The kind of Middle East diplomacy that doesn't appear on a foreign ministry letterhead is what we're seeing now with a barrel of Iranian crude, a Pakistani field marshal and a phone call that apparently saved missiles from landing in Riyadh for three months.

Three officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Pakistan's military chief, Asim Munir, was able to negotiate an informal agreement through a joint oil transport company with the IRGC commander, Ahmad Vahidi, that involved Saudi Arabia agreeing not to be targeted by missiles from Tehran. The agreement was concluded in the final days of March, shortly after the United States and Israel began an air assault on Iran, and was first reported by the Times of Israel and later picked up by other media outlets in South Asian and Gulf countries, the account said.

It was a ridiculously simple mechanism. Munir dangled the business of a commercial enterprise that has been smuggling Iranian oil to Pakistan since late last year, and has reportedly made "out of the ordinary" profits for both men, especially since the American naval blockade cut off Iran's traditional oil export lines. Saudi Arabia remained largely unharmed for months following the deal, but on this past weekend it ended up taking its first hit from Iran since March, when it launched a missile at the kingdom. It was not a diplomatic protest or a UN Security Council session that followed. All Vahidi had to do was tell Munir that the strike would threaten their common business and since then no other missiles have fallen on Saudi soil.

The difficulty of the story landing is not only that the transaction is happening, but that it is an indicator of who is really making the rules of engagement in this war. One Middle Eastern diplomat quoted in the original report didn't hold back an insult, naming the scheme as “an effective form of legitimation of the ransom money that Iran has been demanding from all countries in the region, without facing any pressure.” A separate intelligence official said Munir's intention was different; if Saudi Arabia comes to Pakistan's mediation, then it will come to Pakistan's mediation in the future as well.

The story made its way from Singapore to New Delhi via at least half a dozen other sources within hours of the Times of Israel' coverage. One regional outlet wondered did Munir merely land on the geopolitical jackpot, benefiting from a scheme for smuggling oil out of the region and gaining huge political leverage in Riyadh as the only player who could check Tehran? The same themes were picked up by Indian wire services, with none of the three capitals, Islamabad, Tehran or Riyadh, saying anything public about confirmation or denial, leaving the whole thing in the "deniable space" where this type of shadow diplomacy flourishes.

And Pakistan is by no means the only nation in this grey market of protection arrangements. Abu Dhabi has emphatically denied unconfirmed charges that it has been holding billions of dollars of Iranian money to avoid being a target and then releasing the funds. An accusation also leveled against Qatar is that it offered to reduce gas production if Iran spares a key facility, an allegation Qatar has vehemently denied. The overall impression is of an area where formal ceasefire structures are falling behind a 'back channel' marketplace of deals brokered by generals, intelligence services and commission agents, not career diplomats.

The economic arguments employed by Munir are worth reading with. Pakistan ended the previous fiscal year with debts of approximately $27 billion from overseas financing, which was primarily in the form of rollovers and not new direct investment to build productive capacity, and exports dipped while foreign direct investment fell to less than $2 billion. Saudi Arabia is Islamabad's biggest bilateral lender with an estimated $8 billion in central bank deposits and a $1 billion oil financing facility at 6 percent interest. The rupee's recovery earlier this year was directly attributable to the money injections from the Gulf and Riyadh's money has served its purpose; and Pakistan's interest in keeping Saudi Arabia calm, grateful and indebted is much stronger than that of ideology or alliance politics it's a hard balance-of-payments interest.

It is the same reasoning that drives Islamabad's parallel efforts in Washington, where Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb is seeking a $10 billion stabilization fund from the United States, with the help of the goodwill he garnered as an intermediary between Iran and the United States. Economists have been stating their doubts in public, one of them from Oxford calling the request 'geopolitical rent' and a former US Treasury official declaring that Pakistan was now an 'IMF ward'. It is welcome news that S&P has just upgraded Pakistan's credit rating by a notch, but the greater issue is that the structural problem, as one Pakistani economist said, is that "fresh liquidity can buy time but not growth.

From that angle, the Munir-Vahidi oil affair is more of a symptom of a trend: financed regimes and middlemen who are struggling trying to make a buck and who have found a niche in the fissures of a conflict that formal negotiations have not been able to stem. It is almost irrelevant if the deal is ever officially confirmed by Riyadh, Washington or Tehran. For as long as the oil flowed, so did the missiles, and that is a story that could be a correlation without proof, but it still has a message to tell about the power in this conflict.