Tough Love

by Susan Rice

  Over the next year and a half, that is how we proceeded—quietly toiling toward the Big Bang. Ben and Ricardo had multiple sessions with the Cubans, in locations ranging from Canada to Trinidad and Tobago, from New York to the Vatican. My former deputy at USUN, Ambassador Jeff DeLaurentis, ably managed bilateral engagement as our chargé in Havana. As we began to close the gaps and the potential for success came into focus, we started selectively to widen the circle of those in the loop. Understandably, no one was especially pleased to learn that this historic negotiation was happening without their knowledge, but all were good soldiers and quietly joined the team. As we neared agreement, we roped in appropriate additional officials at State, Justice, CIA, Treasury, and Commerce to execute those parts of the potential deal that fell uniquely within their purview. They all agreed to help do their part, happy to implement this momentous policy change.

  By mid-December 2014, all the pieces were in place. It was time to bring Alan Gross home and ignite the Big Bang. This required careful orchestration—a last-minute heads-up to those in Congress who long favored a changed Cuba policy (especially Senators Patrick Leahy and Jeff Flake) and to the most powerful who opposed it.

  Two planes—one carrying three former Cuban prisoners and another carrying Gross—passed in midair between Cuba and the U.S. President Obama signed an executive order directing the maximum amount of relief on commerce, travel, and other restrictions possible without legislation lifting the embargo. Both countries launched a process to establish normal diplomatic relations. Cuba publicly committed to release fifty-three political prisoners and improve internet access. President Obama and President Castro spoke for the first time by phone. And, on December 17, 2014, President Obama announced that he was turning the page on fifty-plus years of failed Cuba policy.

  Miraculously, we managed to pull all this off with no leaks. NBC’s intrepid Andrea Mitchell came dangerously close to getting the story and tried at a holiday party to wrench some insight out of me. I gave nothing. No one in the White House or the agencies let it slip, because all were invested in the new policy and understood its extreme sensitivity. When the president made the announcement, the press and public were stunned. The Big Bang blew exactly as planned.

  The exhilaration of this historic policy change and its flawless roll-out was a highlight of my tenure as national security advisor. It also proved to be a welcome turning point. After a year and a half of relentless challenges and few obvious successes, we had a big one; and there would be more to come.

  20 Putting Points on the Board

  When I called down the hall, Ferial Govashiri, the president’s personal aide, said he was on the phone but, “Come on down!”

  On a small, three-by-five card with “The White House” printed on top, I wrote in all caps: WE HAVE AN IRAN DEAL. Card in hand, Avril, Ben, and I walked into the Oval Office and flashed the note before the Boss. The president knew that a deal might be close, but as we had learned repeatedly (and not just with the Iranians), nothing is done until it’s done.

  Obama’s face lit up, and he ended the call. We all whooped and fist-bumped. Obama hugged me, and Ben jokingly suggested that Obama call the guy from the 2007 YouTube primary debate who asked if Obama would engage Iran.

  John Kerry called in shortly thereafter to report the news officially and to receive well-deserved congratulations. He and a tireless team of U.S. negotiators led by Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, and including Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz, our extremely capable NSC coordinator for the Middle East Rob Malley, and an all-star cast of experts from NSC, State, Treasury, Energy, USUN, and the Intelligence Community, had spent nearly two years negotiating with Iran, the European Union, and the P5+1 (the U.S., Russia, China, France, and the U.K., plus Germany).

  Negotiations between the U.S. and Iran had begun in earnest in the summer of 2013. After years of painful sanctions and under the new leadership of the more pragmatic President Hassan Rouhani, Iran decided that it was time to stop stringing along the P5+1, as it had over the years, and to ascertain whether progress with the U.S. was actually possible. As President Obama stated as far back as the 2008 campaign, we were willing to test the same proposition.

