A senior intelligence official in the Trump administration has warned that Iran has stepped up efforts to target US officials, and that Tehran’s plots to carry out deadly attacks on US citizens have reached a “final stage”.
Reuters news agency has seen a written memo on the matter from US Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton. The warning came as Washington reduced the number of staff at its missions in Saudi Arabia.
Washington took that decision earlier this week after Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi rebels intensified their attacks on Saudi Arabia. The United States and Israel began attacking Iran on February 28, and Iran responded with attacks of its own.
The Houthis have entered the war on Iran’s side. The war, now nearly eight months old, has turned into a regional conflict, and the fighting between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia has become one of its battlefields.
Earlier this month, several sources told Reuters that Iran was preparing to respond more forcefully if the United States launched large-scale military strikes on Iranian territory again.
In a message dated October 23, 2026, Clayton wrote to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio: “In particular, we have received intelligence through various sources that Iran has significantly increased its efforts to target US officials.”
Clayton also wrote: “Iranian plots to carry out deadly attacks against Americans in some countries, including in the Middle East, have now reached a final stage.”
The US news outlet Axios was the first to report on the memo. A copy was also sent to CIA Director John Ratcliffe. The memo was not classified.
US officials told Reuters that on Wednesday the State Department ordered non-emergency staff at US diplomatic missions in Saudi Arabia, and their family members, to leave the country.
The United States is also planning to move family members of staff out of several other missions in the Middle East.
On Saturday, the State Department updated its travel advisories for more than a dozen countries in the Gulf and the Middle East, among them Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq and Israel. The advisories were updated because of a rising threat of attacks from the Houthis, Iran’s allies.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report