After Success on Iran, U.S. Treasury’s Sanctions Team Faces New Challenges

This is what the modern American war room looks like: the clocks on the wall show the times in Kabul, Tehran and Bogota. The faces around the conference table are mostly young. There is talk of targets, and of middle-of-the-night calls to Europe.

But the meeting one recent morning convened deep within the Treasury Department, not the Pentagon. The weapons at hand were not drones or cruise missiles, but financial sanctions, aimed with similar precision at U.S. rivals' economic interests.

Before discussing possible next steps against Russia over its annexation of Crimea, Adam Szubin, the slim, boyish-looking director of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), thanked his team for putting in a string of sleepless nights to devise sanctions against senior Russian officials and associates of President Vladimir Putin.

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“OFAC is probably one of the most powerful government agencies no one's ever heard of,” said Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, which backs tough sanctions on Iran over its suspected nuclear weapons work.

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