Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  Of course, we did not yet have a final agreement to defend. In late May, we had a particularly tense meeting with the Iranians and the EU at the InterContinental hotel in Geneva. In the wake of the Lausanne agreement and its reception, Ayatollah Khamenei had put forward a number of new parameters that we judged to be off the wall, from breakout-time calculations to centrifuge numbers. I understood that the Iranians were reacting to the storm of criticism they had received at home, but I felt they were undermining everything we had achieved just a few weeks prior. At one point, I was angry enough at what I heard that I banged my hand down on the table, hard. The pen I was holding accidentally bounced out of my hand and flew straight at Abbas Araghchi, landing near his chest. Everyone was silent for a moment; it was the most demonstrative any of them had ever seen me. I apologized to Abbas at once, but the moment surprised us all and punched a reset, bringing us back to a respectful and reasonable, if not terribly productive, conversation. That six-hour meeting ranked up with Muscat as the worst we had, but it was necessary. Sometimes in diplomacy, you need to have a meeting where absolutely nothing positive happens. It forces everyone to go home, take a breath and reexamine the reasons for negotiating in the first place. Often enough, I’ve found, the least productive meetings set the stage for the most productive ones.

  In this case, however, our meeting was followed by a setback of a different kind. The next morning, a Sunday, I went for a bike ride—something I tried to do on long trips to get some outdoor exercise and clear my head for an hour or two. We drove an hour out of Geneva to the small town of Cluses, just over the border in France. I was about to embark on a mountain climb, the Col de la Colombière at the foot of the French Alps—a short section of the Tour de France. I was just getting started, moving pretty slowly, while maneuvering to clear a police motorcycle to my left. With my head turned in that direction, my bike crashed into a barely visible curb, knocking me over on my right side. My leg was crunched under me. When I tried to get up, nothing worked. I couldn’t get my leg to react. I put both hands on my thigh and watched while one hand went in one direction and the other the opposite direction. I turned to the security guys who had run over to help and said, “I’ve broken my leg.” The leverage between the curb and the street had created exactly the wrong angle, snapping my femur.

  I was in pain but the main thing I felt was frustration. I was pissed at myself for letting this happen and hugely disappointed at not being able to enjoy the day and make the climb. More important, we had the last, critical weeks of negotiation ahead of us to get a deal. I was determined not to let my injury get in the way.

  From Geneva, I had been scheduled to head to Spain and then Paris to chair an important meeting of the global coalition we were leading against ISIL. I still fully intended on doing those stops, as soon as my leg was wrapped up, but after the Swiss doctors examined me, they said that I was in no condition to do much of anything. The break, they said, was an inch from my femoral artery, just below my hip—a dangerous place for a shattered bone. I needed surgery right away.

  President Obama called me when he heard the news. I assured him I would not miss a beat. I’m not sure what he believed, but he could not have been more supportive, then and in the days to come.

  I flew back to Boston on a C-17 along with Dr. Dennis Burke, the superb orthopedic surgeon who had performed my hip replacement a number of years before. He had graciously flown to Geneva to examine me and accompany me home for the operation. My deputy chief of staff, Tom Sullivan; my senior advisor for strategic communication, Glen Johnson; my longtime aide, Jason Meininger; and a few members of my security detail stayed with me on the flight back as well. As we were crossing the Atlantic, Dennis told me that I had to take it easy for a few weeks, or I’d be out of commission for a lot longer than I needed to be.

  When we arrived at Logan International Airport, I was transported by ambulance from the plane to Massachusetts General Hospital—about a five-minute walk from my home in Boston. I heard what the doctors told me, and I listened. But I had business to conduct. The morning of my surgery was the anti-ISIL coalition meeting I was scheduled to attend in Paris. I woke up at 4:30 a.m. to call into the meeting. (Later my foreign minister friends told me how important it was that this disembodied voice was piped into their meeting to encourage additional efforts to rapidly crush ISIL.) For the next ten days, I made as many calls and conducted as many virtual meetings as I could from my hospital bed.

