In March, the president sent a videotaped Nowruz message to the Iranian people and, in a subtle effort to signal his lack of interest in forcing regime change, referred to the government by its formal name—the Islamic Republic. He committed the United States to “engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.” The Iranian popular reaction was overwhelmingly positive. The regime, particularly the Supreme Leader, remained skeptical.6
In early May, the president sent a long secret letter to the Ayatollah Khamenei. The letter tried to thread a needle—the message needed to be clear, but written in a way that would not cause too much controversy if it was leaked. In the letter, Obama reinforced the broad points in the Nowruz message. He was direct about his unwavering determination to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and his support for the P5+1 position that Iran was entitled to a peaceful civilian nuclear program. He also made clear that it was not the policy of his administration to pursue regime change, and indicated his readiness for direct dialogue. The Supreme Leader replied a few weeks later, trying to thread a similar needle. His message was rambling, but at least by the standards of revolutionary Iranian rhetoric not especially edgy or sharp. While it offered no explicit reply to the president’s offer of direct dialogue, we understood it nevertheless as a serious indication of his willingness to engage. President Obama responded quickly, in a short letter that proposed a discreet bilateral channel for talks, naming me and Puneet Talwar, a senior NSC staffer, as his emissaries.
All this halting momentum, modestly encouraging given the usual tribulations of dealing with Iran, came to an abrupt stop when the Iranian presidential elections in June turned into a bloodbath. The regime’s ballot stuffing and repression of a surprisingly potent Green Movement opposition led to violence in the streets, documented by cellphone-wielding Iranian citizens and broadcast around the world in dramatic fashion. The government cracked down with its customary brutality, with paramilitary militias beating demonstrators, thousands arrested, and dozens killed. The White House’s public response was initially tepid, less because of concern that it would jeopardize the fledgling effort at talks and more because the message from Green Movement leaders was not to suffocate them with an American embrace and allow the regime to paint them as U.S. stooges. In hindsight, we should have politely ignored those entreaties and been sharper in our public criticism from the start. Such criticism, which we eventually made quite strongly, was not only the right thing to do, it was also a useful reminder to the Iranian regime that we weren’t so desperate to get nuclear talks started that we’d turn a blind eye to threatening behavior, whether against Iran’s own citizens or our friends in the region.
As the summer of 2009 wore on, we continued to invest systematically in our P5+1 partners. Part of this had to do with an intriguing new idea that had emerged from IAEA director General Mohamed ElBaradei. Near the end of his tenure, ElBaradei still smarted from his frequent clashes with the Bush administration, but was anxious to help the new American administration get off on a more positive footing. The Iranians had sent a formal request to the IAEA in early summer, notifying them that the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR), which produced medical isotopes, had nearly exhausted the supply of 20 percent enriched uranium fuel plates that the Argentines had supplied in the 1990s. The implication seemed clear: Either ElBaradei would produce an alternative supplier, or the Iranians would produce the material themselves—and move closer to weapons-grade enrichment.
ElBaradei had the beginnings of a creative proposal. Why not call the Iranian bluff and supply the fuel plates, which posed no risk of being used for enrichment or weapons purposes? Bob Einhorn, my Baker-era Policy Planning colleague and now a senior advisor on nonproliferation issues at State, and Gary Samore, his counterpart at the NSC staff, took this one very interesting step further. Why not offer to supply the fuel plates for the TRR, but insist in return that the Iranians “pay” with about twelve hundred kilograms of 5 percent enriched uranium, roughly the amount that it would take to produce a batch of 20 percent fuel plates (and roughly the amount for one bomb’s worth of material) to replenish the original Argentine shipment? Subtracting it from the then Iranian stockpile of about sixteen hundred kilograms would leave only four hundred kilos, far less than what they would need if they wanted to try to break out toward a weapon. It would take the Iranians a year or so to get back to one bomb’s worth of material. That would provide time and space for serious negotiations about both the interim “freeze for freeze” proposal and a comprehensive solution.
