by John Kerry
It took a while for any progress to be made. At first, the Iranians gave us an absurd list of prisoners whom they wanted released; it was dozens of names long and included people with charges related to terrorism and other violent crimes. President Obama was clear that only those with nonviolent charges would even be considered for release. After the nuclear deal, the negotiations gained some steam, and by the fall of 2015, the negotiators had come up with a list of seven Iranians, all of whom had been charged with nonviolent crimes, whom we were willing to release in exchange for the Americans’ freedom. At one point, it looked like we might have our guys home by Thanksgiving, but unfortunately the process hit a few more speed bumps, delaying the exchange until mid-January.
Back in the 1970s, before the Iranian Revolution, the United States sold our then ally hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of military equipment. The Shah’s government fell far behind in its required payments, and the parties reached an agreement in early 1979 to restructure the sales. Once Ayatollah Khomeini seized power and took our embassy personnel hostage, the United States obviously wasn’t going to provide those weapons to Iran. The only problem was, Iran had already paid for many of them. That money was sitting in an account with the U.S. Treasury. Iran had long demanded that we return the money—with interest. Tehran filed claims with an international court at The Hague for $10 billion, plus interest, including return of those funds. They had a solid legal case for this portion of its claim, and hearings were slated to begin. The court could stick the United States with an enormous bill. The administration eventually agreed to settle the claim for those funds, as prior administrations had settled other claims with Iran, and did so for less than a fifth of what they were attempting to claim: $1.7 billion. This figure was derived from the amount of funds in the Iranian account at the treasury, plus an amount to account in part for interest.
While $1.7 billion is still a lot of money, it is a hell of a lot better than $10 billion. Before the United States paid the money, however, there were a few other things to consider. First and foremost, President Obama wanted to make certain the decision to move forward with the payment was a good deal for the country on the merits, not a concession. He asked all the relevant cabinet members to carefully consider whether they thought this settlement made sense at face value, and to send him their individual written recommendation. He would move forward, he explained, only if there was unanimous consent to do so. We all agreed that the settlement was fair and likely to save taxpayers billions of dollars. The State Department’s career lawyers, who led this negotiation, told me it was a better deal than they thought possible.
After the president decided that we would move forward, there was the question of timing. While the settlement had no connection to the prisoner exchange, neither of our governments could ignore the fact that both agreements had been reached and that the execution of either one—or political backlash in either country—could interfere with the other. Despite the diplomatic breakthroughs, we still had zero trust in each other. The prisoner exchange, we knew, mattered more to us than it did to them, so it would have been foolish to make the payment before the Americans were released, just in case they decided to renege on the swap. Rouhani had been elected president to improve an economy starved of cash by our sanctions, so finalizing the Hague settlement was a major priority. While we never discussed it, I suspect the Iranians worried that if the Americans were released before the settlement was paid, we might go back on our word and try to delay paying what was agreed.
In the end, for all these reasons, both sides decided that it made the most sense to bring everything to a close at once: we would implement the nuclear deal, pay the settlement and exchange the prisoners simultaneously. We knew that all these moving parts would be difficult to coordinate. We also knew that the optics would be bad; we were giving an opening for politically motivated people to attack it. With that in mind, we were immediately transparent about the fact that the payment was made and why. Still today, however, plenty of critics will argue we delivered a secret ransom and tried to hide it from the American people. That is simply not true, as many of those who spread that lie know.
As 2015 became 2016, the IAEA was preparing to certify that Iran had met all the required rollbacks to its nuclear program. It was time for Implementation Day. I made plans to join Zarif and Mogherini in Europe to sign the appropriate paperwork on January 16.
All of our various teams spent hours hammering out the details of what was to be a tightly choreographed day of diplomacy, involving complicated transactions, legal and political steps in a half dozen countries—when planes would take off, when documents would be signed, who would be on hand for what, etc. But as Robert Burns reminds us, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. This was no exception. In retrospect, given the complexity, it was almost inevitable.
The day before Implementation Day, we awoke to news that the non-nuclear issues we had hoped to resolve that day were hitting snags. The plane carrying the first tranche of the settlement money we intended to deliver to Iran would be delayed for several hours. Ironically, because the sanctions we had implemented were so effective, it was almost impossible to electronically transfer the funds we owed in a reasonable amount of time. We agreed to make the payments in cash instead, which became another source of baseless conspiracy theories. All of this meant the entire exchange would be delayed several hours.
And there were plenty of other last-minute hurdles to come.
For one thing, the Swiss military flight that was supposed to take the newly freed Americans from Iran to Switzerland was having trouble getting approval from some countries to fly through international airspace. Three countries refused to green-light the pilot’s request, since the flight originated in Tehran and they were concerned that permitting it would violate our own international sanctions regime. We fired off a series of urgent phone calls and emails to our ambassadors, asking them to immediately communicate to their host governments the sensitive humanitarian purpose for the flight from Tehran and to urge them to approve the flight path without delay.
