by John Kerry
When Bill returned, I asked him how close we were to finding some common ground. “We’re not in the ballpark yet,” he said. “But at least we’re in the parking lot.” Two years of careful back-channel outreach had been worth the risk.
• • •
A FEW WEEKS after the 2013 UNGA, Wendy Sherman, our invaluable undersecretary of state for political affairs, traveled to Brussels for a coordination meeting with the political directors of the P5+1 and EU delegations. This was nothing new for Wendy; her experience with multilateral nuclear negotiations dated back to the Clinton administration. Still, she braced herself for a series of tough discussions: it was time to inform our partners of the back channel we had been advancing in secret with Iran.
According to Wendy, no one was shocked. Everyone was pissed off.
The cause of their frustration wasn’t so much the secrecy; most people understood our reasons for taking that approach. They were frustrated because they had been trying for years to convince the United States to accept a limited Iranian enrichment program as part of a comprehensive nuclear deal, and we had refused to endorse such a plan. Then we went off on our own and discussed as much with the Iranians without letting our negotiating partners know our position had changed. Sometimes international diplomacy just comes down to people-to-people relationships: the nations we were working with were upset that we had gone around them, and they wanted us to know that they expected to be fully engaged from that point on.
Our partners’ negative reaction was understandable, and we had expected it. But there’s not a doubt in my mind that it was the right course of action for the United States. Ultimately, the Iranians had to trust that the United States wasn’t going to be the spoiler of the talks—that we were as serious as anyone about getting a deal—and we had to get the same sense of certainty with respect to the Iranian position. The back channel had enabled our two nations to reach a baseline of good faith. After noting their frustration for the record, our P5+1 partners accepted that the progress the United States and Iran had made was fundamentally a good thing. Now the talks could begin in earnest.
Our initial goal was to reach an interim agreement that would give us time to negotiate a comprehensive, longer-term deal. For our part, we knew we couldn’t sit at the table as Iran’s nuclear program proceeded full steam ahead. At the same time, President Rouhani, who had been elected in large part because he pledged to revive Iran’s crippled economy, wanted to get some relief from the tough sanctions that were making life miserable for many of his people. So we needed a temporary arrangement that would, for the duration of our negotiation, freeze Iran’s program in place in exchange for modest relief from the nuclear sanctions the world had imposed.
At this point, the United States and Iran had already been discussing in our bilateral talks what this interim agreement could look like. In early November, as Wendy and the other political directors were getting ready to reconvene in Geneva, Wendy called to tell me she thought things were moving along. She thought it was a good time for me to come to Geneva to try to secure the interim agreement.
It wasn’t long before the foreign ministers from the other P5+1 nations confirmed their travel to Geneva as well. Possibly we can build some momentum, I remember thinking. Our goal should be to try our hardest to secure an interim agreement but remember always that no deal is better than a bad deal. None of us anticipated the surprise French foreign minister Laurent Fabius was about to offer.
Upon his arrival at the Geneva hotel, Fabius stopped to talk to the press, which was camped out around the InterContinental hotel, where the talks were being held. “As I speak to you, I cannot say there is any certainty that we can conclude,” Fabius told a French radio station in his deep, sonorous voice. France would not accept “a sucker’s deal,” he warned.
When I heard about Fabius’s comments, I was taken aback. I had engaged him in several conversations leading up to the meeting and his team had been involved in all the P5+1 political directors process with Wendy. He hadn’t reached out through staff or attempted to talk to me personally or do any of the other things ministers do before airing their grievances to the public. This was not how a cooperative multilateral process should unfold. Regardless, I recognized that I had to do what I could to get things back on track.
I called Fabius and asked to come see him in his room. We were all staying in the same hotel. After initial pleasantries, I asked him to be specific about what language he was concerned about in the draft text. In my memory there was no substantive response. He didn’t offer one word or sentence. He had no recommendations for how to improve it. C’est la vie.
A little frustrated, I left Fabius and began to prepare for what had just become an even more complicated meeting with Zarif later that evening. Iran was under the impression that the P5+1 countries were coming from a unified place—indeed, that was our strength. Fabius, who was to become a close friend and an important partner in the negotiations, had just made it clear to the world there might be some differences within our own team.
It quickly became evident that we would not be leaving Geneva with an interim agreement, at least not during that visit. The other European nations knew that they could not be seen as weaker than France, so they too had to oppose the text. And in the end, so did the United States. President Obama’s guidance was clear: the number one priority was unity among the P5+1. It would be essential, the president believed, both in getting a deal and in protecting that deal once it was reached.
So we stood by France and the rest of our partners, announcing that the gap between Iran and us remained too wide. We were going home. We would try again in a few weeks. As my motorcade pulled up to the tarmac at Geneva Airport, I reached for my cell phone to call the State Department Operations Center. I asked if they could please connect me to Foreign Minister Fabius.
