Daniel Khalife is discovered responsible of spying for Iran: British soldier, 23, who escaped from jail underneath meals van DID promote state secrets and techniques to Iranian brokers

A British soldier who escaped from prison by clinging to the bottom of a food truck has been found guilty of spying for Iran.

Daniel Khalife, 23, dramatically changed his plea midway through his trial to admit escaping HMP Wandsworth and going on the run for three days in September last year.

Now, following a trial at Woolwich Crown Court, he has been further convicted of three charges linked to two years he spent passing sensitive information to agents of Iran.

Jurors rejected Khalife’s story that he had actually been undertaking a one-man ‘double agent’ mission after being told his Iranian heritage would stop him getting his dream role in British intelligence.

Wearing a blue shirt and pale trousers, he calmly replaced his glasses as the verdicts were read out and did not show any emotion.

Khalife’s own lawyer even accepted the ‘hapless’ operation bore more resemblance to Scooby Doo than James Bond.

Following today’s verdict, one of the country’s most senior counter-terrorism officers said Khalife was ‘the ultimate Walter Mitty character’, but one whose crimes had an ‘extremely significant impact in the real world’.

He now faces the prospect of decades behind bars when he is sentenced at a later date by Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb.

Khalife had joined the Army at 16, but was left ‘devastated’ when he was told halfway through his training that his heritage would stop him getting the security clearance required to work in intelligence at ‘the sharp end’ of the military.

He almost immediately set about trying to make contact with agents of Iran – which he eventually managed after sending a message to a sanctioned Iranian on Facebook.

Over the months that followed, he passed bogus secret documents he wrote on his laptop to an agent calling himself ‘David Smith’.

The Iranians were pleased with his work – despite many of the documents being littered with typos – and Khalife collected £1,500 in a dog poo bag from them in a north London park in 2019.

Even though the documents were fake, he was accused in court of ‘endangering’ British-Iranian mother Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe with a fictious Government dossier written while she was still be ‘cynically’ detained by the regime in Tehran.

His willingness to betray his country, however, appeared to escalate when he joined the Royal Corps of Signals in Staffordshire.

Once there, he started giving his handler sensitive information relating to his work – including pictures of military equipment and classified documents.

He tried to email MI6 twice to tell them what he was doing, but was ignored. He continued to operate under the radar until two years later when he rang MI5 twice to volunteer himself as a double agent.

MI5 passed the information to the police who were able to identify Khalife and arrest him by tracing the number he had used to ring the intelligence agency.

During a year spent on bail between January 2022 and January 2023, Khalife claimed he hatched a new plan – inspired by the TV series Homeland on Netflix – to stage a ‘pretend defection’ to Iran.

In the series, he said, a US intelligence agent appears to defect to Iran but is still loyal to her own country and continues passing information back to the West.

Khalife visited the Iranian embassy on two occasions during the course of that year to try to get an Iranian passport, before absconding from his barracks in January 2023.

For around 20 days, Khalife lived in the back of a van with around £20,000 in cash and the apparent intention of leaving the country for a glorious future in Iran.

His plan came unstuck, however, when he was spotted by an Army colleague in a leisure centre in Stone, Staffordshire, and promptly arrested by the police.

Khalife was charged and remanded in custody at HMP Wandsworth where, eight months later, he escaped while awaiting trial – triggering a huge nationwide manhunt.

He was able to slip out of the prison estate by exploiting his role as a kitchen chef to attach a sling made from torn kitchen trousers to the bottom of a food delivery lorry.

On the morning of September 6 last year, the oblivious driver climbed into his vehicle after dropping off a delivery and whisked the stowaway to freedom.

Although spectacularly audacious, his escape below the lorry did not allow much time for enjoyment.

He later said: ‘Oh my god, even 10 miles an hour you…you feel it.

‘You see the floor going faster and faster and faster. And the lorry shakes, and it’s hot and steaming and you’re banging your head.

‘It’s unbelievably dangerous.’

But Khalife insisted he had no intention of remaining on the run for good. His motivation for escaping was entirely linked to his desire for a cushty new cell once recaptured, he claimed.

He told jurors he wanted to be caught so he could be moved to a high-security unit (HSU) away from sex offenders and terrorists in HMP Belmarsh.

Prosecutor Mark Heywood KC suggested during cross-examination that this was nonsense, and Khalife had actually hoped to be spirited away with the help of the Iranians.

This was supported, he said, by a message to his Iranian handler that had been recovered from a cheap smartphone he bought while on the run, which said simply: ‘I wait.’

Mr Heywood told Khalife: ‘You weren’t doing this to get into the high-security unit – if you could have escaped, you would have, and you wanted the Iranians to help you do it.’

Khalife was eventually arrested on September 9 by a plain clothes police officer after he was spotted riding a stolen bicycle northbound out of central London.

After being wrestled to the floor, Khalife was said to have congratulated the officer for catching him.

Giving evidence during the trial, Khalife spent several hours describing in detail how he had escaped, while preposterously still pleading not guilty to escaping lawful custody.

The exasperated prosecutor demanded that the judge put the charge to him again and, when she did, he changed his plea to guilty mid-trial.

Following the verdicts, Commander Dominic Murphy, head of the Met Police’s counter-terror command, said of Khalife: ‘He is, I think, the ultimate Walter Mitty character. The problem is, he’s a Walter Mitty character that was having an extremely significant impact in the real world.

‘The reality is, he provided highly sensitive, protectively marked information to the Iranian state. We know very well the threat the Iranian government poses to the United Kingdom’s national security.

‘Only he will know why he was doing this, I do believe there is some of this that fitted into his own fantasies, but he caused a substantial amount of damage in doing so.’

The police investigation into Khalife’s escape from prison is said to be ‘ongoing’, with a 24-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman arrested earlier this year on suspicion of assisting an offender.

The trial heard that after escaping, Khalife used the landline of a pub in Richmond, west London, to ring several numbers of contacts he had made while in custody.

Later that evening, he was met by an individual who gave him £400 in cash.

The disgraced soldier was convicted by a jury of committing an act prejudicial to the safety or interests of the state and eliciting information about members of the armed forces. He was found not guilty of perpetrating a bomb hoax.