by Jay Solomon
By early July, Iran had pocketed another concession: the Arak reactor, initially seen as a bomb-making factory, would be allowed to remain open. It would be altered to produce less plutonium. But after a decade Iran would be able to construct additional heavy-water reactors. The Qom enrichment site, fortified under a mountain, also would be allowed to remain open and to continue developing faster centrifuges, though without actually producing fissile material.
The United States and its partners, in return, were preparing to lift most of the international sanctions that Stuart Levey and his colleagues at Treasury had spent a decade putting in place. Tens of billions of dollars of Iran’s oil revenues, frozen under the sanctions, were to be released from banks in Asia and the Middle East. The aim was to reintegrate Tehran back into the international economy. U.S. officials said sanctions could be “snapped back” if Iran cheated on the deal. But the logistics would be daunting, given how long it had taken to put them into effect in the first place.
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THE FINAL DAYS OF VIENNA were marked by frayed nerves and Iranian efforts to squeeze even more out of the agreement. U.S. officials, meanwhile, continued to try to determine if Khamenei was truly behind his diplomats or if there could be a reversal at the last minute, as in previous negotiations.
Zarif and his team specifically focused on two issues most reporters didn’t even realize had been on the negotiating table. Iran wanted the lifting of United Nations statutes that barred the country from testing ballistic missiles and engaging in the conventional arms trade. The Iranian foreign minister argued, with some merit, that these prohibitions had been put in place as part of broader UN laws specifically aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear program. An agreement on the nuclear issue, Zarif argued, meant all these restrictions had to be repealed at once. U.S. officials knew this risked legitimizing Tehran’s shipments of arms to its military proxies, such as Hezbollah and the Assad regime. Americans also believed there was no reason for Iran to develop ballistic missiles unless they eventually planned to mount them with nuclear payloads.
This Iranian hard line fueled fireworks in Vienna as the P5+1 diplomats grew irritated and fatigued. On July 5, Kerry and Energy Secretary Moniz scrapped with Zarif and Ali Akbar Salehi in the basement at the Coburg about the duration of the curbs on Iran’s nuclear program. The Iranians were seeking as short a timeline as possible and pressing for more concessions from the Western side. The exchange got so heated that an aide to Kerry had to enter the negotiating room and tell the secretary to tone it down, as the Coburg’s well-heeled clientele were complaining. “The whole hotel could hear you,” Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, joked with Kerry the morning after the contretemps.
Another blowup occurred as Zarif sought to rewrite terms that many of the P5+1 parties thought had been agreed upon months earlier. Zarif’s position caused the coordinator of the P5+1 team, European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, to warn that she might instruct her diplomatic partners to go home. “Don’t threaten an Iranian,” Zarif barked back at the normally mild-mannered Italian, unnerving diplomats in the room. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, known for his scowl and tailored suits, sought to lighten the mood by interjecting: “Or a Russian.”
The Iranians, though, played hardball on the missile issue and arms embargo to the end. Calling foreign journalists to a late night briefing at the Coburg on July 6, Iranian diplomats cast the United States as the recalcitrant party. One Iranian official said he believed the nuclear deal was largely done, but the West’s unbending position on the arms embargo could reverse all the progress. He said no country should be prevented from arming itself. “So this is a question that should be posed to our European and American partners…What was the reason that you put this issue in the agenda of the Security Council?” the official said, suggesting there was a wider international conspiracy against Iran.
Within a week, the United States and its partners caved to Iran’s positions, but with a twist. The arms embargo would be lifted in five years and the missile bans in eight years, rather than immediately. A new UN resolution was drafted to codify the agreement, but its language was weak. Rather than banning missile tests, it only “called” on Iran to refrain. There was no formal document to be signed by the P5+1 as part of the Vienna agreement, so the Security Council resolutions were the closest thing to an enforcement mechanism.
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IN ANOTHER WORRYING SIGN, the United States vastly scaled back its demands that Iran come clean on the past nuclear weapons work it was accused of conducting through the Physics Research Center. The IAEA, the UN’s atomic watchdog, had been seeking for more than a decade to understand just how close Iran had come to building a bomb, but received almost no cooperation from Iran on the probe. IAEA attempts to meet with Fakhrizadeh, Abbasi-Davani, and other nuclear scientists were repeatedly rebuffed, as were requests to visit military sites. Iran called documents the IAEA had amassed on Iran’s covert work “fakes.”
Through the Vienna process, Iran did agree to take some additional steps in late 2015 to answer the IAEA’s questions about its suspected bomb work. But U.S. officials, in private, acknowledged that Tehran would probably never own up to developing a bomb, nor would it fully cooperate in the agency’s investigation. The Obama administration said it could live with this. It was more important to block Iran from developing a weapon in the future than to bring it to task for its previous violations of United Nations statutes. The White House believed it knew exactly what Iran had done in Parchin.
