Wait.
Aren’t the payments to Iran quid pro quo?
...reports and cables written mainly in 2014 and 2015 by officers in Irans version of the C.I.A.
Seomething tells me that the USA version of the CIA knows damn little what Iran’s version of the CIA is up to.
These payments were not a quid pro quo as explained in the long detailed link below. This money dates back to Carter and Reagan and the overthrow of the Shah. Iran had alredy paid for weapons that we then did NOT deliver. More recently the case was being tried in international court with 3 US, 3 Iranian, and 3 neutral votes. It looked like we would loose and to reduce the likelihood of a very large payment that might take years to settle, we negotiated a more reasonable immediate settlement. We held up making the first agreed payment until some US hostages were actually being returned, but the Iranian press tried to paint this as a ransom, not a long worked on settlement of a very old debt.
https://www.vox.com/2016/9/7/12830688/us-iran-cash-payment-ransom