Updated November 14, 2026, 7:42 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — America’s war on Iran has pushed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent out of his Washington-area home and into a military base, placing him on a growing list of top Trump administration officials under U.S. protection against alleged threats of retaliation from Tehran.
Bessent confirmed the move on Nov. 13 in an interview with CNBC, saying Iran was trying to retaliate against him — and other Trump administration officials he did not name — for pushing for a war-related economic sanctions effort known as “Operation Pariah Economics.”
“I’m not going to be intimidated by the fact that they made death threats against me,” Bessent said. “The rest of the cabinet members, we’re not going to be intimidated. And that means what we’re doing with Operation Economic Outcast is working.”
“President Trump is constantly receiving death threats,” Bessent also said, adding that the Iranian military’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is behaving “like a cornered dangerous animal.”
“So I followed the instructions of the secret service and left my home and moved to a military base,” Bessent said.
Attorney General Todd Blanche has also been living at a military installation in the Washington area for months, according to three sources cited by Fox News Digital. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller also moved into military housing, according to media reports.
These relocations — which come as America’s war continues into its ninth month — underscore something that U.S. national security officials have feared for decades: that the Islamic Republic has a global network of assassins, terrorists and other operatives that the IRGC can — and does — deploy against foreign adversaries abroad and on American soil.
“The Iranians have shown, both in Europe and in the United States, that this is a clear and present danger to American officials,” said Magnus Ranstorp, an Iran expert at the Swedish Defense University who has studied that country’s global operations since the 1990s. other adverse actions by US allies around the world.
Lina Khatib, an Iranian military expert and visiting scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative, said Iran uses proxy networks, some of which are directly connected to the IRGC, to carry out and plan terrorist activities around the world, including in the United States.
Despite efforts by the United States and its allies to counter them, Iran “continues to have the capacity to do this,” Khatib said. “As military, economic and diplomatic pressure on Iran intensifies, network activation is one of the ways the Tehran regime is trying to put pressure on its adversaries. »
U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies have worked aggressively to counter the threat posed by Iran through the IRGC, the elite military force that answers directly to the country’s supreme religious leader.
In July 1980, a year after the Iranian revolution toppled the U.S.-backed monarch Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a gunman dressed as a mailman fatally shot a former Iranian government official turned dissident as he answered the door to his home in Bethesda, Maryland. In 2011, U.S. authorities foiled what the FBI said was an Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States at a popular Washington restaurant.
Iranian threats against officials in the first Trump administration became so alarming that federal agents were assigned to protect former national security adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Brian Hook, a Pompeo aide. Hook became the public face of the US “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran following Trump’s 2018 decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.
In 2022, the Justice Department indicted Shahram Poursafi for allegedly working on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to “commit the murder” of Bolton and another unidentified official, whom Pompeo later identified as himself.
On November 10, the FBI placed Poursafi on its most-wanted terrorist list for allegedly hiring agents to assassinate two former U.S. government officials between 2021 and 2022. The federal agency also released “Seeking Information” posters on three of his alleged Iran-linked associates.
In those cases, the FBI said in a statement, Iran allegedly sought to assassinate U.S. officials “likely in retaliation for the 2020 death of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani” on Trump’s personal orders.
“The FBI will not tolerate the IRGC’s brazen attempts to silence, harm or assassinate activists, dissidents, journalists, public officials or anyone else it considers a threat,” said Gregory Heeb of the Counterterrorism Division of the FBI’s Washington Field Office.
In October, Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton warned in a declassified memo that Iran had “significantly increased” its efforts to attack U.S. government personnel in the Middle East.
“Lethal Iranian conspiracy efforts against American citizens have reached advanced stages both in the Middle East and in some other countries,” Clayton warned in the memo to Rubio obtained by Politico.
Despite the threats the three men faced, Trump withdrew federal protection from Bolton, Pompeo and Hook right after his inauguration in January 2025. Bolton told USA TODAY that the FBI’s new designation of Poursafi as “most wanted” indicates he still poses a threat to current and former U.S. officials, including himself and Bessent.
“I think they are very motivated, not only because of the attack on Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, but also because of the war. That’s why they added Poursafi,” Bolton said. “This shows how ongoing the Iranian effort is and how immediate it is. »
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