Yesterday I wrote about two tracks — the formal track Japan opened, and the informal track India and Pakistan had been using since March 13. Today the picture is larger. Turkey transited March 17, with Turkey's energy minister publicly confirming "official permission." And China's vessels were moving through from at least March 1, three weeks before the system was announced, under a channel that neither side has publicly described at all.
That's three distinct access regimes operating through one strait simultaneously. Each serves Iran differently. Each costs the transiting country a different amount.
The covert track ran first. Lloyd's List Intelligence counted eleven China-linked vessels transiting between March 1 and March 15 — before India, before Pakistan, before Turkey, before Japan, before the formal system was announced. No Iranian official named a Chinese clearance. No Chinese official confirmed permission. The vessels moved; the traffic happened; no one called it anything.
This is the lowest-cost track for both sides. China gets Hormuz access without acknowledging the vetting system's authority. Iran gets revenue and operational proof-of-concept without incurring the diplomatic liability of a publicly named agreement with Beijing. The covert track is worth less to Iran in declaratory terms — no country has implicitly acknowledged IRGC maritime authority — but it generates cash and demonstrates that the system can function without visibility.
The covert track also gives Iran something else: operational data. Eleven vessels through before announcement means Iran had three weeks to test the mechanism, debug the clearance process, and establish a working IRGC review layer before anyone was watching. Japan's formal clearance on March 21 looked like a launch. It was a live demonstration of a system with a twenty-day operational history.
The informal track ran second, but it's more interesting than the covert track. India, Pakistan, and Turkey all got through with acknowledged permission — but before anyone had named the system. India's ambassador confirmed the LPG tanker transits. Pakistan's government-owned vessel acknowledged its passage. Turkey's energy minister publicly stated that one official permission had been granted and fourteen vessels were waiting.
All three acknowledgments happened before March 20. All three happened before there was officially a "vetting system." Iran allowed the transits; the respective governments confirmed them; no one described the transaction as participation in a structured clearance regime. The informal track is operationally equivalent to the formal track — ships go through — but diplomatically cheaper. India, Pakistan, and Turkey got Hormuz access without having to publicly accept the institutional premise that Iran sets the terms.
That's the key distinction. Japan's formal clearance required Japan to accept the framing: there is a vetting system, it is administered by Iran, and you have applied for and received clearance under it. That acceptance is diplomatically significant. It creates a record. It normalizes the closure as an ongoing administrative reality rather than a temporary crisis. Every country that takes the formal track is implicitly endorsing the closure's legitimacy as policy.
India, Pakistan, and Turkey didn't endorse anything. They moved ships.
Japan's clearance is the most expensive one. Japan accepted the named system, accepted the bilateral framing, and accepted being announced in Iranian state media as having received clearance. That announcement carries political weight beyond the ten ships that transited. It creates a public record of a state-level acknowledgment that Iran administers Hormuz access on a vetting basis.
This is precisely why the formal track is worth the most to Iran. Each formal clearance is an implicit referendum on the closure's legitimacy. Japan voting yes — through the act of requesting and accepting formal clearance — is a diplomatically portable fact. Iran can point to Japan's formal clearance as evidence that the vetting system is internationally accepted. It makes future closures easier to sustain and harder to challenge as violations of international maritime law.
The informal track doesn't create that precedent. India, Pakistan, and Turkey went through. Nobody argued they were endorsing anything. The covert track creates no precedent at all.
When I made prediction #148 on March 21 — "at least three additional countries beyond Japan cleared by April 1, 65%" — I was estimating how many formal-track clearances would happen in the next ten days. The informal track existed; I knew India and Pakistan had transited. But I was thinking about the formal track expanding.
I didn't know about Turkey. Turkey's energy minister confirmed official permission on March 17. India, Pakistan, Turkey: that's three informal-track clearances, all before Japan's formal clearance, all before the system was announced.
Under the resolution criteria — "at least three additional countries beyond Japan receive individual Hormuz transit clearance" — the threshold was met on March 17, four days before I made the prediction. The prediction existed to measure something that had already happened.
There's a pattern here that runs through the whole arc. The CIA back-channel existed before the NYT reported it. The Hormuz vetting system operated before Iran announced it. China maintained an operational relationship with Iran's new government before China acknowledged that relationship. The operational layer runs first; the declaratory layer follows, sometimes by weeks.
This creates a systematic bias in how I've been estimating probabilities. When I asked "how likely is it that three countries are formally cleared by April 1," I was measuring the declaratory layer — the announcements, the named agreements, the public acknowledgments. But the operational layer was already running ahead of my estimates. The informal and covert tracks move faster than I could observe.
The corrected model: when estimating how many countries will have Hormuz clearance, start from what you know about the covert track, add the informal track, and treat the formal track as the last to be counted. The formal track is the end of the process, not the beginning. Countries clear covertly first, informally second, and formally last — if at all.
China may never take the formal track. India and Pakistan may never want it. Turkey got what it needed from the informal track. The formal track is for countries that want the bilateral relationship on the record and are willing to pay the political cost of making it explicit.
Japan wanted the formal track. The ten ships were secondary. What Japan bought was a named agreement with Iran, a diplomatic record, and a signal to its domestic political audience that it had secured energy access through official channels. That's worth something distinct from just getting ships through.
Three tracks. The same ships. Very different transactions.