  I also worked my ass off on physical therapy. At first, my doctors were skeptical I’d be able to fly overseas to conclude the Iran negotiations at the end of the month. I’d be on crutches at least a couple of months, and there were risks involved with flying too quickly after the surgery. But the Iranians couldn’t come to the United States, and it simply wouldn’t have been possible to negotiate such a deal over the phone. I knew I had to get well enough to be cleared for a transatlantic flight. I worked every single day toward that goal. Finally, the verdict came back from the doctors: I was good to go. I boarded the plane for Vienna at Andrews Air Force Base the morning of June 26. A hydraulic lift elevated me up to the door of the plane since I couldn’t climb the stairs.

  • • •

  THE FINAL ROUND of negotiations was held at the Palais Coburg, a massive residence-turned-hotel with a history (and a wine cellar) that dates back to the sixteenth century. Its centuries-old foundation meant the floor plans were a bit convoluted; going from one office to another often meant switching elevators and navigating long, mazelike hallways. Thankfully, the other delegations and the hotel management were understanding of my condition, and I was able to spend non-negotiating time in a suite right off the elevator on the second floor.

  Summer was in full swing, and Vienna was scorching hot. At the Coburg, the top-floor suite in which the delegation spent most of its time crunching numbers and fine-tuning statements had subpar air-conditioning, but the superb team from the U.S. mission to Vienna brought in several fans and taped plastic tarps over the windows to keep the cool air inside. The embassy team were unsung heroes: they worked to ensure we didn’t miss a beat thousands of miles away from the nerve center in Foggy Bottom, monitoring updates and intelligence reports from around the world, facilitating meetings and transportation logistics at a moment’s notice and even keeping the fridge stocked and the coffee flowing around the clock.

  The various experts so essential to our delegation were heroes as well. Many of them had been working in Vienna, away from their families, for weeks longer than the rest of us. They missed weddings, anniversaries, funerals, children’s birthdays—every aspect of family life was sacrificed to achieve a vital public policy goal. But no one complained or even asked for a break. Every single member of the team was deeply committed to the mission. It was among the most professional, capable group of people I’ve ever worked with.

  As June turned to July, it soon became clear we would also miss whatever Fourth of July plans any of us had made. Roland, the cheerful and flamboyant manager of the Coburg, tried to make the best of it. He wore star-spangled pants all day and hosted a quick barbecue on the terrace of the hotel, complete with hot dogs and hamburgers. It was a nice and rare reprieve from the marathon talks.

  Back in the negotiating room, however, things were getting tougher. As we narrowed down the issues, the latitude for concession also narrowed. We continued to argue over numbers, configurations, documents and timelines.

  One evening Ernie Moniz and I met with Zarif and Salehi in the prime negotiating room on the second floor. We wondered if the Iranians were stalling, uncertain about their direction and intent, or waiting for instructions from Tehran. We found ourselves raising voices yet again. One of my aides came into the room and informed us that we were echoing down the hall for the whole floor to hear. I ran into German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier shortly afterward, and he quipped that, from what he was able to hear, my meeting with Zarif “sounded constructive.”

  It wasn’t. The
following day I relayed our lengthy conversation to the rest of the P5+1 ministers, and we spent hours working up a proposal with ideas on a number of sticking points that we thought would help to close some of the gaps between the two sides.

  We invited Zarif into the large conference room, and about thirty seconds after we walked him through what we had come up with, he dismissed it out of hand.

  “This is insulting. You’re trying to threaten me!” he exclaimed, getting up to leave. “Never threaten an Iranian.”

  A brief silence followed, before Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov broke the tension: “Or a Russian!”

