Inside the Treasury Department's War on Iran

FOREIGN POLICY

YOCHI DREAZEN

Last June, the Treasury Department announced hard-hitting new sanctions against an alleged Iranian front company, its main subsidiary, the subsidiary's subsidiary, and then, for good measure, the subsidiary's subsidiary's two subsidiaries. All the firms, Treasury said, were secretly controlled by the Iranian government.

The daisy chain of punitive measures, diagrammed on an unclassified PowerPoint presentation, highlight a rarely-discussed aspect of Washington's decade-long assault on the Iranian economy. The Treasury Department has gone after dozens of state-owned enterprises like the Iranian central bank, but it hasn't stopped there. Treasury analysts have also spent years painstakingly identifying Iranian front companies around the world, from construction firms to insurance companies, and then lashing each of them with sanctions. The measures have robbed Tehran of billions of dollars of much-needed cash.

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