With war raging in the Middle East, we want to bring you as many trusted voices on the news as we can. One such voice is the Israeli journalist Amit Segal. He writes a daily newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel, which we’re pleased to publish in The Free Press.
In Iran, more than almost any of the generals and military figures, there is one man whose elimination might truly cause the regime to topple. The man could have been a Silicon Valley billionaire; instead, he joined the Revolutionary Guards: Babak Zanjani, the architect of Iran’s crypto-based sanctions-evasion system.
Zanjani’s is a fascinating story: the son of a railway worker who became a businessman and built a global empire of dozens of companies across Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, and Tajikistan—designed specifically to bypass sanctions. In 2013, he was arrested for allegedly embezzling $2.7 billion from Iran’s oil revenues and sentenced to death in 2016—but the sentence was never carried out. It turned out the architect of its shadow economy was more valuable to the regime alive than dead. Before and during his arrest he was a media fascination, and was the most famous prisoner in the history of the Islamic Republic. After his gamble on the explosion of crypto netted major returns for the regime, Zanjani was released under supervision in 2025.
