Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton warned Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Iranian plots to kill Americans have reached advanced stages, as U.S. personnel pulled back from Saudi Arabia.

A declassified memo from Clayton to Rubio states that Iran has ramped up efforts to target U.S. personnel and that lethal plotting has moved into advanced stages in the Middle East and other countries, The Hill reported.

Axios first reported the memo. A U.S. official later confirmed its existence to NewsNation, The Hill’s broadcasting partner. The warning landed days after the State Department ordered certain nonessential U.S. personnel to leave Saudi Arabia amid stepped-up attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

The message is blunt. American officials and citizens face a sharper Iranian threat, and the intelligence community is putting that judgment in writing to the nation’s top diplomat.

Clayton tells Rubio the threat has moved past the planning stage

In the memo, dated Friday, Clayton described intelligence gathered through multiple channels. He did not soften the finding.

Clayton wrote to Rubio:

"Specifically, through various channels, we have received intelligence that Iran has substantially increased efforts to target U.S. personnel,"

He went further on the maturity of the plots:

"The lethal plotting efforts by Iranians against U.S. citizens have reached advanced stages in both the Middle East and certain other countries."

Those lines matter. “Substantially increased” speaks to volume and intent. “Advanced stages” speaks to operational progress, not chatter, not vague aspiration, but plotting that has moved forward in the region and beyond it.

The memo does not name specific targets. It does not list the “certain other countries.” And it does not mention the State Department’s order pulling some American personnel from the Middle East. The warning stands on its own as a direct alert from the director of national intelligence to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

State Department already moving people out of Saudi Arabia

The Clayton warning came days after the State Department ordered the departure of certain nonessential U.S. personnel from Saudi Arabia. The timing ties the intelligence judgment to real movement on the ground.

Diplomats and support staff do not get pulled from a partner country on a whim. Hostilities in and around the kingdom have climbed, and Washington is treating the risk to Americans as live.

A State Department spokesperson told The Hill on Wednesday that the danger is not locked inside one battlefield map.

"As the Department has repeatedly emphasized, the hostilities have the potential to escalate rapidly, including beyond that immediate area,"

That is the department’s case for caution: fighting that starts in one corner of the region can jump borders fast, and U.S. personnel sitting in the wrong place at the wrong time become targets.

Rubio, as secretary of state, sits at the center of both the diplomatic response and the protection of Americans overseas, a role that keeps him in the national spotlight even as 2028 GOP nomination odds shift in party political coverage.

Houthi strikes hit Saudi civilian sites while Iran’s shadow lengthens

The personnel order unfolded as Yemen’s Houthi rebels, backed by Iran, ramped up attacks inside Saudi Arabia. The strikes have hit civilian infrastructure, including airports, and have wounded and killed civilians.

Saudi officials said Wednesday that the kingdom’s military prevented another attack on the holy city of Medina. That claim underscores how close the fighting has come to sites that matter far beyond a single war map.

The Houthis remain locked in a long war with the Saudi-backed Yemeni government. They have also directly attacked countries across the region since the conflict began. The impact of that war has widened through the Persian Gulf, and U.S. military action involving the Islamic Republic has further amplified the regional strain, per the reporting.

Iran’s fingerprint is the through-line. The same regime intelligence officials now describe as pushing advanced lethal plots against Americans is the power behind a proxy force hitting Saudi airports and infrastructure. That is not a coincidence conservatives should shrug off.

For a secretary of state already navigating hard national-security files, the memo lands as more than paper. It is a formal notice that Tehran’s threat to U.S. lives is active, growing, and operationally mature, the kind of file that follows Rubio’s standing in successive Republican debates only in the separate lane of domestic politics, not in the duty in front of him now.

What the memo does, and does not, settle

Clayton’s note puts the intelligence community’s judgment on the record for the State Department’s leader. Iran has increased efforts to target U.S. personnel. Lethal plots against U.S. citizens have reached advanced stages in the Middle East and in unspecified other countries. The information came in through various channels.

Open questions remain. The public report does not give the full memo text beyond the key sentences. It does not identify which other countries face advanced-stage plotting. It does not name individual U.S. officials or citizens as specific targets. Absolute calendar dates for the Friday memo and the earlier personnel order were not pinned down in the account beyond the relative timeline.

None of those gaps erase the core warning. When the director of national intelligence tells the secretary of state that Iranian kill plots have matured, the burden shifts to policy: harden security for Americans abroad, keep pressure on Tehran and its proxies, and refuse the old habit of treating Iranian aggression as background noise.

Saudi forces blocking a strike on Medina, U.S. nonessential staff leaving the kingdom, and Houthi hits on civilian airports all sit in the same week’s frame as Clayton’s alert. The region is hot. Americans are in the blast radius. Iran is pushing the temperature higher.

Rubio’s portfolio now includes receiving that kind of raw threat traffic and turning it into protection for U.S. personnel, work that stands apart from horse-race chatter about whether he outperforms rivals in hypothetical matchups or trails in nomination snapshots.

Iran has spent years hitting Americans through proxies, plots, and regional war. A declassified warning that those efforts have “substantially increased” and reached “advanced stages” is not a puzzle. It is a bill coming due for a regime that reads American hesitation as permission.

Keep the personnel safe, keep the pressure on Tehran, and stop pretending advanced Iranian murder plots are someone else’s problem.