Hard Choices

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

  On the morning of January 31, 2013, my second-to-last day as Secretary of State, the Treaty Room was filled with family and friends of the five agents. David was still in a wheelchair, but he made it. Members of the Stevens family were there as well, to show their appreciation for how much these men had done to protect Chris. It was my honor to pay tribute to their courage and professionalism. They represented the strength and spirit of a great nation. I presented each agent with the State Department’s Heroism Award. There were tears in people’s eyes as they watched. It was a reminder that on that terrible night, we saw the best and worst of humanity, just as we had eleven years before.

  Memories of Benghazi will stay with me always, and they will shape the way America’s diplomats do their jobs in the future. But we should remember Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods as much for how they lived as for how they died. They all volunteered to serve their country where security was far from assured because those were the places where American interests and values were most at stake and they were most needed.

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  Iran: Sanctions and Secrets

  The Sultan of Oman has a flair for the dramatic.

  We were sitting over a lavish lunch in a palace designed by the Sultan himself in Oman’s capital city of Muscat, near the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, when I heard the familiar strains of John Philip Sousa’s “Liberty Bell” march. Sultan Qaboos, dressed in a long flowing robe with a ceremonial dagger on his belt and a colorful turban on his head, smiled and looked up. On a balcony above us, partially hidden by a screen, was part of the Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra. It was a typical gesture for a shrewd and gracious leader who valued his relationship with the United States, loved music, and used his absolute power to modernize his country over four decades of rule.

  What the Sultan had to say was even more dramatic. It was January 12, 2011, just days before the Arab Spring would upend the chessboard of Middle East geopolitics. I had just come from Yemen, Oman’s troubled southern neighbor, and was headed to a regional conference in Qatar to warn leaders that without economic and political reform, their regimes would “sink into the sand.” But today the Sultan’s focus was on Iran.

  The standoff over Iran’s illicit nuclear program was escalating, and it posed an urgent threat to regional and global security. Since 2009 the Obama Administration had pursued a “dual-track” strategy of pressure and engagement, but negotiations between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France), plus Germany—the so-called P5+1—were going nowhere. The prospects of armed conflict, possibly including an Israeli strike to knock out Iranian nuclear facilities like the ones carried out against Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007, were mounting.

  “I can help,” the Sultan said. He was one of the few leaders seen by all sides as an honest broker, with close ties in Washington, the Gulf states, and Tehran. He proposed hosting secret direct talks between the United States and Iran to resolve the nuclear issue. Previous attempts to engage Iran’s theocratic regime had failed, but the Sultan thought there might be a chance for him to facilitate a breakthrough. Secrecy would be necessary to prevent hard-liners on all sides from derailing talks before they had a chance to get going. Was I willing to explore the idea?

  On the one hand, there was no reason to trust the Iranians and every reason to believe they would exploit any opportunity for delay and distraction. New negotiations could turn into a rabbit hole that would buy the Iranians time to race closer to their goal of a nuclear weapon that would threaten Israel, their neighbors, and the world. Any concessions we offered as part of these talks could undo years of careful work to build an international consensus for tough sanctions and increased pressure on the regime in Tehran. On the other hand, the Sultan’s offer could be our best chance to avoid conflict or the unacceptable prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. Our failure to pursue diplomacy could end up fraying the broad international coalition we had built to impose and enforce sanctions on Iran.

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  While it is hard to believe, given all that has happened since, Iran was once a Cold War ally of the United States. The country’s monarch, the Shah, owed his throne to a 1953 coup supported by the Eisenhower Administration against a democratically elected government thought to be sympathetic to Communism. It was a classic Cold War move for which many Iranians never forgave America. Our governments enjoyed close relations for more than twenty-five years—until, in 1979, the autocratic Shah was overthrown by a popular revolution. Shiite fundamentalists led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini soon seized power and imposed their theocratic version of an Islamic republic on the Iranian people. Iran’s new rulers were implacably opposed to America, calling us “the Great Satan.” In November 1979, Iranian radicals stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two Americans hostage for 444 days. It was an appalling breach of international law and a traumatic experience for our country. I remember watching nightly news reports in Little Rock counting the number of days the hostages had been held captive as the crisis went on and on without an end in sight. It became even more tragic when a rescue mission by the U.S. military ended with the crash of a helicopter and a transport plane in the desert that killed eight servicemembers.

