Senior Pentagon officials were excluded from the Obama administration’s internal debate over sending $1.7 billion to Iran earlier this year, the officials revealed on Thursday.
“The chairman and I were not involved in that,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter told Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, while testifying alongside Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “It is a decision that was taken by the law enforcement and the diplomatic community.”
President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry agreed to settle a decades-old dispute with Iran over a broken arms deal, timed to coincide with the release of four American hostages. After receiving the money, Iranian leaders raised their official military budget by “exactly the same amount as the U.S. settlement payment,” according to GOP senators.
Cruz asked Dunford if the payment would “incentiviz[e] positive behavior from Iran,” which prompted the admission of ignorance about the deal.
“I don’t know the details of that arrangement, and it really was a political decision that was made to provide that money,” Dunford said.
The Joint Chiefs chairman also declined to say if the deal amounted to a ransom payment. “Our policy in the past is that we don’t pay ransom for hostages, and I think that’s held us in good stead in the past,” he said. “But again, I don’t know the arrangements that were made in this particular case, and I can’t make a judgment as to whether or not that’s what we did. All I’ve done is read the open source reporting on that.”
Cruz quoted one of the hostages, who said that the plane taking them out of the country wasn’t allowed to depart until after the money arrived. But State Department officials have insisted that they did not pay ransom, but instead used the money as “leverage” to make sure that the Iranians followed through on the prisoner release.
“If your top priority is to get your Americans out and you’re already having some issues about locating some of them, [then] you want to make sure that that release gets done before you complete that transaction,” State Department press secretary John Kirby explained.