Another priority that spring and summer was to strengthen cooperation with Russia on the Iran nuclear problem. The Georgia war in August 2008 had cratered U.S.-Russian relations, and the Obama administration had begun its effort to “reset” the relationship. Cooperation with Russia was the key to making the P5+1 effective. If the Iranians realized that they couldn’t separate Moscow and Washington, and that we and the Russians might actually work together on much tougher sanctions, there might be a chance of focusing minds in Tehran. President Obama’s conversation with Dmitry Medvedev in London in April 2009 was an excellent start. Secretary Clinton stayed in close touch with Foreign Minister Lavrov, and I had several long, quiet meetings with Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, my counterpart and Russia’s representative in the P5+1 talks. Ryabkov and I discussed the TRR proposal, and began to outline a cooperative arrangement in which Russia might produce the fuel plates for the TRR and take the Iranian low-enriched material in return.
Events came to a head in September 2009. As the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly approached in New York, which would be followed shortly by a G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, U.S., British, and French intelligence uncovered damning evidence of a covert Iranian enrichment site, buried deep inside a mountain near Qom. What made the clandestine site especially alarming was its relatively modest scale; with a capacity of only about three thousand centrifuges, it was much too small to produce enriched uranium fuel for a civilian nuclear power plant, but big enough to produce material for one or two nuclear bombs a year. Apparently nervous that Western governments might be poised to expose them, the Iranians sent a brief, seemingly innocuous note to ElBaradei informing the IAEA (many months after they were obligated to) of vaguely described construction work near Qom, at a site they called Fordow.
ElBaradei walked into a previously scheduled meeting at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York with me, Samore, and Einhorn on the evening of September 20. A little jet-lagged, and unaware of what we already knew about Fordow, ElBaradei reached into his pocket and handed us the Iranian notification. As Gary, Bob, and I each took turns looking at it, struggling to seem nonchalant, we quickly realized that it referred to the covert enrichment facility at Qom. We now had a fair amount of leverage with the Iranians, and a powerful argument to use with the Russians. Medvedev was angered by the revelation, partly because the Russians had again been caught off guard, and partly because the Iranians had apparently deceived them too. When President Obama announced the breach we had uncovered a couple days later in Pittsburgh, it deepened the resolve of the P5+1 to push the Iranians hard at the meeting that had already been scheduled in Geneva on October 1, and left Tehran backpedaling.
Led again by Javier Solana, my P5+1 colleagues and I met with Saeed Jalili and the Iranian delegation at a chateau outside Geneva on a sunny day in early October. We spent a desultory three hours in the morning delivering familiar positions across the table. Impatient and concerned that we’d miss the moment, I took advantage of the break for lunch, walked up to Jalili, shook his hand, and said, “I think it would be useful if we sat down and talked.” He agreed, having presumably gotten advance permission from Tehran. And so began the highest-level conversation between the United States and Iran since 1979.
We walked over to a small side room and sat down around a polished round table with seats for four. Bob Einhorn joined me, and Jalili was accompanied by his deputy,
Ali Bagheri. Puneet Talwar arrived a few minutes later and sat behind Bob. Jalili was more soft-spoken than in our prior encounter. There were no set pieces this time. This was the first bilateral talk we had ever had with the Iranians on the nuclear issue, and I didn’t want to waste it with a long preamble. I was also mindful that Jalili, with or without bombast, remained deeply suspicious of this whole interaction. He was a true believer in the Islamic Revolution, and he had come by his convictions through bitter experience. Wounded fighting the Iraqis in the 1980s, he had lost part of his right leg and walked with a distinct limp. Like many in his generation, he had learned the hard way in the trenches that Iran could trust no one and could only rely on itself.
I laid out carefully the TRR swap concept that ElBaradei had already previewed to the Iranians. Bob added some details, to make sure Jalili and Bagheri understood precisely what we were proposing. Jalili asked a few questions, but seemed to accept the core concept, and to appreciate how Iran would benefit from such a reciprocal arrangement. I also made clear, in a straightforward tone, that the consequences of rejecting the proposal, especially in light of the Qom revelation, were certain to be substantially tougher sanctions. Jalili seemed confident that Tehran would approve. “Our viewpoint,” he said, “is positive.” After we broke up, I asked Bob to go through the TRR proposal one more time with Jalili’s deputy. They produced a paragraph summarizing our understanding, which we agreed that Solana could make public. Our P5+1 partners were supportive, relieved that we finally seemed poised to make some headway.
