US intelligence is investigating Moscow’s support for Tehran, but Rubio plays it down

Before and after his meeting with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Manila, on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov carefully avoided all questions from journalists. First by pretending not to hear (“Speak up!”, he said to those who were already shouting questions at him), then by replying to CNN’s Kit Maher, who asked him whether Russia was helping Iran to target US troops in the Middle East: “Nice haircut”. A few hours earlier, Reuters had published an exclusive report citing a document circulating amongst Western intelligence agencies, according to which Iran’s precision strikes against CIA facilities in the Gulf raise suspicions of Moscow’s active involvement in sharing information and technology with Tehran. 

During the US Secretary of State’s press conference, when asked in the first question whether there had been any progress, Rubio replied that the war cannot be resolved by a half-hour meeting in Manila; he said it had been “a good conversation, a frank conversation”, but declined to go into detail, in order to maintain a degree of discretion regarding the negotiations – a rather unusual practice under the Trump presidency. Someone then asked him about reports of Russian aid to the Iranians to target American troops, and Rubio was evasive, in a sense even contradicting what Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth had reported the day before yesterday, when he stated at a Senate hearing that Russia and China are aiding Iran “at various levels”. The Secretary of State said yesterday that “if the news is in the media, it’s a leak. Let’s assume it’s true: I certainly wouldn’t discuss it with the press”, and in any case “nothing that anyone is doing to help Iran is in any way increasing its ability to target Americans”.

According to Reuters, US intelligence analysts have begun investigating potential Russian assistance in Iranian attacks in the Gulf. At present, there are reportedly no definitive conclusions, but the effectiveness and precision of the attacks, alongside the already known Russian technical support provided to Iran in the past, are cited as possible indications of more substantial support for the operations. Moreover, according to information gathered by Reuters in recent weeks, Iran is said to have struck at least six different CIA stations in the Gulf. One source has indicated that Russia may have helped Tehran improve the accuracy of its Shahed-136 drones, including by supplying the Kometa-M satellite navigation system, described as far more accurate and difficult to jam than the Iranian-made version. According to Iranian documents revealed by the Financial Times in mid-April, the Pasdaran secretly acquired a Chinese spy satellite at the end of 2024, which would have enabled them to locate US military bases across the Middle East.

Even in the early days of the US and Israeli operations against Iran, both the Washington Post and CNN had reported that a CIA base within the US embassy compound in Riyadh had been struck by Iranian drones, and that US intelligence had already begun to suspect that Moscow was assisting Tehran in locating US personnel and aircraft in the Gulf. Nicole Grajewski, a researcher at Sciences Po who has long studied the collaboration between Russia and Iran, told Al Jazeera yesterday that the new Reuters exclusive is plausible, because “compared to Russia, Iran does not have enough military satellites for basic operations”, and therefore “it seems likely that they have struck a deal with the Russians” – including for gathering intelligence following the bombings, which serves to make subsequent attacks more precise. However, according to the researcher, Iran’s Humint capabilities – that is, the gathering of intelligence through interaction with human sources – should not be underestimated.

Last Sunday night, many of the Iranian drones and Zolfaghar ballistic missiles breached the air defences of US bases in five different countries, from Qatar to Kuwait, and from Bahrain to Jordan. According to recent analyses, the motive may stem not only from Moscow but also from Beijing: the missiles are believed to have been upgraded to utilise the encrypted Chinese BeiDou-3 satellite system, making them much harder to neutralise and much more expensive to shoot down. The technical reason is that ‘soft-kill’ defences – that is, those which jam or deceive the missile’s navigation system rather than physically shooting it down – work by transmitting false satellite signals that override the real ones. But this tactic ceases to work if the attacker possesses the current encryption keys for the satellite system in use, which would render the missiles immune to spoofing and force the United States to rely on the much more expensive ‘hard-kill’ interceptors, such as the Patriot and THAAD systems, whose stocks are rapidly running out (giving a strategic advantage not only to Iran, but also to Russia and China).