We met twice more in October in the familiar confines of the Omani beach club. Sanctions relief remained a source of great irritation to the Iranians. We wouldn’t budge from our position of roughly $4 billion in relief over six months, far short of the $18 billion that the Iranians sought. We still had sharp differences over restrictions on the Arak heavy water facility, as well as over the continuing Iranian insistence on language about their “right” to enrich. Trying to anticipate some of the main lines of concern expressed by critics of the P5+1 process, we pressed relatively late in the game for a freeze on new centrifuge production, not just their installation. That set Araghchi off. “What are you going to demand next?” he asked, with an air of deep exasperation.
We talked at length with the Iranians about how best to handle the resumption of P5+1 meetings in Geneva in mid-October, in the middle of our extended back-channel talks that month. We both recognized that we were approaching the point where we would merge the two processes, but we had made surprising strides in the secret bilateral talks, and thought it was worth seeing how far we could get by the end of October. Araghchi suggested that Iran make a general presentation to the P5+1, laying out the broad contours of a two-phase approach, including interim and comprehensive agreements. The Iranians left out the details to which we had tentatively agreed, as well as the areas of continuing disagreement, but it was useful to introduce the framework. By the time we completed an intensive two-day back-channel session on October 26–27, we had a draft text that still had five or six contested passages, but that was beginning to resemble a solid step forward after so many years of tension on the nuclear issue. In a meeting with Sultan Qaboos just before we flew home from Muscat, I again expressed our appreciation for everything he had done to make this channel work. “We’re getting close,” I assured him.
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THE PRESIDENT WAS pleased with the progress we had made, but intent in his lawyerly way on “buttoning it down tight.” We were genuinely surprised that we had come such a long way in such a short time. We were equally surprised that the back channel had stayed secret through eight rounds. We realized that that would not last much longer, with at least two journalists already beginning to put some of the pieces together.
A new P5+1 round under the leadership of EU high representative Cathy Ashton was scheduled to begin on November 7 in Geneva. With Wendy Sherman, my exceptional successor as undersecretary for political affairs and as head of our P5+1 delegation, joining us for the late October back-channel talks in Oman, we had told the Iranians that we would inform our multilateral partners of our direct bilateral meetings before the November session. They were a little nervous, but understood that the time had come. We scheduled another back-channel round on November 5–7 to see if we could remove another bracket or two in the draft text, before turning it over to our P5+1 partners for their consideration as the basis for rapid completion of an interim agreement.
Wendy had the unenviable task of briefing our P5+1 colleagues on the back-channel effort. The debate about when to tell our closest allies about the secret talks had been extensive. I was torn, having spent years as undersecretary working with my P5+1 counterparts, and understanding the very real concerns of the Israelis and our Gulf Arab partners, but also acutely aware of the risks of leaks and premature public disclosures. The White House preferred, in any case, to hold off as long as we could in the fall of 2013, but by the end of October there was no longer any good reason to wait.
Starting with Ashton, who knew as well as anyone that bilateral U.S.-Iran talks were essential, Wendy laid out the quiet effort we had been making, and the main areas of agreement and disagreement with the Iranians. Some of our partners were not entirely surprised. The British government, for example, had excellent contacts in Oman, and was generally aware of our progress. The president had also taken Prime Minister Netanyahu into his confidence at the end of September, in a one-on-one conversation at the White House. Netanyahu was not surprised either, since the Israelis had their own sources in the region, but he was decidedly less understanding than the Brits. He saw our back channel as a betrayal.
On November 5, we met with the Iranians at the Mandarin Hotel in Geneva, on the other side of town from the InterContinental, where the P5+1 session would take place a couple days later. The president and Secretary Kerry told us to make a final push to improve the draft text, which now bore the suitably anodyne title “draft joint working document.” We made a little more progress on defining a “pause” on Arak, but still had bracketed language there. We had made quite a bit of headway on specifying the elements of a freeze on enrichment at Natanz and Fordow, and on conversion and dilution of Iran’s existing stockpile of 20 percent enriched material. We were close to an understanding on sanctions relief in return, at roughly the $4 billion figure over six months that we had set out at the start of the back-channel talks. We also settled on an unprecedented set of verification and monitoring measures that would serve as a solid foundation for much more detailed arrangements in an eventual comprehensive agreement. The draft text we produced with Ravanchi and Araghchi still had three or four difficult brackets to resolve in its four and a half single-spaced pages.
