The transaction was a little more complex then that. Of course you can believe what you want.
It was a diplomatic maneuver that had some precedents. Often, to get deals done with a minimum loss of face, governments negotiate two or more issues, insisting they are separate. President John F. Kennedy, for example, agreed to move nuclear missiles out of Turkey as part of the 1962 agreement with the Soviet Union to end the Cuban missile crisis, but denied that the acts were linked. They clearly were.
Mr. Kirby argued that the timing was beneficial to the United States. “This was a sound decision made in the end game of two separate negotiation tracks,” he insisted. “It’s their money. They were going to get it anyway.”
Mr. Trump got into trouble this month when he described seeing secret Iranian government tapes of the handoff of the $400 million in Iran. His campaign later said he had been mistaken, that he had seen images of a different plane, in Geneva.
The original financial dispute arose because of military goods the United States sold to the shah of Iran, but never delivered after the Islamic Revolution and the taking of hostages inside the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979. The mullahs who overthrew the shah demanded back the money Iran had paid. The United States refused.
Thirty-five years ago, Iran and the United States agreed that a commission set up at The Hague would sort out that claim, among others. In recent years it became clear that the United States would lose the case and the only question was how the interest would be calculated.
The $1.7 billion the United States paid included accumulated interest on the original $400 million owed to Iran. Mr. Kirby pointed out that the United States’ paying back only $1.3 billion in interest rather than the billions more Iran had sought was one of the reasons the January deal was good for the United States.
“We were able to conclude multiple strands of diplomacy within a 24-hour period, including implementation of the nuclear deal, the prisoner talks and a settlement of an outstanding Hague Tribunal claim, which saved American taxpayers potentially billions of dollars,” he said, a reference to estimates that the United States would have had to pay far more if it lost the case in The Hague.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/19/world/middleeast/iran-us-cash-payment-prisoners.html?
