Catherine Perez-Shakdam

Catherine Perez-Shakdam is a French-born analyst of Middle Eastern affairs whose career spans two sharply distinct phases, making her one of the more unusual figures to have intersected with the Islamic Republic's media ecosystem. Born in 1982 in France into a secular Jewish family, she later studied at the University of London, earning degrees in finance and communications. At university she married a Yemeni Sunni Muslim man and presented herself publicly as a convert to Shia Islam — an identity she maintained for nearly a decade as she built a career as an Iran-sympathetic commentator.

During the period roughly 2013–2021, Perez-Shakdam contributed extensively to outlets aligned with or operated by the Iranian state, including Mehr News Agency, Tasnim News Agency, and Mashregh News. Content she contributed was also published on Khamenei.ir, the official website of the Supreme Leader. From 2015 to 2017 she served as Director of Programs and Lead Analyst at the Shafaqna Institute for Middle East Studies, a UK-based think tank with a Shia-oriented, Tehran-sympathetic editorial position. She also consulted for the United Nations Security Council Panel of Experts on Yemen in 2016–2017, specializing in war economy and sanctions evasion — access that gave her significant institutional credibility. During Iran's 2017 presidential election she traveled to Iran and conducted an interview with then-candidate Ebrahim Raisi, obtaining access to elite political circles.

In November 2021 she published a disclosure on the Times of Israel blog platform, revealing that she was Jewish and had never genuinely converted to Islam, framing her prior activities as an effort to gain access to and document the Iranian regime from within. Iranian state media immediately deleted all her published content and regime officials publicly denied any association with her.

Following her disclosure she pivoted to explicitly anti-regime advocacy. In June 2022 she joined the Henry Jackson Society as a Research Fellow focused on countering Iranian influence. She subsequently became Director of We Believe in Israel, a British Israeli advocacy organization.

The Iranian regime's response to her story has been characterized by mutually contradictory disinformation. Some regime-aligned media and politicians — most notably former reformist MP Mostafa Kavakebian, who in July 2025 claimed on state television that she had maintained sexual relationships with 120 senior officials — pushed a sensationalized espionage narrative. However, Iran's own security and judicial bodies publicly contradicted these claims, stating that no documents indicated espionage or illegal conduct during her time in Iran, and Tehran's prosecutor charged Kavakebian himself for making unsupported public allegations. Neither Israel nor any Western intelligence service has confirmed any operational relationship with her. The "Mossad superspy" framing is best understood as a regime face-saving narrative — reframing the embarrassment of having published a Jewish analyst on state platforms, including the Supreme Leader's own website, as evidence of a sophisticated infiltration operation rather than a failure of due diligence.