It was probably inevitable that the handover to the P5+1 would have its awkward moments. Some of our European colleagues were impressed by our progress, but not happy about being kept in the dark. Ashton did a superb job of focusing the group on the opportunity the draft text offered. With Zarif already in Geneva to take charge of the Iranian team, John Kerry flew in on November 8. French foreign minister Laurent Fabius was close on his heels, bringing both considerable Gallic ego, a bit bruised over the back channel, and some solid ideas on how to tighten language, especially on Arak. Sergey Lavrov and the other ministers flew in too.
The next couple of days had lots of drama, some contrived and some reflecting real frustration, emotion, and exhaustion. Pressures were building in Washington for another round of sanctions, and Zarif faced his own share of domestic suspicions and second-guessing. Some of our P5+1 partners were still smarting over the back channel. Ashton and Kerry skillfully defused most of the tensions within the P5+1, and we developed a revised text that the group supported. It built on the back-channel draft, filling in new proposed language in some of the bracketed areas, and adding a few new sentences.
Zarif was not thrilled to see this updated text on November 9. The Iranians knew that the bilateral draft we had been working on for months still had brackets with unresolved differences over language. They also knew that it would have to be reviewed and accepted by the rest of the P5+1, who would undoubtedly want to put their own stamp on it. As Zarif reminded Kerry, he faced a tough audience in Tehran, and any shifts in language, however minor, were troublesome. Like other accomplished diplomats, Zarif was also a gifted thespian, and his head-in-hands expressions of gloom and duplicity unsettled some of the other ministers.
After a long day and night of discussions, the ministers agreed to consult in their capitals and convene another, hopefully final, round of talks in Geneva on November 22. The back channel had still not become public, and we worried that their revelation would complicate completion of an interim agreement. Jake and I arrived back in Geneva on November 20 to help bridge the final gaps with the Iranians. Coordinating closely with Ashton, and joined by Sherman, we met with Araghchi and Ravanchi on the twenty-first. We further narrowed our differences. The Iranians seemed more relaxed about preambular language on enrichment, in which we had carefully separated the words “right” and “enrichment,” using the first to refer explicitly to NPT language on the widely acknowledged right of members in good standing to peaceful nuclear energy, and the second in the much more conditional sense of an Iranian demand that might be applied if mutually agreed, long-term limitations on its program were developed. We made some headway on Arak, as Araghchi and Ravanchi grudgingly accepted French edits to more tightly defin
e a cessation of construction activity at the site.
We also pinned down an excellent set of verification measures, including 24/7 surveillance arrangements at Natanz and Fordow, and access to each step along the nuclear supply chain. On sanctions relief, we wound our way toward the formula that Kerry and Zarif eventually agreed upon. Its core was $4.2 billion in unfrozen Iranian oil revenue, metered out in six monthly installments. It had a few additional provisions, notably a relaxation of sanctions on the auto industry, whose main beneficiary was French automaker Renault. Zarif recounted to us with a mischievous glint in his eye that Fabius had spent most of their bilateral sessions in Geneva on this issue, not on Arak and the other questions on which he had been so voluble in public.
Throughout November 22 and 23, John Kerry was his usual relentless self, nudging Zarif toward the finish line, working with Ashton to manage the P5+1, and staying in close touch with the president by secure phone. Jake and I came over to the InterContinental Hotel for the final push, using service elevators and stairwells to get up to the secretary’s suite. Our cloak-and-dagger seemed a little silly at this stage, but it had become habitual over the past eight months, and we figured it was worth it if we could keep the back channel under wraps until an interim agreement, now termed the “Joint Plan of Action,” could be reached.
