A former British soldier who escaped from Wandsworth prison while awaiting trial for spying for Iran has been jailed for 14 years and three months.
Daniel Khalife, 23, sparked a nationwide manhunt after clinging to the underside of a food delivery lorry to break out of the Category B jail on 6 September last year.
He evaded capture for three days before he was spotted riding a stolen mountain bike along the canal towpath in Northolt, west London – about 14 miles away.
Khalife, who was a lance corporal in the Royal Signals, was being held on remand accused of using his role in the military to pass secret information to Iranian spies.
He was arrested after telling the British security services he wanted to be a “double agent” and claimed he had cultivated the relationship over more than two years in the national interest.
But he was found guilty of a charge under the Official Secrets Act and another under the Terrorism Act at the end of last year at Woolwich Crown Court, having admitted escaping from lawful custody part-way through his trial.
Sentencing live: Ex-soldier was ‘motivated by personal grievance to betray colleagues’
Sentencing Khalife, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb told him: “When you joined the Army as a young man, you had the makings of an exemplary soldier. However, through the repeated violation of your oath of service, you showed yourself to be, instead, a dangerous fool.”
She added: “You embarked on the course of conduct I have described because of a selfish desire to show off, to achieve by unregulated means what you were told will be difficult for you to achieve by conventional promotion.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
“The mere fact that you started on this dangerous and fantastical plan demonstrates your immaturity and lack of wisdom, 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.”
She said he would have been a blackmail risk for his whole career had he not been caught.
The judge said Khalife contacted MI5 and MI6 in his attempts to become a double agent but was ignored. She added: “The greater mischief in your offending is that, having failed to engage any response from the intelligence services of the United Kingdom, you continued betraying your country and exposed others to the possibility of harm.”
There was no reaction from Khalife, who looked down as the judge read out his sentence.
The court heard Khalife, from Kingston, in southwest London, joined the Army aged 16, before contacting an Iranian middle-man through Facebook.
Giving evidence, he said he wanted to prove himself after a senior officer told him he would not be able to work in intelligence because his mother was born in Iran.
Khalife left material in public locations in exchange for cash in an old-fashioned spy tactic known as the “dead drop” or “dead letter box”.
He told his handlers he would stay in the military for 25-plus years for them and twice travelled from his barracks, in Staffordshire, to the Iranian embassy in South Kensington, in London.
The court heard he flew to Istanbul, where he stayed in the Hilton hotel between 4 and 10 August 2020, and “delivered a package” for Iranian agents.
The contact continued while he was deployed to Fort Hood, Texas, where he received training in Falcon, a military communications system and even after he was arrested and released on bail.
Khalife told the jury he was an English “patriot” and “not a terrorist or a traitor,” claiming he “thought he could be James Bond” but had only passed on fake or useless information.
But prosecutors said he “exposed military personnel to serious harm” when he shared sensitive information including a handwritten list of serving soldiers, including some in the SAS and SBS special services.
Khalife’s spying activities will not go down in the “annals of history,” his barrister told the court at his sentencing.
Gul Nawaz Hussain KC reminded the judge how they described his actions as more Scooby Doo than James Bond, adding: “What Daniel Khalife clearly chose to do was not born of malice, was not born of greed, religious fervour or ideological conviction.
“His intentions were neither sinister nor cynical.”
Mr Hussain told the court some of the documents Khalife had forged to pass to the Iranians were “laughably fake”.
Police said he had been planning his “pretty audacious” escape for “quite some time” and the court heard he wrote in his prison diary of a “failed” attempt on 21 August last year.
Khalife, who got a job in the prison kitchen, said he used the trousers inmates wore as uniform, to make a rope, which he attached to the Bidfood lorry on 1 September to test prison security as it made its daily deliveries.
“When I had made the decision to actually leave the prison I was going to do it properly,” he said, describing how he concealed himself, resting his back on the sling as the vehicle was searched.
The driver Balazs Werner said two guards told him someone was missing as they checked the truck with a torch and mirror and he was surprised he was allowed to drive off and that the prison was not in lockdown.
Khalife said he waited for the lorry to stop, dropped to the ground and lay in the prone position until it moved off.
Follow our channel and never miss an update
MI5, the Ministry of Defence and counter-terrorism police launched a nationwide manhunt, fearing Khalife would try to flee to Tehran or get to the Iranian embassy in London.
He used the phone at the Rose of York pub in Richmond before a contact withdrew £400 from a nearby cashpoint, which he used to buy a sleeping bag, a mobile phone and a change of clothes.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
CCTV footage captured his movements as he bought clothes from Marks & Spencer, stole a hat from Mountain Warehouse, drank coffee at McDonald’s and even read about his escape in the newspaper.
The court heard that while he was on the run, Khalife was in contact with his Iranian handlers, who used the code name “David Smith”, and he sent the message: “I wait.”
When he was arrested on the footpath of the Grand Union Canal on 9 September Khalife told police: “My body aches. I f****d myself up under the lorry” and “I don’t know how immigrants do it”.
He told jurors his time on the run showed “what a foolish idea it was to have someone of my skillset in prison”.
