by John Kerry
I knew that Israel’s mistrust in Iran’s leaders ran deep—we all shared it—but in accepting congressional Republicans’ invitation, the Israeli government revealed its disrespect for President Obama. The relationship between the two presidents never recovered.
In early March, as Bibi made his way to the U.S. Capitol, I was in Montreux, Switzerland, for a series of negotiations with the Iranians. I braced myself for what he would say.
The speech was broadcast live internationally, including in Switzerland. A few of us were in the middle of a tense session with the Iranians, so I missed it, but much of the delegation watched and reported the highlights. I read it later and caught a few snippets on the news. Bibi passionately told Congress that the deal “doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb. It paves Iran’s path to the bomb.” It was no surprise that Netanyahu grossly distorted the agreement. He delivered a well-crafted but purely political statement, not an honest analysis of nonproliferation strategy or a substantive argument for how one would in fact make Israel safer without the agreement. But then again, everyone understood that the speech was an appeal to the gut—an emotional screed calculated to mobilize his supporters in the United States and scare senators from approving the agreement.
As an unwavering supporter of Israel who always viewed my differences with Bibi through a political, not personal lens, I was disappointed in him. For my entire Senate career, I had loyally supported Israel, and as secretary, I continued in countless ways to help Israel avoid attacks in international organizations, to intervene on unfair resolutions and to recommend vetoes at the UN. President Obama had done as much, if not more, to support Israel than any other president. We had consistently acted with Israel’s best interest at heart in international forums. I thought we deserved better than a speech that hit below the belt. We were vilified alongside the Iranians, which was strange indeed. For those of us gathered in Montreux that day, it was one of the more inexplicable moments of the journey.
We had gotten used to the steady stream of third-party vitriol by that time. We’d walk out of an intense, even heated meeting with the Iranians, only to catch wind of an angry statement released by someone who was ostensibly on our side. I’d spend three hours trying to convince Javad that an offer on a particular item was the best he could hope for, only to dial into a call with a counterpart from the region who wanted to give me a completely inaccurate and even fanciful earful on how much I was giving away. Fighting for a good deal on multiple flanks simultaneously made the entire task much more difficult.
A few days after Bibi’s speech, Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, led forty-six of his Senate colleagues in sending a letter to the Iranian government. The letter essentially argued that the Obama administration didn’t speak for the United States. It warned Iran against trusting us, suggesting that any deal would be undone “with the stroke of a pen” as soon as Obama was out of office.
I had served in the Senate for twenty-eight years, as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee for the last four of them. I knew how unprecedented it was for a member of Congress to intervene directly with foreign leaders and try to undermine a sitting president in the middle of a negotiation, let alone one where the stakes were so high. It was irresponsible and reckless. I could only imagine what the response of the Republicans would have been if Democrats had ever done that to President Reagan during his negotiations with the Soviet Union.
I saw Zarif the following day. I had barely said hello before he pulled out a copy of the letter. I explained the inaccuracies in Cotton’s statement and urged him to remain focused on narrowing the gaps between our sides. We were getting too close to allow distractions to shake us. After all, there would be no better way to shut up the naysayers than to come home with a good deal in hand.
• • •
BY THE END of 2014, I had more or less succeeded in convincing Javad there was no way President Obama would agree to a deal that didn’t expand Iran’s so-called breakout time to at least a year. This key principle became a central tenet that guided the talks from that point on. Translated, it meant we needed U.S. nuclear experts to be confident that if the Iranians decided to break out of the deal and ramp up their enrichment, it would take at least a year for them to acquire enough fissile material to power a bomb. In our view, a year was more than enough time for the United States and our allies to pursue “alternative” (read: military) means of preventing a nuclear-armed Iran.
Breakout time is calculated based on a number of factors, from the size of the existing stockpile of enriched uranium, to how many centrifuges would be spinning, to how advanced those centrifuges were, to how they would be configured. The trouble was certain inputs our experts used to crunch those numbers were classified. There was only so much we could explain to the Iranians about why individual proposals were more, or less, acceptable to us. This frustrated Zarif. Much of what could clarify the choice of one approach over another was dependent on mathematics and science rather than politics. Perhaps because neither of us was a scientist, it was difficult to persuade each other of the efficacy of one position over another.
Just before we walked into the Situation Room one afternoon for an NSC meeting, Wendy received an email from Abbas. The Iranians notified us they were sending Ali Salehi to the next round of talks to oversee the more technical negotiations. Salehi was one of Iran’s top nuclear physicists and served as the head of the country’s Atomic Energy Organization. Abbas wanted to know whom we would send to serve as Salehi’s interlocutor.
Wendy pulled Susan Rice and me aside and read the email off her BlackBerry. In unison, the three of us spoke the obvious answer: Ernie.
