by Ronan Farrow
EPILOGUE
THE TOOL OF FIRST RESORT
VIENNA, 2015
There are two types of military dispute, the one settled by negotiation and the other by force. Since the first is characteristic of human beings and the second of beasts, we must have recourse to the second only if we cannot exploit the first.
—CICERO, ON DUTIES
THE STEADY DISSOLUTION of the State Department under the Trump administration may appear to be a logical outcome of years of imbalanced foreign policy, but it is not an inevitable one. The trend of sidelined diplomats and ascendant soldiers and spies since September 11, 2001 has not been linear. Diplomats who served in the Bush administration point to the return of North Korea diplomacy through Christopher Hill’s efforts, and initiatives like PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which channeled billions into lifesaving medical treatment in developing countries.
And, taken together, the Iran deal and the Paris Climate Accord represented a rearguard action for diplomacy. They were the more striking for the contrast they represented, after a first term of the Obama administration that was comparatively dismissive of diplomats and barren of large-scale diplomatic endeavor. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor, attributed the late breakthroughs partly to the slow-burn nature of diplomacy and partly to course correction. “The centerpieces of our second-term foreign policy were much more diplomatic in nature than in our first term, and you also had an effort to. . . .” he paused, seeming to reflect on the failures of the Holbrooke era. “The kind of superstar-general dynamic, the Petraeus, McChrystal dynamic, was not present in the second term. Not that generals weren’t stars, it’s just that they weren’t these giant public figures who sucked up oxygen in certain parts of the world. I think there was a slow, admittedly, but steady reprioritization of diplomacy.”
The results were controversial: proof points of diplomacy’s power for some, and of its folly for others. But, even as Trump withdrew the United States from Paris and as fierce debate over the Iran deal and its virtues and vices continued, it could not be denied that these were serious foreign policy initiatives, born of hard-fought, old-school diplomacy. Little surprise that the most controversial of those initiatives, the Iran deal, would begin and end with shouting.
IT WAS NIGHT when one of those rounds of shouting began, echoing off gilt- and white-paneled walls, and rococo chairs, and an ornate marble fireplace with a mantle held up by cherubs. Half of the shouts were from Iran’s foreign minister, backtracking on how many years his country would assent to constraints on its nuclear program. Half were from the American secretaries of state and energy, telling the Iranians to, in not so many words, go to hell. “I’ve had it with this,” John Kerry was shouting. “You cannot do what you’re threatening to do.” If Iran wanted to renegotiate basic terms, the United States was more than happy to walk away.
It was July 2015, and Iranian, American, British, French, Chinese, Russian, German, and European Union negotiators had converged on Vienna for a final, tortured stretch of diplomacy. The hyperluxe Palais Coburg, where Johann Strauss had once conducted in the glittering ballroom and where the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynasty had schemed and inbred and reclined in scented baths until its last princess expired in the 1990s, was selected as the venue for the talks, partly because its thirty-four rooms allowed for few guests to overhear conversations like this. Still, those who could afford to stay at the Palais Coburg—spies and diplomats, bankers and barons—had keen ears. And by then, six hundred reporters had descended on hushed Vienna for just such gossip.
The Americans, in the next dining room over, were nervous. “Kerry kind of lost it, lost his temper,” Jon Finer—Kerry’s chief of staff and, later, the director of policy planning at State—remembered. “A lot of us were gathering in the dining area, outside where this meeting was, and people were able to hear the shouts coming through the walls.” Kerry’s longtime body man, Jason Meininger, finally opened the doors and interrupted. He delicately informed the Americans and the Iranians that random guests were hearing the intimate details of the most sensitive diplomacy in the world. There turned out to be some truth to this. Over breakfast the next morning, Germany’s foreign minister—and later president—Frank-Walter Steinmeier drily congratulated Kerry for what he assumed were productive talks, seeing as the whole hotel heard them.
