As Iran resumes indirect nuclear talks with the United States in Oman, a report by the think tank France2050 reveals the extent of a decades-long Iranian influence campaign on French soil.
On Tuesday, Iran’s top security official Ali Larijani met Oman’s Sultan Haitham bin Tariq in Muscat, where the two men “discussed the latest developments in the Iranian-American negotiations” and “ways to reach a balanced and just agreement between the two sides,” according to Oman's state news agency.
The talks followed the first US-Iran dialogue since last year’s 12‑day Iran-Israel war, underscoring that diplomacy is back on track in the Gulf.
But French think tank France2050 alleges in its report The Islamic Republic of Iran’s Infiltration in France, published late last year, that while Iran has spent years influencing US and European policy makers, it has also been building a hidden apparatus of influence in France.
The 120‑page report, submitted to France’s Interior Ministry, Senate and National Assembly, argues that Iran has maintained a “structured system of infiltration” in France for nearly half a century, with its Paris embassy acting as the hub.
It describes the mission as “the European anchor of the Revolutionary Guards’ influence operations”, combining official diplomacy with covert intelligence work, diaspora surveillance and propaganda.
“In France, the number two of the Iranian embassy, Ali Reza Khalili, was responsible for establishing an influence network: recruiting and directing ‘agents", whether they were aware of being manipulated or not,” the report reads.
Khalili is presented as deputy ambassador, chief of staff to the envoy and president of the Centre Franco‑Iranien, an organisation created in 2016 that has hosted conferences, cultural events and training sessions which, according to the authors, allowed Tehran to “identify and recruit potential interlocutors in academia, civil society and the media".
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Recruiting grounds
Adrian Calamel, one of the report's co-authors, says that France’s vulnerability is rooted in a long history of contact with Iran’s revolutionary leadership.
“When you think about 47 years to grow that network, that influence.... In the United States there absolutely is influence, but not at the level that we see inside France,” he said.
The report claims several staff accredited as diplomats in Paris have been flagged by European counter‑intelligence services as officers of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence (MOIS) or the Quds Force, the arm of the Revolutionary Guard responsible for intelligence operations and projecting Iranian influence abroad.
The embassy is described as simultaneously “a cultural centre, a propaganda unit and a coordination office for the surveillance of the diaspora and the repression of opponents abroad".
The report describes universities and grandes écoles – France's elite, highly selective higher education institutions – as prime recruiting grounds.
The embassy and the Centre Franco‑Iranien offered scholarships, internships and tightly managed trips to Iran to “students or researchers demonstrating open‑mindedness toward Iranian culture,” the report says, calling this a form of influence‑orientated recruitment.
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Campaign of confusion
Targets for recruitment have included “young intellectuals, journalists in training or NGO activists susceptible to anti‑Western or anti‑imperialist rhetoric".
“There’s always going to be the influence with NGOs,” said Calamel, pointing out that some operate under umbrella structures linked variously to the Islamic Republic and the Muslim Brotherhood. “Often they’re intertwined."
He added that there "is a concern with the press, that you do have people peddling the line of the Islamic Republic – that they have a right to produce a nuclear weapon, that they have a right to nuclear energy, but that they don’t have to go through the safeguards of everybody else".
The France 2050 report accuses the Iranian embassy of coordinating a French‑language digital campaign through accounts tied to Iran's state broadcasters, including Press TV, Al‑Alam and Hispan TV. Cyber‑monitoring cited by the authors found recurring links between these networks and the mission’s communications unit, with some account administrators appearing at events run by Khalili’s Centre Franco‑Iranien.
The aim, the report concludes, is to “create ideological confusion, erode trust in democratic institutions and normalise the Iranian regime’s positions in the French political and media landscape".
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Calamel sees Iran's information campaigns – and, more recently, complete news blackouts – as an external extension of Iran’s internal repression. He recalls that when in 2019 the authorities "shut down the internet for roughly 12 hours, security forces slaughtered 1,500 protesters”.
To quell the protests that began in December 2025, Revolutionary Guard forces killed thousands of demonstrators after Tehran shut off the internet.
Calamel warned: “This is a regime that murdered thousands of its own people just recently, and they want to influence France. The people of France need to start pushing back against this."