Many nuclear experts, however, feared the United States and global powers were letting Tehran off the hook. It would be very hard to verify Iran’s compliance with a new nuclear deal if the IAEA and P5+1 didn’t fully understand the scope of Iran’s capabilities. And Tehran’s unwillingness to cooperate with IAEA inspectors was a cautionary sign about the integrity of any agreement in the years ahead. “This decision on weaponization will haunt the international community for a long time,” said Olli Heinonen, a former IAEA weapons inspector who spent decades studying Iran’s program and emerged as a critic of the Vienna talks. “It sets an incredibly bad precedent.”
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THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF AN agreement came on the afternoon of July 14 in Vienna, another oppressively hot day in Austria. P5+1 diplomats had stayed up until three in the morning finalizing it. Ministers took showers and tried to catch some sleep before descending on a convention center to announce the deal. More than two years of talks—from Oman through to Austria—had finally come to an end.
Kerry and the other world leaders privately gathered in UN offices and spoke about the impact of the deal. They presented in the alphabetical order of the countries they represented and described the accord as a historic one. Fabius, who’d been coerced into playing ball, noted it had been reached on Bastille Day and hoped it would have the same long-term relevance. Zarif confidently said the Vienna deal would mark the end of Iran’s international isolation. And Kerry, citing his experience as a soldier in Vietnam, repeated his mantra that diplomacy must be exhausted before any use of force. He choked back tears as he spoke.
Still, in the final days, U.S. officials continued to wonder whether Khamenei and the IRGC really supported Zarif. Hard-liners in Tehran chastised the Iranian negotiating team for its work in Vienna, despite terms many analysts viewed as favorable to Iran. Khamenei continued his rhetorical attacks on Washington throughout the process.
Kerry and his team confronted Zarif in the hours before the talks concluded and asked him whether he really spoke for the supreme leader. “He assured us that he did,” said one of Kerry’s aides. “Only history will show if he was right.”
Kerry, reflecting on the process months later, said it remained unclear to him whether the deal marked just a short-term truce between the United States and Iran or an opening for a real rapprochement. Ever the optimist, he focused on the latter. “My hope is that Iran will change some of its behavior further so t
hat they can take advantage of what they opened the opportunity for,” Kerry told me outside his office on the seventh floor of the State Department. “That would be the lost opportunity. Hopefully, what we’re doing in Syria, what we’re doing in other places, allows us to make the most out of these things so that we avoid that other war.”
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TWO MONTHS AFTER THE Vienna agreement, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a Japanese diplomat named Yukiya Amano, visited Iran. The sixty-nine-year-old’s mission was straightforward: to complete the IAEA’s probe into Iran’s suspected efforts to develop an atomic weapon. Specifically, his team of inspectors was visiting the Parchin military base, where bomb testing was believed to have happened more than a decade earlier. Agency staff were taking soil samples to test them for the remnants of nuclear materials.
Iranian authorities didn’t make Amano’s work easy during his trip, despite the landmark agreement. Tehran denied the IAEA interviews with its top nuclear scientists, including Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani. Tehran also demanded that its staff, not the IAEA’s, physically conduct the sampling at Parchin, worried about outsiders roaming the secretive base. Scores of Revolutionary Guards were massed at the site when Amano and his delegation arrived on a late September morning.
Still, the IAEA obtained the samples and tested them at the agency’s laboratory in the woods outside Vienna. The results only deepened the mystery of Parchin and the questions about just how close Tehran had come to building a bomb. The IAEA found particles of man-made uranium there, possible evidence of nuclear weapons work. The agency said in a report that Iran’s claims that only conventional weapons testing had occurred at Parchin simply weren’t credible.
I asked Amano about his trip to Parchin and the tests during a spring 2016 interview in Washington. “The samples…the samples,” he replied cryptically, before pausing for thirty seconds of silence. “The samples did not support [the] Iranian story. The Iranians weren’t telling us everything in this regard.”
Conclusion
War and Peace
Ten days after the Vienna accord was reached, Major General Qasem Soleimani secretly boarded an Aeroflot jet in Tehran and made the four-hour flight to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport. Despite the nuclear deal, Soleimani remained under a UN travel ban in the summer of 2015 for his role in developing Iran’s nuclear program. UN member states were obligated to prevent the Revolutionary Guard commander from traveling on their soil. U.S. officials believed countries largely respected the UN’s ban, except for Iran’s closest allies, including Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, where Soleimani regularly visited. He was supposed to be a marked man in the rest of the world. But the nuclear agreement seemed to have given him carte blanche to enter the international community.
The Russians and Iranians both moved quickly to pocket the Western concessions made in Vienna, including the end of the international sanctions and the arms embargo, to fortify their military and economic alliance. Indeed, even before the nuclear talks ended, Supreme Leader Khamenei sent his top foreign policy advisor to Moscow to meet Russian president Vladimir Putin. The Iranian envoy, Ali Akbar Velayati, passed on a letter to the Kremlin’s czar that called for greater strategic cooperation between the two countries. Putin responded by announcing Moscow’s intent to move forward with the sale of an anti-aircraft missile system, the S-300, which could guard Iran’s nuclear facilities from Israeli or American air attacks. The Kremlin and Tehran also outlined plans to develop a fleet of new nuclear power reactors in Iran. And the Kremlin eyed selling more conventional weapons to the Revolutionary Guard.
