The Biden administration notified Congress on Monday that it had cleared an important hurdle, paving the way for a controversial deal with Iran that would see the release of five Americans detained in the country in exchange for unfreezing $6 billion in frozen cash.
The blanket waiver would transfer the money from South Korea to Qatar without being penalized by U.S. sanctions, the Associated Press reported.
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“To facilitate their release, the United States has committed to release five Iranian nationals currently held in the United States and to permit the transfer of approximately $6 billion in restricted Iranian funds held in (South Korea) to restricted accounts in Qatar, where the funds will be available only for humanitarian trade,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote.
Blinken signed off on the waiver, which will likely draw rebuke from Republicans and other critics who claim the deal would help stabilize Iran’s economy and could lead to heightened threats against U.S. troops and allies in the Middle East.
The blanket waiver means that banks in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East will not be violating U.S. sanctions by making the money available for Iran to use.
The money was a critical element for the prisoner release deal, which the United States had been working on quietly for two years, the New York Times reported last month.
“This is just the beginning of a process that I hope and expect will lead to their return home to the United States,” Blinken said in August. “There’s more work to be done to actually bring them home. My belief is that this is the beginning of the end of their nightmare.”
Iran has already released four of the five prisoners, who are dual American Iranian citizens, into house arrest, State Department officials said. The fifth detainee had been on house arrest before the deal went down.
People familiar with negotiations said the detainees could be back on U.S. soil as early as next week.
They include Siamak Namazi, Emad Sharghi, and Morad Tahbaz, along with two others who were not identified.
Namazi was detained in 2015 by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps while visiting his family in Tehran. Months later, his father, Baquer Namazi, was detained after going to Iran to visit his jailed son. They were both sentenced in 2016 to a decade behind bars for allegedly spying and cooperating with the U.S. government. The elder Namazi, a former Iranian provincial governor and former UNICEF official, was put on house arrest in 2018 and left Iran for medical treatment last year.
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Sharghi, a venture capitalist, had moved to Iran from the United States with his wife in 2017. He was arrested a year later while working for Saravan Holding, a tech investment company, but was released on bail after eight months. Though he was cleared of spying, he was not allowed to leave Iran. In 2020, he was summoned by the Revolutionary Court, which sentenced him to a decade in prison for espionage. Despite the verdict, he was initially imprisoned. He was arrested again in 2021 while trying to escape the country.
Tahbaz, a British American conservationist, was arrested in 2018 and sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2019 for “assembly and collusion against Iran’s national security” and “contacts with U.S. enemy government … for the purpose of spying,” Reuters reported.
