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Former soldier Daniel Khalife has been called a “dangerous fool” by a judge jailing him for more than 14 years for escaping from prison and spying for Iran.
In a jailbreak that drew intense nationwide attention and sparked a major manhunt, Khalife, 23, escaped from category B prison HMP Wandsworth in south-west London by clinging to the underside of a food delivery truck in September 2023. He was caught on a canal towpath by a plainclothes detective days later.
Described by police as the “ultimate Walter Mitty character that was having an extremely significant impact in the real world”, the 23-year-old was also 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 handlers he would stay in the military for 25-plus years for them.
Prosecutors in his trial said Khalife, originally from Kingston, south-west London, 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”. However, his defence lawyer Gul Nawaz Hussain KC called the double agent plot “hapless” and “sometimes bordering on the slapstick”, more Scooby-Doo than James Bond or Homeland.
In November, jurors at Woolwich Crown Court found that Khalife had breached the Official Secrets Act and the Terrorism Act. He was cleared of carrying out a bomb hoax and had already admitted during his trial to fleeing Wandsworth prison. He was sentenced to 14 years and three months imprisonment at the same court on Monday.
Passing sentence, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb told Khalife: “When you joined the army as a young man, you had the makings of an exemplary soldier. However, through repeated violations of your oath of service, you showed yourself to be, instead, a dangerous fool.”
She described his “fantastical” plans as illustrative of his “immaturity” and showing such a “degree of folly at your failure to understand at an obvious level the risk you posed”.
Concluding he had been motivated by “a selfish desire to show off”, the judge referenced a doctor’s findings when she said: “You are an attention-seeker and you enjoyed the notoriety attracted to you after your escape… You didn’t want to be just a number with no one looking at you.”
Khalife’s own barrister told the sentencing hearing that some of the documents he had forged to pass to the Iranians were “laughably fake” and that his crimes demonstrated “a sense of unswerving self-belief and gross overestimation of ability”.
Mr Hussain said the 23-year-old’s spying activities will not go down in the “annals of history”, adding: “There’s no way that what Mr Khalife did is going to wind up being a lesson for budding spies.”
He also told Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb that Khalife has been made “uncomfortable” by the notoriety generated by his case and that he “hopes the interest in his case will diminish”.
The hearing heard Khalife stated: “I’m not going to let what happened define me.”
The defendant joined the Army in 2018, two weeks before his 17th birthday, and served with the Royal Corps of Signals.
In 2021, Khalife 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 believed 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 jurors 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 having been 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.
Prosecutors said Khalife prepared a bomb hoax at his Staffordshire barracks in January 2023, but the trial heard how a soldier who arrived in the room pulled wires out of the device to prove it was not real. A bomb disposal unit was called after police attended and looked at the device several days later.
More follows on this breaking news story…
