A US Navy sailor directs a Super Puma helicopter aboard USS Abraham Lincoln during operations near Iran.
The investigation found that one agency, identified as MOD 346428, imported military-related goods worth $2.3 billion between January 2025 and June 2026. Reuters identified more than 5,000 agencies with names beginning with MOD, followed by a five or six-digit number. Iran has continued importing materials that can be used to build missiles and drones despite Western sanctions and a US naval blockade, with a Reuters investigation uncovering a network of thousands of agencies and overseas intermediaries involved in military procurement. The shipments included explosives, rocket-fuel ingredients, aircraft engine parts and heavy-duty trucks that can be modified to carry missile launchers. The entities shared a registered address with Iran’s Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces Logistics, known as MODAFL.
The investigation, conducted with Israeli-American risk consultancy 240 Analytics, examined Iranian banking and government records, corporate filings and shipping data.
“What you have here is the regime’s military lifeline during this conflict and for many years before,” said Miad Maleki, a former senior US Treasury official who helped design American sanctions against Iran. 97% of the shipments it reviewed were settled “without currency transfer”, making the transactions harder to trace through conventional cross-border payments, according to Reuters. Such equipment can have civilian uses, but weapons experts who reviewed the findings said many of the items could support missile and drone production. “This looks like an industrial-scale effort to rebuild or expand Iran’s existing fleet” of drones and missiles, said Peter Salisbury, an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University who researches Iranian arms transfers and supply chains.
It found that the agencies used foreign intermediaries and shell companies to purchase goods for Iran’s military. Rather than relying on direct payments from Iran to foreign suppliers, the network used intermediaries who could pay for goods from overseas bank accounts. The materials included chemicals used in rocket propellants, detonators, titanium and precision machinery.