LONDON (Dispatches) -- Newly declassified 
British government documents reveal a sinister Western strategy aimed at undermining Iran’s sovereignty by exploiting ethnic divisions and stoking separatist ambitions among the Kurdish population. 
In the early 1980s, at the height of the Iraq-Iran war, the UK actively encouraged exiled anti-Iranian groups to promise the Kurds a federal state — a clear attempt to fracture Iran from within and destabilize the revolutionary government of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Despite officially refusing direct involvement in efforts to overthrow Iran’s government, Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) acknowledged in internal communications that any hope for exiled anti-Iran elements to gain traction inside Iran hinged on winning over minorities, especially the Kurds. 
The UK bluntly advised subversive figures to “buy” Kurdish support by promising autonomy and federalism, an egregious interference in Iran’s internal affairs and an act of blatant political manipulation.
In November 1981, John Graham, Deputy Undersecretary at the FCO, met with Mehdi Samii, a prominent exile and former governor of Iran’s Central Bank, discussing strategies to unite subversive forces. Graham explicitly stated that an exiled entity must “look for an ally who had a local power base, access to armed supporters, and links throughout the country,” singling out the Kurds as the key group to target. He added that the “best way to buy Kurdish support would be to promise a Federal State,” an offer Samii conceded was necessary to secure minority backing once the regime changed.
Lord George Brown, a former UK Foreign Secretary, who was lobbying for Britain to restore its influence in the Middle East, further urged cultivating Kurdish alliances by promising federalism not only to the Kurds but also to other ethnic minorities — a deliberate Western tactic to sow division and weaken Iran’s national unity. Brown cautioned that involving the Kurds might provoke complications in neighboring Iraq and Turkey, yet showed no concern for the devastating regional fallout such interference would cause.
Internal British assessments also revealed that finding a suitable foreign base for subversive groups was problematic, with Turkey considered a possible gateway into Iran — a fact that underscores regional destabilization designs. The documents suggest that Lord Brown might have been complicit in efforts to assist Iraq’s attempts to destabilize Iran, revealing a murky web of Western-backed subversion.
Further evidence of the West’s covert campaign emerges from correspondence with General Gholam-Ali Oveissi, former Chief of Staff under the Shah, who admitted maintaining ties with Kurdish tribal leaders but warned that Iranian Kurds might eventually accept any foreign power offering autonomy, even the Soviet Union. This underlines the perilous nature of foreign meddling in Iran’s ethnic affairs.
The British government also repeatedly rejected pleas from Kurdish advocates within the UK calling for direct intervention in Iran’s Kurdish insurgency,