Obama’s alternative facts on Iran

When the Obama administration sold its Iran nuclear deal to the United States Congress in 2015, one of its primary arguments was that the agreement was narrow. It lifted only nuclear sanctions.

America, President Barack Obama said, would remain a vigilant foe of Iran’s regional predations through sanctions and other means.

Thanks to stunning new reporting from Politico’s Josh Meyer, we can now assess these assertions and conclude that they are, well, ‘‘alternative facts’’.

Meyer reports that while the US and other great powers were negotiating a deal to bring transparency to Iran’s nuclear programme, top officials in Obama’s government dismantled a campaign, known as Operation Cassandra, intended to undermine Hizbollah’s global drug trafficking and money laundering network.

A few months after the implementation of that bargain in January 2016, Operation Cassandra was ripped apart and bad guys got away.

Hizbollah is many things: a Lebanese political party, a militia and a Shi’ite religious movement. It is also an arm of Iranian foreign policy. Hizbollah shock troops fight alongside Iran’s Revolutionary Guard commanders in Syria and Iraq. Iran uses the group’s operatives for international terror attacks in Latin America. Hizbollah’s advanced arsenal is supplied by the Iranian state. Hizbollah’s drug trafficking provides the revenue it needs to spread mayhem. To curb that trafficking is to starve Iran’s primary proxy.

The Obama administration believed cracking down on Hizbollah’s trafficking would undermine nuclear negotiations.

The details are troubling. One example involves Ali Fayad, a suspected Hizbollah operative who reported directly to Russian president Vladimir Putin as a weapons supplier in Iraq and Syria. In 2014, Fayad was arrested by Czech authorities.

Meyer reports that even though Fayad was indicted by US courts for planning the murder of US officials, ‘‘top Obama administration officials declined to apply serious pressure on the Czech government to extradite him to the US, even as Putin was lobbying aggressively against it’’.

If the Trump administration had let Fayad slip through the net of law enforcement, that would be a five-alarm scandal. And yet for Obama, this was part of a pattern. Obama never asked Syria’s neighbours to deny fly-over rights to Russian aircraft in 2015, which could have slowed or prevented Putin from establishing air bases in Syria that were used to bomb civilians and aid workers.

Russia established those air bases less than two months after the end of the Iran nuclear negotiations. The chief of Iran’s Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani, also saw the close of the nuclear talks as a green light.

Obama officials reached for comment disputed elements of Meyer’s reporting. Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for Obama, pointed to some European arrests of Hizbollah operatives after the implementation of the nuclear deal. But Meyer says officials with Operation Cassandra noted that these suspects were nabbed after the Obama Justice Department shot down efforts to prosecute these operatives in US courts.

A particularly cringe-inducing response came from a senior national security official who suggested, anonymously, to Meyer that agents in a DEA operation might unwittingly botch a CIA or Israeli intelligence operation within Hizbollah.

That’s doubtful, at least for the CIA.

So was all of this worth it? We know what the West got out of the nuclear deal – a temporary suspension of Iran’s nuclear programme and increased transparency into its stockpiles, enrichment facilities and laboratories.

At the time, the Obama administration told us that in exchange, the US had to lift only the crippling nuclear sanctions against Iran. It turns out the price was much higher.

❚ Eli Lake is a Bloomberg View columnist.