Ex-top FBI official to 'Post': When Iran-Hamas Oct. 7 threat really started

'No matter what, Iran was going to ally with Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis,' Burns told the Post.

By YONAH JEREMY BOB MARCH 13, 2025 18:29 Updated: MARCH 13, 2025 18:45

Palestinian Hamas gather at the site of the handing over of the bodies of four Israeli hostages in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza on February 20, 2025. (photo credit: EYAD BABA/AFP via Getty Images)

Most of the world now knows that Iran gave critical and multifaceted support to Hamas, which enabled the October 7 invasion of Israel, but few know the story of how these two strange bedfellows came together unexpectedly decades before and what their alliance means for the future.

In an interview on Wednesday with the Jerusalem Post, former senior FBI counterterror official Lara Burns said that the relationship was started by top Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzook during a trip to Tehran in 1992 and that the continuous alliance between the parties frames their common anti-Israel, anti-US, anti-democracy goals for the future as well.

From decades of managing significant aspects of the FBI’s crackdown on Hamas and its link to Iran, Burns, now Head of Terrorism Research at the George Washington University Program on Extremism and associated with the Combat Antisemitism Movement, said that any idea that Hamas can be left in Gaza and might moderate if it allows other Palestinian groups to run civilian functions is a mirage that ignores the core of the Hamas-Iran axis and ideology.

She draws a straight line between Abu Marzook’s work with Iran in 1992 and his and other top Hamas officials’ work with Iran leading into October 7 and even now (Abu Marzook is one of the few surviving top Hamas leaders.)

“The Hamas-Iran relationship as part of Iran’s axis of resistance means it needs to use proxies to do their dirty work. No matter what, Iran was going to ally with Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis,” Burns told the Post.

Lara Burns (credit: Courtesy)

How could this be when Hamas are Sunni and Iran is Shiite, two distinct Muslim groups who themselves have been at war on and off for over 1,000 years?

The former senior FBI counter-terror official responded that regarding, “the Palestinians and Israel – the enemy of my enemy is my friend...Iran and Hamas can disagree on many regular issues, but when it comes to fighting Israel, being anti the US, anti-democracy, and anti-West, they will agree every time that: we [Israel, the US, the West] are the enemy.”

Burns and others at the FBI helped seize documents which she said outlined Hamas’s strategy and presentation to Iran in 1992 and in other early meetings between the sides.

She stated that Hamas recognized the importance of its relationship with Iran because Iran possessed “huge material and human resources.” 

Further, she noted that Hamas emphasized to the Islamic Republic that if it worked with Hamas, which was part of the broader global Muslim Brotherhood which had deeply penetrated the US and the West,  it could “break the regional and international isolation which was imposed on it due to the Iraq-Iran war,” also flagging that Iran opposed American power in the region and wished “to contain it.”

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For example, Abu Marzook got multiple degrees in the US, and a green card and spent 14 years living there, during which time he raised tens of millions of US dollars for Hamas terrorism.

True, there have been ups and downs in the Hamas-Iran relationship, given the Sunni-Shiite split, and especially during the Syrian Civil War which started in 2011.

But by the late 2010s, Tehran and Hamas were working together again, and in 2023 alone top Iranian and Hamas officials met four times, leading up to October 7.

Anti-Israel October 8 protests were not spontaneous

Currently, Burns is applying her FBI experience of cracking down on certain terror groups like Hamas who had infiltrated the US, to confronting some of the groups she says are a critical part of the ecosystem of these terror groups.

Talking about the organization, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR),  she said, “They are the largest Muslim advocacy group in the country [in the US], they are a Muslim umbrella for American Muslims for Palestinians. They are involved in lots of protest activities. They are loud, and they intimidate. They seed their narrative, and it has been a perfect model for decades,” she said.

Their message is simple, stated Burns: “Adopt our narrative or be quiet.”

Next, she stated that in one of CAIR’S “meeting minutes of its leaders, Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, in Philadelphia, the meeting focuses on ‘intimidating people to adopt our narrative’. What does CAIR do? Anytime an individual, law enforcement, or organization calls out some group or someone for supporting terror or charges someone, CAIR brings the intimidation with accusations that this is Islamophobic or racist…and violating the individuals’ right to free speech under the Constitution.”

