Just after 07:30 on 6 September last year, Skye Vokins was driving along the dual carriageway south of Wandsworth Roundabout, in London.
Scarcely believing her eyes, she saw a man land on the road beneath the rear axle of a delivery truck stopped in front of her car at a pedestrian crossing.
“I saw him drop to the ground and then do a kind of pencil roll,” Ms Vokins recalls.
The man stood up and walked slowly to the nearest pavement.
“I remember him flicking his fringe back and behaving very casually – as if nothing had happened.”
The man was Daniel Khalife, a former British Army soldier who was supposed to be in prison awaiting trial for spying for Iran.
He had just hitched a ride out of HMP Wandsworth by clinging to the underside of the lorry using a makeshift sling made from a pair of trousers.
Earlier that morning, Khalife had been working in the prison kitchen. When the daily food delivery lorry arrived he walked out of the kitchen and strapped himself under the truck, partially hidden from view by its tail lift mechanism.
As the lorry drove towards the airlock – a secure area between the inner and outer gates of the prison – Khalife heard one of the kitchen staff asking: “Where is that young boy?”
The lorry driver remembers hearing prison security staff say someone was missing, and said two guards checked his vehicle twice using a torch and a mirror, before eventually waving it through.
“I said: ‘Are you sure I can go?’ I thought there should be a lockdown if someone is missing.”
Despite the security alert, Khalife’s uncomfortable ride out of prison continued unhindered.
His escape, and the three-day manhunt for him that followed, were front page news across the country, but at that stage little was known about the 22-year-old’s life – or why he had been in prison.
Still no official report into the escape has ever been published. An independent investigation was commissioned, but despite repeated requests by BBC News the Ministry of Justice has refused to make its findings public.
Now Khalife has been found guilty of spying for Iran. The BBC has been investigating his life and what led him to contact Iranian agents while working for the British Army.
Khalife was born in London in 2001, to a British-Iranian mother and a British-Lebanese father. His parents soon broke up, and he has had little contact with his father.
At secondary school in south-west London, many of Khalife’s friends came from well-off families and he felt ashamed of his relative poverty. He had struggled to focus at school but managed to get 10 GCSEs.
Aged 15, Khalife was caught stealing goods from a shop by using a powerful magnet to remove security tags.
“I have always had a gift for exposing flaws in security,” he told the jury during his recent trial.
He said his mother was very strict and that he “wanted to get away from home” and “to feel what it would be like to be free”.
So in September 2018, at the age of 16, Khalife joined the Army.
A soldier who trained alongside him at the Army Foundation College, in Harrogate, told the BBC Khalife stood out for his cockiness, arrogance and over-confidence.
“He seemed to want the spotlight. He liked to be the centre of attention and be the big show-off character,” he said. “He tested the patience of most of us – especially the corporals.”
The next stage in Khalife’s Army career was training as a signaller in Dorset – but his dreams of joining a Special Forces regiment were shattered when he was told he wouldn’t pass the high security clearance needed because of his Iranian heritage.
Within a few weeks of arriving in Dorset, Khalife contacted an Iranian man on Facebook called Hamed Ghashghavi. Ghashghavi had been sanctioned by the USA for allegedly helping to recruit a former US servicewoman, Monica Witt, as an Iranian spy. Khalife knew that.
Khalife made some amateurish mock-ups of secret documents which he sent to Ghasghavi to win the Iranians’ trust and slowly built a relationship with them. He was handed on to a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) who used the codename “David Smith” in his communications with Khalife.
By August 2019, having been in the Army for less than a year, Khalife was collecting £1,500 in a dog poo bag from a “dead drop” in Mill Hill Park, north London.
What Khalife did next was bizarre. He filled out an information form on the website of the Secret Intelligence Service MI6, best known for its fictional officer James Bond.
He told MI6 he had been paid by Iran after passing on false information and said he wanted to be a “double agent”. He did not reveal he was in the Army – and the intelligence agency ignored him.
Disappointed with their reaction, Khalife carried on his life as a young soldier, but stayed in touch with his Iranian contacts.
A year later, in August 2020, Khalife flew to Istanbul, in Turkey. But what happened on the trip is unclear. There seems to have been an intention – at least from the Iranians – for Khalife to travel to the Iranian capital Tehran, but he barely left his hotel, the Hilton Istanbul Bomonti.
Khalife later told Ghashghavi his IRGC handlers had messed up the logistics, but that he had handed something over.
“I delivered a package to them,” Khalife told Ghashghavi in a voice note, “but they haven’t responded to me for about, I think, eight days.”
Khalife’s contact in Iran, “David Smith”, urged him to be careful, writing on Telegram: “We can work together a lot of years.”
Khalife replied: “Absolutely, I won’t leave the military until you tell me to. 25+years.”
During his time in the Army, including while on a military exercise in the US, Khalife accumulated numerous pictures of secret communications equipment on his iPhone – including computer screens showing IP addresses. It is unclear how many of the photos he actually sent to Iran.
During one conversation with his handlers recorded on his iPad, Khalife said he wanted them to give him espionage training.