  The Iranian Revolution led to decades of state-sponsored terrorism. The Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah, which served as an Iranian proxy, carried out attacks across the Middle East and the world. Their crimes included the bombings in Beirut, Lebanon, of the U.S. Embassy in April 1983, which killed sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans; the attack on the U.S. Marine barracks that October, which killed 241 Americans; and the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed nineteen U.S. Air Force personnel and wounded hundreds of others. Iran also targeted Jews and Israelis, including bombing an Israeli cultural center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1994, killing eighty-five people and injuring hundreds more. On a regular basis the State Department designated Iran as the world’s “most active state sponsor of terrorism” and documented its links to bombings, kidnappings, hijackings, and other acts of terrorism. Iranian rockets, automatic weapons, and mortars were also being used to kill U.S. troops as well as our partners and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Given this history, the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran represented a serious security threat to Israel, Iran’s neighbors in the Gulf, and, by extension, the world, which is why the UN Security Council had passed six resolutions since 2006, calling on Iran to cease its weapons program and abide by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Like more than 180 other nations, Iran is a signatory to the Treaty, which gives countries the right to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes but requires those with existing nuclear weapons to pursue disarmament and those without nuclear weapons to foreswear acquiring them. Allowing Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon in violation of this treaty could open the floodgates on proliferation, first in the Middle East among its Sunni-led rivals, and then around the world.

  We knew Iran had worked for years to develop the technology and materials necessary to build a bomb, despite condemnation and pressure from the international community. In early 2003, Iran possessed about a hundred centrifuges for enriching uranium, one of the two ways to fuel nuclear weapons, the other being plutonium. Centrifuges spin at incredibly fast speeds, enriching uranium to a high enough level that it can be used to build a bomb. This is a difficult and precise process that requires thousands of centrifuges. Over the next six years, with the international community divided and Iran denying access and information to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it steadily expanded its program. By the time President Obama took office, Iran had about five thousand centrifuges. Despite Iran’s leaders’ claims that their nuclear program was intended for purely peaceful scientific, medical, and commercial purposes, their scientists were working in secret in hardened bunkers built deep in
side mountains, enriching uranium at levels and quantities that led reasonable people to harbor well-founded suspicions of their intentions.

  For a brief period in the late 1990s, there was hope that Iran might choose a different course. In 1997, Iranians elected as President a relative moderate, Mohammad Khatami, who said in an American TV interview that he wanted to tear down the “wall of mistrust” between Iran and the United States. The Clinton Administration was understandably wary in the wake of the Khobar Towers attack, but Bill responded with cautious reciprocal steps, including mentioning Iran in a video message marking Eid al Fitr, the feast at the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. “I hope that the day will soon come when we can enjoy once again good relations with Iran,” he said. The administration sent out a number of diplomatic feelers in an attempt to start a dialogue, including a letter delivered via our mutual friend the Sultan of Oman. In 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright offered a more public olive branch by formally apologizing for the American role in the 1953 Iranian coup and easing certain economic sanctions. But Iran never followed through, in part because hard-liners restrained Khatami’s ability to act.

  That groundwork may have helped encourage Khatami to reach out after the 9/11 attacks in the hopes of cooperating with the United States in Afghanistan, which shares a border with Iran. But President Bush’s speech in 2002, in which he named Iran, Iraq, and North Korea an “Axis of Evil,” ended any chance of further dialogue between our countries at that time. The Europeans then took the lead on negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program, but those talks fell apart after Khatami was replaced in 2005 by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier and provocateur who threatened to wipe Israel off the map and insulted the West at every turn.

  As a Senator representing New York during the Bush years, I advocated for increasing pressure on the regime in Tehran and its proxies, voting to impose sanctions on Iran and to formally designate the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. As I stated again and again, “We cannot, we should not, we must not permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons.” Yet without a broad international consensus, unilateral U.S. sanctions did little to curb Iranian behavior.

  In a 2007 essay in the journal Foreign Affairs, I argued, “The Bush Administration refuses to talk to Iran about its nuclear program, preferring to ignore bad behavior rather than challenge it.” And, “If Iran does not comply with its own commitments and the will of the international community, all options must remain on the table.” Without being specific, “options” could be read as including potential military action, but I emphasized that the first choice should be diplomacy. After all, if the United States could negotiate with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, with thousands of their missiles pointed at our cities, we should not be afraid to talk with other adversaries such as Iran under appropriate conditions. This was a delicate balancing act—raising the prospect of military action while also pushing for diplomacy and restraint—but it was hardly novel. Effective foreign policy has always involved the use of both sticks and carrots, and finding the right balance between the two is more art than science.

  During the heat of the 2008 Presidential primaries, I jumped on Senator Obama’s statement in a debate that he would meet with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea “without precondition” during the first year of a new administration. Return to diplomacy, I said, engage with these countries, but don’t promise to reward them with a high-profile Presidential meeting unless we get something in return. In response his campaign accused me of toeing the Bush line and refusing to talk to our adversaries. None of this was particularly illuminating for voters, but that’s life on the campaign trail. I also caused a bit of a stir in April 2008 when I warned Iran’s leaders that if they launched a nuclear attack on Israel on my watch, the United States would retaliate and “we would be able to totally obliterate them.” That got Tehran’s attention, and Iran actually filed a formal protest at the UN.

