The Lawfare Podcast · The Lawfare Institute

Lawfare Daily: Iran Will Retaliate in the U.S., and We May Not See It in Time

March 19, 2026·44 min·4 clips

The IRGC is the only foreign intelligence agency also designated a terrorist organization, making it a uniquely dangerous target.

The episode opens with host Michael Feinberg introducing Lawfare Public Service Fellow Troy Edwards and his new article arguing that Iran will retaliate in the United States and that current conditions may prevent detection in time. Edwards provides historical context, tracing Iran’s external operations back to the 1979 revolution. Using Matthew Levitt’s interactive map of Iranian operations worldwide, he identifies a bimodal pattern: one spike around 1979-1980, including a successful assassination in Maryland, and another in the five years following the January 2020 drone strike that killed IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani. Edwards narrows his focus to asymmetric, non-conventional retaliation rather than conventional military responses. He walks through three cases. First, the Miriam Thompson case: within days of the Soleimani strike, a Lebanese handler contacted Thompson, a Department of Defense contract linguist, seeking the identities of human assets who helped target Soleimani. She successfully passed classified documents, demonstrating the speed and reach of Iranian intelligence. Second, the Najee Zindashti case from January 2021, where Iran recruited Canadian Hells Angels members to travel to the United States to assassinate an Iranian dissident and their spouse in Maryland. Edwards highlights that the Iranian handler pushed for the killing to be gruesome as a message. This case illustrates Iran’s expanded proxy network beyond traditional Middle Eastern militias into organized crime. Third, the Asif Merchant case, where the IRGC sent Merchant to the U.S. in 2023 to build a network of assets, then tasked him in 2024 to connect with what he believed were New York mafia members -- actually undercover law enforcement -- to plan assassinations of political leaders including then-candidate Trump. Feinberg notes the IRGC’s unique status as the only organization that is simultaneously a foreign intelligence service and a State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization, requiring different investigative and prosecutorial approaches. The conversation shifts to the current state of the national security apparatus. Edwards details that the DOJ’s National Security Division has lost over 50 percent of its counterespionage section personnel, including nearly every supervisor. At one point in 2025, CES had three different heads in three weeks, with one interim leader lacking sufficient clearance to enter the SCIF. The counterterrorism section and civil rights division have experienced similar losses. Feinberg adds the FBI perspective: agents are not fungible, and the loss of experienced personnel means losing cultural knowledge, language skills, source relationships, and the muscle memory of how to run national security cases. He notes that 100 agents from Washington Field Office are still tasked daily to the Safe and Beautiful task force, and hundreds of NSD attorneys were diverted over holidays to redact Epstein documents. Edwards explains the technical complexity of these cases: they typically begin with classified intelligence that prosecutors must navigate through compartmented information systems, requiring clearances, SCIF access, and the experience to develop parallel unclassified evidence for court proceedings. With fewer cleared, experienced personnel, this chain breaks down. Feinberg poses a provocative final question about whether prosecution is even the right strategy against a nation state, versus intelligence operations like double agent recruitment and signals collection. Edwards argues the answer is both, noting that NSD had been developing the capability to support intelligence operations well before any courtroom was in sight. That creative institutional capacity, built over two decades in the post-9/11 landscape, is what has been most damaged. Both speakers emphasize that the remaining personnel are dedicated but stretched thin, operating under a zero-tolerance mission with significantly fewer resources, while Iran’s 40-year-old networks remain intact and its motivation to retaliate has intensified.

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