After serving time for leaking NATO intelligence to Iran, a former British soldier, once the personal interpreter to NATO’s chief commander in Afghanistan, is now instructing unsuspecting students in salsa dancing in Brighton, as discovered by the Mail on Sunday.
Known originally as Esmail Mohammed Gamasai and born in Tehran, Daniel James, a dual national of Iran and the UK, was found guilty at the Old Bailey in November 2008. His conviction was for transmitting sensitive NATO operational information to an Iranian military official stationed in Kabul.
James was assigned to Afghanistan in March 2006, where he worked directly with General Sir David Richards, the British commander leading NATO forces. This position granted him access to highly sensitive operational intelligence within the alliance.
Utilizing a series of coded messages, he communicated with Colonel Mohammad Hossein Heydari, sharing information about troop movements, fuel logistics, munitions, and insurgent activities, and notably stating, “I am at your service.”
Subsequently, he received a ten-year prison sentence after a court was cautioned by an intelligence officer about the potential danger his information leaks posed to NATO and UK service personnel in Afghanistan and beyond.
However, James was released in December 2011 after completing three years of his sentence. He has since returned to Brighton and now lives under the name Dani Jay.
When approached by the MoS, James, now 63, said: ‘It was a long time ago. I have put it behind me. I don’t want to talk about it – I am just getting on with my life.’
His ex-wife Alethea Haralambous, whom he married in 1982, lives a few miles away in Hove. Her partner, who raised James’s son Gino from the age of four, said he had seen James only a handful of times since his release. Gino, 38, a carpenter in nearby Portslade, is not in contact with his biological father.
Daniel James (pictured), a dual Iranian national born Esmail Mohammed Gamasai in Tehran, was convicted at the Old Bailey in November 2008 after passing classified details about alliance operations to an Iranian military attaché in Kabul
James (left) had been deployed to Afghanistan in March 2006 as personal interpreter to General Sir David Richards (right), the British officer commanding all Nato forces in the country – giving him privileged access to some of the alliance’s most sensitive operational intelligence
He was released from prison in December 2011, having served three years of his sentence. James (pictured) returned to Brighton, where he now lives under the name Dani Jay
With no family to return to, James – who told his trial he turned spy after racist colleagues passed him over for promotion – threw himself into salsa teaching, billing himself on promotional posters as ‘No. 1 in Brighton’.
He ran weekly classes at the King & Queen pub on Marlborough Place, where students paid as little as £3 a lesson, and hosted dedicated nights featuring guest teachers and live music.
His most ambitious production was a full salsa concert at the King Alfred Ballroom on Hove seafront, where he performed as DJ Dani Jay alongside a roster of professional dancers and the live Latin band Salseology.
He was able to do so because, despite his conviction for espionage against British forces, he was never stripped of his UK citizenship – meaning he is free to live and work in the country he betrayed.
James also retains most of the Brighton property portfolio whose mortgages – which the trial heard had left him £25,000 in debt – were among the reasons he turned spy.
He owns his ground-floor flat and two of the three other apartments in the same building, yards from Brighton Marina, on a road where a comparable flat sold for £322,000 in May 2022.
He kept his properties despite being ordered to repay nearly £250,000 in legal aid costs after a means test found he should never have qualified for taxpayer-funded support during his trial.
Neighbours on the quiet cul-de-sac where James lives were unaware of his past. One said: ‘I’ve been living here for four years and I’ve never heard about him.’
Later becoming estranged from his family, James threw himself into salsa teaching. He ran weekly classes at the King & Queen pub (pictured) on Marlborough Place, where students paid as little as £3 a lesson
He owns his ground-floor flat (pictured) and two of the three other apartments in the same building, yards from Brighton Marina, on a road where a comparable flat sold for £322,000 in May 2022
It comes after Daniel Khalife (pictured) – a former Royal Signals soldier whose mother is Iranian – was jailed for 14 years in February 2025 at Woolwich Crown Court for passing classified documents and the names of special forces personnel to Iranian intelligence over a two-year period
Intelligence and security figures who remember the case say his continued presence in Britain is an affront to those who served in Afghanistan.
Colonel Philip Ingram, a former Army intelligence officer who served in Iraq, said: ‘Daniel James would have been party to some of the most sensitive negotiations taking place in Afghanistan, and those conversations were being passed directly to the Iranians. That probably resulted in the deaths of Allied troops.
‘As a dual national, his citizenship could and should have been revoked and him thrown out of the country to go and live in Iran. He let his colleagues, and his country, down.’
Professor Anthony Glees, a national security expert at the University of Buckingham, added: ‘His shamelessness is disgusting to decent people. He should not be teaching salsa in Brighton – he should be living in exile in Tehran.
‘The sentence was insultingly light. There was a real chance that people died because of his espionage, and a ten-year sentence was an offence to every British serviceman who fought and died against the Taliban – and, in effect, against Iran.’
Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee warned last year that Iran poses one of the gravest state-based threats to UK national security.
In his annual threat update last October, MI5 director general Sir Ken McCallum disclosed that the service had tracked more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots in a single year – warning that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps make extensive use of low-level criminals as proxies to conduct operations on British soil.
In February 2025, Daniel Khalife – a former Royal Signals soldier whose mother is Iranian – was jailed for 14 years at Woolwich Crown Court for passing classified documents and the names of special forces personnel to Iranian intelligence over a two-year period.
