Bingo.
There's a typical misconception of SHIELD as just the CIA, as just an American intelligence agency. But they were never that. They are a multinational agency tasked specifically with finding, monitoring, registering, controlling, understanding, and utilizing superhumans and artifacts. Their liaison with Tony Stark wasn't based on Ten Rings at all; it was based on Tony himself, who had somehow become a superhero after building a battlesuit in Afghanistan.
This is also the reason that SHIELD didn't feature in IM3 at all --- because they simply weren't interested in this Mandarin....any version of him: Killian, Slattery, or whatever "real" Mandarin people choose to fantasize about. That's because, by all accounts, Mandarin was an "ordinary" terrorist carrying out ordinary terrorist attacks around the world. That was the bailiwick of the CIA and whatever other standard real-world intelligence agencies, who *were* tracking and fighting him. But there was no indication that AIM, Ten Rings, or Mandarin were utilizing superpowers at all: it was only Tony who discovered that, and conveniently took care of the Extremis problem himself.
TLDR: SHIELD don't care 'bout no Ten Rings. That ain't their ball of wax.
Good catch. I got so used to AoS not using minor Marvel character names, that I didn't expect to see one there.