Continuing, she explained, “Now we see a number individuals who exposed these narratives through university professors,” who support Iran and Hamas and accuse “Israel of committing genocide, the US of helping Israel commit genocide. They are woven into various fronts in the US by design. What we saw on October 8 on US campuses and streets was not a spontaneous response to Israel’s retaliation against Hamas, but was part of an agenda set in place in 1993 by really smart people,” like Abu Marzook.

Returning to Hamas’s long-term strategy for its activities visa vise the US and the West, she remarked, “Hamas leaders stand on the back of dead Palestinians and point fingers – they use the Palestinian people as human shields, their civilians die, Hamas tells the world: ‘look at Israel’s genocide’ that is his [Abu Marzook’s] strategy,”

She said that Hamas’s darkest hour was the mid-1990s when it seemed like the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinian Authority might work, leading the terror group to unleash a wave of suicide bus bombings against Israeli civilians.

Once again, when Israeli normalization got momentum among moderate Sunni countries in 2023, Hamas instigated the current war with its October 7 invasion of southern Israel to slaughter around 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, she said.

Infamous group Samidoun

Burns has used her background to go after groups like Samidoun.

Samidoun has become infamous in Israel for many reasons, but one was that it was the group which convinced elements of Brazilian law enforcement to try to arrest an Israeli soldier-citizen who was vacationing there.

According to Burns and a US governing finding in October, Samidoun is connected to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which Bruns added, “believes in annihilating Israel.”

There has been media coverage of what will happen to Samidoun co-founder and US citizen Charlotte Kates, and her husband Khaled Barakat who the US has found is directly linked to the PFLP.

Moreover, Burns stated Samidoun, “claims they run a Palestinian prisoner solidarity group…protesting the imprisonment of terrible terrorists with blood on their hands. The Holyland Foundation [which the US prosecuted in the 2000s] was one of their causes.”

“Charlotte was born in New Jersey, but lives in Canada and has been extremely vocal for Hamas, Hezbollah, the PFLP, and Islamic Jihad – that they are not terror organizations. She said it doesn’t matter if the US has designated them. Well, if you live in the US or are a US citizen, you can choose this or not – but then if you provide support to them [the terror groups] that’s a crime whether you want to agree or not.”

“After the death of Ismail Haniyeh, Iran invited Kates to receive their humanitarian award, which they also awarded posthumously to Haniyeh. She went to Iran and accepted the award,” said the former senior FBI official.

Around this time, “Iran shot another female in the head for not wearing a Hijab properly: what do you need to do as a woman to receive a humanitarian award from Iran?”

Moreover, she said Kates held seminars for university students about how to support the above terror groups, but to take it to a certain line while avoiding a US conviction, adding, “that sounds to me like conspiracy to provide material support” to terror groups.

Also, she said that Kates went to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral, declaring “she is not a useful idiot, she is all in on the cause.”

Although Burns said Kates has not yet been arrested, she indicated she would not be surprised if Kates has not become a person of interest for the FBI to look into.

Visiting Sudan

Beyond Israel issues, Burns has led an interesting life.

She spent decades traveling both around the US and also around Europe, the Middle East, and once to Khartoum in Sudan to train others in counter-terror techniques.

When she visited Sudan, in the late 2010s, there was at least one anecdote which really stood out for her.

At one point, she was one of only two women in a room of around 30 Sudanese men, including senior-general types.

She had been teaching a course about how to maneuver an investigative interview of a witness into an interrogation of a suspect – “when you know an individual is lying. You use various techniques, verbal techniques to encourage them to disclose the truth, using your mind, using your intelligence to get them to admit that they are lying.”

“That last day, I had gone through mechanisms and had given examples about how to do that. Toward the end, one of the old general types asked, ‘but, when do you hurt them?’”

She responded, “the whole point of today is that you don’t have to.”

The Sudanese official was flabbergasted and found it hard to believe that a top FBI official solved counterterror cases without using enhanced interrogation techniques, with a vibrant debate following about whether such an approach could work in Africa.

Now, Burns works at her GW think tank, trying to combat the spread of Islamist radicalization, which she says in many ways is more pernicious than open Islamist violence because one can be more easily tracked and confronted while the other can stealthily destabilize and undermine the West gradually under the guise of free speech.