  Following a few rounds of secret negotiations in Oman between the U.S. team of Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns and Jake Sullivan and their Iranian counterparts, we could begin to see the contours of an interim agreement. President Obama and President Rouhani both signaled publicly at the U.N. General Assembly in late September 2013 their cautious hope that discussions could yield progress. In a historic first since the severance of diplomatic relations in 1979, the two leaders spoke by phone, as Rouhani was heading to the airport in New York, to affirm their commitment to talks. Kerry and Iranian foreign minister Mohammed Javad Zarif met for the first time as counterparts at UNGA and launched a more formal and public negotiation in Geneva that would include the P5+1.

  As with Cuba, the talks with Iran in the months leading up to the September 2013 conversation between Obama and Rouhani were very closely held within the U.S. government. Six months prior to that, the direct dialogue with Iran began in Oman, but it was not until Rouhani’s election in June that it seemed our contacts might lead somewhere. We were concerned that any premature exposure of the talks would invite sabotage and poison the potential for progress.

  Up through this early stage, my role was to liaise with the president and provide our negotiating team with strategic guidance and support, offering input on the parameters of what we could accept. Before late September 2013, we informed neither our European allies nor Israel of the first few rounds of talks, though we suspected the Israelis might know through their own means. Our allies were not happy to learn they had been left in the dark, especially the French, who like to be at the center of everything. Later, in November, the French demonstrated their enduring discontent by blocking P5+1 agreement on the initial version of the interim nuclear agreement.

  It was Israel, however, that was most incensed and claimed to have been blindsided by the speed of events. I was meeting with my Israeli counterpart, Yaakov Amidror, in my White House office while, unbeknownst to us both, President Obama spoke by phone to Rouhani on September 27, 2013. The Israelis (and our Gulf partners) reported being shocked to learn of the call. Netanyahu was scheduled to meet with Obama at the White House three days later, and it was then that the president laid out the state of our engagement with Iran and our intention to try to resolve the nuclear issue through diplomacy. The day after their meeting, Netanyahu colorfully blasted the nuclear talks and Rouhani in his UNGA speech, saying, “He fooled the world once. Now he thinks he can fool it again. You see, Rouhani thinks he can have his yellowcake and eat it too.”

  By November 2013, after painstaking negotiations, we reached an interim agreement to freeze the progress of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for modest sanctions relief—in order to create time and space for negotiations toward a full, final deal. Once the interim Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) was signed by the U.S., Iran, and the P5+1, the difficult contentious negotiations toward a comprehensive agreement got under way. The JPOA was set to last six months but had to be renewed twice due to the political and substantive complexity of the negotiation.

  Over this period, the Principals Committee met on numerous occasions, as did the NSC with the president, to define the limits of our negotiating posture and decide how to surmount various obstacles. Throughout, our bottom line was that any deal must fully and verifiably eliminate every potential pathway for Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. We were also determined to extend the time it would take for Iran to acquire enough nuclear material to make a bomb (if it decided to violate the deal)—from two or three months to over one year. That increased “breakout time” would give the U.S. plenty of opportunity to respond, including militarily, before Iran developed any weapon.

  One important concern we faced was how to reimpose U.N. sanctions swiftly if Iran broke the deal. We could not allow Russia or
China to veto renewed sanctions, should they differ with us on whether Iran was to blame and how to react. In response to a question about how to address this challenge during an interview on 60 Minutes that aired in December 2013, I replied (speaking as a former U.N. ambassador) that I believed we could craft some kind of “automatic triggers” that would reimpose sanctions “for failure to comply” and avert a Russian or Chinese veto. We could insert unorthodox language into the U.N. resolution, which would codify any eventual deal, that allowed sanctions to be reinstated by any permanent member of the Security Council if there were a significant violation.

  In other words, I felt confident there was a way to ensure we could “snap-back” sanctions, as I told my colleagues at the next Principals Committee meeting on Iran, even though I had not yet figured out exactly how. My off-the-cuff answer on TV put “snap-back” into the sanctions lexicon and inspired us to devise effective UNSC resolution language and then work with the Russians to embed it in the implementing resolution. The “snap-back” assurance became a core element of the final deal and our ability, ultimately, to sell it to Congress.

