The Iran Wars

by Jay Solomon

  The two men were the best positioned to negotiate the technical terms of the agreement that was now aimed at achieving the one-year breakout time. Starting in Switzerland in March 2015, they held marathon one-on-one discussions focused on the numbers of centrifuges and Iran’s stockpile of fissile material. The United States also wanted Tehran to dismantle or repurpose its plutonium-producing reactor in the city of Arak, which offered a second path for the country to develop the nuclear fuel for a bomb.

  In their talks, Moniz and Salehi sought to build on their common history. The American brought a onesie emblazoned with MIT’s logo, the beaver, for the Iranian scientist’s granddaughter. Salehi praised Moniz to the Persian press as a serious and honest diplomat and negotiator. “The Iranians could not move without Salehi at the table. He’s a very influential person. And he built Iran’s nuclear program, to a degree,” Moniz told me in his Department of Energy office in early 2016. “He had to be there to decide what they could and would accept.”

  Vast scientific establishments in the United States and Iran backed the two men in their negotiations. To support his efforts, Moniz mobilized hundreds of nuclear experts at the U.S. National Laboratories in Oakwood, Tennessee; Sandia, New Mexico; and Livermore, California. The Americans assembled a mock-up of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in Oakwood to gauge how the centrifuges at the site could be dismantled and kept offline to keep Tehran’s stockpile at low levels. They also modeled how the Arak reactor could be repurposed to ensure that it produced significantly less plutonium usable in nuclear weapons. Part of the process involved taking out the core of the reactor and filling it with cement.

  But as the talks proceeded, Salehi and other Iranian officials continued to test even the new American approach to the one-year breakout time. While the Iranians were open to limiting their country’s enrichment capacity for a time, they stressed this wouldn’t be permanent. Tehran was also demanding a rapid rollback of American sanctions, rather than the phased approach demanded by the Obama administration. The two scientists were having trouble bridging their countries’ remaining negotiating gaps. Iran was demanding to keep all of its nuclear facilities and infrastructure.

  Every U.S. red line was under attack.

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  IN LATE MARCH 2015, the negotiations moved to the Beau Rivage Palace, a massive nineteenth-century hotel and spa, in the Swiss city of Lausanne. The complex covered two city blocks and stared out across Lake Geneva and up into the Swiss Alps. The hotel had maintained an impressive guest list over the decades. European powers and the United States had met there in 1918 to negotiate the breakup of the Ottoman Empire following the end of World War I. Coco Chanel had lived there intermittently, in a lake-view suite, before her death in Paris in 1971. Her stylish grave is down the street from the Palace, daisies arranged in the logo of the luxury Chanel brand. The ruler of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko, convalesced at the hotel in the 1990s while receiving cancer treatments from a nearby clinic in a failed attempt to extend his life.

  The Beau Rivage’s long, eggshell-white corridors stretched out before Lake Geneva, often empty, or with just one foreign-born hotel staffer shuffling down its lime-green rugs. Diplomats congregated in a glass-encircled breakfast room dwarfed by the Alps to chart out their strategies during early morning meetings. Foreign ministers took breaks in the steam baths and swimming pools laid out on the hotel’s lower floors. The Iranians went on long walks outside along the lakeside esplanade, trailed by photographers and camera crews.

  Despite this picture-postcard setting, the politics of Washington were dogging Kerry, Moniz, and their team as they tried to reach a framework agreement with Tehran that would form the basis for the final nuclear accord. U.S. lawmakers and supporters of Israel, Republican and Democratic alike, were growing increasingly alarmed by the emerging terms of the agreement that were leaking out to the press. Iran was going to be allowed to maintain a sizable capacity to enrich uranium, they were told. The subsequent lifting of Western sanctions would release Tehran from its isolation and feed it with billions of dollars in funds to support its terrorist proxies in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories. Washington’s power circles were on high alert.

