In October 2011, shortly after the hikers had returned home, Secretary Clinton met with Qaboos in Muscat, and concluded that the Omani channel was our best bet. President Obama spoke a couple times by phone with the sultan, and was similarly impressed, especially by Qaboos’s conviction that he could deliver contacts with Iranians fully authorized by the Supreme Leader. I shared the view that the Omanis offered a promising opening, although I always wondered whether their relative success with the Iranians was a matter of their influence and ingenuity, or perhaps simply that they were a convenient vehicle for the Iranian regime when it decided to unburden itself of problems (like the hikers) or test channels with some plausible deniability. It also always appealed to the Iranians to sow dissension among the Gulf Arabs and use the Omanis to irritate the Saudis.
Even more energetic in his promotion of the Oman channel was Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Kerry had long been persuaded that the United States had to come to terms with Iran’s nuclear progress and engage directly. Coordinating with Clinton and Donilon, he had a series of meetings and phone calls with the sultan and Ismaily in late 2011 and 2012, which made him a passionate advocate of the Oman channel. He made clear his commitment to exploring a dialogue with the Iranians, and his interest in playing a personal role.
At around the same time, Salem came to us with a new proposal, which he and the sultan were certain bore the approval of the Supreme Leader. He suggested a direct U.S.-Iranian meeting in Muscat, quietly facilitated by the Omanis. He asserted that the Iranians would be prepared to address any issue, but wanted to focus in particular on the nuclear problem. He was uncertain who would lead the Iranian team, but thought it might be Ali Velayati. After some debate in Washington, we decided to suggest a preliminary, preparatory meeting at a lower level. We had been burned so many times in the past few decades that caution seemed wise.
Jake Sullivan, still serving as Secretary Clinton’s Policy Planning director, and Puneet Talwar were natural choices to represent the United States at this exploratory session. Puneet had joined me for innumerable P5+1 rounds, and was a key player in the TRR initiative. Jake was Hillary Clinton’s closest policy advisor. He had her full confidence, and the president’s trust.
In early July, Jake was off on yet another overseas trip with the secretary when I called him and asked if he could break off for a couple days in Oman. He didn’t hesitate, and made his way from Paris to Muscat, where, hosted by Salem, he and Puneet spent a long and not particularly encouraging day with a mid-level Iranian delegation. Jake reported that the Iranians had been almost entirely in “receive mode,” and seemed intent on securing some kind of substantive down payment for any future talks. They were particularly focused on the thorny issue of their “right” to enrichment—something that the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons did not explicitly convey, and that their continuing violation of successive IAEA and UNSC resolutions did little to promote. With his usual candor, an unusually effective mix of Minnesota politeness and East Coast hardheadedness, Jake made clear that the issue was what the Iranians would do to satisfy powerful international concerns, not the other way around.
Over the next few months, as the American elections approached in November, both sides regrouped. We made clear, through Salem, that we were ready for further meetings but weren’t in any rush. Sanctions pressure was building, and we wanted the Iranian government to feel the pain.
Following President Obama’s second inauguration, John Kerry succeeded Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. On the same day his nomination was announced, Kerry asked me to stay on as deputy secretary. I had planned to retire, but I was glad to accept.
It was obvious that Secretary Kerry, like the president, wanted to make Iran negotiations a priority for the second term. Sensing an opening, Salem conveyed renewed interest from the Iranians in meeting again, this time at a higher level, with a deputy foreign minister heading their delegation. We eventually settled on March 1, 2013, in Oman. I would lead the American team, with Jake as my alter ego. He had already become my closest collaborator in the Obama administration—the best of his generation of foreign policy thinkers and practitioners, strategically creative as well as tactically adept. We’d be joined by Puneet and Bob Einhorn; Jim Timbie, whose encyclopedic knowledge of nuclear issues and four-plus decades of negotiating experience made him a quiet national treasure; Richard Nephew, a specialist on sanctions; and Norm Roule, the senior advisor on Iran in our intelligence community.
The president convened several meetings in February to review our approach. In all my three decades in government, this was—along with the bin Laden raid in 2011—the most tightly held effort. The White House Situation Room, usually crowded with cabinet officials and backbenchers, was unusually spare. Only a handful of people in the White House and the State Department knew of the secret talks, and we went to great lengths to preserve their discretion. Meetings on this issue didn’t go on our public calendars, or bore innocuous titles; documents related to the talks were kept only on the ultra-secure White House communications systems.
By this point, the president’s grasp of the Iranian nuclear issue and his policy sense were both well developed. His expectations were realistic; he knew the odds that the Iranians would be willing or able to accept sharp limitations on their nuclear program were low. He also knew the dangers of being played by Tehran, as had happened too many times before. Yet he was determined to test the proposition, and secure in the investment he and Secretary Clinton had made in the first term on sanctions and international solidarity. “We’re as well positioned to negotiate as we’ve ever been,” Obama said in one session in the Situation Room. “We’ve set this up right. Now we’ll see if we can make this work.”