  Kerry and Foreign Minister Zarif were the lead diplomatic negotiators. Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz and Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s nuclear enterprise, were nuclear physicists with shared ties to MIT who together chaired the technical nuclear discussions. There were numerous fits and starts, near collapses, and efforts at sabotage—on both sides. At times, their meetings became so testy that John Kerry once slammed his fist on the table so hard that he propelled a pen and directly hit Zarif’s deputy Abbas Araghchi. At any point, we knew the whole deal could fall apart and, sure enough, on the final day of negotiations, an exasperated and dramatic Zarif moved to walk out. For all intents and purposes, the negotiation appeared to be collapsing—until the very last moment when the walkout was blocked by a hobbled John Kerry, recovering from surgery on a badly broken leg, who used his crutch to bar the door.

  Throughout, hard-liners in Iran opposed any restraint on its nuclear program and completely distrusted the U.S. Meanwhile, hard-liners in Washington—mainly Republicans but also some Democrats—decided well in advance of any agreement that the only good deal with Iran was no deal; and they made every effort to force us to fail. Their devious tactics ranged from Senator Tom Cotton’s “open letter” signed by forty-six other Republican senators to Iran’s leaders aimed at undermining their confidence in the durability of any deal; to House Speaker John Boehner’s secret invitation to Prime Minister Netanyahu to deliver a joint address to Congress in March 2015, during which Netanyahu roundly condemned the “bad deal” with Iran.

  Inside the White House, we seethed at the Israeli prime minister’s machinations to orchestrate a joint session invitation behind the back of the administration and Democrats in Congress. In my view, this marked a new low in the already strained U.S.-Israel bilateral relationship, removing it from the customary protection of bipartisanship. As I said at the time in an interview, Netanyahu’s gambit “injected a degree of partisanship, which is not only unfortunate, I think it is destructive of the fabric of the [U.S.-Israel] relationship.”

  One month later, in early April 2015, we agreed with Iran on the framework for a comprehensive deal. Negotiations continued through the evening of July 13, when our team in Vienna sent back the final draft text for one last review by Washington. It was a 150-plus-page tome full of technical complexities. Reviewing it line-by-line and providing timely feedback to our exhausted and impatient negotiating team was a challenge.

  Avril assembled a cadre of NSC lawyers and experts in the Situation Room. We plugged in Vienna via secure video so we could seek clarifications in real time from the negotiating team and give rolling responses as we plowed through the text. Avril and the NSC team worked through the night and woke me several times to obtain guidance on our proposed amendments. By morning, we thought we might have the makings of a deal, pending the agreement of the other parties. Indeed, on July 14, 2015, Secretary Kerry signed the final agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

  As soon as the ink dried, the truly hard work began: persuading Congress not to torpedo the deal. Again, sadly, it was the Obama administration vs. Netanyahu. Congress had recently passed the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, which required the president to submit the full, final agreement to Congress. The law prevented the president from waiving or suspending nuclear-related sanctions against Iran (as the deal required, if Iran fulfilled its commitments) until congressional review was complete and no resolution of disapproval had been enacted. In other words, if sixty days after signing the deal, Congress did not vote to disapprove it (or, thereafter, if Congress failed to override an Obama veto), the sanctions could be suspended, and the deal could go into effect—pending full Iranian compliance.

  As a practical matter, this meant the administration had to gain support from at least thirty-four Democratic senators and, ideally, one-third of all House members to sustain a veto. But we sought to gain the support of at least forty-one senators so that Democrats could successfully filibuster any Republican attempt to pass a resolution of disapproval in the first place. This might seem like an easy lift since we only needed Democrats, but it was not, given widespread misunderstanding about the complicated terms of the deal and Israel’s heavy-handed efforts to sink it.