  A little-known southern senator, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, took it upon himself to derail the process. On March 9, the Harvard graduate and Iraq War veteran directed forty-six other Republican lawmakers to sign a letter directly addressed to Ayatollah Khamenei warning him that Kerry and the White House didn’t have the power to deliver a nuclear deal that wasn’t supported by the majority of Congress. “It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system,” Cotton and his colleagues wrote. “We will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement….The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”

  Kerry and his team shuddered over the potential impact of the Cotton letter. Khamenei might use it to overturn a diplomatic process about which he was already suspicious. The cleric could also cite Congress’s meddling as a pretext to toughen the terms demanded by his negotiators. He and other hard-line actors in Tehran could reassert themselves directly, as Khamenei had done from time to time. He continued to make speeches outlining terms that were at odds with those discussed in Europe.

  The political pressure from both Washington and Tehran, strangely enough, drew the American and Iranian negotiating teams closer together in Lausanne. Immediately upon arriving at the Beau Rivage on a cold morning, Kerry convened a meeting with Zarif where he sought to assure the Iranian diplomat that Cotton was “dangerous” and didn’t have the power to derail the White House’s negotiating strategy. “Although we see the letter as a political move, we need to know the U.S. government’s stance on this issue,” Zarif said, seeking the Obama administration’s support in pushing back Congress. Kerry said they must keep their talks focused solely on the negotiating room and not be distracted by outside agitators.

  U.S. officials reached out emotionally to President Rouhani’s brother, Hossein Fereydoun. Fereydoun was a regular in the negotiations and known to pass messages to his older sibling. Days into the Lausanne session, the Rouhani brothers’ mother died in Iran. Kerry and his aides warmly embraced the diplomat and politician before he flew back to Tehran for the funeral. “We hope this is a year that can bring us prosperity and peace,” Mr. Kerry told the Iranian delegation ahead of another hours-long negotiating session. Beau Rivage staff tried to brighten the mood by assembling a traditional Persian hafsin table, stocked with goldfish, eggs, grass, and candies, to welcome the spring and commemorate the Iranian New Year, Nowruz, outside the negotiating room.

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  THE PRESSURE OF TRYING to forge the framework for a final agreement was building on Kerry and his negotiators. The secretary of state had repeatedly warned that the Americans were prepared to walk away from the talks if Iran didn’t make the necessary concessions to secure the framework. His aides said that on two occasions in the winter of 2015, Kerry bluntly told Zarif the U.S. team wouldn’t turn up at the negotiating venue if Iran did not display some flexibility. Kerry at one point asked Zarif if he needed to return to Tehran for instructions. But the secretary never made good on his threats, feeding the perception among some diplomats that he wanted the agreement more than the Iranians did—this despite the continued deterioration of the Iranian economy, made worse by the steep drop in global oil prices.

  The United States, meanwhile, continued to offer concessions to keep Tehran engaged. In addition to giving ground on enrichment, the Americans suggested that the White House was prepared to allow Iran to maintain other core parts of its nuclear program that just a year earlier the United States had said absolutely needed to be shut down, including the underground enrichment facility in Qom
that had been exposed by French and American intelligence in 2009 and the heavy water reactor in Arak, the so-called bomb-making factory.

  Washington’s slackening position placed it at odds with some of its closest allies, and not just Israel. France was a key player in the negotiations at the Beau Rivage and had a history of being hawkish on nuclear proliferation. U.S. officials believed that Fabius had nearly sunk the interim agreement in 2013, when France pushed for denying Iran any enrichment capacity, while Paris was deeply skeptical of Zarif and the other Iranian diplomats because of the earlier failed negotiations in the 2000s in which he had taken part. The French believed at that time the Iranians had used diplomacy as cover to advance their program, and were doing so again. French officials were nervous when Kerry and Zarif met alone, assuming the secretary of state would make even more concessions.

