Time to Confront Escalating Russia-Iran Intelligence Cooperation

New CNN reporting shows that Russian spy satellites moved over a U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia two days before Iran struck it—likely providing the necessary data for Iran to target its attack. This potential satellite support is just the latest engagement between the Russian and Iranian governments—which also includes drone transfers and rumors of cyber operations—with serious implications for U.S. national security.

It’s time for the U.S. government to prioritize confronting Russia and Iran’s expanding cooperation on intelligence and technology. At the current pace, there are few indications that the engagements between the two U.S. adversaries will do anything but accelerate and deepen—both speeding up the rate of cooperation and increasing the sensitivity of the intelligence, technology, and know-how shared. That cooperation already results in improved targeting and surveillance of U.S. forces, mutual enhancement of Russian and Iranian drone technology, and longer-term intelligence and military technology improvements. Further continuation or expansion of the cooperation will hurt U.S., allied, and partner security even more.

Wide-ranging claims about lockstep alliances or a new “axis of evil” are counterproductive for crafting tailored policy responses. Sharpening the public and policy debate about Russia-Iran cooperation instead requires a more granular understanding of what forms that cooperation takes, the intended and actual impacts, and the cooperation’s limits and boundaries. This includes studying which specific actors in each country are engaged in which specific intelligence or technology activities, mapping their status within the state or their relationship to it, and determining what forms of potential cooperation are currently off the table, for any reason. And if Washington has any ideas about driving a wedge between Moscow and Tehran—however aspirational a notion—identifying any fractures will similarly depend on a detailed, nuanced understanding of Russia-Iran intelligence and technology engagement.

The Contours of Cooperation

There is little doubt that foreign adversaries have increased cooperation of late. Many Chinese firms continued selling chips to Russia as it launched and has carried out its full-scale war on Ukraine. North Korea sent thousands of troops to fight in Russia and supplied the Putin regime with millions of rounds of ammunition. As the U.S. intelligence community assessed last year, “these primarily bilateral relationships, largely in security and defense fields, have strengthened their individual and collective capabilities to threaten and harm the United States, as well as improved their resilience against U.S. and Western efforts to constrain or deter their activities.”

For U.S. policymakers and commentators, it is important to not mistake these interactions for a harmony that necessarily equals broader strategic alignment. Supposedly “no limits” partnerships do indeed have real limits, such as China not going all-in to support Russia’s war on Ukraine. These adversaries also seem to approach many engagements with one another transactionally, compartmentalizing their other differences to achieve military, security, and intelligence outcomes. But for Russia and Iran in particular, the areas of intelligence and technology cooperation are clearly tactically meaningful—and increasingly numerous. They show no signs of slowing down. Meanwhile, the impacts on U.S., allied, and partner security are looking less and less theoretical and more like successful military strikes, enhanced monitoring of U.S. communications and movements, and a better intelligence picture of U.S. objectives in war.

On the technology front, the Iranian government delivered combat drones to Russia soon after its all-out invasion of Ukraine, which preceded the Russian military launching thousands of Iranian-made Shahed attack drones against a wide range of targets in Ukrainian territory. Sending this technology has in part served as Tehran’s attempt at leveraging Moscow into a quid pro quo, under which the Russian government helps bolster Iranian capabilities. In that vein, Russia has rapidly adapted its attack drones and in March sent upgraded attack drone technology back to Iran, including with improved navigation capabilities. Lessons learned from Ukraine, translated into hardware, firmware, and software, can now help the Iranian government carry out its own military and other operations. The Russian government is also reportedly aiding Iran’s development of supersonic cruise missiles in secret, and at least one key Russian firm has helped the Iranian government improve its domestic telecommunications intercept (i.e., surveillance) capabilities as well.

Intelligence sharing is another rapidly evolving front of the relationship. Day-to-day, Russian intelligence has reportedly provided Iran with targeting information to attack U.S. military forces and assets in the Middle East, such as the locations of warships and aircraft, as well as satellite and signals intelligence to defend against U.S. air strikes. One media story, not corroborated elsewhere, claimed that Russian intelligence also provided Iran with a list of critical infrastructure targets in the region. Several media stories asserted or implied that the Russian and Iranian governments were cooperating on offensive cyber operations, but the available evidence has yet to rise to that level of claim. Given these public reports, it is quite possible that additional intelligence interactions between Russia and Iran are occurring behind the scenes.