We could sense that the Iranians were in a hurry to finish the deal, before their own politics became an even bigger impediment. We didn’t think we needed to concede anything further on sanctions, and were confident that we had succeeded in preserving most of our leverage for the much more complex task of negotiating a comprehensive accord. Borrowing a famous Mel Gibson line from the movie Braveheart, as he urged his Scottish compatriots to stand firm in the face of charging English cavalry—and with a little of the giddiness that comes from high stakes and little sleep—Jake and I kept repeating to each other “Hold, hold, hold” as the Iranians kept probing for concessions.
By 2 A.M. on November 24, we were nearly there. The ministers were straining one another’s patience by this point, and I met with Ravanchi to iron out the last bits of language. Tired and relieved, we quietly congratulated one another. Ashton mobilized all the ministers for a signing ceremony at 4 A.M. Araghchi called me thirty minutes before the ceremony to say that he had “just two or three more changes to make” in the text. The Iranians were never entirely satisfied until they had overreached on nearly every issue and tested every last ounce of flexibility. I laughed politely. “It’s a little late for that,” I said. “We’re done.”
The Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) was a modest, temporary, and practical step. Iran froze its nuclear program for an initial six months, and rolled it back in key respects, especially in disposing of its existing stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium. It accepted intrusive monitoring arrangements. In return it got limited sanctions relief, and a commitment not to increase sanctions for six months.
The JPOA aroused more than a little controversy. Prime Minister Netanyahu said publicly on November 24 that it was “the deal of the century” for Iran. I told Ravanchi that hyperbolic statements like that should help his selling job at home, and he smiled with some satisfaction. Then the congressional critics joined in, predicting that the Iranians would cheat and the whole edifice of sanctions that we had so painstakingly put together over the years would collapse, long before a comprehensive deal could be negotiated. None of that turned out to be true. The JPOA was a solid agreement, in many ways better for us than for the Iranians, who still faced huge economic pressure. It offered us and the Iranians an opportunity to show that we could actually each live up to our sides of a fair bargain, and it gave the president and Secretary Kerry the time and space to negotiate a final agreement.
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NEWS OF OUR back channel broke a few hours after the signing of the JPOA, helping to explain how the P5+1 and Iran had concluded the interim deal so quickly. Spent after this long effort and more than three decades in the Foreign Service, I intended to retire at the end of 2013. I had promised John Kerry when he asked me to remain as deputy secretary that I’d stay on for his first year. In the end, encouraged by him and the president, and admiring them both immensely, I would keep at it for an additional year, until late 2014.
I was especially touched when President Obama invited me to lunch at the White House to reinforce the case for continuing at State. He was an adroit closer. We sat in his small private dining room just off the Oval Office, with tall windows looking out onto the Rose Garden. Over a relaxed conversation, we covered everything from our daughters and the current NBA season to the Iran negotiations and the state of the State Department. “I don’t want to play on your Irish Catholic guilt,” he said, “but I consider you to be the ultimate professional, and it would mean a lot to me if you would stay for another year.” I noted that he was doing a pretty good job on the Irish Catholic guilt part—and that he had had me at the lunch invitation.
With the back channel now history, Jake and I played a supporting and episodic role in the negotiations for a comprehensive nuclear agreement that consumed 2014 and the first half of 2015. In all those hours and days of secret talks, we had built some rapport with Araghchi, Ravanchi, and their other colleagues, as well as with Zarif. While the Iranians knew that the road to a comprehensive deal went through the P5+1, it was also clear that what were now overt and frequent U.S.-Iran contacts were the core of the effort. Even the distinctly unsentimental Iranians could get a little nostalgic sometimes about the seemingly simpler days of the back-channel talks in 2013.