  French diplomats in Lausanne pressed the United States to take its time and not rigidly stick to any specific deadline. They believed that there had been so many arbitrary deadlines that it didn’t make sense to force the process into one now. The sanctions were crippling the Iranian economy, they argued, and time was on the West’s side. France’s ambassador to the United States, Gérard Araud, a former nuclear negotiator, took to Twitter to press his government’s case. “Making the end of March an absolute deadline is counterproductive and dangerous,” Araud wrote. “No agreement without concrete decisions on issues beyond the enrichment capability question,” he said, specifically mentioning the need for extensive monitoring of Iran’s nuclear sites and clarity on Iran’s alleged past weaponization work. French foreign minister Laurent Fabius called his team in Lausanne and told them to hold the tough line. French diplomats were virtually the only ones briefing the international press at the Beau Rivage, making clear their uneasiness about the process.

  France’s outspokenness drew a stiff reprimand from the White House. President Obama called French prime minister François Hollande as the Lausanne talks ground on and told him to quiet his negotiators or risk blowing up the deal. Kerry’s team seethed at what they saw as French insubordination, and belittled them as minor players in the talks. These tensions would continue until the end of the process.

  But the French concerns were real. Iran pocketed the carrots the White House dangled in Switzerland. And the framework agreement that was announced showed that Tehran would be able to maintain, if not grow, its nuclear program over time. It accepted that the centrifuges and the heavy-water reactor at Arak would remain in some form.

  The White House’s dogged pursuit of its agreement became clear in the final days of negotiations in Lausanne. The night before the April deadline, President Obama ordered a satellite teleconference with his negotiators on the ground, including Kerry and Moniz. They congregated in a white tent on the lawn outside the Beau Rivage on a secure link. The Iranians could see the Americans gathering in the cold winter air away from their hotel rooms, as could the television cameras.

  Obama wanted to make clear to his team that the United States would maintain a tough line, according to participants in the call. But at the same time, the president ordered Kerry to allow the talks to continue beyond the stated April 1 deadline, if required. The nuclear agreement was too important to the United States and the world not to push on, he said. The White House wanted to send a message of assertiveness. But negotiators in Switzerland said the meeting conveyed the absolute opposite—that the United States would keep talking indefinitely. “There was little doubt at that point that the Iranians had boxed us in,” said a European diplomat in Lausanne. “The Americans had ensnared themselves in the process.”

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  VIENNA’S COBURG PALACE WAS the site of what was expected to be the final round of negotiations in June 2015, which were aimed at formalizing the framework nuclear agreement set forth in Lausanne. Kerry and the Americans targeted July 1 as the deadline to complete the diplomatic process. But many inside the negotiating bloc, particularly the French, were skeptical the deal would get wrapped up by then. Kerry arrived in Austria only seventy-two hours before the self-imposed deadline. He hobbled around the Austrian capital on crutches after having broken his femur in three places during a bicycle ride weeks earlier in Switzerland, and he needed painkillers and regular physiotherapy in order to keep up his hectic pace. Members of his entourage said they expected to be at the Coburg at least a week, as a summer heat wave drove temperatures above a hundred degrees. U.S. embassy staff were already planning for a Fourth of July party for Secretary Kerry and his entourage in the gardens of the scenic hotel.

  As he had done in the past, Ayatollah Khamenei tacitly intruded into the negotiations. Just days before they started, the cleric gave another nationally televised speech in which he laid out new red lines for his negotiators, again apparently without their knowledge. The address, which marked the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, said no outside inspectors would be allowed entry into Iran’s military sites and that any restraints on Tehran’s program would be limited. Khamenei also said the country’s research and development would continue. “Contrary to the Americans’ insistence, we do not accept long-term, ten-year and twelve-year restrictions, and we have told them the acceptable number of years for restrictions,” Mr. Khamenei said in his address.

  Khamenei’s speech fed into the sense of uncertainty in Vienna. U.S. lawmakers were champing at the bit to impose fresh sanctions on Tehran if the process appeared to stall. And while President Obama still had eighteen months left in office, U.S. diplomats felt they needed to get a deal in the coming weeks or the administration wouldn’t have enough time to implement it. The clock again was ticking, but the Iranians seemed calm. Zarif and other diplomats said they didn’t feel the pressure of committing to any American timeline. Party politics in Iran were much less of a factor.

