure to foresee risks that were present. In this case, we can’t afford to do that again.’
Swecker said ‘the number of Hezbollah sympathizers or card-carrying members’ had grown exponentially under Joe Biden’s presidency, with pro-Iran militants believed to have entered the US during the ‘open borders’ era.
But he also called for the Trump administration to be disciplined in its pursuit of the sleeper cells.
‘I think under Kash Patel, he heads them towards the shiny object like immigration, when they should be laser focused on this mission right here,’ Swecker said.
The Palm Jumeirah Fairmont Hotel in Dubai was hit by an Iranian suicide drone. Four people were injured, per Dubai’s media office
Iran retaliated to the airstrikes by launching a missile attack targeting the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Manama, Bahrain
Swecker also warned of lone actors connected to Hezbollah and other Iran-linked groups, which he said were typically ‘the hardest to root out.’
Law enforcement authorities have previously derailed some of those plans.
‘Some have gotten careless over the years and sort of spouted off on social media sites,’ Swecker told the Daily Mail. ‘The FBI has run operations, infiltrated the sites [and] arrested those people.’
US President Donald Trump announced the joint attack on Iran in an eight-minute video posted Saturday on Truth Social around 2.30am ET.
Trump called the strikes a ‘massive and ongoing operation’ to prevent the Middle Eastern country from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Iran retaliated by launching missiles targeting Israel, as well as US military bases and assets in the UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait and Qatar.
Against this backdrop, the Daily Mail takes a look at the groups Tehran has used to project power around the world.
The Quds Force
Size: 20,000 (estimated)
Location: Iran, operates globally
Leader: In flux
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps armed personnel wear masks and participate in a military rally in downtown Tehran in January
At the heart of Tehran’s global war machine is the Quds Force, the elite wing of the IRGC, tasked with foreign operations. It is named after the Arabic word for Jerusalem and is likened to a spy agency with commando units.
With decades of experience funding, training and arming foreign fighters, the Quds Force is Tehran’s go-to instrument for asymmetric warfare. Analysts say that it is likely coordinating Iran’s response, selecting targets across the region and beyond.
The force built up a network of Arab allies known as the Axis of Resistance, establishing Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1982 and supporting the Palestinian militant Islamist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Quds Force leaders have in recent years plotted to bomb Israeli and Saudi embassies in Washington and been involved in assassination plots against Republican hawks John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, along with a Saudi ambassador to the US.
Intelligence chiefs fear that Quds Force already has ‘sleeper’ cells operating in the US homeland. Some 729 Iranian nationals were reportedly allowed into the US between 2021 and 2024 under the Biden administration’s relaxed border rules.
Still, the group has suffered setbacks. Its leader, brigadier general Esmail Qaani, was reportedly killed in an Israeli strike on June 13. His infamous predecessor, Qassem Soleimani, died in a 2020 US drone strike.
Hamas
Size: 20,000 (estimated)
Location: Palestinian territories
Leader: In flux
Hamas fighters put on a show of force in January 2025, but it’s not clear whether they can stage a serious attack on Israel today
The Palestinian group Hamas was quick to condemn US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, branding Washington and its regional ally Israel ‘fully responsible for the grave repercussions of this aggression’.
Yet while expressing ‘solidarity’ with Tehran in its official response, Hamas steered clear of that fight, saying it had ‘complete confidence in Iran’s ability to defend its sovereignty and the interests of its people’.
Hamas is not the force it was before the coordinated October 7, 2023, raids on southern Israel that prompted a ferocious reciprocal military onslaught on the militants and innocent Gaza residents alike.
Virtually all of Hamas’s senior leaders have been killed, and it remains unclear whether the group can still mount major attacks on Israel.
Israel says that it has killed some 20,000 militants in Gaza. US officials in January said Hamas had recruited as many as 15,000 fighters since the war began, though many were young and untrained.
Hamas is a Sunni militant group focused on a land dispute with Israel. It only ever had moderate ties with Shiite Iran. Hamas leaders expressed ‘disappointment’ at the lackluster support they received from Axis allies against Israel.
Hezbollah
Size: 50,000 (estimated)
Location: Southern Lebanon
Leader: Naim Qassem
Hezbollah fighters seen in 2002. The group has been torn apart by recent Israeli attacks
Hezbollah was once seen as the ‘crown jewel’ of Iran’s surrogates and the most deadly member of the ‘ring of fire’ to attack Israel in the event of war between the Jewish state and Iran.
But much has changed since Hamas’s October 2023 raids and Israel’s military response in Gaza and then against Hezbollah in Lebanon, involving everything from airstrikes to exploding pagers.
The group is understood to be well short of the 100,000 fighters it boasted in 2021. It bears the brunt of regular Israeli strikes and commando raids and has not launched a single attack on Israel since the recent flare-up began.
A spokesperson for Hezbollah told Newsweek that the group did not have immediate plans to retaliate against Israel and the US over their strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, saying Iran was a ‘strong country capable of defending itself’.
‘Logic dictates that it can confront America and Israel.’
Still, US intelligence agencies remain alarmed at Hezbollah’s worldwide footprint of terrorist cells, including militants who could have crossed America’s southern border to launch attacks on American soil.
The Houthis
Size: 10,000 to 30,000
Location: Yemen
Leader: Abdul-Malik Al Houthi
Yemen’s Houthi group followers are a wild card that could be the most likely to join Iran’s fight
The rebel Houthi armed movement in Yemen is the Tehran-aligned group perhaps best positioned to forcefully respond to the US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran.
Since the weekend attacks, the Houthis have vowed to support Iran in its fight and called for Muslim states to join the ‘Jihad and resistance option as one front against the Zionist-American arrogance’.
Yet while the Houthis have a track record of long-range drone strikes on Israel and missile attacks on shipping containers transiting the nearby Red Sea, these do not appear to have resumed amid the current escalation.
The Houthis are still technically bound by a ceasefire they struck with the US in May – Washington stopped its military campaign in exchange for the group halting attacks on US interests in the region.
The Houthis, too, have had their missile and other military assets in Yemen pounded by Israeli warplanes for months, along with US and British strikes aimed at reducing their threat to shipping in the region.
While the Houthis have received arms and training from Iran over the years, they follow a different branch of Islam, are geographically isolated and chiefly focused on their country’s 11-year civil war.
Syria and Iraq
Sizes: Various groups from 3,000 to 60,000
Location: Syria and Iraq
Leader: Various
Kata’ib Hezbollah members mourn the loss of one of their commanders in an Israeli antistrike in September 2024
In terms of raw manpower, Iran’s proxy strength is perhaps greatest across Iraq and, to a lesser extent, in Syria. Tehran has strong ties to nearly a dozen armed groups there, some with as many as 60,000 fighters.
Among the most formidable are Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iraqi Shia Islamist paramilitary group founded in 2003 to fight off US-led forces there, and the Badr Organization, which was formed in the years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Kata’ib Hezbollah has a record of attacking US bases at the behest of Iran. Its commander Abu Ali al-Askari has threatened to target US bases over its attack on Iran, telling CNN that they ‘will become akin to duck-hunting grounds’.
Still, these Shiite groups are also focused chiefly on local concerns. Iran in the past wielded great influence in Syria, thanks to President Bashar Al Assad’s growing reliance on Tehran to prop up his embattled government.
Tehran’s influence in Syria collapsed after Assad’s regime fell in December and Sunni rebels seized control of the country. Crucially, this denied Iran a land route to supply missiles to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
