The Iran Wars

by Jay Solomon

  The fallout was swift. Israeli and Arab officials jumped on Fabius’s comments as proof that the United States was preparing to accept a nuclear-weapons-capable Iran. Zarif and Iranian diplomats, meanwhile, felt the Americans had betrayed them, particularly after Kerry deferred to Fabius and consented to negotiating more stringent terms for the agreement. “We expect the West to have a united stance over the draft,” Iran’s foreign minister said.

  The diplomatic contretemps proved short-lived. Two weeks later, Iran and the P5+1 returned to Geneva and agreed to an interim agreement not significantly different from what Burns and Sullivan had negotiated with Tehran in their secret channel. Three days of virtually round-the-clock negotiations concluded with Kerry, Zarif, and the other foreign ministers announcing an agreement that for the first time rolled back parts of Iran’s nuclear program. Burns and Sullivan remained in the shadows.

  Still, the interim agreement unnerved Israel and Washington’s Arab allies. It strongly suggested that the Obama White House would ultimately accept a final agreement well short of what previous U.S. governments had once demanded. Tehran would likely retain much of its nuclear capacity, as well as the missiles to deliver warheads. Iran would remain a latent nuclear weapons state, which would significantly alter the power balance in the Middle East.

  “What was concluded in Geneva last night is not a historic agreement, it’s a historic mistake,” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters. “It’s not made the world a safer place. Like the agreement with North Korea in 2005, this agreement has made the world a much more dangerous place.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Khamenei’s Shadow

  In 2014, American diplomats Jake Sullivan and Undersecretary of State William Burns emerged from the diplomatic shadows as a July heat wave gripped Austria, including Vienna’s Coburg Palace Hotel, where the United States and Iran were now trying to convert the interim nuclear deal into a final historic agreement. Critics of the negotiations, particularly in Israel, bristled at the location of the talks. The nineteenth-century royal home turned five-star hotel was less than a mile from where Adolf Hitler had addressed 250,000 Viennese after the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938. Israelis noted the irony that the United States was going to give ground to the Iranians on the nuclear issue in a city with such a dark history for their people. U.S. officials countered that the Coburg was situated on Theodor Herzl Platz, a downtown square named after the Austro-Hungarian founder of modern Zionism.

  Even with the interim nuclear agreement in place, U.S. and European officials remained puzzled over the role of Supreme Leader Khamenei in the diplomacy. They assumed the cleric accepted Rouhani’s winning the 2013 presidential election in a bid to relieve international financial pressure on Tehran. European governments viewed Rouhani and his foreign minister, Javad Zarif, as moderates who generally wanted an accommodation with the West and could be trusted. But did the supreme leader really want to make major concessions? Some cynics inside the diplomatic bloc were convinced the cleric was just using his media-savvy diplomats to divide the Western powers while continuing to grow Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Khamenei said in speeches that his revolution would die if he made peace with the Great Satan in Washington. The White House, however, was betting the supreme leader would accept major long-term concessions as the process, and the sanctions, ground on.

  U.S. negotiators continued to try to find some common ground with Zarif and his team at the Coburg that summer. Almost all the Iranians spoke fluent English. Some had attended universities in the U.S. heartland, such as the University of Kansas and the University of Denver, or elite eastern institutions, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Zarif had spent nearly twenty years in the United States working or studying in California, Colorado, and New York. American diplomats acknowledged he might have had an advantage inside the negotiating room because he knew their culture so much better than they knew his. Zarif was particularly adept at using the international media, sympathetic academics, and retired diplomats to make his case. His years at the United Nations had earned him a vast Rolodex of top contacts in the U.S. media, business, and academic elite.

