HISTORY: The Pentagon Paid Moldova $40 Million for 21 MiG-29s So Iran Couldn’t Have Them. The Minister Who Signed the Deal Went to Prison for It. “In 1997, the United States quietly paid a former Soviet republic tens of millions of dollars to buy an entire fighter regiment — not to fly it, but to keep it away from Iran, and to take it apart. The Moldova deal is remembered as one of the Pentagon’s cleanest nonproliferation coups, and in one sense it was: the intelligence haul shaped American weapons for a decade. But the full story runs stranger than the legend, taking in a rationale Moscow disputed the same week, a defense minister who went to prison for signing it, and six fighter jets that no one on Earth would ever buy.”