  There was some nervous laughter at Lavrov’s quip, but the meeting was over. Disappointed, I headed to the Coburg’s dining room for dinner with the U.S. negotiating team. We took over a large, round table and, as we ate our sixth Wiener schnitzel of the week, debriefed what had just happened. For the first time since these talks began, I thought it could well be necessary to leave Vienna without a deal. We began talking about how we would explain the failure—how we could describe how unreasonable the Iranians were being in a way that wouldn’t give immediate confidence to those advocating military action, inadvertently sparking a larger conflict.

  I went to bed that night hoping the Iranians would see the value of what we had proposed. The next morning, I visited Javad in his suite. I wanted to talk to him one-on-one to see if we really had reached an impasse.

  “Javad,” I began. “This is it. Do you want to make this work, or don’t you?” We talked for some time about the stakes and the road we had taken to get where we were. Javad told me he had talked with Tehran. He thought they had responded constructively to some ideas he had, and he wanted to get together to see if we could pull back from the brink. I told him I was willing to listen but that there were certain things we couldn’t move away from. I left that conversation with a feeling that Javad had reflected overnight and resolved problems he had thought were insurmountable.

  We remained in Vienna for several more days. I believe the Iranians may have thought they could hold us over the barrel that Congress had created, which triggered a longer period of congressional review if we didn’t finish by the July 9 deadline established in the Corker legislation. We didn’t let the deadline scare us. We weren’t willing to sacrifice anything just to meet an arbitrary congressional deadline, even if it meant Congress would ultimately have twice as long to review the agreement.

  Every day, we were getting closer, but Zarif still couldn’t seem to bring himself to say yes. On the evening of July 13, our seventeenth night in Vienna, I invited Zarif, Lavrov and the new EU high representative, Federica Mogherini, to the American suite at the Coburg. Federica had succeeded Cathy Ashton and had already gotten to know Lavrov and Zarif pretty well. I sat there with my bum leg propped up on an ottoman, and we listened to Zarif tick off all the reasons the deal we had been working toward wasn’t good enough for Iran. Around midnight, Lavrov, who was eager to depart on a trip to Uzbekistan the following day, interrupted him. “Javad, is it that you don’t have the authority to make a deal? If that’s the case, then please, just tell us. You are wasting our time.”

  Zarif was furious at Lavrov’s goading. Angry, he rose off the sofa and started to move toward the door, forcefully objecting to Lavrov’s taunt. I jumped up as fast as I could and hobbled over on my crutches to intercept him. “I know Sergei didn’t mean to insult you,” I told Zarif, trying to calm him down. We’d been at it for long, difficult hours. Tension was understandably high. “We just don’t think there’s anything else we can do. This is the deal. It’s the moment of truth. Are you taking it or leaving it?”

  After a moment, he acknowledged that he was prepared to accept the agreement, but he needed one more thing—of several he had asked for—that from his point of view would make it fair.

  I moved as quickly as I could into the adjoining room, where Robert Malley from the NSC, Jon Finer, Wendy Sherman and a few others were waiting for an update.

  I told them, “We’re not moving away from anything on the substance, but let’s find something that gets him over the hump without costing us. That’s all that’s standing in the way. Thoughts?” I looked around to shrugged shoulders from all.

  Chris Backemeyer, our sanctions lead, cautiously began to speak. “There’s one thing . . .”

  The Treasury Department had already been prepared to remove a dozzen additional people from the list of Iranians we had been sanctioning. We held this back for a moment like this—a card the United States had kept in our back pocket. It was time to play it.

  “They’re small players,” Chris advised. “They may not be enough.” But I was convinced that what mattered was the gesture and respect for the difficult choices the Iranians had made. I had grabbed my crutches and headed for the door.

  I reentered the room where Sergei and Javad were seated. I told Javad we were willing to take one more step to bring this to a close. I offered him the handful of additional names we were prepared to delist from sanctions. “Do we have a deal?” I asked.

  He paused for what seemed like an eternity. “We have a deal.”

