The Revolutionary Guard does not ordinarily talk to American media. So when Commander Mohammad Reza Naqdi, top adviser to the IRGC’s overall commander, sat down with PBS NewsHour in Tehran, it was a departure from a media strategy long on Lego Trump and short on any actual journalism. Naqdi sounded cool and confident — a far cry from the image Donald Trump or Pete Hegseth have painted of a desperate regime in disarray. The questions were soft, but I was left with one inescapable conclusion: America has been caught in a sophisticated geopolitical trap that was decades in the making.
Our recent Baku investigation revealed how a marriage of criminal elements and intelligence fronts from the old Soviet bloc and Iran laid the groundwork for where we are today — starting when they licensed the Trump Tower hotel in Baku, Azerbaijan, and running through the millions of laundered dollars we traced through that hotel. The Iranians did not stumble into this war. They built the trap over decades, and in Donald Trump they found a man willing to step into it.