“Laurent,” I said, when he was patched through, “I’ll see you in a couple of weeks. I look forward to working with you to close any gaps and see to it that everyone is on the same page. I hope you agree that we need to be careful about what we say to the press. If there are any issues, please call me personally.” We hung up, and I got out of the car and walked up the tall stairway and into the cabin of the white C-32 U.S. Air Force plane, our home in the sky.
• • •
WE RETURNED TO Geneva two weeks later, on Saturday, November 23. Cathy Ashton, the thoughtful EU high representative, and I had been in regular touch since we left Geneva. We agreed on a new game plan: for the time being, I would focus on France and the rest of the P5+1, and she would liaise with Iran. After meeting with Zarif, Cathy presented the updated text of the agreement, which included minor changes to the previous iteration. All nations were more or less on board—except, ironically, my own.
The U.S. delegation agreed with the technical aspects of the text—the steps Iran would take to freeze its program, verification measures, and the process by which we’d provide modest sanctions relief—all of which had largely been negotiated in our secret bilateral channel. Our concerns lay in the preamble to the agreement. We knew that section—the first two paragraphs of the text—would be read most closely and parsed by friends and critics alike. Some might even stop reading after that point. It mattered that we got every word right.
The American delegation quickly dashed the hopes of our partners who were ready for a late-afternoon press conference announcing the deal. We went back and forth with Iran well into the night. It came down to word choice and phrasing. These are the last-minute details over which diplomats pull their hair out. The scene in my hotel room at 3:00 a.m. Sunday morning was like something out of a play: I was in one corner, using the secure phone to explain to National Security Advisor Susan Rice the hiccups and the changes we were working through. Bill was in the adjoining room, on the phone with his counterpart in the secret channel, Majid Takht-Ravanchi, trying to get the Iranians’ sign-off, and between us, experts and aides were frantically typing on BlackBerrys, fueled b
y seemingly endless espresso pods.
Finally, as the clock approached 4:00 a.m., we had an agreement—one we wanted to lock in as airtight and quickly as possible, lest anyone come back later that day with a different view. We woke up the other ministers, who had understandably gone to bed hours earlier, and alerted the press that an announcement was forthcoming.
As we made our way over to the Palais des Nations, where the press conference would be held, Helga Schmid, Wendy’s EU counterpart, got a call from Abbas Araghchi, one of Zarif’s deputies. The Iranians had four more points they wanted incorporated into the agreement.
Helga passed the phone to Wendy. “Abbas, there are no more points to incorporate,” she told him. “The other ministers are now awake, they are making their way to the Palais; the press conference has been advised, and it’s done.” Abbas understood, and at 5:00 a.m. on Sunday, November 24, 2013—nearly two years after my initial trip to see Sultan Qaboos—the United States, our international partners and Iran announced a preliminary agreement that would enable us to begin direct, comprehensive negotiations. Most important, for the first time in decades, Iran’s nuclear program would not be accelerating but frozen in place—and even, in some aspects, rolling back.
I soon boarded our plane and flew home, just in time for Thanksgiving. I thought we all had a lot to be thankful for that year. The world was a little bit safer that morning and a lot of hard work had paid off. But I had no illusions: even harder work was just getting started.
• • •
ON JANUARY 20, 2014, the interim deal—the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA)—went into effect. The Iranians froze production of highly enriched uranium. They stopped installing centrifuges and halted progress on their heavy-water reactor near the city of Arak. In return, we began releasing installments of a total of $4.2 billion of Iran’s own money frozen in banks around the world.
Before this step, there was a possibility that Iran would attempt to keep us at the negotiating table for years while it moved closer and closer to a bomb. With the JPOA in place, time could not be used against either side. The situation would not get more dangerous while we were negotiating.
But while that hurdle had been removed, others remained. Critics of the deal on all sides intensified their attacks as the new phase of the talks got under way. A bipartisan group of my former Senate colleagues, led by Senators Mark Kirk, Bob Menendez and Chuck Schumer, was pushing sanctions legislation that, if passed, would torpedo the talks. Their efforts received vocal support from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. Bibi Netanyahu was furious, telling anyone who would listen that the JPOA was a “historic mistake.”
By the time our experts got back to the table, politics in both the United States and Iran had made the playing field more complex. In early July, the ayatollah delivered a speech that declared Iran’s desire not to cut back its enrichment, as we had been discussing, but to increase its capacity tenfold. In the version of the future the supreme leader described, Iran would be bringing thousands of new centrifuges online in the coming years. It was an outrageous and unexpected assertion—even Zarif claimed to be blindsided—and it gave our critics in the region and on Capitol Hill even more reason to blow their gaskets. The six-month time period we had allotted for the negotiation was wishful thinking. There was no way we were going to reach any agreement by the end of July. We extended the talks, and the JPOA, another four months, to November 24, 2014.
At that point, I stayed in constant communication with our day-to-day negotiating team led by Wendy Sherman, as well as our international partners. Cathy Ashton, Javad and I would meet trilaterally. Then Javad and I would meet bilaterally. The Omanis stepped in to mediate from time to time. We were trying to close the gaps that had emerged, but tensions continued to rise.