We landed in Vienna around lunchtime, and I headed straight for the Palais Coburg. It was odd to walk through the hotel where we had spent so many late nights around the negotiating table. It was virtually empty, absent the palpable energy that existed during those midsummer talks. The beautiful building felt enormous and cold. As I walked past the dining hall, where we had devoured so much Wiener schnitzel months before, I noticed it was dark and unused. The hallways felt eerily quiet, and for a moment I worried that it might be an omen.
In between our JCPOA discussions, we learned of another significant hiccup back in the United States: one of the Iranians we had agreed to release was no longer interested in taking the deal. He had a multimillion-dollar forfeiture judgment that he wanted expunged, and he wanted a pardon, not a commutation, from President Obama. That wasn’t going to happen, but without his cooperation, the entire exchange might have been at risk. And so began a major and ultimately successful lobbying effort from his government, our government and members of his own family—all trying to talk some common sense into him. The Iranians also tried to get us to guarantee that their citizens, who were to be released from prisons across the United States, would return to Iran, presumably for some PR-driven welcome. We said no, this wasn’t part of the deal—and as it turned out, none of them wanted to go back.
Back in Vienna, as we prepared to finalize the JCPOA paperwork, Federica Mogherini received word that the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, had new questions he wanted answered before she signed on the dotted line on behalf of the EU. It was surprising, as he had previously signed off on everything he now objected to, but he had similarly raised last-minute “concerns” in Geneva, Lausanne and Vienna the last time around. But this time, there was some risk in delay. Javad was receiving regular photos of President Rouhani and his entire cabinet waiting for the implementation announcement with stern looks on their
faces. They were beginning to suspect that we were purposely delaying the JCPOA’s implementation for some reason. Nerves were fraying, to say the least.
Federica worked diligently to try to persuade Laurent, who was in Paris, of the merits of what had been proposed (and long agreed to). She spent over an hour on the phone with him, and by 9:30 p.m., she thought she had inched him closer, but he wasn’t fully on board. I realized that the clock was ticking, and things could get messy very quickly, so, in an attempt to expedite the process, I brought Javad and Federica into my suite. Together, we called Laurent. After passing my iPhone around in circles, I finally put it on speaker and placed it in the middle of the coffee table. The three of us heard him out before carefully suggesting that instead of altering the deal, which was impossible, we could put new language into the joint EU-Iran statement to be released during the press conference. We explained how we thought our fixes would assuage his concerns—and then we paused to gauge his comfort with the plan. Javad finally said, “Do we have a deal, Laurent?” After a beat, Fabius’s distant voice said, “Yes.”
Minutes after Javad and Federica left my Coburg suite to head to the press center, I sat down to sign the documents lifting the U.S. nuclear-related sanctions on Iran. As I was signing, Jon Finer’s phone rang. It was Brett, calling from Geneva. We had a problem: Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, one of the Americans being released by Iran, had been told his wife, a journalist named Yeganeh Salehi, couldn’t accompany him out of the country. Apparently, she too had an outstanding judicial charge against her, and the Iranians on the ground said that made it impossible for them to send her home. I couldn’t believe it. We had an explicit agreement that spouses would be permitted to accompany the released prisoners home. I called Zarif as soon as I could, but he was already onstage at the press conference. We hustled over to the press center, and I grabbed Zarif as soon as he walked offstage to explain what I had learned from Brett. His face dropped. To his credit he understood immediately how serious this situation was. He assured me he would take care of it right away and proceeded to immediately light a fire under his colleagues back in Tehran.
Before we took off for Washington, I called Zarif one more time to confirm Jason’s wife was cleared to leave. He assured me it was settled. Officials ultimately went to a judge’s home in the middle of the night so he could sign an order to permit Yeganeh to leave.
Our flight had barely taken off before we got another call from Brett: both Yeganeh and Jason’s mother, Mary, who had been visiting from the United States, were missing. No one could track them down. Murphy’s law at work overtime. I was ready to bang my head into the airplane bulkhead, convinced no one could script such a day if they tried. Another flurry of frantic phone calls and emails commenced. Finally, Brett got in touch with Jason’s brother, Ali, who indicated that he had been in contact with the women. They were holed up in an apartment, scared and not sure whom to trust—a reasonable reaction given everything they had experienced. Ali gave Brett a phone number where they could be reached and a code phrase (“mango sticky rice”) to indicate to them that they could trust him. When he got Yeganeh on the phone, Brett took down her address and told her Giulio Haas, the Swiss ambassador to Iran, who was an essential partner on the ground in Tehran, would come to escort her to the aircraft. Haas arrived a few minutes later and took the women to the runway, and a short while after that they were on a Swiss military aircraft heading first to Zurich and then back home to the United States. Finally, Jason, who had been released from prison, was really free: he was in the arms of the love of his life again.