Ultimately, the most powerful diplomats in the world would spend eighteen days trapped in splendor. Night after night, negotiations stretched into the small hours of the morning. The red-eyed US team went through ten pounds of strawberry-flavored Twizzlers, twenty pounds of string cheese, thirty pounds of mixed nuts and dried fruit, and hundreds of Rice Krispies Treats and espresso pods.
THE NIGHT AFTER the shouting match, the showdown had a reprise in a larger meeting of the ministers of the “P5+1”—the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany. As Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif tried to insist on a more lenient time frame, the EU’s Federica Mogherini said she’d sooner go home than consider it. “Never threaten an Iranian!” Zarif bellowed. “Or a Russian,” added Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov slyly, cutting the tension. But, in fact, Russia had fallen in line with the Americans and Europeans. Again and again, Lavrov helped the US break logjams—a remarkable fact as the Ukraine crisis worsened and US-Russian relations went into a deep freeze. It was one of the many unusual characteristics of an unusual diplomatic effort: a unified front. Even China signed up to play an important role helping to modify one of Iran’s reactors.
The process was also an anachronistic showcase of diplomatic grit. For Bill Burns, it was the last mission of a decades-long career in the Foreign Service that had taken him from ambassadorships in Russia and Jordan to, at the time of the Iran negotiations, the second-in-command job at the State Department. Burns was what you’d picture when you envision a career diplomat. He was lanky, with a salt-and-pepper moustache and a creaky, soft voice that seemed impossibly patient and even-tempered. He was, a Washington Post headline declared upon his retirement, a “diplomat’s diplomat.” When John Kerry told me about the challenges of encouraging young diplomats, he referred to the importance of “finding the next generation of talented foreign service, the next Bill Burns so to speak.”
Burns was a living testament to the irreplaceable role Foreign Service officers could still play. He had been involved in American diplomacy with Iran dating back thirty years, to when he joined the National Security Council staff at the White House immediately after the Iran-Contra affair. “As a relatively young diplomat,” he said, “the perils of Iran diplomacy were driven home to me because of how badly that all ended.” But Iran had a gravitational pull for him. Years later, he had run the Middle East bureau in Colin Powell’s State Department and grown distressed at the shrinking space for diplomacy and the growing emphasis on policy made out of the Pentagon. “I saw first-hand the inversion of diplomacy and the use of force that was so characteristic of the run up to the Iraq War,” he continued. That inversion, he felt, was one reason why earlier opportunities to approach Iran, when its nuclear program was still in its infancy, were shunned. It wasn’t until the very last year of the Bush administration, when Burns was serving as the under secretary for political affairs under Condoleezza Rice, that the administration began to warm to the idea of a diplomatic approach. It was that summer that Burns sat, for the first time, directly opposite the Iranians, in a meeting of world powers in Geneva. “That really opened up a new phase in a sense,” Burns reflected. “Which, you know, Obama drove through much more ambitiously.”
In the summer of 2009, the United States discovered a secret uranium enrichment facility, not far from the holy city of Qom, and responded with a wave of new sanctions squeezing every aspect of Iran’s economy. This entailed careful diplomacy. State Department and Treasury officials appealed to country after country to cut ties, creating a unified front of economic warfare. The impact was devastating: “Their oil exports dr
opped by 50 percent,” Burns recalled. “The value of their currency dropped by 50 percent.”
That pressure set the stage for talks. In March 2013, at a military officers’ beach house in Oman—which had demonstrated its pull with Tehran by brokering the release of several imprisoned American hikers—Burns and four colleagues held their first secret talks with the Iranians. Over the course of three days, he and the head of the Iranian delegation walked the grounds and spent long hours in a light-filled conference room with a wide view of the Arabian Sea. “I think we left with the sense that there might be an opening here,” Burns said. The Iranians were still on a tight leash from Tehran. But they were working-level diplomats, not the national security hard-liners who had shown up for international talks before. That distinction would be important on both sides.