President Obama laid out the framework for our effort crisply. First, our direct channel wasn’t a substitute for the wider P5+1 channel, but a pragmatic complement. Agreements on the nuclear issue could only come through that broader group, since it was the source of much of the international pressure that was starting to weigh on Tehran.
Second, we would have to keep the bilateral channel secret. The Iranians, facing enormous internal pressures, and filled with suspicion of American motives, warned that any premature disclosure would make it impossible to continue. Secrecy would help prevent opponents in both capitals from smothering the initiative in its crib—but it would carry future costs, feeding stab-in-the-back criticisms from some of our closest partners, particularly the Israelis, Saudis, and Emiratis. We knew that secret talks would be hard to sustain. In the age of omnipresent information technology and never-ending media scrutiny, it was unlikely that we could avoid disclosure for long. Oman was a relatively quiet and off-the-beaten-path place, but it was also a fishbowl in its own way, under the intermittent scrutiny of a variety of intelligence services.
We also knew that transitioning from a direct channel back into multilateral talks would be complicated and awkward. Some of the best foreign diplomats with whom I had ever worked had been or remained part of the P5+1. I didn’t much enjoy the idea of keeping our efforts from them. But we would never have gotten as far as we later did, as relatively fast as we did, if we had been trying to negotiate with the Iranians in the glare of international publicity, and solely in the inevitably more cumbersome P5+1 process.
The president stressed a third point. We would focus the back-channel talks on the nuclear issue, which was the most pressing and explosive of our many problems with Iran. It was the concern around which we had united the international community and built such powerful pressure, and the one on which the Iranians seemed prepared to engage. Moreover, our Gulf Arab partners were adamant that we not widen the aperture of the nuclear talks and address Iran’s non-nuclear transgressions, unless they were in the room. The purpose of the secret bilateral talks would be to test Iranian seriousness on the nuclear issue, and jump-start the broader
P5+1 process.
This was a fairly transactional and unsentimental view of the nuclear negotiations, without any grand illusions of overnight transformations in Iranian behavior or U.S.-Iranian relations. I was a short-term pessimist about the prospect for such changes, given the cold-blooded nature of that regime, its resilience and practiced capacity to repress, and the opportunities before it to meddle in a troubled Arab world. We knew we’d have to embed any progress on the nuclear issue in a wider strategy to push back against threatening Iranian behavior in the region, and preserve leverage and non-nuclear sanctions to draw on.
The president’s fourth bit of guidance cut right to the core of the transactional challenge. We would indicate to the Iranians, carefully, that if they were prepared to accept tight, long-term constraints on their nuclear program, with heavily intrusive verification and monitoring arrangements, we would be prepared to explore the possibility of a limited domestic enrichment program as part of a comprehensive agreement. There had been considerable internal back-and-forth on this issue, beneath the president’s level, less over whether to play this card than when. I thought it was best to do it at the outset, as a sign of our seriousness and a test of theirs, putting the burden squarely on the Iranians to show that they would accept tough constraints, and make clear in practical terms that they wouldn’t be able to break out to a bomb. Tom Donilon was a little uneasy about that tactic. He wanted to see more tangible evidence of Iranian seriousness before playing a card that—however carefully framed the proposition—would be hard to put back in the deck.
The president was convinced that we’d never get an agreement with the Iranians without some limited form of domestic enrichment. They had the knowledge to enrich, and there was no way you could bomb, sanction, or wish that away. Maybe we could have gotten to a zero enrichment outcome a decade earlier, when they were spinning a few dozen centrifuges. That was extremely unlikely to happen in 2013, with the Iranians operating some nineteen thousand centrifuges, and with broad popular support across the country for enrichment as part of a civilian program. The president wanted to cut to the chase in the back-channel talks, and that made sense to me. He approved the caveated formula we suggested, but placed heavy emphasis on the verb “explore.” This was not a promise or a guarantee.
Finally, the president reminded all of us that the chances of success were “well under fifty-fifty.” We’d keep all our other options open. We’d keep developing the “bunker buster” bomb we’d need to strike Fordow. The Pentagon would “set the theater” and demonstrate through regular deployments and thorough preparations that our military was prepared to act. We’d keep up other efforts to slow and obstruct the Iranian program. And we’d be ready to pivot again from a failed negotiating effort to even stronger sanctions. If direct talks went nowhere, it would be harder to blame the United States, and easier to build more pressure against a recalcitrant Iran.
At the end of our last meeting, the president shook hands with Jake and me and said simply, “Good luck.” Obama was staking a lot on this uncertain enterprise, and we were determined to do all we could to make it work.
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WE WOULD SOON get used to long flights to Oman in unmarked planes with blank passenger manifests, but I was too restless on that first trip at the end of February 2013 to sleep, wondering what lay ahead. Salem met us on arrival at a military airfield in Muscat, upbeat as always, and confirmed that the Iranian delegation, led by Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Asghar Khaji, had arrived just before us.
