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Hells Angels Indeed: When you bust a criminal network, sometimes you find an intelligence operation lurking within it. Cracking an encrypted phone network used by criminals helped foil an assassination attempt on U.S. soil that was orchestrated by Iranian intelligence. The plot described Monday involved Naji Sharifi Zindashti, an alleged Iranian drug trafficker who’s also accused of running an international assassination network. Zindashti has been linked to murders in the United Arab Emirates, Canada, and Turkey, and his operations are overseen by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, U.S. officials said.

Zindashti was a customer of SkyGlobal, a Canadian firm that marketed the secure SkyECC phone and offered $5 million to anyone who could beat the phone’s encryption. European intelligence officers broke the code in 2021, SkyGlobal was shut down, and its CEO indicted. Intercepted messages show that in December 2000 and January 2021, Zindashti used SkyECC to recruit members of the Hells Angels biker gang in Canada to kill two people in Maryland, one of whom had defected from Iran, according to the indictment unsealed Monday. (“We gotta erase his head from his torso,” one Hells Angels texted on SkyECC.)