Soleimani’s summer trip, however, had a much more specific and immediate goal—saving Russia’s and Iran’s closest Middle East ally, President Assad of Syria. Through the winter and spring of 2015, the dictator’s military opponents had gained control of large swaths of northern Syria and threatened to cut off the capital, Damascus, from the coastal territory of Latakia, the stronghold of the Assad family and its Alawite sect. Many of these rebel groups were tied to al Qaeda, and some were the forward troops of the Islamic State. The Syrian regime controlled most of Syria’s major towns and cities but only a fifth of the country’s total territory. Assad appeared to be on the brink of falling from power.
In Moscow, Soleimani met with Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu and the heads of Russian military intelligence and the Kremlin’s defense industries. Unfurling a map in front of his Russian hosts, the Iranian general charted out the areas where the rebels were making gains, but also the choke points where their militaries could bolster Assad and drive back the insurgents. He stressed that the Syrian opposition remained divided, with little to no real support from the United States and the West. “The Russians were very alarmed, and felt matters were in steep decline and that there were real dangers to the regime,” said a senior Middle East official briefed on the meetings. “The Iranians assured them there is still the possibility to reclaim the initiative. At that time, Soleimani played a role in assuring them that [they] haven’t lost all the cards.”
Soleimani’s trip set the stage for Russia’s direct military intervention inside Syria in the fall of 2015. Moscow’s airstrikes in the ensuing months were matched by ground operations coordinated by General Soleimani and the militias he controlled on the ground, including Hezbollah and Shiite forces recruited or conscripted from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen. The Revolutionary Guard sent in hundreds of its own military advisors and troops to oversee the operation. This combination allowed President Assad to intensify strikes and begin reclaiming territory from the opposition.
The joint Russian-Iranian operation challenged the Obama administration’s hopes for how Tehran would behave in a post-deal environment. President Obama and Secretary Kerry optimistically told journalists and lawmakers after the July agreement that a deal might pave the way for greater cooperation with Iran in ending many of the Middle East’s crises, including those in Syria and Yemen. Kerry and his European counterparts talked about using the P5+1 diplomatic format to engage with Tehran in a process to bring about a political transition in Damascus.
But the White House and State Department at times appeared tone-deaf to the messages that were coming out of Tehran. Supreme Leader Khamenei repeatedly told his followers that the nuclear deal would bring no change in Tehran’s regional policies and that there would be no discussions with Washington aimed at ending his government’s support for Hezbollah, the Assad regime, or the Palestinian factions at war with Israel. “Negotiations with the United States open gates to their economic, cultural, political, and security influence. Even during the nuclear negotiations they tried to harm our national interests,” Khamenei said in the weeks after the talks concluded. President Obama’s critics, meanwhile, concluded that the Russians and Iranians had colluded to manipulate the American negotiators at the end of the talks. “One reason Iran was able to negotiate so successfully was because of Russian support for a deal that would be antithetical to America’s interests,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told lawmakers shortly after the nuclear agreement was reached in July 2015. “No surprise then that just days after the deal was accounted, the commander of Iran’s Qods Force reportedly flew to Moscow to secure Russian support for their mutual ally in Syria.”
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WHILE THE IRANIANS AND RUSSIANS were plotting their moves into Syria, the Obama administration was executing its own war: this one a political campaign to ensure that the nuclear deal passed through Congress. The administration characterized the deal and its approval as the most important initiative of its second term and the defining foreign policy legacy of Barack Obama’s presidency. But there was staunch opposition in Congress. Republicans were keen to deny Obama a major political victory in his last months in office. Even many leading Democrats were deeply skeptical of the agreement. They believed it afforded Iran too many concessions without any assurances Tehran wouldn’t eventually get a nuclear bomb when the terms of the a
greement ended. At that point, with sanctions lifted, the United States’ ability to contain Iran would be severely limited.
Under the deal, many of the United States’ opponents in Iran would be taken off international sanctions lists, either immediately or in a phased process. This meant they could again travel, open bank accounts overseas, and engage in international business. These included General Soleimani and the alleged masterminds of Iran’s secret atomic weapons work in Parchin, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani. A range of the Revolutionary Guard’s top brass, including some implicated in international terrorist attacks, were also given sanctions relief. A decade of U.S. efforts to constrict Iran financially and militarily was being unwound by the nuclear deal.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-line stance against the agreement harnessed congressional opposition, with many pro-Israel groups in the United States lining up behind him. Netanyahu took the almost unprecedented step of speaking to a joint session of Congress in March 2015, even before the deal was concluded, to say that its emerging terms posed an existential threat to his country. Netanyahu rallied Israel’s supporters in Washington, urging them to spare no expense in their efforts to sink the agreement. “This is a bad deal. It’s a very bad deal. We’re better off without it!” Netanyahu said in a forty-minute address that drew repeated standing ovations in a House chamber packed mostly with Republican lawmakers. “It would be a farewell to arms control. And the Middle East would soon be crisscrossed by nuclear tripwires. A region where small skirmishes can trigger big wars would turn into a nuclear tinderbox.”