We drove about thirty minutes outside Muscat, to a secluded military officers’ club on the Arabian Sea. Its four walls became the boundaries of our little universe for the next few days. Our team spent that first evening reviewing our approach to the start of talks the next morning and hashing out roles and responsibilities. Our expectations were modest, but after many months of internal debate and planning, we were just glad to finally get started.
The next morning was typically hot and humid. I went out on an early-morning stroll, but the sauna-like conditions did little to cure me of my jet lag. Salem, the chief of the royal court, and the head of Omani intelligence greeted both delegations as we walked into the meeting room, which offered a panoramic view of the sea. I shook hands with Khaji and his colleagues, who included Reza Zabib, the chief of the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s North America division; Davoud Mohammadnia, from the Ministry of Internal Security, or MOIS; representatives of Iran’s atomic energy agency; a capable Iranian interpreter; and what I always assumed were a number of listening devices to record our conversations. We sat on opposite sides of a long table, too weighted down by history to enjoy the view or the moment. The Omanis, clustered around the head of the table, offered a few brief words of welcome and then departed. There was then an awkward pause.
I broke the silence by asking Khaji if he wanted to speak first. In what was an early indication that the Iranians were mostly on a reconnaissance mission, he deferred to me. I then made a brief presentation, along the lines the president had approved in the Situation Room a few days before. I tried to strike a respectful but candid tone. This was an important moment for both of us, a rare chance to talk directly and privately. We had no illusions about how hard this would be. While it was not our purpose to point fingers or lecture, there were profound mutual suspicions, and a long record of Iranian defiance of its international obligations that had provoked widespread concern. There were too many unanswered questions; too many obvious disconnects between the requirements of a realistic civilian nuclear energy program and the pace and lack of transparency of Iran’s efforts; and too much disregard for the clear requirements of a series of UN Security Council resolutions. There was a serious and growing risk that Iran’s domestic enrichment capacity could be quickly and covertly converted to produce weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium. That concern cut right to the core of what was at stake and the dilemma we faced.
The nuclear issue was not just a dispute between Iran and the United States, but between Iran and the P5+1, and the broader international community. I repeated the president’s message in his earlier letters to the Supreme Leader—it was not the policy of the United States to seek regime change in Iran, but we were absolutely determined to ensure that Iran did not acquire a nuclear weapon. Any hope for a diplomatic resolution would require Iran to understand the depth of international concerns and act upon them. I repeated bluntly that failure to take advantage of the uncertain window before us would certainly increase the costs to Iran, and the risk of military conflict.
The key to any diplomatic progress would be Iran’s willingness to take concrete, substantial measures to give the rest of us confidence that a peaceful program could not be converted into a weapons program. If Iran were ready to do that, I continued, we would be willing to explore whether and how a domestic enrichment program could be pursued in Iran, as part of a comprehensive settlement of the nuclear issue. That settlement would require many difficult, long-term Iranian commitments, and intense verification and monitoring provisions. Should we eventually reach a satisfactory agreement, the United States would be prepared to call for an end to all United Nations and unilateral sanctions against the Iranian nuclear program. Such a process would likely have to unfold in phases, with early practical steps to build confidence, leading to a comprehensive agreement.
There was enormous skepticism in both our capitals, I concluded. I shared much of that skepticism, but if the Supreme Leader’s fatwa against nuclear weapons was serious, then it shouldn’t be impossible to find a diplomatic path forward and prove the skeptics wrong. We were certainly prepared to try.
As I went through this presentation, Khaji and his colleagues listened and took copious notes. There were a few cold stares, and some head-shaking, but no interruptions. The Iranians in Oman were a welcome change and stark contrast to the doctrinaire, obstructionist Jalili-led delegation in the P5+1 talks. They w
ere professionals, mostly career diplomats, and it wasn’t hard to sense a shift in style and seriousness of engagement.
When I was done, Khaji took the floor. His tone was measured, even when he recited a long and predictable list of grievances about American policy. He spoke sharply about the unfairness of UN Security Council resolutions, the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, and the U.S. public emphasis that “all options are on the table.” He objected to American references over the years to the use of “carrots and sticks” against Iran. Raising his voice, he exclaimed, “Iranians are not donkeys!”
Khaji had little of substance to offer, although he stressed that he “wanted to look to the future.” The Iranian delegation had clearly taken note of my heavily caveated comment about domestic enrichment, but they were looking for (and probably expecting) more. Khaji asserted that Iran would defend its “right” to the whole nuclear fuel cycle, including enrichment, “at any cost.” We went back and forth over this argument, emphasizing our conviction that no such explicit “right” was granted by the NPT. The problem that Iran’s defiant behavior had created was simply that there were serious and growing international doubts about whether it wanted only a civilian program, or might pursue a military one. The onus was on Iran to disprove those doubts. Constant reassertion of imaginary rights was not going to get anywhere.
The Back Channel Page 39