“I wanted to have some training from you guys, and I think the best training for me is inside of Iran,” he said. “I am one of the most intelligent people – I won an award. I am better than everybody here – I am more intelligent than everybody here.”
The award Khalife was referring to was for best junior soldier in his small squadron, for which he received a cheap trophy.
The training in Iran never happened.
Later that year, Khalife began compiling a list of names of Special Forces soldiers from regiments, including the Special Air and Special Boat Services. Initially he only had surnames and initials, but he found a flaw in the Army’s holiday-booking system that allowed him to look up and photograph soldiers’ first names too. These pictures were later found on his phone.
Clearly happy with the information they were receiving from Khalife, the Iranians arranged a second dead letter drop in October 2021 – this time £1,000 was left underneath a flower pot beside a mausoleum in a west London cemetery.
Soon afterwards Khalife contacted Britain’s spy agencies again, this time the Security Service, MI5. Telephone calls were recorded on 9 November and 22 November 2021.
Khalife didn’t give his name, but did reveal he was a serving solder. MI5 did not recruit him as a “double agent”, instead Khalife was arrested at his barracks on 6 January 2022.
The UK will never know what the most sensitive material Khalife sent to Iran was. Most of the messages he exchanged with his contacts on the encrypted communication app Telegram were deleted. But he does seem to have sent at least two classified documents – one on drones and another on “Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance”.
Even these Khalife edited to make look more significant, changing the “OFFICIAL” classification to “SECRET”, which on one document he misspelled “SECERT”.
“Only he will know why he was doing this,” Commander Dominic Murphy of counter terrorism command said. “I do believe that there is some of this that fitted into his own fantasies – but he caused a substantial amount of damage in doing so.”
Commander Murphy likened Khalife to the self-aggrandising fictional character Walter Mitty, who daydreamed about extraordinary personal triumphs.
“The problem is he was a Walter Mitty character that was having an impact in the real world.”
After his arrest, Khalife was allowed to remain in the Army, though assigned to less sensitive work. But as detectives slowly built the case against him, he could feel the net closing in.
On 2 January 2023, Khalife absconded. The trial heard he left a fake bomb on his desk – it was unconvincing, but realistic enough for the bomb disposal unit to be called out.
He did not go far. When Khalife was re-arrested on 26 January 2023, he was just seven miles from his barracks. Detectives later discovered he had been living in a van kitted out with a bed, a carpet and a portable toilet. They also found £18,000 in cash in the vehicle, some of it counterfeit.
Khalife was charged under the Terrorism Act with making the list of Special Forces soldiers, and perpetrating a bomb hoax. Later, another charge was added under the Official Secrets Act of collecting information for the enemy – in this case Iran.
Ahead of his trial Khalife was held in the vulnerable prisoners unit at HMP Wandsworth, because of fears the serving soldier might be attacked by other inmates.
Fellow inmate Chris Jones – who was acquitted after spending seven months in Wandsworth – remembers Khalife as an “odd sausage” who told him “he was going be famous”.
Khalife managed to get a job helping in the prison kitchen. There he found the kitchen trousers and metal clips used to secure food lockers from rats, which he re-purposed for his escape.
After he was seen dropping from under the lorry in Wandsworth, Khalife made his way to nearby Richmond, where he stole a baseball cap from Mountain Warehouse to conceal his identity.
At this stage he doesn’t appear to have had any money. But that evening he made a phone call from a pub, and not long after he had £400 in cash. No-one has yet been charged with helping Khalife, but detectives do not think it was the Iranians who gave him the money.
He left a message for his Iranian contact saying, “I wait”, but got no response.
Khalife spent his first night on the run sleeping rough in Richmond Park. The second he probably spent a few miles away in Chiswick. Then, as the net closed in, he spent a third night wandering the streets of west London.
The public were gripped by Khalife’s prison escape story, and phoned in hundreds of sightings – some real, some not.
A woman walking her dog told the BBC Khalife came and sat next to her on a bench in the gardens of Chiswick House. He was “nicely dressed” and “very sweet”, she said, and talked to her about her Maltese poodle.
A jogger twice saw Khalife during his morning run – once lying on a bench, and then again in a cemetery.
“I actually felt a bit sorry for him,” Frank Noon said. “I thought for somebody who is most wanted you don’t look that scary. He was just sitting there minding his own business.”
At 10:35 on Saturday 9 September Khalife was riding a stolen bike on a canal tow path in Northolt, north-west London, when he was arrested by a counter-terrorism detective in plain clothes.
He had been on the run for 75 hours – but never got further than 11 miles from HMP Wandsworth.
Part way through Khalife’s trial he pleaded guilty to escaping from prison.
After 23 hours of deliberation, the jury convicted him of breaching the Official Secrets Act and Terrorism Act. He was acquitted of perpetrating a bomb hoax at his army barracks.
Khalife’s lawyer described him as more Scooby-Doo than 007, and painted a picture of a hapless amateur on a one-man mission to become a double agent – someone who might never have been caught had he not phoned MI5 himself.
Even the hardened counter-terrorism detectives…
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