A calibrated swap of prisoners between the United States and Iran

It strongly resembles a hostage release, but with a particularly sophisticated outcome, involving a dozen captives, two enemy states and the transfer, via complex banking circuits, of 6 billion dollars. We are not talking about ransom, since it concerns Iranian money blocked on American orders in banks in South Korea. However, the synchronization of the final “sequencing”, the culmination of eight rounds of negotiations over fourteen months between Iranians and Americans, via Qatari emissaries in Doha, evokes the outcome of a hostage-taking.

Monday morning, finally seeing the end of the tunnel, five American citizens of Iranian origin, detained for years in Iran, were first transported to an airport in Tehran, where a plane from Qatar was waiting for the green light to take off. “We hope to have confirmation today of the payment of all” of the assets released and that “the exchange of prisoners will take place on the same day”, declared the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the time. “They are in good health,” a source confided to the Reuters agency almost simultaneously.

The identities of three of them are known: Siamak Namazi, 51, a businessman arrested in 2015 while visiting family; Emad Sharghi, 59, also a businessman, apprehended in 2018 then released conditionally but who was prohibited from leaving the country, then was arrested again when he allegedly tried to flee; and Morad Tahbaz, a 67-year-old environmental specialist, arrested in 2018. All were accused of espionage, which they deny. The identity of the two other ex-captives is not known.

Shortly after, Qatar confirmed that the 6 billion had been transferred from the Swiss central bank to Doha, with a spokesperson for the Iranian central bank specifying that six Iranian accounts in two Qatari banks had been activated to receive 5,573,492,000 euros. Tehran preferred euros to dollars. But we still had to wait several hours for the White House to announce that the former American detainees and two members of their families had taken off from Iran, then to affirm that Joe Biden had a conversion “full of emotion » with the families of ex-prisoners.

As luck would have it, at almost the same time, Iranian President Ebrahim Raissi landed in the United States, where he is participating this week in the United Nations General Assembly.

At the same time, according to a carefully calibrated choreography, we learned, from an Iranian source, that two of the five Iranian prisoners released by the United States in return for this deal had arrived in Doha, where the exchange was going to take place. Each camp was therefore able to announce the recovery of its captives. Reza Sarhangpour and Mehrdad Moin-Ansari return to Iran. As for Amin Hassanzadeh and Kaveh Afrasiabi, they plan to stay in the United States. And the last, Kambiz Attar-Kashani, to go to a third country where his family resides. American justice accused them of having diverted sanctions against Iran.

Faced with opposition from the many adversaries of this “deal” in the United States, at a time when we are marking the first anniversary of the bloody repression against Iranian women who are revealing themselves, the Biden Administration is defending itself by ensuring that it is not a “blank check” to Iran. To make things easier, Washington announced yet another sanctions against the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and against the former President of the Republic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is largely out of political circles.

The use of these funds can only be for “humanitarian purposes” and will be “under strict supervision”, specified the American National Security Council. To which Tehran responded that it had the possibility of using this envelope differently.

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In 1986, to recover American hostages in Lebanon, the Reagan Administration went much further by negotiating secret arms sales to Iran, in violation of an arms embargo.

First announced on August 10, this agreement underlines, on both sides, a desire for appeasement, while the nuclear dispute remains deadlocked. The UN also said on Monday that it hoped for a “reduction in tensions”. Taking advantage of the dynamic initiated in Doha, will this exchange of prisoners be followed by other Iranian-American talks with a view to calming persistent tensions over nuclear power, as illustrated by Tehran's latest decision on Saturday not to not renew the mandate of inspectors, French and German, who monitor its atomic installations? These talks have in fact already started in Oman - the other mediator of the Iranian-American crises - but no one knows whether they will be successful.