And in a few days, Obama will give them 100 billion dollars.
“Iran Holds Two U.S. Navy Boats After Mechanical Problems, Officials Say,” by Helene Cooper, New York Times, January 12, 2016:
WASHINGTON — The crews of two small United States Navy patrol boats were picked up by the Iranian authorities in the Persian Gulf on Tuesday after commanders lost contact with the vessels, and Pentagon officials said that Iran had agreed to return the sailors soon.
An official said that the boats appeared to have drifted into Iranian territorial waters after one of them experienced mechanical problems. The boats were moving between Kuwait and Bahrain when contact was lost late in the afternoon, a Defense Department official said.
The Pentagon said they had been on a routine training mission, but those waters are a frequent location for intelligence collection by the United States, Iran and many Gulf countries. A senior military official said he expected the sailors to remain held overnight and be released on Wednesday.
The detention of the 10 sailors comes at a particularly delicate moment in the tense American-Iranian relationship, just days before the formal implementation of a nuclear deal in which the United States is supposed to unfreeze about $100 billion in Iranian assets in return for the disablement of critical nuclear facilities….
Secretary of State John Kerry, an official said, was notified of the seizure of the sailors while meeting with top Philippine officials and Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter. Mr. Kerry broke off the meeting and called his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, with whom he spent months negotiating the nuclear accord.
Many American and Middle Eastern officials believe that recent actions by the Iranian Navy against American forces in the Gulf may be intended to embarrass Mr. Zarif and President Hassan Rouhani. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps was responsible for the military side of the nuclear program, and many of its senior officers have objected to the nuclear agreement.
The semiofficial Fars news agency in Iran said that the boats had illegally traveled more than a mile into Iranian territorial waters near Farsi Island, in the Persian Gulf, which is the home of a major Iranian naval base. It said that forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Navy had confiscated GPS equipment, which would “prove that the American ships where ‘snooping’ around in Iranian waters.”
But an American official said that military and diplomatic contacts with the Iranians had been professional, which he credited to the stepped-up engagement over the nuclear accord….