The Wall Street Journal:

By Benoit Faucon and Lara Seligman

A U.S. special operations team boarded a ship in the Indian Ocean last month and seized military-related articles headed to Iran from China, U.S. officials said, a rare interdiction operation at sea aimed at blocking Tehran from rebuilding its military arsenal.

The ship was several hundred miles off the coast of Sri Lanka when the operatives boarded it and confiscated the cargo before letting the vessel proceed, the officials said. The U.S. had been tracking the shipment, according to the officials and another person familiar with the operation.

The previously undisclosed raid was part of a Pentagon effort to disrupt the Islamic Republic’s clandestine military procurement after Israel and the U.S. inflicted heavy damage on its nuclear and missile facilities during a 12-day conflict in June.

It was the first time in recent years that the U.S. military is known to have intercepted cargo with Chinese origins on its way to Iran. The name of the ship and its owner couldn’t be determined.

The operation occurred weeks before the U.S. seized a sanctioned oil tanker on Wednesday off the coast of Venezuela that had been used to transport oil from Venezuela to Iran. It underscored the Trump administration’s use of aggressive maritime tactics against adversaries that the U.S. has rarely used in the recent past.

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, which carried out the operation, declined to comment. Spokespeople for Iran and China’s foreign ministry didn’t return requests for comment.

The cargo consisted of components potentially useful for Iran’s conventional weapons, one official said, adding that the shipment was destroyed. The seized components were dual-use items, with both civilian and military applications, the official said.

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