Talks gathered steam when Iran surprised the world by electing as president Hassan Rouhani, a perceived moderate who ran on a platform of thawing the freeze on Iran’s economy. He installed Javad Zarif, a Western-educated Charlie Rose regular, as foreign minister. Over the following year, Burns would lead nine or ten secret negotiations in capitals around the world. In one case, “we did a patch of negotiations in Muscat, then flew to Beijing, then flew back to Oman then back to Beijing,” remembered Jon Finer, who was present for many of the later talks. As the months dragged on, the negotiators began to develop a personal rapport. When one of the American diplomats, Wendy Sherman, and her counterpart, Majid Takht-Ravanchi, both became grandparents in the fall of 2013, they shared pictures. Kerry and Zarif held such long meetings that New York magazine later Photoshopped a cloud of hearts between the two men and place them atop a listicle entitled “The Most Romantic Moments of the Iran-Deal Negotiations.” By the end of 2013, an interim agreement had been signed. In April 2015, that progressed to a framework agreement. And over the following three months, the fight to translate the commitments developed over the previous years into a final deal played out in Vienna.
AS THE SECRET TALKS advanced, some aspects of the American position softened. “Obama made a very critical policy decision. . . . which was the US might consider a very, very limited enrichment program if Iran agreed to very strict monitoring and verification,” recalled Sherman. Iran having a nuclear program would happen with or without our blessings, the thinking went. The sanctions, Sherman, Burns, and the rest of the Americans became convinced, could only slow that down. Negotiations offered the only hope of ensuring oversight of Iran’s activities. The concession of allowing a civil nuclear program—a source of rebuke from opponents of the deal to this day—was an inflection point, one of the most significant factors in making the cascade of agreements that followed possible.
Sherman compared the deal to a Rubik’s Cube, with each twist messing up another facet of the negotiations. (Later, a Department of Energy official gave Rubik’s Cubes to forty of the American negotiators, including Finer and Sherman, as a gag gift, the word “gag” loosely applied.) The talks literally broke several members of the team. Wendy Sherman broke her nose slamming into a door while rushing to brief Kerry on a secure line, and ruptured her pinky finger tumbling down a staircase en route to one of the team’s many Senate briefings defending the negotiations against political attacks. She put her finger on ice and carried on with the briefing anyway. (“I was quite focused, it was a really good briefing,” she said. After answering the last question, she burst into tears.) In one heated negotiation in Geneva in 2015, John Kerry slammed his hand on the table so hard a pen went flying and hit one of the Iranian negotiators. Still rattled the day after, he’d gone for a bike ride in the French Alps to clear his head, which is a thing you do if you’re John Kerry and you’re too far from the coast to windsurf. Distracted by a passing motorcycle, he slammed into a barrier and went flying, shattering his femur.
From Muscat to New York and Geneva to Vienna, they persevered, and entreated allies to do the same. In July 2015—after one last push that stretched until 3 a.m.—the ministers lined up at the United Nations in Vienna, looking tired in front of a row of their countries’ flags as flashbulbs went off. Together, they announced a deal that would constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions for at least a decade. The rogue nation that had flouted sustained diplomacy with the outside world for more than thirty years had consented to rigorous, intrusive checks and verifications.
John Kerry took the opportunity to defend the deal against what he knew would be years of outrage, from those who opposed the very idea of talks, and those who would argue that the United States got snookered. “I will just share with you, very personally, years ago when I left college, I went to war,” he told the assembled press, referring to his time in Vietnam. “And I learned in war the price that is paid when diplomacy fails. And I made a decision that if I ever was lucky enough to be in a position to make a difference, I would try to do so.” His voice, hoarse and weary, cracked with emotion. “I know that war is the failure of diplomacy and the failure of leaders to make alternative decisions.”
THE DEAL WAS A LIGHTNING ROD for criticism. Getting to the finish line required what some considered to be unacceptable compromises. Back in 2009 Obama had ordered the CIA and the State Department to stand down from supporting anti-government protesters in Iran’s Green Revolution, fearing regime change would explode the secret diplomatic entrees. Some critics argued that the Obama administration’s obsessive pursuit of the deal had also contributed to its inaction in Syria, after Iran threatened to pull out of talks if the United States interfered with the Tehran-allied Syrian regime. And the deal itself—affording Iran the right to a low level of nuclear enrichment insufficient for weapons production, and featuring some restraints that would expire after a decade—was no clean victory.
