The past week marked another anniversary of my daughter Alisa’s murder in a 1995 Iranian-sponsored terrorist attack—an attack that forced a question the United States is still struggling to answer. And that is not only who carries out acts of terror, but who finances them—and whether America is willing to confront those financial networks when they operate in plain sight.
That question is back in the news with a newly announced settlement between the U.S. government and the Iranian-linked Alavi Foundation over its Manhattan skyscraper at 650 Fifth Ave.
The deal has been framed as accountability. Victims of Iranian terror will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation. The foundation itself will be dismantled. On paper, it sounds like justice.
But look more closely.
A newly created entity, the Amir Kabir Foundation, will take control of the same building, with overlapping leadership, similar institutional structures and continued access to the very revenue streams that made the property so valuable in the first place.
After nearly two decades of litigation, the question is not simply what was won, but what was preserved. I have been thinking about that question for a long time.
In the 1990s, long before this case became a headline, I set out to do something that was widely dismissed at the time—to seize Iranian assets in the United States as part of my effort to hold the Islamic Republic accountable for my daughter’s murder.
Following a trail that began with little more than a database search and a series of title reports, we uncovered what seemed increasingly clear—that the Alavi Foundation was not an ordinary charity, but an instrument of the Iranian government, tied directly to a valuable office tower in Manhattan.
We went to court with what we believed was a straightforward argument: This was Iranian money, held behind a charitable facade, and it should be subject to seizure.
The response from the U.S. government was swift—and dismissive.
Federal lawyers produced an affidavit asserting that the foundation had no connection to Iran. The courts accepted it. The governing legal doctrine required proof of “day-to-day control” by a foreign government. Without that, the assets were deemed untouchable.
It did not matter what the building represented. It did not matter what the evidence suggested. In fact, much of that evidence would later surface in the government’s own case. We had not met the standard, and the case was dismissed.
At the time, it felt like failure. In retrospect, it was something else: an early test of whether the United States was prepared to treat economic infrastructure tied to hostile regimes as part of the battlefield.
Years later, the government answered that question differently and more honestly.
In its own filings, the U.S. Department of Justice ultimately described what we had been arguing all along: that the building was tied to an Iranian government-owned bank, that its ownership had been concealed through a web of front companies and that the structure had been orchestrated at the highest levels of the Iranian regime.
What had once been dismissed as insufficient proof became the government’s central claim.
Using legal theories that closely tracked the arguments we had advanced, the Justice Department brought its own case against the Alavi Foundation. This time, the government was willing to say plainly what it had once resisted—that these were hidden Iranian assets, and they could be reached.
The result was a landmark forfeiture. The building we had once tried to seize was finally taken, and its proceeds designated, in part, for victims of terror.
That shift matters. It reflects a broader evolution in how the United States confronts state-sponsored terrorism—not only through military means, but through financial and legal pressure.
But evolution is not the same as resolution. Because what the latest settlement reveals is that even when the United States recognizes the threat, it does not always follow through to its logical conclusion.
The government extracted substantial financial penalties and compensation. That is meaningful. But the structure of the deal raises an unavoidable question: If the same networks, the same leadership circles and the same institutional DNA remain in place under a new name, has the underlying problem truly been addressed?
Or has it simply been repackaged?
Some observers have described this as a shell game—accountability on paper, continuity in practice. It is an uncomfortable description. It is also difficult to dismiss.
I encountered this tension decades ago. It hasn’t disappeared.
The Alavi case shows how long it can take for the United States to recognize a threat—and how difficult it remains to confront it fully.
We have learned how to seize the assets. We are still learning how not to give them back.
