Former soldier Daniel Khalife has been jailed for 14 years after “betraying his country” by spying for Iran and escaping from prison.
Khalife, 23, 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 secret information and told Iranian handlers that he would stay in the military for 25-plus years for them.
However, at his sentencing at Woolwich Crown Court on Monday his own barrister admitted that his “hapless” plot to be a double agent was not likely to be a “lesson for budding spies”.
Sitting in the glass panelled dock, Khalife, wearing a black jumper and grey jogging bottoms, was flanked by three prison officers.
Before he was sentenced he was seen chatting and laughing with his solicitors.
He did not react as the sentence was read out.
The judge, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb, said that the duty of confidentiality that Khalife owed to the British Army would have been “drilled into him”.
She said that the oath he took upon joining the military bound him to comply with the Official Secrets Act and “put the interests of the UK first”.
She said: “And yet you passed information you gathered to agents of an enemy state.”
‘Fantastical plan’
The judge said his “dangerous and fantastical” plan was driven by a “selfish desire to show off”.
She added: “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.”
Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said he had betrayed his country and the full extent of the harm he had caused was “unascertainable”.
The judge said that his escape from prison had not been attempted because he was fearful of other inmates but “because he thought he could”.
She concluded: “You had the makings of an exemplary soldier. However, due to repeated violations of your oath of service you showed yourself instead to be a dangerous fool.”
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 claimed that he did so in the hope that he would be kept in a high-security unit (HSU) at a different prison after his recapture, away from “sex offenders” and “terrorists”.
While on the run, Khalife bought clothes from Marks & Spencer and a coffee from McDonald’s, and strolled along the Thames, before being caught on a stolen bicycle on a canal towpath in Chiswick by police three days later.
A ‘cynical game’
Prosecutors in his trial said that Khalife played “a cynical game”, claiming that he wanted a career as a double agent to help the British intelligence services while gathering “a very large body of restricted and classified material”.
In November, jurors found Khalife guilty of breaching the Official Secrets Act and the Terrorism Act.
He was cleared of carrying out a bomb hoax at Beacon Barracks in Stafford and had already admitted during his trial to escaping from Wandsworth prison.
Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb sentenced Khalife to 6 years for breaching the Official Secrets Act and 6 years for the Terrorism offence. He was also handed a 2 year and 3 month sentence for the prison escape.
Police described Khalife as the “ultimate Walter Mitty character that was having a significant impact on the real world”.
In mitigation, Gul Nawaz Hussain KC said that Khalife’s actions were “not born of malice, greed, religious fervour or ideological conviction”.
He said: “His actions were not systematic, not efficient, nor in many respects highly organised.”
He said that some of the documents Khalife had sent to his Iranian handler were “laughably fake” and that he had “grossly overestimated” his own abilities.
‘Grossly naive’
Mr Hussain said: “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”.
His barrister told the court that his espionage techniques would not go down in the “annals of history”.
He added: “There’s no way that what [he] did is going to wind up being a lesson for budding spies.”
Mr Hussain said Khalife’s escape from prison “exposed horrific and fundamental failings within the prison system which are now being addressed”.
He noted that Khalife had not tried to flee the country, adding: “He had the time, the resource and ability to launch a far more effective escape than he obviously did.”