At the macro level, the U.S. intelligence community assessed last year that Moscow’s technical support has helped Tehran advance its own intelligence capabilities—meaning the technological and intelligence gains will more than likely long outlast the current war in Iran.

Time to Act

Whether or not enhanced Russia-Iran cooperation was born largely of circumstance, too few structural conditions have changed to slow down its intelligence and technology dimensions. Russia can keep helping Iran target U.S. forces in the Middle East and pull the United States’ focus even further from the Putin regime’s brutal war on Ukraine. Iran can receive upgraded attack drones from the place currently generating better, real-world-tested drone technology than anywhere else on earth: the Russia-Ukraine frontline. Put together, this increases connectivity between two U.S. adversaries and risks bolstering their resilience against U.S. leverage. It’s time for the United States to place a greater priority on disrupting this cooperation—and the starting point is not sweeping proclamations about adversaries walking hand in hand, but a focused understanding of the details and boundaries of the two countries’ interactions.

First, U.S. policymakers and planners, as well as those debating these issues in the public domain, should more closely map where various intelligence and technology engagements are led by government organizations versus those in the private sector. This is not to say doing so will be easy; in Iran and especially Russia, that is a blurry line at best. But it is very much the point that some of this cooperation might be between intelligence services—ostensibly, this would cover Russia supplying satellite and signals intelligence to Iran—while other engagements labeled as “bilateral cooperation” might be between two state-owned companies, between a Tehran-controlled military front and a private company in St. Petersburg, or some other permutation. These differences matter because they will help policymakers to establish a baseline of where cooperation is formally advanced by the Russian and Iranian political or security leadership versus where it may be happening incidentally as a result of activity not directed or encouraged by the state. Analysts and commentators should ask these questions across known or potential Russia-Iran intelligence sharing, technology transfer, formal training or exercises, informal knowledge transfer, and much more.

Second, these stakeholders should identify the bounds of Russia-Iran intelligence and technology cooperation. Cyber operations provide a useful example. Media reports might claim that a group of hackers in Russia appeared to break into a target that hackers in Iran had also targeted, but that does not mean one coordinated with the other. Shared technological infrastructure, simultaneous interest in the target among the respective governments, and even similar intrusion capabilities do not mean that two different sets of hackers—who could be operating of their own volition entirely separate from the state—coordinated their actions, either. Digging into the nuances in such reports could suggest that, in fact, Russian government hackers and Iranian government hackers have not been publicly observed acting in concert. So, the question for analysts evaluating the bounds of the relationship becomes: why not?

The same framework applies to other intelligence and technology areas, including satellite intelligence and attack drones. Russia has reportedly sent upgraded attack drones back to Iran. But questions remain about what software capabilities these drones might include beyond the reported, upgraded navigation capabilities; whether they include training data that Russia may have collected from the battlefield and used to train drone-related AI models; and what else Russia might not be transferring—and what Iran might not want to transfer back to Russia going forward. Answering these kinds of questions can shed light on the bounds of cooperation, at least as it stands now. Those bounds can provide insights into Moscow’s incentives and wishes, Tehran’s incentives and wishes, and potential areas of cooperation that are currently off the table. Key opportunities for the United States will lie in places where the two states distrust one another, cannot build or procure the requisite components on their own to pursue a technology objective, or have other gaps in knowledge, resources, talent, and the like that get in the way of their aims.

With both sets of questions in hand—what exactly Russia-Iran intelligence and technology cooperation looks like, and where the bilateral gaps and tensions may lie—U.S. policymakers and planners can better identify their options for attempting to downgrade or disrupt the cooperation.

Driving a wedge between Moscow and Tehran—which might be the knee-jerk reaction of a proposal from anyone in Washington—is exceedingly difficult, if it can be done at all. The U.S. government does not seem willing to halt its war on Iran, which will not listen to the United States about anything related to Russia. CIA Director John Ratcliffe also recently went to Moscow and, among other things, reportedly encouraged Russia to cut off Iran, to no avail. Another route, rather than driving a wedge into the countries’ interest in cooperating, could be outright disrupting the cooperation mechanisms themselves. But if policymakers and planners are concerned by the apparently quickening, deepening intelligence and technology cooperation between Russia and Iran, getting a full, nuanced picture of the dynamics at hand is the best place to start.

Justin Sherman is a senior associate (non-resident) with the Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.