To a person, Republicans welcomed the news this month that five Americans had been released from a notorious Iranian prison and transferred to a hotel in Tehran as the first step in a U.S. negotiation aimed at eventually bringing them home.
But when officials in the Biden administration confirmed that the hostage deal included not only the release of five Iranians from U.S. prisons but also the transfer of $6 billion in Korean won frozen under U.S. sanctions in two South Korean banks, Republicans were in lockstep in their condemnation.
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“Biden has authorized the largest ransom payment in American history to the Mullahs in Tehran,” former Vice President and presidential candidate Mike Pence posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“Unfreezing $6 billion dollars in Iranian assets dangerously further incentivizes hostage-taking and provides a windfall for regime aggression,” posted Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “The Biden Admin must punish those who use Americans as political pawns and work to end this practice.”
“For decades, standing U.S. policy was to refuse ransom payments, a legacy continued by President Trump, who secured the release of two American hostages from Iran without offering a cent of financial relief,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a press release.
When the outlines of the yet-to-be-completed deal leaked, the White House and State Department immediately went into spin mode.
“Iran will not be receiving any sanctions relief,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “Iran’s own funds would be used and transferred to restricted accounts such that the monies can only be used for humanitarian purposes.”
“This is not a ransom,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on CNN. “The account from which money could be accessed by the Iranians is an account set up in the previous administration.”
The funds in question were from money due Tehran for Iranian oil imported by South Korea in 2018 and 2019, but placed in escrow subject to U.S. approval, under an exemption to U.S. sanctions.
“No U.S. taxpayer dollars involved here,” Kirby said. “What we’re talking about is the possibility of making that one account that has been in existence for several years more accessible to the Iranians … and there is an oversight mechanism that’s already built into that process, so it’s not ransom.”
“There is no chance this money is ultimately going to be used for humanitarian purposes,” former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo scoffed in an essay posted on the American Center for Law and Justice website. “Team Biden knows this because money is fungible. That means that even if every cent released to the regime is in fact used for humanitarian purposes — an improbable outcome in itself — the regime will still be free to allocate more resources to fund terror and mayhem on America’s partners and allies.”
The undeniable reality of hostage deals is that, whether they involve the payment of cash ransom or are a straight prisoner-for-prisoner swap, they inevitably beget more hostage-taking.
Three months after the Biden administration traded notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout, known as the “Merchant of Death,” for WNBA star Brittney Griner, Russia took Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich hostage.
Families, and even the hostages themselves, know that paying ransom is a counterproductive strategy, but they fear the alternative is indefinite confinement, usually in brutally harsh conditions.
Among the five hostages now under house arrest in Tehran is Siamak Namazi, an Iranian American who’s been held the longest, almost eight years, and whose father was also imprisoned when he traveled to see his son.
“He spent first two years being detained in the toughest part of Evin Prison by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, subjected to very, very terrible conditions of detention,” Jared Genser, a lawyer for the family, told CNN International. “Siamak himself has been left behind three times, once by President Obama in the 2016 nuclear deal and two more times by President Trump.”
Frustrated, Namazi gave a prison phone interview to CNN, risking retaliation from his tormentors.
“I spent months caged in a solitary cell that was the size of a closet, sleeping on the floor, being fed like a dog from under the door,” he said. “Honestly, the other hostages and I desperately need President Biden to finally hear us out, to finally hear our cry for help and bring us home. And I suppose desperate times call for desperate measures. So, this is a desperate measure.”
Left behind in the deal that freed Griner after 10 months was Paul Whelan, a former Marine, sentenced to 16 years in prison for spying after a Russian agent allegedly framed him by passing him an incriminating flash drive that was supposed to contain innocuous wedding photos.
Russia wants another high-value prisoner for him.
Jason Rezaian, a journalist jailed by Iran for 544 days between 2014 and 2016 and now a columnist for the Washington Post, said he understands the debate over the “merits and the wisdom of doing these kinds of deals,” but he told CNN, “The reality is that if you don’t do a deal, you’re leaving Americans behind.”
“The question is, then, what do you do? Do you let an innocent American citizen who’s a father, a brother just die in a foreign prison? Do you do nothing to bring them home?” said Neda Sharghi, whose brother Emad is one of the five Americans Iran is using as a bargaining chip.
“What do we answer to this?” Sharghi continued. “How can we let an innocent American man perish in a foreign prison? Especially one who has been taken because he’s an American.”
“It is never wrong to bring an American home,” said Tara Tahbaz, whose father, Morad, like Emad, has been wrongfully detained since his arrest in 2018.
“They need to come home first, and then we need to figure out how we deter this in the future,” Tahbaz said in an interview along with Sharghi on CNN. “I mean, they have a blue passport, and they should be afforded the protection of their country.”
In an opinion piece in the New York Times titled “How Much Is an American Hostage Worth?” conservative journalist Bret Stephens says there’s a better way to deter ransom demands than making repeated concessions to terrorists or terrorist states.
“Every time Iran takes another hostage, the administration imposes another sanction. Every time Iran or its proxies attack a single U.S. military installation, the United States retaliates against multiple Iranian targets. Every time Iran supplies offensive weapons to Russia or other outlaw states, the United States supplies long-range fire and other advanced munitions to Ukraine,” Stephens argues. “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun.”
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“Of course we welcome home Americans who are wrongfully detained anywhere in the world, but we should be clear-eyed about what’s going to happen here. This is going to encourage Iran and other enemies to take more American hostages because they see that it pays,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity. “They may release the current hostages, but they can easily reverse their promises and just take another set of hostages.”
“That $6 billion is not going to go to support widows and orphans in Iran,” Cotton added. “It’s going to go to support attacks on our troops, to fund terrorism to support attacks on Israel, to arm Russia. That’s what that money is going to go for, so this is a shameful and craven act of appeasement.”