Like all secretaries of energy, Ernie Moniz oversaw the U.S. nuclear arsenal. But unlike other secretaries of energy, he also had a PhD and decades of experience in nuclear physics. While Salehi and Moniz had never met, they had overlapped for a few years at MIT in the 1970s. This turned out to have consequence: Salehi was very proud of his MIT education. And Ernie was a professor there by the time Salehi was working toward his degree. Ernie not only had the appropriate clearances, but was fully briefed on the most sensitive aspects of the negotiations. He had frequently weighed in on our internal discussions. He was ready to jump right in.
Moments after Wendy read out Abbas’s email, Ernie made his way into the Situation Room. As the NSC meeting got under way, Susan and I broke the news to him. “Hopefully you don’t have plans this weekend,” we said. “You’re going to Switzerland.”
We didn’t know initially if Salehi had been sent to try to get a deal or to prevent one. As such, he was extremely close to Ayatollah Khamenei. At first, most of our nuclear folks thought it was a bad sign that the Iranians were deciding to send him in. He was viewed as the guy who would say no. In their estimation, he would be reluctant to take any steps that might undermine the country’s nuclear program that he had built from scratch.
I was among those who thought his presence could be positive. I didn’t believe the Iranians would send Salehi if their only goal was to obstruct progress. There were plenty of ways to do that. To me his participation meant they wanted to get the solution right. It meant they were serious about reaching a deal.
I turned out to be right. On the surface, Salehi and Moniz could not have been more different. Salehi, who wore wire-rimmed glasses and an impeccably groomed beard, was soft-spoken and serious. Moniz, whose hair fell to just above his shoulders, was gregarious and easygoing. But their differences were irrelevant. They spoke the same scientific language. With them on hand to hammer through the more technical elements with mutually understood authority, the rest of us could focus on the bigger picture. The talks began to accelerate.
• • •
WITH OUR INITIAL deadline fast approaching, we arrived in the Swiss city of Lausanne on March 26, 2015, with the goal of finally concluding the political agreement we had promised the world.
We took over the Beau-Rivage, a hotel on the shore of Lake Ge
neva. It had seen its fair share of diplomacy in the past, including the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, which dissolved the Ottoman Empire. Zarif was all too familiar with this history. “If we have an announcement to make at the end of this, we can’t do it at the Beau Rivage,” he joked. “Too much baggage.”
The U.S., French, British, German, Chinese, Russian, EU and Iranian delegations each had office space in the hotel. The U.S. delegation room was occupied around the clock. The experts—from nuclear experts to sanctions experts to experts in international law—were meeting regularly with their foreign counterparts, and in between those meetings, they were on standby to be pulled into one of our minister-level sessions. Our communications team was stationed at the conference table, eager for updates from me or Wendy Sherman or one of the other negotiators. (They were also seeking refuge from the press, who were sectioned off in another part of the hotel, not so patiently waiting for details to feed to their editors in every part of the world.) It was crunch time, and everyone was aware of the ticking clock.
We were also in regular touch with Washington. At night, when it was midafternoon in D.C., a few of us would pack into a small tent where our IT team had set up a secure video conference. We’d update the president, Susan Rice, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and others on the progress, or lack thereof, we had made and we’d discuss the strategy for the following day.
These virtual meetings were some of the most productive I’ve ever experienced. President Obama’s leadership was clear and important. He was well briefed on every aspect of the agreement, asking all the right questions and making tough decisions whenever he was required to do so. But he also trusted us. He would defer to Ernie or Jack or me if he thought we had a better sense of what could be accomplished. We knew exactly where he stood and exactly how much freedom we had to maneuver in the negotiating room. It was a paradigm for how an administration should function, and I wish that kind of administration-wide collaboration was more common.
But now it was time to see whether we could reach a deal or whether we should call it quits. Unfortunately, progress was met by almost daily backsliding. I don’t know if the Iranians were engaging in a deliberate strategy or whether they were getting pushback from leaders in Tehran after they reported on the day’s deliberations. Either way, it became somewhat debilitating. We’d arrive at a decent place one evening, and by the next morning, the Iranians would walk back some of the progress we’d made the night before. It was three steps forward and two steps back, and it was an unproductive use of our limited time.
“Thank goodness the real deadline is in June, not March,” Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi said to me at one point. “We’d never make it otherwise.” But the Chinese didn’t have to deal with a Congress that was eager to do mischief. To the U.S. delegation, the March deadline was as real as it gets: the Republican majority was ready at the first sign of weakness to implement new sanctions against Iran and in effect blow up the talks. So, in an effort to ensure each negotiating session built off the previous one, we minimized the amount of time between our meetings. We worked until late in the night, every night. One night we worked straight through until 9:00 a.m. the following morning. Then we slept for two or three hours and immediately came back to the table.
President Obama said that if we were getting close, we were not to get up from the table simply because the clock struck midnight. He told us to be mindful of the deadline, but to work through the following day or two, if we thought it meant we could get where we needed to be.
We did exactly that. The gaps continued to narrow. We started to build some momentum with a sense that an agreement was within reach. Before we knew it, we were discussing the political realities each side faced in making an announcement. Until that moment, we had refrained from putting anything on paper, in hopes of preventing leaks or premature dissection by talking heads. Wendy had the creative idea of bringing in a large dry-erase board, where we highlighted each component of the agreement, facilitating an overview that proved helpful.
