Intelligence Brief · September 15, 2026 · NN-IB-2026-0915
Critical minerals, an investment screen, and Zanjani’s exchanges
USGS stockpile math, a CFIUS shortcut that is not a rubber stamp, and the January–July trail on Babak Zanjani.
Navy civic globe with gold dots marking mineral sites, ivory field. 01
The MCS 2026 ledger is still the minerals baseline
The U.S. Geological Survey’s Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 remains the earliest comprehensive public ledger of 2025 mine production, reserves, and trade for more than ninety nonfuel minerals. Version 1.3, dated May, is the copy this desk is using. The Survey’s accompanying news release put last year’s U.S. mine-production value higher than the year before, driven by precious-metal prices, and noted that the February drop coincided with the White House announcement of Project Vault — a critical-minerals stockpile aimed at rare earths, lithium, nickel, and related metals. That is a planning statement, not a warehouse inventory. What the two-page commodity sheets do show, metal by metal, is import dependence and who mines what. For a register that already isolates Federal briefs from local notices, the MCS is the open-source baseline: if a later sanctions action names a laterite pit or a refinery, the tonnage table is already on the public shelf.
Cite: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 (ver. 1.3, May 2026), doi:10.3133/mcs2026.
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CFIUS asked how to know an investor before the filing
Treasury’s Office of Investment Security asked the public, in a February 9 Federal Register notice, how the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States should run a Known Investor Program and otherwise shorten review without dropping the national-security screen. The request sits under the America First Investment Policy memorandum. The idea is not a rubber stamp. Investors who opt in would give CFIUS information before a formal filing so the committee can start due diligence earlier. Participation alone, Treasury wrote, would not guarantee an outcome. Comments were to appear on regulations.gov. Eight months later that docket is still the public record of how the committee wants to treat allied capital versus adversary-linked capital. This brief does not list transactions. It records the process document the committee put in the Federal Register.
Cite: 91 Fed. Reg. (Feb. 9, 2026) CFIUS Known Investor Program RFI, 2026-02481.
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BIS moved the drone endurance line from thirty minutes to three hours
On August 14 the Bureau of Industry and Security published an interim final rule streamlining export controls on certain unmanned aerial vehicles. The rule drops wind-gust tolerance as a control parameter, raises the national-security endurance threshold from thirty minutes to three hours, and keeps military end-use and end-user controls on the shorter-endurance machines. Software and technology for those lower-endurance drones lose national-security controls but not the military-end-use overlay. The Commerce Control List still flags UAVs specially designed for military use. A January IFR started the rewrite; the August document is the one now on the Federal Register. This desk does not treat a control-list edit as a battlefield report. It is a public rule about what a U.S. manufacturer may export, and to whom, without a national-security license.
Cite: 91 Fed. Reg. (Aug. 14, 2026) Streamlining Export Controls for Drone Exports, 2026-16628.
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Zanjani, Zedcex, and Zedxion are already on the SDN trail
On January 30 OFAC designated Babak Morteza Zanjani and two UK-registered digital-asset exchanges, Zedcex Exchange Ltd. and Zedxion Exchange Ltd., under E.O. 13902 for operating in Iran’s financial sector. The exchanges were also designated under E.O. 13224 for support to the IRGC. OFAC’s recent-actions notice for that day is the primary public listing. Treasury later said Zedcex had processed more than ninety-four billion dollars since 2022, and that Zedxion had listed Zanjani as a director when it registered in 2021. On July 24 Treasury designated four more individuals and nine entities in the same network, including support shops in Turkey and the UAE. This brief records those two 2026 rounds. It does not name an exchange that is not yet on a public designation dated today.
Cite: OFAC recent actions, Jan. 30, 2026 (Zanjani, Zedcex, Zedxion).
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