  U.S. and European diplomats struggled to understand the political power of the Iranian men across the negotiating table. For most of Ahmadinejad’s eight-year rule, the affable Zarif had been exiled to a Tehran think tank, out of sight of the cameras, where he could only grumble privately to a selected few that Ahmadinejad was incompetent and was destroying Iran’s international standing. Zarif was resurrected only after the election of President Rouhani in 2013, when the regime was desperate for some form of rapprochement with the West. Tehran knew of his connections in Washington and New York.

  Zarif’s number two, Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, was viewed as more of a hard-liner by the American team. Kerry thought the diplomat had stronger revolutionary credentials than Zarif and was closer to the supreme leader’s office and the Revolutionary Guard. Araghchi led the day-to-day negotiations in Switzerland and Vienna and regularly guided the Iranian media on the status of the talks. He was sober and reserved compared to the gregarious and smiling Zarif. His nationalist sentiments were made clear in his conversation with Jake Sullivan in which he compared Iran’s nuclear program to the U.S. space launch.

  Salehi, the atomic energy chief, oversaw the entire process, the Americans believed, whether he was at the talks or not. He spoke for Iran’s nuclear bureaucracy, and as a former vice president, he had access to Khamenei. The Revolutionary Guard also was seen as trusting Salehi because of his central role in promoting the nuclear program, in which the IRGC was the major player. “The IRGC made out like bandits under the sanctions, because they controlled the black markets,” said Wendy Sherman, the undersecretary of state. “They didn’t want this deal…because it gave Rouhani more credibility. Yeah, the IRGC was very present in the negotiation.”

  U.S. negotiators in Vienna still hoped to make steady progress as they eyed a July 2014 deadline to reach a final nuclear accord. The target was essentially six months from when the interim deal was implemented. Washington was working to get Zarif to accept a sizable reduction in the number of centrifuges Tehran maintained to produce nuclear fuel—to a few thousand from nearly twenty thousand. The United States saw its significant concession in Geneva (that Iran would be allowed to maintain some capability to enrich uranium) as deserving a reciprocal step. A smaller enrichment capability would be that step, they said.

  But as the Vienna round drew to a close that July, Khamenei gave a major speech from Tehran without notifying Zarif or any of his negotiators. Iran’s ultimate aim was to have nearly two hundred thousand centrifuges, the supreme leader told his country, and Iran would never stop advancing its nuclear capabilities through research and development, citing their use in medicine, power, and science. This was nearly twenty times the capacity Kerry and Zarif were negotiating.

  “On the issue of enrichment capacity, their [the West’s] aim is to make Iran accept 10,000 SWU,” Khamenei said, referring to an atomic work unit that required at least one centrifuge to achieve. “Our officials say we need 190,000 SWU. We might not need this [capacity] this year or in the next two or five years, but this is our absolute need and we need to meet this need.”

  Khamenei foresaw an industrial-scale enrichment program that could quickly produce enough weapons-grade uranium for hundreds of atomic bombs, if Tehran made the decision to weaponize. But the supreme leader hadn’t conveyed his thoughts to his negotiators in Vienna. Zarif was “blindsided” by Khamenei’s comments, said American diplomats who met with him at the Coburg. “He seemed to have no idea where it came from.” Indeed, the technical nature of Khamenei’s speech raised fears in Washington that the cleric was being advised by an entirely different scientific team. The Americans again started to worry that Khamenei wasn’t really interested in forging an agreement.

  “The personal interplay in all of this was fascinating,” Kerry told me. “The momen
ts of passions, the flare-ups, the moments of demanding decision. It was pretty dramatic at times.”

  —

  DIPLOMATIC DEADLINES CAME AND went that July and November. And the failure to meet them presented the United States and its partners with two stark realities in pursuing their negotiating track with Iran. The first was that the aim of some inside the U.S. government to dismantle Iran’s nuclear infrastructure was now a non-starter if a final accord was going to be reached. Tehran had amassed a large program since negotiations with the Europeans had started in 2003, consisting of uranium conversion plants, underground enrichment facilities, and uranium mines. Iran was also moving ahead with building the plutonium-producing reactor in the city of Arak.

