As Eli Lake reveals at Bloomberg, President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry never told top defense officials, including Secretary of Defense Ash Carter or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, about sending $400 million in cash to Iran in January.
This information was made public on Thursday at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Prompted by a question from Senator Ted Cruz about the cash payment, Carter argued that the payment was part of a decades-old quarrel between Iran and the U.S. over arms sales, asserting, “We weren’t involved in this. I don’t know all the details of it, and the chairman and I were not involved in that. It is a decision that was taken by the law enforcement and diplomatic and I would refer you there.”
Dunford echoed, “I am not trying to be evasive but I don’t know the details of that arrangement and it really was a political decision that was made to provide that money and I don’t think it’s appropriate that I comment on that.”
Christopher Sherwood, a press officer at the Pentagon, spoke to Lake after the hearing, admitting, “It was worked out through the administration. The Department of Defense had nothing to do with that.”
The State Department had insisted that the payment by asserting the decision was made through an inter-agency process. State Department Deputy Spokesman Mark Toner said on August 4, “There’s always an interagency discussion around any decision like this, and every relevant agency weighs in.”
But now it appears the Pentagon was not part of the decision at all; that kind of secrecy was also evident, as The Weekly Standard reported, when members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, including its chairman Senator Bob Corker, were left in the dark regarding wire payments to Iran, which were made before the cash payment.
The chasm between the Pentagon and the White House has been illuminated more fully recently; Robert Gates, Obama’s first secretary of defense, said in his memoir that senior White House staff. Treated him badly; Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense between 2011 and 2013, told the New York Times Magazine he had never seen the correspondence between Obama and Iran’s Supreme Leader; Chuck Hagel, who succeeded Panetta, told Foreign Policy the White House meant to destroy him.