  It was after midnight, and there wasn’t much time—or energy—for celebration. After a few handshakes, I returned to my room, where I called the president to deliver the news. He thanked me, I thanked him, and I told him I was gearing up for the fight we had ahead of us on Capitol Hill. We had gotten the deal we wanted; now we had to keep it.

  • • •

  WHEN THE CORKER legislation passed, some suggested the less time Congress had to consider the deal the better off we’d be. I came to believe the opposite was true. Most members took the process incredibly seriously, and we were grateful to have sixty days to brief them thoroughly and answer any questions they had.

  The hearings were vicious. Corker told me I had been “fleeced.” Others said we were “bamboozled” and called the agreement “ludicrous.” But I was more confident in the merits of that deal than anything I’d ever worked on. Outside the public eye, Wendy, Ernie, Jack Lew and I went up to the Hill to meet with senators privately. We had the support of some essential allies—including Senators Dick Durbin, Chris Murphy and Jeanne Shaheen—who were constantly whipping votes and pointing us toward senators in need of persuasion. We didn’t take a single vote for granted, and we tried to turn even the staunchest opponents. It was an all-hands-on-deck affair, complete with a “war room” setup at the White House, and it was an ensemble effort drawing on the best of every relevant agency, the intelligence community and the team at the White House, including Susan Rice. Chris Backemeyer was practically living on Capitol Hill. Undecided senators were reading the text with a fine-tooth comb and seeking answers to all the questions they had. Senator Barbara Mikulski, who was struggling with the vote, actually traveled to Vienna to meet with the IAEA and get a better understanding of the transparency and verification aspects of the agreement directly from the international experts. Slowly, more and more senators announced that they would vote on our side. On September 2, upon her return from Vienna, Barbara Mikulski became the thirty-fourth senator to announce her support for the agreement, giving us enough votes to sustain a veto. In the end, forty-two senators voted with us. The Iran agreement would go forward.

  • • •

  THE JCPOA WAS to go into effect on the appropriately if not creatively named “Implementation Day.” There was no specific date attached to it in the text; rather, it would be the date on which the IAEA certified that Iran had completed a series of steps to roll back its nuclear program, and in return, the United States, the EU and the UN would suspend their nuclear-related sanctions. Given the number of actions Iran had to take—for example, shipping nearly all of its enriched uranium out of the country, removing most of the centrifuges from the Fordow facility, allowing inspectors to ensure it no longer conducted nuclear activities at a military site called Parchin and deactivating its heavy-water reactor at Arak—we expected the Iranians would tak
e about nine months to complete their part, which would put Implementation Day somewhere in March 2016. But Iran worked quickly, perhaps, as some suspected, in hopes of obtaining the sanctions relief before the country’s February 2016 elections. By mid-December, the IAEA informed us that Implementation Day could be weeks, not months, away.

  Two unrelated negotiations between the United States and Iran, each led by entirely separate teams, but catalyzed by the nuclear breakthrough, came to a head at around the same time.

  The first involved our long-standing efforts to secure the release of four Iranian American citizens unjustly imprisoned in Iran. Not a meeting would go by without our pressing at some point for the release of the Americans. In response, the Iranians would spout talking points about the severity of the charges against them and vaguely mention that there were a number of Iranians in U.S. prisons that they would like freed as well. By the end of 2014, we realized there might be real potential for an exchange. We didn’t think it would be appropriate to negotiate their release in the same track as the nuclear talks because we didn’t want the Iranians to make their lives a bargaining chip for a lesser nuclear agreement. Accordingly, both countries appointed entirely separate teams to explore a potential exchange. We tapped Brett McGurk, an experienced diplomat who had recently helped secure a peaceful political transition in Iraq, to lead the U.S. delegation. Brett and a small group of colleagues began to meet monthly in Geneva with their Iranian counterparts. The talks were held in secret, given the obvious sensitivity involved. In fact, most of our nuclear negotiators, and even many senior officials in our administration, had no idea they were happening.