  Getting Tehran to give all that up, after the United States had already started to ease some of the sanctions, was a long shot, the White House concluded. Some American and European officials felt it had been a mistake to begin channeling billions of dollars in financial relief to Tehran after the interim agreement was reached in Geneva in the fall of 2013. Western countries were giving Iran around $700 million in cash every month as part of this interim deal. The White House was essentially subsidizing the Iranians to talk and reducing the United States’ financial leverage. Critics in Congress argued the Americans should be increasing sanctions on Iran, rather than easing them, if they wanted a better deal. Massive concessions from Iran, they argued, would come only if Iran was on an economic cliff. American leverage gained through financial warfare had successfully brought the Iranians to the table, and that leverage appeared to be growing.

  Kerry and the White House, however, didn’t believe additional sanctions were an option. They said the international community had gone as far as it had only because of the U.S. commitment to talk with Iran. Seeking more sanctions at that time, the Americans believed, would irreparably split the P5+1.

  “To squeeze them further was to guarantee this wouldn’t have happened,” Kerry said about the idea that more sanctions would have forced Iran to capitulate. “We were going to lose our allies. They felt strongly that we were over-squeezing.” While this was definitely not the case with the French delegation, the Chinese and the Russians had publicly spoken out against more sanctions.

  The other wild card, of course, was Khamenei. The White House believed it needed to continue to try to bring the supreme leader on board the diplomatic process, despite his public hostility. President Obama, in the weeks before the November negotiating deadline, penned his fourth letter to the cleric through the direct channel he had opened up with his first missive in 2009. This letter, rather than focusing on the nuclear program alone, for the first time specifically raised the possibility of cooperation between Washington and Tehran in fighting Islamic State militias that had taken over large swaths of Iraq and Syria in the preceding months. They posed a direct threat to both Iran and the United States, the president argued. Solving the nuclear issue could open the path for greater security cooperation.

  The supreme leader was noncommittal in his reply, as he’d been in response to the three previous letters. He acknowledged that his country was open to better relations with Washington, but only if it stopped its “hostile policies” toward Tehran. The White House was divided over whether this presented an opportunity or more obfuscation. U.S. allies in Europe and the Middle East were astounded to hear of the White House offer on ISIS, as so far the Americans had refused to link the nuclear deal to other security issues.

  Indeed, President Obama was about to significantly change his negotiating strategy to keep the diplomatic process going, paring back most of the harshest demands that were initially the West’s negotiating positions. The United States accepted that Iran would possess many of the technologies used to make atomic bombs. But the focus now was on maximizing the time Tehran needed to amass the fuel for a bomb. Kerry and his negotiators, meanwhile, were seeking to gain as much access for international inspectors as possible. “To the Iranians, they wanted to hear the magic phrase, ‘the right to enrich,’ ” Rhodes said. “We also knew, when we talked about it internally, obviously we envisaged enrichment. The president, in his mind…had made this decision a long time ago.”

  Yet for decades, the United States had made dismantlement a precondition for any final agreement. The White House had made a major concession.

  —

  THE UNITED STATES AND its allies initially orchestrated their campaign against Iran’s nuclear program based on the argument that the country had repeatedly violated the UN statute governing the use of atomic energy, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Beginning in 2006, the UN Security Council had passed six resolutions requiring Iran to suspend its enrichment of uranium until the country addressed evidence it had covertly developed nuclear weapons technologies. The United Nations imposed sanctions on Iran starting that same year on the grounds that Tehran had failed to abide by the Security Council’s demands. Then between 2010 and 2012 the United States and the European Union constructed a much broader sanctions regime targeting Iran, using the UN resolutions as political cover.