While hopeful, I told Secretary Clinton on the phone later that afternoon that the chances were probably less than fifty-fifty that the deal would stick in Tehran. Unfortunately, my pessimism proved well founded. A follow-up meeting in Vienna, hosted by the IAEA later in October, collapsed when the Iranians tried to walk back key provisions, particularly the shipment of twelve hundred kilograms of material to Russia. That was the crucial confidence-building step. The irony was that President Ahmadinejad was the biggest booster of the TRR agreement in Tehran, anxious to improve his standing after the disastrous fixed election and show that he could “deliver” the Americans. I assumed that Jalili’s positive response in Geneva reflected Ahmadinejad’s eagerness, and perhaps also wider regime worries after the Qom revelation that they needed to find a way to ease tensions. The Iranian president’s political rivals, some of whom had been involved in the nuclear negotiations before and might otherwise have taken more supportive positions, didn’t want Ahmadinejad to get the credit for any breakthrough, however modest. Iranian politics are a brutal contact sport, and the TRR deal was one of its many casualties.
As we had warned Jalili, his rejection of the deal led us to pivot to greater pressure against Iran. Secretary Clinton played a particularly effective role in helping Susan Rice, our ambassador at the United Nations, cajole the members of the Security Council toward a much tougher sanctions resolution, finally passed as UN Security Council Resolution 1929 in early June 2010. The Iranians played their usual critical role in helping us to persuade key members of the council, announcing in February 2010, for example, that they were beginning to enrich to 20 percent, ostensibly for the TRR. Russia’s position was crucial; among the permanent, veto-wielding members of the council, we could count on strong support from Britain and France for more substantial sanctions, and China tended on the Iran issue at least to defer to Russia. Frustrated by the Iranians after the Qom disclosures and the failed TRR experiment, and increasingly confident in the possibilities of selective cooperation with the United States as the “reset” evolved, Medvedev eventually came around to support Resolution 1929.
An improvised effort in May by Brazil and Turkey to rescue the TRR proposal and stave off a new round of sanctions was too little, too late. In mid-May, Presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an went to Tehran and announced with great fanfare that they had brokered a breakthrough. The problems with their vaguely worded declaration were manifold: Since the Iranians now had accumulated enough low-enriched uranium for two bombs, exporting half would still leave them with enough for a bomb, if they chose to enrich to weapons-grade; the arrangements for shipping the material out of Iran to be swapped for TRR fuel plates were unclear; and Iran had already started enriching to 20 percent, another new problem. The bigger issue was that we had put enormous effort into getting Russia and China on board for what became UN Security Council Resolution 1929, and it would have been foolish to turn back unless the Iranians had made a spectacular move. This wasn’t.
Passage of Resolution 1929, aimed in part at isolating Iran from the international financial system, was an enormous relief. I was at the high school graduation of our younger daughter, Sarah, in Georgetown on the day the vote took place in New York. Much to the consternation of the watch officers at the State Department Operations Center who had been connecting me with calls to P5+1 counterparts and a variety of American colleagues earlier that day, I happily turned my cellphone off for a few hours to enjoy Sarah’s moment.
Resolution 1929 provided a platform for additional U.S. sanctions against Iran, as well as significant new EU measures. The U.S. steps, adopted overwhelmingly by Congress two weeks later, were aimed in part at reducing international purchases of Iranian oil, the lifeblood of its crumbling economy. The EU followed in July with a stringent package of its own. Far more than any previous combination of sanctions, these took a serious toll on the Iranian economy. By the end of President Obama’s first term, the value of Iran’s currency and its oil exports had each declined by 50 percent.