We were mindful that if there was to be an announcement, it would be vital to explain clearly in layman’s terms precisely what was agreed. Steadily, we pulled together a document outlining the agreed-upon points, the wording of which prompted yet another hours-long negotiation.
When we were all of us finally comfortable, I assured Javad we wouldn’t put the document out until after we had a joint press conference the following day. “Wait a minute!” he exclaimed. “This document isn’t meant to be public!”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Javad,” I said, “it’s four o’clock in the morning. We just spent eighteen hours negotiating every single word of this thing. If you don’t want another round of sanctions, this has to be public. Of course it’s going to be public!”
If we had returned to the United States claiming to have agreement on a series of principles, but told Congress and the public that we couldn’t show them what those principles were, we would have been ridiculed. More important, we wouldn’t have a shred of credibility with Congress to keep it from passing sanctions. And the negotiations would not survive additional sanctions, which the Iranian leadership would regard as bad faith, to say the least.
The next morning I went to see Zarif and explain this reality to him. If we couldn’t put out a fact sheet, I told him, we might as well go home.
Finally, he conceded. “Please be careful how you word it,” he said. “Don’t go overboard. Make it clear this is an agreement, not something you’re forcing us to accept. Otherwise, it will be very difficult to move forward.”
We honored his request, in the fact sheet as well as in my public statement to the press. For example, we were careful to say, “Iran has agreed to do X,” instead of “Iran must do X.” I understood that Javad had his own political reality. If we were perceived to be taking victory laps at the expense of the Iranians, hard-liners in his country would pull the plug before we got any further.
That evening, April 2, 2015, we announced a detailed framework, essentially the broad outline of the agreement but with key details to be filled in during the ensuing months. It was an important milestone, but we still faced very difficult negotiations ahead of us. None of us wanted to go public with a framework agreement. We were forced to do so because of the congressional threat of sanctions. More sanctions would have killed the process, but releasing the framework also made the road ahead much more difficult, because it showed how far we had gotten and how real the possibility of a final agreement was. We knew that was sure to bring out the opponents on both sides.
The delegation went to a nearby Italian restaurant for dinner at eleven o’clock that night, just in time for us to catch our 2:00 a.m. ride back to Washington. Ernie proposed a toast, but I wasn’t ready to celebrate. “We’re not there yet,” I reminded the team. I was a killjoy and I knew it, but to me, celebration felt premature. After all, we had deferred until the next round some of the toughest issues, like the timing of sanctions relief and what kind of research and development Iran’s nuclear program would be permitted to undertake. A comprehensive deal was far from certain.
It had been imperative to announce our progress in Lausanne. The only way to hold on to the gains we achieved was to release as many details as possible; opponents of the talks were ready to pull the plug if we didn’t. It would have been far more effective if we could have completed the entire agreement before announcing an unfinished product. Congress didn’t give us any choice.
The framework announced in Lausanne was well received. It was far more ambitious than most people expected. It was applauded by experts, some of whom had been publicly skeptical until that point. But we knew that the positive response—and the extra time it bought us—would come at a steep price.
Every detail we put out served as a target for the opponents. Critics were already calculating what might turn out to be the weakest aspects of the deal, given what was left to be negotiated, and they began to target their cr
iticism accordingly.
At the same time, the praise the P5+1 received in the press outraged and embarrassed the Iranians. It was clear from the moment the headlines were printed that, in the next round, the Iranians would try to compensate for those things they were criticized for by the opponents to a deal at home. Sometimes I wished Americans could have read or heard some of the vicious criticism Javad Zarif and his colleagues were subjected to; perhaps they might have thought a bit more clearly about what we were accomplishing in Lausanne. Both sides were left extremely exposed.
• • •
AS EXPECTED, THE momentum from Lausanne faded almost immediately. Republicans began an immediate push for legislation to require congressional review of the final text of the deal. Given Congress’s inability to pass much of anything, the Obama administration viewed a formal congressional ratification process to be a death sentence. After an intense series of negotiations led by Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker, Republican from Tennessee, a bill was passed. Under this legislation, which President Obama signed into law that May, if we completed the deal by July 9 as planned, Congress would have a month to review it, and senators would then be permitted to vote to prevent President Obama from lifting the sanctions. If we completed the deal after July 9, which ended up being the case, Congress would have sixty days to review the deal. If two-thirds of the Senate agreed to reject the agreement, they could stop the president from implementing the deal.
This was key: It wouldn’t be necessary for us to convince a sweeping majority of senators to vote in support of the deal, which might have been impossible, given the aggressive anti-Iran lobbying campaign from groups like AIPAC and others. Instead, we would need thirty-four senators not to vote to reject the deal in order to uphold the president’s inevitable veto and forty-one to prevent filibuster of the legislation that would stop it from passing altogether. Securing those votes would be an enormously difficult task in its own right, but this legislation, which the Senate passed near unanimously, gave us a fighting chance.