  As the negotiations in Switzerland and Austria gained pace in 2014, the American negotiators started significantly departing from this original policy strategy and weakening its terms. U.S. officials knew this was a dangerous approach. If Iran was allowed to maintain these technologies, its regional rivals, particularly Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt, might demand the same capabilities, and a regional nuclear arms race could ensue. U.S. officials, however, believed they might have to take that risk.

  John Kerry, while still chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had been the first senior American official to suggest to the Iranians that the United States would accept enrichment on Iranian soil, passing messages to Tehran via Oman in late 2011. His comments unnerved some State Department officials, who felt he offered the concession too soon, and without a formal green light from the administration.

  In the winter of 2013, Jake Sullivan and Williams Burns also discussed, in theory, what type of enrichment program the Iranians might need in the future, but without making any commitments. The interim nuclear agreement reached in Geneva in November 2013 implied that Iran would maintain the ability to enrich uranium, though it didn’t spell out the scope.

  By late 2014, Secretary Kerry and his team came up with a new strategy to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis. Iran would be allowed to possess thousands of the centrifuges used to produce nuclear fuel, they concluded. But the country’s infrastructure would have to be scaled back to the point that any rush to acquire the fissile material for a bomb would take at least a year. The U.S. strategy was remarkably complex: negotiators needed to develop a formula based on the number of centrifuges Iran already employed, the size of its existing fuel stockpile, and the ultimate curbs on the sophistication of the centrifuges. It also required the White House to upgrade the scientific knowledge of its negotiators and to prepare the American public and U.S. allies for an agreement that wouldn’t be nearly as far-reaching or constricting on Tehran as originally envisioned.

  —

  IT WAS AT THIS point that U.S. energy secretary Ernest Moniz quietly entered the Iran diplomatic process. It was early 2015 and the negotiations were shifting to Zurich, Switzerland’s financial capital. Moniz, the seventy-year-old son of Portuguese immigrants, had the experience and knowledge of nuclear technology and weapons systems needed to assume a key role in the talks. He had been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for four decades and was known as one of the world’s leading nuclear physicists. He had also served in the Clinton administration’s Energy Department during the late 1990s. After becoming secretary of energy in mid-2013, he navigated complex issues such as nuclear waste storage and the safeguarding of the United States’ nuclear weapons arsenal.

  Moniz didn’t look the part of a globetrotting diplomat. He wore his silver hair down to his shoulders and greeted the press with a puckish grin. He looked like an aging folk singer or an
English professor at a northern California university in the 1960s. But this laidback appearance belied a ruthless political acumen. Moniz had gained the trust of both President Obama and Secretary Kerry. He regularly attended all the White House’s National Security Council meetings on Iran once he took over the Energy Department in the summer of 2013. He liked to finish his nights in quiet bars or his office drinking bourbon or scotch.

  The White House dispatched Moniz to Switzerland to counter Iran’s decision to send Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and one of Iran’s top nuclear scientists. He had also served as Tehran’s ambassador to the IAEA, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, during the mid-2000s, as scrutiny of Iran’s nuclear program intensified. IAEA personnel believed Salehi had more knowledge of Iran’s nuclear program, and possibly its atomic weapons activities, than any other senior Iranian official. He was mild-mannered, spoke fluent English and Arabic, and was capable of charming foreign governments.

  Kerry and his team were initially worried about Salehi’s direct involvement in the talks. They saw it as Khamenei potentially hardening the Iranian government’s line and marginalizing Zarif. Salehi regularly told Iranian newspapers that the government wouldn’t dismantle any of its nuclear facilities. Back in Tehran, he rallied the country behind the need for nuclear power, though he supported the direct talks with the Americans.

  Ironically, Salehi had earned his doctorate in nuclear physics from MIT in the 1970s, at the same time Moniz had taken up a position as an associate professor there. The two men had never met during their time in Cambridge, according to American and Iranian officials. But their relationship emerged as one of the most important in the final stages of the nuclear talks. The contrast between Salehi in his dark suits and tieless shirts and the boyish Moniz captivated the world’s cameras.