• • •
MORE THAN TWO years of intense, complicated effort and an agreement was finally in place. What had we achieved? We had certainly avoided war, until or unless Iran decides to try to break out. We had already witnessed Iran take major steps to freeze and dismantle its program. But more important, Iran committed to six other nations and the UN Security Council that it would forever live up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—that for the lifetime of the agreement it would adhere to the Additional Protocol of the treaty mandating inspection of any facility suspected of being used for illicit nuclear purposes; that its stockpile of enriched uranium would be restricted for 15 years to 300 kilograms, physically too little to make a bomb; that its tens of thousands centrifuges would be dismantled and limited to 5,000 and all centrifuge production would be monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, for 20 years; that Iran’s uranium enrichment level would be restricted to 3.67 percent—far too low to power a bomb; that the country’s only plutonium reactor would be destroyed; that all mining of uranium in Iran would be tracked from cradle to grave for 25 years; that Iran would accept 130 additional inspectors living and working every day in Iran to guarantee compliance with each and every provision of the agreement; that for at least a decade, it would take Iran a year or more to break out of our agreement and move toward a bomb.
Here’s the bottom line: it would be impossible for Iran to build a bomb for at least the next decade and a half—at least—and if, after that, it began to try, we would know immediately and have enough time to deploy every single option then that was available to us before the agreement went into effect—and perhaps more. We always maintained our ability to bomb Iran if they didn’t comply.
Given the situation we faced when I first sat down with Javad Zarif that afternoon in New York—where Iran had mastered the nuclear fuel cycle and was a month or two away from a weapon—the limitations we put in place bought us important time and offered the best chance for peace, even as we maintained security and all our military options. To me, that’s a damn good deal, and it made the United States, Israel, the region and the world safer.
CHAPTER 19
The Open Wound
THE TINY BOY in the maroon T-shirt wasn’t much older than my grandson. His arm was awkwardly contorted, twitching back and forth uncontrollably. His eyes stared ahead, unfocused, empty, as he moaned. The hospital floor was packed, every inch of it, with the bodies of mothers, fathers, grandparents, boys and girls, stretched out, arms across their chests. Parents sobbing, refusing to let go of their children’s lifeless pajama-clad bodies. Innocent people unable to control the spasms jerking their bodies into unnatural positions. Agony. Despair. Death. Fourteen hundred people, a third of them children, indiscriminately murdered.
The scene could have easily been mistaken for the aftermath of traditional combat or a natural disaster, with one haunting exception: there wasn’t a single drop of blood visible anywhere. No scratches, bruises, cuts or outward signs of physical violence. But violence it was. The life had been squeezed out of the dead and dying by poison gas.
Local doctors reported that the victims all evidenced symptoms consistent with exposure to nerve gas. Each symptom described the prelude to a horrible death: suffocation; constricted, irregular and infrequent breathing; involuntary muscle spasms; nausea; frothing at the mouth; fluid coming out of nose and eyes; convulsing; dizziness; blurred vision; red and irritated eyes and pinpoint pupils.
There was no mistaking what had happened. Early that morning, around 2:00 a.m. local time in Syria, rockets armed with chemical weapons were fired from regime-controlled areas and released deadly fumes over several suburbs of Damascus—an area held by the opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Thousands of miles away in the comfort of my wood-paneled, private office on the seventh floor of the Harry S Truman Building, I was sickened and seething. I took a pause from watching the video and scrolling through the classified photos and maps on my secure iPad. I looked out the window. Washington is deserted in August, and the city felt eerily empty. It was 7:00 a.m. The rising sun lit up the Lincoln Memorial, wrapping it in a warm orange glow. It was almost hard to imagine that the same sun rising peacefully over Washington had risen that morning over Ghouta, Syria, casting the soft morning light on abject horror. Imagine: parents had tucked their children into bed the night before, some entire
families never to wake again.
Bashar al-Assad had flagrantly violated not just international law, but every idea or norm of human decency. Audio intercepts proved high-level Syrian government coordination in the attack. It wasn’t a war crime committed by a rogue military unit. It was official regime policy carried out mercilessly.
Assad’s regime had been murdering its own people in increasingly insidious ways since the uprisings began in 2011. When I became secretary of state, already more than one hundred thousand Syrians had been killed. Assad possessed the world’s largest stock of undeclared chemical weapons. Almost exactly one year before, President Obama had publicly warned Assad against using them. The admonition was intended to prevent this kind of atrocity. The president threatened “serious consequences” if the line was crossed. Now, on this sultry August day, Assad, increasingly on defense on the battlefield, had overtly and arrogantly barreled right through the red line of American warnings, international law and civilized behavior.
I wondered what combination of desperation, miscalculation, weakness and bloodless evil had led him to this point. I’d probably spent more hours with Assad in 2009 than any American other than, perhaps, the American ambassador. Assad always seemed slightly in over his head. I wondered whether he had been led into this barbaric act by his family or if this was his initiative to regain battlefield momentum and remake the brutal playbook his father had used in the Hama massacre, when twenty thousand of his Syrian countrymen were wiped out.
But given the willful choice of weapon, the why didn’t matter all that much. Assad, who once seemed like an accidental authoritarian, had committed an atrocity and nothing about it was accidental. He was an undeniable, irredeemable war criminal presiding over the gruesome destruction of his country. We now knew Assad was capable of using his chemical weapons arsenal indiscriminately.