Secretary Kerry threw himself into the comprehensive process, and he and Zarif were its prime movers. Wendy was tireless, and a deft leader of a vastly expanded negotiating team, including Timbie and Roule and terrific experts from Treasury, Energy, and other departments. Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz’s nuclear expertise and creativity helped to bridge gaps with his Iranian counterpart, Ali Salehi, a fellow MIT alum. I joined our team a few times in the cramped confines of the Palais Coburg hotel in Vienna, where both the slow rhythm of multilateral negotiations and the buffet menu became very familiar. At Kerry’s request, I saw Zarif privately a couple times in the second half of 2014. Before marathon talks in Lausanne in the spring of 2015, I met quietly in Geneva with Araghchi and Ravanchi. With congressional impatience and appetite for new sanctions growing, and the Iranians backtracking on key issues, I told them bluntly, “We have come so far, but maybe we should start thinking about a world without an agreement.” That helped get their attention.
Kerry’s talks with Zarif and Ashton in Lausanne in late March and early April 2015 were the longest continuous negotiation that a secretary of state had engaged in since Camp David in 1978. A framework for a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was announced on April 2, and the final deal emerged in July. In return for the gradual lifting of sanctions, Iran made a permanent commitment never to develop a nuclear weapon, and accepted substantial, long-term limitations on its civilian nuclear program. Ninety-eight percent of Iran’s stockpile of enriched material was removed, and so were nearly two-thirds of its centrifuges. The deal also cut off Iran’s other potential pathways to a bomb, eliminating the heavy water reactor core at Arak and the capacity to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Extensive verification and monitoring measures were put in place, some of them permanent. For the next decade, at least, Iran’s “breakout time”—the time it would theoretically take to enrich enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb—was extended from the two or three months frozen in the JPOA to at least one year. We had achieved our objective, and we diverted a potential path to war.
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IT WAS HARD to imagine when we embarked on that first secret flight to Oman in early 2013 that diplomacy could resolve the Iranian nuclear issue, at that time the most combustible challenge on the international landscape. The even longer history of grievance and suspicion in Ame
rica’s relations with Iran was another massive obstacle. The politics in Tehran and Washington were corrosive, offering little room for maneuver or incentive for risk-taking. The nuclear problem itself was maddeningly complicated and opaque. There was little reason to think that we could overcome any one of those obstacles, let alone all of them.
Neither the JPOA nor the JCPOA were perfect agreements. In a perfect world, there would be no nuclear enrichment in Iran, and its existing enrichment facilities would have been dismantled. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and perfect is rarely on the diplomatic menu. We couldn’t neatly erase by military or diplomatic means Iran’s basic know-how about enrichment. What we could do was to sharply constrain it over a long duration, monitor it with unprecedented intrusiveness, and prevent its leadership from building a bomb.
For all its trade-offs and imperfections, this was a classic illustration of how diplomacy can work. We set out at the beginning of the Obama administration, building on tentative steps taken at the end of the Bush administration, to test Iranian seriousness directly and invest in a wider coalition, and to build a stronger sanctions program. Our willingness to engage in direct talks and think creatively was a critical ingredient. It put the Iranians on the defensive, removed a pretext for their inaction, and solidified our coalition. When Tehran proved unwilling or incapable, it gave us the opportunity to build substantial economic leverage. Always lurking just over the horizon was the reality of American military power, backing up our determination to ensure that, by one means or another, Iran would not develop a nuclear weapon.
When our leverage had reached a kind of critical mass, we had to use it or risk losing it. Sanctions had so much impact on Iran because they were international, and widely, if often grudgingly, supported. Once Rouhani and Zarif took office and portrayed Iran in a more pragmatic and sympathetic light, it was time to put diplomacy to a rigorous test. Framing the issue as a question of whether Iran could accept sufficiently tough, long-term constraints in return for sanctions lifting and the possibility of limited domestic enrichment was key. There would have been no agreement without sharp constraints and strong monitoring—but there would also have been no agreement if we had insisted on zero enrichment. As Araghchi once put it to us, a civilian nuclear program, including enrichment, was “our source of national pride, our moon shot.”
The Back Channel Page 41