Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are targeting American diplomats nine days before the midterms, with bounties on Trump and a war on GOP leadership. Even the top Democrat on House Intelligence concedes Tehran is “more anti-Trump.”
Nine days before Americans go to the polls, officials of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have told The New York Times that American diplomats are now “fair game.” The admission came hours after America’s top intelligence official warned that Iranian plots to kill U.S. officials have reached “advanced stages” in the Middle East and beyond. It caps a campaign that runs from murder-for-hire contracts on Trump administration officials to a €50 million bounty bill in Iran’s parliament, and its target is clear: President Donald Trump and the Republicans who took the Islamic Republic to war. On that goal, the ayatollahs have found a chorus of support on the American far left.
The memo
Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton laid out the threat in a one-page unclassified memo to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, first reported by Axios.
“Specifically, through various channels, we have received intelligence that Iran has substantially increased efforts to target U.S. personnel,” the memo states. “The lethal plotting efforts by the Iranians against U.S. citizens have reached advanced stages in both the Middle East and certain other countries.”
Clayton offered to downgrade as much of the intelligence as possible so Rubio could share it with State Department personnel at risk. U.S. officials told The New York Times that American agencies assess the threat to U.S. citizens in the Middle East at its highest level since the war began in February. Analysts have spent the last three weeks examining threats against U.S. officials, including ambassadors, and potential targets include locations in Europe. One official told the Times there is evidence that Tehran has operatives inside the United States who are “not just simply Iranian nationals.”
The European threat has already forced American hands. Earlier this month, the U.S. Air Force withdrew its bombers from RAF Fairford in Britain after receiving information about Iranian plans to attack the base.
On Saturday, Tehran confirmed the American intelligence. Two Iranian officials, one of them a member of the IRGC, told the Times that Iran has expanded its target list to include U.S. diplomats and personnel. They justified the plan as retaliation for the Iranian officials, and several of their relatives, killed by the United States and Israel. Another U.S. official told the Times that Iran’s ambitions overseas exceed its capabilities.
Embassies emptying
Washington is already pulling Americans out. On Wednesday, the State Department ordered non-emergency employees and their families to leave Saudi Arabia, covering the embassy in Riyadh and the consulates in Jeddah and Dhahran. It was the first ordered departure since the war began. On Friday, the department reduced staff at the embassies in Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, and World Israel News reported quiet reductions in Bahrain and Kuwait as well.
In public, the State Department blamed only the Houthis. In private, officials named Iran.
“We decided that due to the threat of Houthi attacks and Iranian terror plots we need to reduce our footprint and keep only essential staff,” one official told Axios.
“The threat of Houthi attacks and of Iranian terror plots targeting U.S. officials are informing our decisions on staffing adjustments for embassies on RO Status in the region,” another told Fox News Digital, referring to embassies operating under “restricted operations.”
State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott called reports of a wider regional shutdown “inaccurate.”
President Trump addressed a rally in Florida on Friday for gubernatorial nominee Byron Donalds.
“We may do another little Epic Fury, or they’ll agree,” Trump said, referring to the U.S. military campaign against Iran. “If they’re smart, they’ll just say, ‘Let’s get down to business.'”
‘No more red lines’
The threats extend beyond diplomats. Two senior Iranian security officials told Reuters that Tehran has drawn up detailed plans to cut the undersea communications cables in the Persian Gulf if the United States and Israel strike again, and to block repairs so the damage lasts.
“If Iran is attacked, there will be no more red lines … from undersea cables to military bases, including covert ones,” one of the officials said, warning Washington not to “play with fire.”
The second official said Gulf states “should hold Washington, not Tehran, responsible for any damage to undersea cables.”
IRGC political deputy Yadollah Javani said Wednesday that Iran could hit seven major internet cables under the Strait of Hormuz. Senior official Mohsen Rezaei warned this month that U.S.-linked data centers and artificial intelligence facilities across the Gulf could become targets.
Iran has already made good on similar threats. Iranian strikes hit two Amazon Web Services facilities in the UAE in March and damaged infrastructure near a third in Bahrain. At the height of the war, the IRGC declared Microsoft, Google, Apple and Nvidia legitimate targets.
“Tehran wants Gulf states and corporate executives to press (US President Donald) Trump over the risks his policies pose to their investment plans,” said Alex Vatanka, director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute.
Eight countries, twenty bases
The threats against diplomats follow eight months in which Iran has made American soldiers a target. A congressionally mandated report by the Pentagon Inspector General found that Iran attacked U.S. bases in eight countries during the war: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan. Iranian missiles and drones have damaged more than 20 American military installations.
The attacks began within hours. On February 28, the first day of the war, the IRGC announced strikes on Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, Al Dhafra Air Base in the UAE, and the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. On the first full day of fighting, an Iranian strike on a tactical operations center in Kuwait killed six American service members. The building had a thin tin roof that offered almost no protection.
A Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery found that Iran struck at least 228 targets across 15 U.S. bases, including hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft and air defense radars, far more than the Pentagon had acknowledged. The Fifth Fleet base in Bahrain was hit repeatedly between February and June.
“They blew the hell out of Bahrain,” Navy official Hung Cao told The Epoch Times in September.
The attacks continued after fighting resumed in July. As recently as September 2, the IRGC announced missile and drone strikes on American positions in Jordan, Bahrain and Iraq. Eighteen U.S. service members have been killed in the war and more than 800 wounded, according to figures reported in September.
A price on Trump’s head
Iran has been hunting Trump and his officials since the U.S. killed Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in January 2020.
In 2022, the Justice Department charged IRGC member Shahram Poursafi with offering $300,000 to have former National Security Adviser John Bolton murdered, timed if possible to the anniversary of Soleimani’s death. Poursafi mentioned a second “job” worth $1 million. The target, according to CNN and Axios, was former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The plots then moved to Trump himself. In March, a Brooklyn jury took two hours to convict Pakistani national Asif Merchant of murder for hire and attempted terrorism. Merchant admitted on the stand that the IRGC sent him to the United States to recruit killers, and he paid $5,000 as an advance on an assassination. Prosecutors said his targets included Trump. Separately, Afghan national Farhad Shakeri told the FBI that an IRGC official ordered him in September 2024 to focus on surveilling and assassinating Trump. His handlers told him Iran had already spent “a significant sum of money” trying to kill Trump.
The bounties grew with each escalation. After the U.S. struck Iran’s nuclear sites in June 2025, a group calling itself the “Blood Covenant” claimed to have raised more than $40 million for Trump’s assassination, promoted by the IRGC-affiliated Fars News Agency. After Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in February, a mass text message went out to Iranian phones promoting an “international campaign to reward the assassination of Trump,” drawing $25 million in pledges. In May, Ebrahim Azizi, chairman of the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, announced a bill offering €50 million to whoever kills Trump, naming Netanyahu and the CENTCOM commander as targets as well. The hacking group Handala, which the Justice Department ties to Iran’s Intelligence Ministry, offered $50 million of its own.
In June, Hassan Rahimpour Azghadi of Iran’s Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution told a rally that Iran should “prepare our supporters in America” to activate cells against U.S. officials.
“When Trump proudly says I assassinated the leader of the Islamic Republic, we must also say we will assassinate you,” he said.
In July, an Iranian state television segment targeted First Lady Melania Trump. In August, state broadcaster IRIB aired a segment titled “Where to kill Barron Trump?!” listing places the president’s 20-year-old son frequents and ending with a $10 million reward. The Secret Service opened an investigation.
The midterm calculation
Tehran’s preference in American politics is on the record. In 2024, U.S. intelligence officials said Iran opposed Trump’s reelection, seeing him as more likely to escalate tensions with the Islamic Republic. That summer, Iranian hackers broke into the Trump campaign, and the Justice Department later charged three IRGC-linked operatives.
“The defendants’ own words make clear that they were attempting to undermine former President Trump’s campaign,” the Justice Department said.
The hackers also sent excerpts of the stolen material to people associated with the Biden campaign. None replied.
Even Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told NPR this week that Iran has “been more anti-Trump.”
In 2026, the calculation includes a date. Former Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki reportedly urged Tehran to hold out until November to defeat “Trumpism.” Trump said in May that Iranian officials “thought they were going to outwait me,” counting on the war’s unpopularity before the midterms.
“I don’t care about the midterms,” Trump said.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told the United Nations last month that Iran would prefer a deal before the election.
The ‘alliance’
The IRGC holds no formal partnership with any American political movement. Its goals and language, however, align closely with those of the Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest socialist organization, with some 95,000 members.
On February 28, the day the war began, DSA issued a statement condemning the strikes as an “unjustifiable assault on the Iranian people.” The statement described the U.S. and Israeli attacks as a continuation of a “hybrid war” waged against Iran “since its popular revolution in 1979,” and dismissed the word “regime” as a favorite of “the imperialist vocabulary.” DSA published the statement in Persian alongside English, Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese, and called on Americans to join mass rallies with the ANSWER Coalition and the National Iranian American Council.
DSA’s platform calls for ending sanctions on countries “whose governments act independently of the United States, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, DSA’s most prominent elected official, called the strikes “a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression.” Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad, herself the target of an IRGC kidnapping and assassination plot, publicly confronted him over the statement.
The overlap has precedent. In July 2024, U.S. intelligence concluded that Iran covertly supported pro-Palestinian protests on American campuses, with operatives posing as students online and providing financial assistance to some protest groups in an effort to stoke division before the election.
Not every opponent of the war echoes Tehran. Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, the first Iranian-American Democrat in Congress, opposed the strikes while calling the Islamic Republic “a brutal, corrupt regime that has murdered and imprisoned its own people for decades.”
Tehran has made its preference clear in bounties, in hacked emails and now in a target list of American diplomats. Nine days before the vote, the regime’s message is reaching American ears, and some of the loudest voices repeating it are American.