In November, just a couple of weeks before the deadline, I stopped in Oman to meet with Javad and his team. I was on my way to China for a long-scheduled visit but hoped an in-person conversation might help to alleviate some of the tension that had been mounting.
The meeting was a total standoff, with each of us talking straight past the other. It was so bad that we decided to meet again a few days later, when I was on my way home from Beijing, but the second meeting was as useless as the first. Our meetings had always been tough, but until that point they were calm and respectful. That week in Muscat, we found ourselves shouting across the table. It was the first time we both lost our patience, but it wouldn’t be the last.
As the deadline approached, the experts tirelessly hammered away to develop solutions to very complex problems. The details were critical. We were making some headway, but shortly after I arrived in Vienna for the final stretch, it became clear that we needed more time.
We began to prepare for another extension, but this one would be harder to explain. In the 2014 midterm elections, the Republicans had won back the Senate. It would be near impossible to stave off new sanctions legislation much longer. Every delay would give credence to their argument that talks were futile and a deal was impossible. It would be difficult to sell a second extension, but if we were able to do it, we’d have to make clear that this was our last effort. We weren’t going to sit at the negotiating table forever.
For several reasons, including scheduling concerns, we agreed to announce two separate deadlines for the talks. We would give ourselves four months, until March 31, for a political agreement laying out the basic contours of the deal, and, if necessary, we would take another three months, until June 30, to resolve the technical details.
The night before we announced the extension, I sat in my hotel suite with a couple of aides, editing my remarks for the press conference we had scheduled for the following day. I was losing patience with the Iranians. They were tempting fate by not recognizing the difficulties of the political playing field in the United States. I wanted to make it crystal clear in my statement that time was running out. Still, I thought the first cut at the draft excessively vilified Zarif. It was too harsh. I didn’t want hard-liners on both sides to be able to use my words in defending their assertion that we were wasting our time with diplomacy. I also knew the Iranians well enough by that point to understand that if they felt humiliated or condescended to, they were more likely to dig in than capitulate. I still believed strongly that success was possible, but we’d have to tread carefully. Every move we made—every word we said—mattered enormously.
The next draft of the remarks was less combative, but I thought it was important to add something about the respect both sides had for each other. Sultan Qaboos had emphasized the importance of respect. I felt strongly that we would gain nothing by venting in public at a critical moment. I told my team, “I’ve always felt that Javad has been a strong negotiator and he’s here in good faith. I want to say that. I know I’ll get shit for it, but I want to keep this cordial. Javad’s team is working as hard as we are to get to a better place. He deserves some credit for that.”
Some critics would attack me for any word of diplomatic nicety I showed to Iran or its foreign minister. That’s the world we live in. I was looking at the long-term goal, not one day in the papers. The purpose of the talks was to prevent a country from getting a nuclear weapon, and if it took building “negotiating” respect with a government we had serious disagreements with, so be it. The way to keep the talks on track was for Javad and me to work hard to maintain the civility we had established.
• • •
WE HIT THE ground running in 2015. As we crept closer and closer to a deal, our critics got louder and louder. By this point, we were giving regular classified briefings to Congress, our Gulf partners and the Israelis to explain how the talks were evolving and to ensure they understood our thinking. We were making progress, and that sat better with some than others.
During our frequent lengthy and occasionally heated conversations, Prime Minister Netanyahu made his displeasure clear, but we stayed in regular contact. I made sure
to call Bibi immediately following each negotiating session to convey where we were. Wendy briefed the Israeli security community often in person and in depth. While Bibi and those closest to him were opposed to what we were doing, most of the high-level leadership of the Israeli security forces supported the outcome of the agreement and would continue to do so even after President Obama left office.
On January 19, 2015, in the late afternoon, I met with Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, in my office in Washington. I’d known him a long time and even weighed in on his behalf when some in the White House were concerned about agreeing to his appointment. After I became secretary, we continued to have an open and respectful relationship. I had enjoyed a wonderful Passover Seder at his home. On this January afternoon, as the Iran negotiations were hitting what felt like the home stretch, I sat with Ron for a solid hour, talking about the future of the region and, of course, the progress made between the P5+1 countries and Iran.
The next morning, Speaker of the House John Boehner announced that Prime Minister Netanyahu had accepted his invitation to visit Washington in March to address a joint session of Congress. I was stunned. Ron sat in my office the day before knowing this announcement was coming and without giving me even a subtle heads-up that he had been working with the Speaker to engineer such a visit. I was blindsided, along with the president and everyone else in the administration.
It was a total departure from protocol and tradition; in the past, the White House and Congress consulted each other before extending this kind of invitation to a foreign leader. In this case, Congress purposely left President Obama out of the loop, in part because Prime Minister Netanyahu was invited precisely to undercut the administration’s diplomatic efforts. It was another troubling indication that on foreign policy, Congress was operating no longer as an institution belonging to the country and history, but on behalf of a party and the moment.
