On Thursday, a 60-year-old Japanese crime boss appeared in a New York court to respond to charges that he helped traffic illicit material from Myanmar to Thailand. You might expect this to be a story about the Southeast Asian drug trade – it’s a vibrant business after all. In fact the supposed Yakuza boss, Takeshi Ebisawa, was allegedly caught trying to supply uranium and weapons-grade plutonium to an undercover DEA agent purporting to know a general in Iran. According to the court documents, Ebisawa and his Thai partner, who are being held in a Brooklyn jail, had been able acquire the nuclear material from an ethnic insurgent group in Myanmar.

The Islamic Republic has long used its sprawling global reach to advance its shady military, political and economic goals. As it battles some of the most extensive sanctions in modern history, it uses a variety of illicit methods – including links with transnational crime groups and fellow rogue regimes.

In the 1980s, as Iran found itself in a prolonged war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, it had to overcome its international isolation by finding unusual paths for purchasing weapons. It forged strong alliances with fellow anti-western regimes like North Korea, Syria and Libya. In the same period, Tehran launched inquiries into producing clandestine unconventional weapons, some of which, such as chemical weapons, it never pursued, given the religious opposition of regime founder Ayatollah Khomeini (Iran was itself soon to be a victim of Saddam’s chemical attacks). One early important connection was with neighbouring Pakistan, a fellow Muslim country with many long-lasting cultural links to Iran. In 1984, the West German intelligence agency revealed that Iran was receiving uranium from Pakistan. It was the first-ever Western intelligence reporting on Islamic Republic’s nuclear efforts. The extent of Iran’s program was only revealed in 2002, leading to a nuclear crisis that is still unfolding.

Pakistan was a natural partner for Iran’s nuclear program since it was home to Abdul Qadeer Khan, a nuclear physicist who emerged as the head of a global empire of illicit nuclear trade. After 9/11, Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharaf was working closely with the Bush White House, and his government pushed AQ Khan to reveal the precise nature of the work he had been doing with Iran. Musharaf also collaborated with the investigations of the UN’s atomic watchdog. The UN quickly confirmed the Pakistani origins of much of Iran’s apparatus of centrifuges. In February 2004, Khan was dragged on Pakistani national TV and he confessed to working with Iran on nuclear material from 1989 to 1991.

Khan and Iran had been able to overcome sanctions by creating a robust international network of co-conspirators. They set up shell companies in Dubai and China. They worked with many German engineers and businessmen. They got help from Japanese companies. Iran’s international reach has only increased since then. The regime’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) maintains an external operations branch, known as the Quds Force, that has organised allied militias in Middle Eastern countries but also in places as far as Paraguay and Central African Republic.

Hezbollah, in Lebanon, is its most impressive creation, founded in the early 1980s on the initiative of Iranians. In the past few decades, Hezbollah has learnt how to use the diasporic reach of the Lebanese Shia to do Iran’s bidding. It has established links with Mexico’s Los Zetas cartel. In 2021, the busting of a corrupt mayor in the Mexico’s state of Michoacan revealed the relations between Hezbollah and Unidos cartel. My own investigations have shown significant presence by Hezbollah in the tri-border area between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. The zone has long been home to Hezbollah’s successful attempts to recruit Shia migrants who settled in cities such as Paraguay’s Ciudad Del Este after fleeing Lebanon’s long civil war of 1975-1990. Hezbollah and its local partners are now deeply integrated in the criminal activities in the area, and are effectively recognised as a local power by other gangs and by authorities in the three countries. In 2011, the extent of Iran’s links with cartels were revealed when two IRGC men were indicted in New York for a plot to hire a Mexican cartel to kill the Saudi ambassador to the US by bombing a restaurant in Washington DC.

Allegations that the Japanese mafia is involved in Iran’s clandestine activities is relatively new but not entirely unprecedented. In a speech he gave in September 2012, David Cohen, then Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at US Department of Treasury, listed Yakuza alongside the Islamic Republic, Assad’s regime in Syria and the Russian mafia Brothers’ Circle as being targeted as ‘terrorist financiers and WMD proliferators.’ In the underground crime world, there has long been connections between gangs operating between Japan and Iran, with some having been recruited by the IRGC in recent years.

Governments such as China, Belarus, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and North Korea have been Iran’s most crucial partners in its underground trade, but the Iranian regime has circumvented sanctions for decades through links that exist all over the world, often with private companies. In December 2009, an airplane was seized in Thailand and charged with sending illegal material from North Korea to Iran. The plane belonged to the Emirates, had been licensed in Georgia, was rented by a New Zealander and sublet to a company in Hong Kong.

As Iran finds itself in a vulnerable state and without an effective deterrence, the Iranian regime is seriously considering steps toward a nuclear weapon. Previous western intelligence estimates believed that work on an Iranian nuclear weapons program was almost entirely stopped in 2003. The head of that program was Iran’s own AQ Khan, the IRGC’s nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. In November 2020, he was assassinated near Tehran in an Israeli operation. Some in Tehran have long believed that his ambitions should be revived and continued. If the West wants to stop a nuclear Iran, it will have to work quickly.