  After President Obama asked me to be Secretary of State, we started talking about crafting a more effective approach toward Iran. Our goal may have been straightforward—prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons—but the path to achieve it was anything but.

  By early 2009, Iran appeared to be on the rise in the Middle East. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq had removed Iran’s nemesis Saddam Hussein and put in place a Shiite government more to its liking. U.S. power and prestige in the region were at a low. Hezbollah had fought Israel to a bloody stalemate in Lebanon in 2006, and Hamas was still firmly in control of the Gaza Strip after a two-week Israeli invasion in January 2009. Sunni monarchs in the Gulf watched in fear as Iran built up its military, extended its influence, and threatened to dominate the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz. Inside Iran the regime’s iron grip was unchallenged, and it enjoyed booming oil exports. President Ahmadinejad was a bellicose peacock strutting on the world stage. But the real authority rested with the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded Khomeini in 1989 and made no secret of his hatred for America. The hard-line Revolutionary Guard was amassing such significant power within Iran, including vast economic holdings, that the country appeared to be moving toward a military dictatorship under the veneer of clerical leadership. I made some waves when I noted this trend during a trip to the Gulf.

  Faced with this difficult landscape, President Obama and I were determined to use both engagement and pressure to present Iran’s leaders with a clear choice: If they complied with their treaty obligations and addressed the international community’s concerns about their nuclear program, then they could benefit from improved relations. If they refused, they would face increased isolation and even more painful consequences.

  One of President Obama’s first gestures was to send two private letters to Ayatollah Khamenei offering a new diplomatic opening. He also recorded video messages aimed directly at the Iranian people. Like my husband’s efforts a decade before, these feelers were met with a stone wall in Tehran. None of us were under any illusions that Iran was going to change its behavior simply because a new American President was willing to talk. But we believed that the effort to engage would strengthen our hand in seeking tougher sanctions if Iran rejected our overtures. The rest of the world would see that the Iranians, not the Americans, were the intransigent ones, and that would make them more likely to support increasing pressure on Tehran.

  An early avenue we explored was possible cooperation on Afghanistan. After all, back in 2001, in the early days of the war, there had been exploratory talks about working together to stem the drug trade and stabilize the country. Since then, however, Iran had played a much less constructive role. In the lead-up to a major international conference on Afghanistan organized by the UN at The Hague at the end of March 2009, I had to decide whether to support the UN’s extending an invitation to Iran. After consulting with NATO allies, I described the upcoming conference as “a big tent meeting with all the parties who have a stake and an interest in Afghanistan.” That left the door open for Iran; if they showed up, it would be our first direct encounter.

  Tehran ended up sending a Deputy Foreign Minister to The Hague, whose speech included some positive ideas for collaboration. I did not meet with the Iranian diplomat, but I did send Jake Sullivan to speak with him to raise the prospect of direct engagement on Afghanistan.

  Jake also hand-delivered a letter requesting the release of three Americans being detained in Iran: a retired FBI agent named Robert Levinson, a graduate student named Esha Momeni, and an American journalist of Iranian Japanese descent named Roxana Saberi. Roxana was arrested in Tehran and accused of espionage only days after I took office in January 2009. After a hunger strike and persistent lobbying by the United States and others, she was released in May. She came to see me at the State Department soon after and told me about her harrowing ordeal. Robert Levinson is still being held. Esha Momeni, who had been out on bail but barred from leaving the country, was allowed to return t
o the United States in August 2009.

  At the same conference at The Hague, Richard Holbrooke had a brief exchange with the Iranian diplomat at an official lunch, though the Iranians later denied the encounter took place.

  The second half of 2009 turned out to be full of unexpected developments that dramatically reshaped the international debate about Iran.

  First came the Iranian elections. In June, Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of a Presidential vote that was, by all accounts, deeply flawed if not totally rigged. Large crowds gathered in the streets of Tehran and throughout the country to protest the results. It was a surprising moment, as the Iranian middle class demanded the democracy that the 1979 revolution had promised but never delivered. The protests gained strength and were known as the Green Movement. Millions of Iranians took to the streets in an unprecedented display of dissent, many even calling for an end to the regime. Security forces responded with brutal violence. Citizens marching peacefully were beaten with batons and arrested en masse. Political opponents were rounded up and abused, and several people were killed. People around the world were horrified by video footage of a young woman shot dead in the street. The violence was shocking, but the repression was in keeping with the regime’s abysmal human rights record.

  Within the Obama Administration we debated how to respond. “We are monitoring the situation as it unfolds in Iran, but we, like the rest of the world, are waiting and watching to see what the Iranian people decide,” I announced as the protests picked up steam but before the worst of the crackdown. “We obviously hope that the outcome reflects the genuine will and desire of the Iranian people.”