WASHINGTON (JTA) — Several Obama administration-era security officials are claiming that the administration’s pursuit of the Iran nuclear deal frustrated their pursuit of what they described as Hezbollah’s expanding drug-dealing empire.

Politico in a long article published over the weekend quoted on the record three officials who ran Operation Cassandra, a task force principally run by the Drug Enforcement Agency, as saying their efforts to bring down the Lebanon-based terror group’s drug-running network was derailed in part because of the progress made by the administration during its second term in securing the nuclear agreement.

The network, they said, was particularly expansive in Latin America, and financed Hezbollah’s arms purchases and terror operations.

Obama administration officials quoted in the article denied that the Iran deal drove the obstructions faced by the former Cassandra officials, saying that interagency spats and broader concerns about U.S. interests caused the problems.

Politico paraphrased an unnamed former Obama administration official as saying factors included “the fear of reprisals by Hezbollah against the United States and Israel, and the need to maintain peace and stability in the Middle East.” At least one of the incidents, a derailed anti-drug mission in Colombia, predated the Obama administration.

The assessments by the three officials are based on their recall of interactions with other unnamed officials during Obama’s two terms and their impressions.

The officials are Jack Kelly, the DEA supervisory agent who led the Cassandra task force and is now retired; Derek Maltz, who headed DEA’s Special Operations Division until 2014 and now directs a security consultancy; and David Asher, who was a Pentagon illicit finance analyst and is now an adviser to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“They will believe until death that we were shut down because of the Iran deal,” Maltz said of his colleagues. “My gut feeling? My instinct as a guy doing this for 28 years is that it certainly contributed to why we got pushed aside and picked apart. There is no doubt in my mind.”

There were a number of arrests and prosecutions during the period the article covers, but the agents said their requests for broader racketeering prosecutions — which would have allowed them to piece together disparate alleged crimes into a conspiracy — were consistently turned down and that diplomatic support was lacking.

The former Cassandra officials cited among others the case of Ali Fayad a Ukraine-based arms merchant detained in 2014 by Czech authorities. Czech authorities released Fayad in 2016, reportedly under pressure from Russia, and he was allowed to return to Lebanon.

Fayad was indicted in the United States for plotting the murders of U.S. officials, providing support to a terrorist organization and attempting to smuggle anti-aircraft missiles. The Obama administration protested the release after the fact, but the agents said it did little to pressure to the Czechs to extradite him to the United States.

The Iran nuclear deal traded sanctions relief for Iran’s rollback of its nuclear program. Israel’s government and a number of pro-Israel groups — among them the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — vehemently criticized the deal.

Hezbollah, which launched a war with Israel in 2006, is a U.S.-designated terrorist group with deep ties inside Lebanon’s government. It is allied with Iran and has joined that country in propping up the Assad regime in Syria during the civil war that has raged there since 2011.

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