Others argued it was a deal with the devil. From stoning rape victims, to imprisoning journalists, including Americans, Iran was hardly a reformed actor. When the Trump administration set about lobbying against the deal—and failed to gain traction on claims that Iran had cheated—many of its arguments were instead premised on this. US Ambassador to the United Nations Nicki Haley talked at length about Iran’s history, since 1979, as a rogue nation and sponsor of terrorism, urging the world to view Iran as a “jigsaw puzzle,” incorporating more pieces than the nuclear issue.
The deal’s negotiators were the first to admit its imperfections. But this was, they argued, what a diplomatic victory looked like. The deal was narrowly focused on the singular, pressing challenge of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Nowhere did it seek to address the country’s human rights record, or its support for anti-US elements in Syria, or its nonnuclear weapons tests. It was hard to envision, the deal’s proponents said, how taking nuclear talks off the table would do anything but diminish the United States’ ability to address any of those other issues. “We recognized that there were a lot of other elements of Iranian behavior that would threaten our interests and the interests of our friends,” Bill Burns told me. “But being able to resolve the nuclear issue without a shot being fired, in a way that serves our interests, is a pretty significant step.”
There were also few alternatives. Without the agreement, Kerry argued, “You were going to have near-term military action, period. Breakout time was down to a couple months. So, either on our watch or early in [Trump’s] presidency, without [the deal] you were going to have a confrontation.” The Obama administration had reviewed the military options and they looked bleak. They could temporarily debilitate specific sites, but there was no way to keep the Iranians from rebuilding. “You were going to be in the situation of doing it once, then making diplomacy totally impossible because once you’ve bombed them,” Finer recalled of the administration’s view of tactical options, “they’re pretty unlikely to sit at the table and negotiate with you, they’re going to try to race to a bomb covertly, away from monitoring. And then you’re going to be in a position where you have to find it and bomb it again, maybe in two years down the road and so you’re in perpetuity in this cycle.”
&nbs
p; “There is this notion out there that there is a better deal or a perfect deal to be had and life’s not like that,” Burns added. “You can make an argument that, had we seriously engaged with the Iranians a decade earlier, when they were spinning sixty-four centrifuges and a very primitive effort of an enrichment program, maybe we could have produced sharper limits on their nuclear program. The reality was, at the beginning of 2013, when we began the secret talks in earnest, they were spinning almost nineteen thousand centrifuges.. . . . And there was no way in which you could bomb or wish that away. The challenge in diplomacy was always going to produce something short of a perfect solution.” This was how complex negotiated settlements looked: twenty years earlier, the agreement Richard Holbrooke brokered in Dayton had compromised deeply, too, attaching rights of political representation to ethnic groups, and creating a bloated, unwieldy government in an effort to satisfy everyone.
Several of the diplomats behind the Iran deal, including Sherman and Finer, banded together to take the fight to Congress and the media. They argued that withdrawal would diminish the United States’ influence, and that China and Russia would seize on the opportunity to drive a wedge between the US and its European allies, which were significantly invested in the deal. Most of all, the diplomats feared how the destruction of the world’s most significant nonproliferation deal with a hostile state might echo across the world, in another great crisis. “If we ditch this deal,” Finer said, “What are the North Koreans going to think? What incentive do the North Koreans have to even contemplate negotiating anything?”
FOR ALL ITS FLAWS, it was a deal, and one that offered lessons on the factors that can still converge to make diplomacy work in the present day. The Iran negotiators prevailed through their trials partly because the president offered full-bodied support, with little micromanagement. Before each round of negotiations, Obama ran through his “red lines” with Kerry and Sherman, then reminded them they were empowered to walk away if they saw fit. By the end of the years-long journey to Vienna, dozens of State Department officials had been involved in the deal. I spoke to many of them: uniformly, they recalled feeling empowered by the White House, and how integral that was to their work.