  I spent hours on the phone arguing, reasoning with, and cajoling friendly members of Congress, including Congresswoman Terri Sewell, my buddy from Oxford; Senators Mark Warner and Claire McCaskill; and Senator Michael Bennet, my friend since nursery school. While we shared their concern that Iran could not be trusted, we argued that this deal was based not on trust but on the strictest and most intrusive verification regime. As many former officials in Israel’s security establishment acknowledged, if not the country’s current political leaders, the agreement would benefit Israel’s security rather than diminish it. Ultimately, after a summer of sustained personal engagement by the president, vice president, Kerry, Moniz, Sherman, and many others, we obtained more than the necessary support. The congressional review period expired without a vote of disapproval. The deal was done!

  The Iran agreement is proof of the value of tough sanctions, when combined with skillful, relentless diplomacy, to accomplish the seemingly unachievable in international affairs. The JCPOA was a finely detailed agreement that effectively closed all pathways to Iran developing a nuclear weapon and ensured Iran would face the most rigorous, intrusive international inspections regime ever established. It was never able, nor was it intended, to halt all of Iran’s nefarious behavior—its support for terrorism, its destabilization of neighboring states, its hostility toward Israel, or its ballistic missile program. Still, it effectively addressed our biggest concern and that of the international community—preventing Iran from posing a far more dangerous threat to the region and the world through its acquisition of nuclear weapons.

  Understandably, Israel always said it viewed Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat. So, surely, the removal of that threat would be welcome news to Israel, our Gulf partners, and their backers. In reality, we discovered that removing the nuclear threat was not in fact their principal motivation. Rather, Israel and the Gulf Arab countries aimed to put permanent and crippling economic and military pressure on Iran such that either the regime collapsed, or it was too weak to wield meaningful influence in the region. The nuclear deal, which allowed Iran to access much of its own frozen assets held abroad under sanctions, in exchange for full and verifiable compliance with the terms of the agreement, was deemed worse than no deal at all by those who prioritized keeping the international community’s boot on Iran’s neck above halting its nuclear program. It turns out, the whole Likud-led campaign against a nuclear-armed Iran was never on the level.

  Indeed, as the U.S. Intelligence Community and International Atomic Energy Agency repeatedly validated, the Iran deal was working exactly as intended when later President Trump decided to with
draw from the agreement in May 2018. Iran had fully complied with its obligations to constrain its nuclear activities—relinquishing 97 percent of its uranium stockpile, dismantling its plutonium facility and two-thirds of its centrifuges, forswearing ever producing nuclear weapons, and submitting to the most stringent verification regime ever established.

  Unfortunately, the U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal put Iran’s continued compliance in jeopardy, did nothing to address our other concerns about Iran’s behavior, placed us at odds with our closest European allies with whom we negotiated the deal, and called into question why any adversary would agree to strike a deal with a self-evidently fickle America. The Iran deal wasn’t perfect, but it was a damn good way to resolve a grave and growing threat to international peace and security while avoiding resort to a highly costly and deadly war. With the U.S. abrogation, reimposition of crushing sanctions, and America’s military buildup in the region, Iran has resumed its nuclear program and stepped up its destabilizing actions in the region. Moreover, the risks of a direct U.S.-Iran conflict are much increased, as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and many in the Trump administration appear intent on embarking on a foolhardy and unnecessary military operation to try to effect regime change in Iran.

  Of all the vindictive and shortsighted actions President Trump has taken only to undo President Obama’s legacy—from abandoning the Paris Climate Agreement to withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement—jettisoning the Iran nuclear deal is the most dangerous and dispiriting to me. We and our allies expended years of painstaking diplomacy to reach an agreement that was fully meeting its objective. The sheer stupidity of withdrawing without an alternative strategy to accomplish their ill-defined objectives, the wasted effort, and the poisoned relationships amount to mind-boggling recklessness. While we can potentially rejoin Paris and the successor to TPP, it’s very hard to imagine how we will ever again verifiably dismantle Iran’s nuclear program short of war—and even then only temporarily.