WAR OF WORDS
Inside a stately boardroom at the Federal Ministry of Finance in Berlin last April, U.S. Treasury Department officials meeting with their German counterparts described an elaborate Iranian operation that the Americans had uncovered. For several years, Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had been using German front companies to buy advanced printing machinery, watermarked paper and specialty inks in violation of European export controls. The IRGC had then printed counterfeit Yemeni bank notes potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars and used them to help fund its proxy war against the beleaguered pro-U.S. government in the capital of Sana‘a. German companies, the Americans said, were being used as a cover by the Iranians to finance the world’s worst humanitarian conflict.
The evidence, uncovered by U.S. illicit-finance investigators, was meant to sway the Germans, but not just in hopes of countering Iran’s moves on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. The larger mission, according to other Treasury documents later used in a presentation and reviewed by TIME, was to convince Berlin that Tehran cannot be trusted and that the Germans should join the Trump Administration in imposing economy-crippling sanctions on Iran. Weeks later, the American officials presented their hosts with one last set of documents: detailed blueprints on how the Trump Administration was preparing to unleash financial warfare on the Iranian economy.
For many, U.S.-Iran tensions are defined by President Trump’s occasionally flamboyant outbursts, including a late July 22 all-caps tweet that appeared to threaten Tehran with military attack. But the low-grade confrontation between the two countries has been intensifying almost from the moment they and five major powers signed the landmark 2015 nuclear deal known officially as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). That deal brought Iran’s nuclear program under tight international controls, but freed it from heavy sanctions. Tehran has been causing trouble for the U.S. and its allies ever since.