Iranian nuclear advances, however, continued to move at a dangerous pace. By the end of 2012, it had a stockpile of nearly six bombs’ worth of 5 percent enriched material, and probably half a bomb’s worth of 20 percent material. It was spinning more and more centrifuges at its openly declared site at Natanz, installing centrifuge cascades at Fordow, experimenting with more advanced centrifuges, and continuing work on its heavy water plutonium-producing site at Arak. Its missile systems were increasing in range and sophistication.
The country most alarmed by these developments was Israel. Although appreciative of all the effort that had gone into stepping up sanctions, Prime Minister Netanyahu argued throughout the latter part of Obama’s first term that sanctions and diplomacy would be too slow to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and that military action would likely be required. His clear preference was to press Obama toward U.S. military action, especially against the deeply embedded enrichment facility at Fordow. Obama was unconvinced by the logic or necessity of force at this stage, and deeply irritated by Netanyahu’s heavy-handed attempts to manipulate him in the run-up to the 2012 presidential elections. The Israeli leader’s efforts to badger and maneuver Obama into a more belligerent approach had the opposite effect, deepening and accelerating his commitment to finding a way short of war to stop the Iranians.
Even a sweepingly effective attack on the Iranian program, Obama believed, would only set back the Iranians by two or three years. They would undoubtedly regroup, take their program fully underground, and very likely make a decision to weaponize, with wide popular support in the aftermath of a unilateral U.S. or Israeli strike.
Obama and Clinton worked carefully to manage Netanyahu’s pressure and demonstrate U.S. determination to ensure by whatever means necessary that Iran would not acquire a nuclear weapon. National Security Advisor Tom Donilon deepened consultations with the Israelis on intelligence, as well as on sanctions and diplomatic strategy. We stepped up the transfer of sophisticated military systems to Israel, and accelerated our own plans for a new, fifteen-ton bomb that could penetrate Fordow. The United States and Israel reportedly jointly developed and deployed a malicious computer worm dubbed Stuxnet to sabotage, at least temporarily, the Iranian program. This campaign helped deflect Netanyahu’s push to bomb, but it was clear as President Obama began his second term that the drumbeat would get louder again if we co
uldn’t make diplomacy work. As Hillary Clinton would later describe it, “the table was set” for a renewed diplomatic push, with sanctions eating away at the Iranian economy and a Supreme Leader in Tehran nervous about a repetition of the unrest that had so unsettled his regime in the summer of 2009.7 What was still missing, however, was a direct channel with the Iranians.
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THE STORY OF how the Omani back channel to Iran emerged seems, like so many things in diplomacy, a lot neater in retrospect than it did at the time. Sultan Qaboos, an engaging ruler of the old Arab school, had navigated complicated currents at home and in the region for more than four decades, and had maintained a good rapport with the Supreme Leader in Tehran. Eager to play the intermediary, and nervous about the dangers of conflict so close to home, Oman sent the new U.S. administration a series of low-key overtures about its readiness to establish a channel to Iran.
The principal messenger for the sultan was Salem Ismaily, a clever, urbane, persistent, and resourceful advisor, who, in the ambiguous way in which Middle East elites often function, moved easily between the worlds of officialdom and private business, and was often used as a trusted fixer and negotiator. Salem was supremely confident of his ability to set up a reliable channel to Tehran, although sometimes murky about who exactly he was dealing with on the Iranian side. Given the checkered history of American-Iranian contacts, we were always skeptical of new initiatives, which often turned out to be overenthusiastic at best, and duplicitous at worst.
But Salem’s steady and upbeat insistence that he could deliver, backed up by long-standing trust in Qaboos, set the Omani overtures apart. What solidified my confidence in Salem and his relationships in Tehran was his role in securing the release of three young American hikers who had strayed into Iran along the border with Iraqi Kurdistan in the summer of 2009. They were arrested and thrown into the dismal confines of Evin Prison in downtown Tehran, where American embassy hostages had been held many years before. The hikers faced deep uncertainty. We tried through a variety of channels to secure their release, with no luck—until Salem got involved. Using his contacts in Tehran and the sultan’s reputation and resources, he managed over the next two years to negotiate the release of all three Americans.
The Back Channel Page 38