Ex-British soldier Daniel Khalife sentenced to 14 years after spying for Iran

“Dangerous fool” Daniel Khalife has been sentenced to 14 years and three months after spying for Iran and escaping from prison.

Passing sentence at Woolwich Crown Court on Monday, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said he had been motivated by “a selfish desire to show off”.

The 23-year-old, originally from Kingston, south-west London, was serving in the British Army when he “exposed military personnel to serious harm” by collecting sensitive information and passing it to agents of the Middle Eastern country.

He was paid in cash for the material, some of which he forged, and told handlers he would stay in the military for 25-plus years for them.

Details he gathered included a handwritten list of names of personnel including some who served in the Special Air Service and Special Boat Service.

In September 2023, Khalife escaped from category B prison HMP Wandsworth, in south-west London, by clinging to the underside of a food delivery truck.

He was caught on a canal towpath by a plainclothes detective days later.

The policing operation to find him cost £250,000, mostly from overtime payments, the court heard.

Khalife was sentenced to six years for committing an act prejudicial to the safety or interests of the state, and another six years – consisting of five years in prison and one on licence – for eliciting information about members of the armed forces.

Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb passed a sentence of two years and three months for the jailbreak.

She told Khalife: “When you joined the Army as a young man, you had the makings of an exemplary soldier.

“However, through the repeated violation of your oath of service, you showed yourself to be, instead, a dangerous fool.”

In addition to the prison sentences, Khalife was ordered to pay £10,000 towards the costs of the prosecution case, which were put at £134,000.

Khalife had been told by a senior officer that he would never be able to fulfil his dream of working for military intelligence because of his Iranian heritage.

“You embarked on the course of conduct I have described because of a selfish desire to show off, to achieve by unregulated means what you were told will be difficult for you to achieve by conventional promotion,” she said.

“The mere fact that you started on this dangerous and fantastical plan demonstrates your immaturity and lack of wisdom, that you thought it was appropriate to insert yourself – an unauthorised, unqualified and uninformed junior soldier into communication with an enemy state is perhaps the clearest indication of the degree of folly in your failure to understand at the most obvious level the risk you posed.”

She told him he would have been a blackmail risk for his whole career had he not been caught.

He contacted MI6 and MI5 in his attempts to become a double agent, but was ignored.

“The greater mischief in your offending is that, having failed to engage any response from the intelligence services of the United Kingdom, you continued betraying your country and exposed others to the possibility of harm,” the judge said.

Khalife has been diagnosed with both antisocial and narcissistic personality disorder, but Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said this did not offer any mitigation.

She said: “You are an attention seeker, and you enjoyed the notoriety you attracted following your escape from prison.”

The judge told the court she did not believe Khalife had been honest about the full extent of the information he had passed to Iran, keeping only an incomplete record in case he was caught.

Jurors, some of whom were in court to watch the sentencing hearing, found Khalife had breached the Official Secrets and Terrorism Acts in November last year.

He was cleared of carrying out a bomb hoax and had already admitted escaping from Wandsworth prison part way through the trial.

Prosecutors told his trial he played “a cynical game”, claiming he wanted a career as a double agent to help the British Intelligence Services, when in fact he gathered “a very large body of restricted and classified material”.

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

In 2021, he 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.

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.

Khalife told his trial he wanted to prove bosses wrong after being told his Iranian heritage could stop him working in military intelligence, and came up with his elaborate double agent plot after watching the TV spy thriller Homeland.

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

He offered to help the British security services, and said he wanted to return to his normal life.

If Khalife had not contacted MI5 to tell them about his contact with Iran, neither they nor the police would ever have known, his barrister told the court.

Defending, Gul Nawaz Hussain KC said Khalife’s actions were more “Scooby Doo” than “007”.

He told the judge: “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.”

Some of the documents he had forged to pass to the Iranians were “laughably fake”, Mr Hussain told the court.

“We say it was offending that was born of professional disappointment, a desire to demonstrate genuine utility and that led him to a grossly naive, rose-tinted view of patriotism,” Mr Hussain said.

Mr Hussain said Khalife’s gathering of a list of soldiers’ names to pass to Iran had led to positive changes being made to internal Army systems that mean servicemen and women are now better protected.

His escape from prison had also highlighted failings within the prison system that are now being addressed, the court was told.

Five days before his successful escape, he attached a sling to the underside of a lorry made from kitchen trousers and carabiners.

While on the run, Khalife bought clothes from Marks & Spencer and a coffee from McDonald’s, and walked beside the River Thames.

He made one last attempt to contact the Iranians before he was caught, sending a Telegram message which said simply: “I wait.”

Concern that he would try a similar stunt during his trial was so high that during his evidence, he was taken to and from the witness box in handcuffs, and plain-clothes officers sat in the public gallery.

Khalife told his trial he escaped in the hope he would be kept in a segregated high-security unit at HMP Belmarsh, away from “sex offenders” and “terrorists” after his recapture.