On Monday, a news agency tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps published an AI-generated video that walked its audience through how and where to kill the first lady of the United States. It singled out her taste in fashion as the vulnerability to exploit, sketched a scenario for poisoning her, and traced her movements through Manhattan; it closed with a line addressed to her 20-year-old son: “Barron, wait for us.” The Secret Service confirmed it is aware of the video and is investigating, while noting that it has not identified a specific credible threat.
Reasonable people will want to know how frightened to be. As someone who spent a career on the other side of operations built exactly this way — and who, in 2010, as a member of Georgia’s parliament, was marked for assassination by Russian military intelligence, in a plot my own country’s counterintelligence service uncovered — my answer is precise: Be furious, not frightened. I know what that kind of threat does to a person and to everyone around him, and I know the fear it plants is not a byproduct of the operation. It is the operation.
Recommended Stories
Start with what the video is not. It presents itself as the product of “anonymous security networks and satellite images” — the vocabulary of penetration, of an adversary already inside the wire. It is nothing of the kind. Nearly everything in it is scraped from public sources: Motorcade footage anyone can find, locations anyone can look up, protective procedures that have been described in the open press for years. A first lady’s taste in clothes is not a state secret. This is not intelligence. It is intimidation dressed as intelligence — a production engineered to make a family, and a nation, feel watched. The Guard does not need to have gotten inside the Secret Service to make you believe it has. It only needs you to behave as though it has.
This video is not even new. For months, billboards in Tehran have displayed the president and his family above flag-draped coffins, and crowds in Mashhad have marched behind banners promising to kill him. The medium keeps changing — a billboard, a chant, now an AI render — but the product does not: manufactured fear, mass-produced and shipped abroad at almost no cost. Treat each new installment as breaking news, and you have volunteered to run Tehran’s distribution network for free.
That is the trap, and much of the coverage is already halfway into it. Every breathless reproduction of the video’s contents does the producers’ work for them, at no cost to Tehran. The first discipline, then, is refusal: Do not amplify a threat whose only ammunition is your reaction to it.
But refusing the theater is not the same as dismissing the danger, because the network behind the theater is not theatrical at all.
In May, Turkish authorities arrested an Iraqi national named Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al Saadi and extradited him to the United States. Prosecutors allege he is a senior commander in Kataib Hezbollah — an Iran-backed militia aligned with the Guard — and that he coordinated a transnational campaign of roughly twenty attacks and attempted attacks across Europe and North America: a synagogue arson, a bank firebombing in Amsterdam, a stabbing in London, a shooting near a consulate in Toronto. He is charged, awaits trial, and is entitled to the presumption of innocence. But according to the government, among the things investigators recovered was a plan to murder Ivanka Trump — a floor plan of her home, and a stated motive of revenge for the 2020 strike that killed Qassem Soleimani. That plot did not fail because it was fantasy. It failed because a man was caught at the surveillance stage.
That grievance did not end in 2020. On Feb. 28, a joint U.S.–Israeli strike killed supreme leader Ali Khamenei along with senior Iranian commanders, and the campaign against the Trump family has only sharpened in the vengeful months since.
Put the two together, and the shape is unmistakable. The video is the loud half — intimidation, aimed at the public. The network is the quiet half: operators aimed at the family. The Guard and its proxy network run both because both are cheap, and because an open society tends to answer the first with panic and the second with paperwork. The whole design is built to exploit that reflex.
The correct response inverts it.
Deny the intimidation its oxygen: Refuse to relay the video’s contents, refuse to treat repackaged public data as evidence of a breach, and refuse to let an adversary set the emotional temperature of a country from a studio in Tehran. And take the network with total seriousness: Prosecute al Saadi and every operative like him to the end of the law, treat the Kataib Hezbollah–Guard infrastructure as the transnational threat the indictment describes, and pursue it — lawfully, patiently, wherever it operates — until the men who plan these things conclude that the planning itself is not survivable. Intimidation should be met with composure; conspiracy to murder should be met with a prosecutor and, where the law allows, with far more than that.
None of this is a partisan question, and it should embarrass anyone who tries to make it one. A threat to murder the president’s wife and son is not an argument for or against any policy or any party. It is an attack on the office, and through the office on the country, and it would be exactly as intolerable aimed at any first family in American history. The citizens who understand that instinctively are ahead of the commentators who are already sorting it into their usual columns.
US STRIKES IRAN FOR FIRST TIME IN DAYS AFTER JORDAN MISSILE ATTACK
I have watched governments treat intimidation as a nuisance and treat networks as a legal inconvenience. They learned, slowly and at a price, that an adversary escalates precisely as far as it is allowed to — and that the moment to answer is the first one, not the fifth. My own country learned that lesson the expensive way, and is still paying the tuition.
Tehran has told the United States, on video, exactly what it wants Americans to feel. The only reply worth giving is to make it feel a cost instead.
Emzari Gelashvili is a Georgian-born American analyst and columnist and a former senior official in Georgia’s state security, defense, and interior ministries (1996-2008), specializing in counterintelligence against Russian and Iranian operations, and a former member of the Georgian Parliament (2008-2012). He writes at emzargelashvili.substack.com.