  Moniz and other negotiators, meanwhile, were worried about the health of Salehi. The physicist and diplomat underwent emergency stomach surgery just weeks before the Vienna round began. Diplomatic sources in Tehran suggested he had cancer and might die. Moniz voiced fears that the Iranian team might not be able to conclude an agreement without Salehi’s presence. Salehi eventually turned up in Vienna, but he was gaunt and had lost more than twenty pounds.

  The negotiations, meanwhile, were taking on a carnival-like atmosphere. Journalists camped out in a giant white tent in front of the Coburg or in the coffee shop of the neighboring Marriott Hotel. Pro-Israel groups appeared on the sidelines to protest the Iranian delegation and raise the specter of another Western betrayal of the Jews, akin to Neville Chamberlain’s peace agreement with Hitler in 1938. An even larger pro-deal, if not pro-Iranian, camp also sat outside the Coburg to pressure the U.S. delegation to make an accommodation with Tehran. It included an odd assortment of Iranian Americans, Vietnam-era leftists, and former U.S. diplomats who seemed to be angling for business opportunities in Tehran once the sanctions got lifted. They blamed the United States, not Iran, for the impasse, which they viewed as a manufactured crisis. They argued that the United States had more to gain from any agreement than did the ayatollahs in Tehran, because of the wars the United States was trying to end in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. “The Obama administration is saying this is only a transactional deal focused on Iran’s nuclear program,” Flynt Leverett, a onetime national security staffer in the George W. Bush White House, told me at a coffee shop across from the Coburg. “I think this should be part of a much more comprehensive agreement.”

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  THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN KERRY and Zarif emerged as the centerpiece of the negotiations. This wasn’t how many in the Obama administration had initially thought it would play out. When the talks had started in Oman three years earlier, the diplomacy was dominated by midlevel diplomats and White House staffers. But Kerry and other high-level American and Iranian diplomats took over after the process became public in the fall of 2013. Some U.S. diplomats felt a secretary of state shouldn’t engage in the day-to-day work of a negotiation, instea
d only coming in at crucial points to push the process forward. They also didn’t believe Washington’s top diplomat would be able to devote himself to one issue when so many other crises were demanding his attention, including civil wars in Ukraine and Syria and territorial disputes between China and other Asian nations in the South China Sea.

  But once Kerry took the reins at Foggy Bottom, he made it clear that he was going to dominate a diplomatic track that he believed he had started and conceptualized. The Vietnam War veteran had boundless energy and stamina and deeply believed that the only alternative to diplomacy would be a war. A breakdown in talks would likely lead to more U.S. sanctions on Tehran and an acceleration of Iran’s nuclear program. “So many wars have been fought over misunderstandings, misinterpretations, lack of effective diplomacy,” he told me in 2016. “War is the failure of diplomacy.”

  Kerry privately told his staff that he wasn’t seduced by Zarif, who was notorious for his infectious smile and charismatic demeanor. Kerry said he knew the U.S.-schooled diplomat was an Islamic revolutionary and a loyal follower of Khamenei, and Kerry repeatedly sought to play down the idea that an agreement was preordained or even likely. Still, as the process moved forward from 2013, the two men spent hundreds of hours directly negotiating in Vienna, Zurich, New York, Geneva, and Munich. They would take long walks together to burn off the stress of the talks. In Geneva, camera crews followed the diplomats as they walked along Lake Geneva in a light snowfall. Video of the two caused controversy in Tehran, as hard-liners believed Zarif was becoming a tool of the Americans. The two men became wary that their collaboration was making them susceptible to political attacks in their own capitals.

  Still, the Iranians were successfully wearing down the Americans and their partners as the negotiations extended beyond the Fourth of July and into a hot European summer. Most of the United States’ initial positions from the start of the Obama administration were no longer hard and fast. Iran was going to be allowed to maintain five thousand centrifuges to produce nuclear fuel at the Natanz facility. This was below the nearly twenty thousand Iran had amassed by 2015. But Kerry and his team agreed that Iran would then be allowed to build an industrial-scale nuclear program, with hundreds of thousands of machines, after a ten-year period of restraint.