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In January 2016, the Obama administration successfully negotiated the release of four Americans who had been imprisoned in Iran in exchange for the release of seven Iranians who had been imprisoned in the United States.(A fifth American prisoner was released separately.) At around the same time, the U.S. airlifted the equivalent of USD $400 million in various currencies to Tehran, sparking conspiracy theories about the timing: As with other issues that would normally fall by the wayside in a normal daily news cycle, the payout to Iran became prime fodder for yet another election-year debate: However, the $400 million dollar transfer was actually an openly announced one, paid in settlement of a nearly 40-year dispute between Iran and the United States — a settlement that likely saved the United States several billion dollars. Back in late 1979, after Iranian revolutionaries took 52 Americans hostage at the US Embassy in Tehran, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Iran and froze Iranian assets in America. Among those frozen assets was a $400 million delivery of fighter jets from the U.S. that Iran’s previous government had already paid for. Although the American hostages were finally released a year later, issues such as the frozen Iranian assets (including that $400 million) were not settled at that time. Instead, an international court based in the Hague, the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal was established to deal with such legal claims. The tribunal process dragged on for years and years without a ruling on the $400 million being issued, and finally, when arbitration process was apparently about to wind up (quite possibly not in American's favor), the U.S. agreed to pay Iran back the $400 million principal along with $1.3 billion in interest. If the issue had gone to the tribunal for a decision, as was expected, the U.S. could have been on the hook for the full $10 billion in compensation Iran was seeking. It is true the U.S. agreed to the settlement at the same time it was negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran and for the return of four U.S. citizens who had been detained by Iran. However, the negotiations over these these issues were conducted by completely separate teams in order to avoid any overlap or suggestions of connections between them. As Vox noted, charges that the U.S. had paid ransom to Iran for the release of hostages didn't even make logical sense: Even though the Obama administration openly announced the settlement in January 2016, it wasn't until several months later that claims the U.S. had offered a ransom payment began to circulate due to spin from some Iranian officials. But Vox also noted that spin wasn't too credible: On 18 August 2016, the Obama administration acknowledged that delivery of the $400 million payment due to Iran in settlement of the dispute over payment for military equipment had been held up until officials were sure that American prisoners Iran had agreed to free in a separate deal were safely away: The fact that the money was physically sent to Iran in various currencies rather than simply transferred by wire may seem odd in the context of the United States' increasingly cashless society, but that was done in order to avoid existing Treasury Department sanctions that banned the use of American currency in transactions with Iran, and international sanctions which at that time kept Iran from accessing the global financial markets (and which were lifted in January 2016).
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