The Iran Wars

by Jay Solomon

  Administration officials who took part in the debates said they were getting mixed messages from the Green Movement. Some supporters, particularly within the Iranian diaspora, pressed for President Obama to publicly endorse their cause. They felt it could protect them from an anticipated government crackdown. However, many inside the movement in Iran felt that American support, even if it was just rhetorical, would give Khamenei an excuse to brand them as American lackeys.

  President Obama ultimately decided to remain silent in the crucial early days of the revolt. Furthermore, he ordered the CIA to sever any contacts it had developed with Green Movement supporters. The Agency has contingency plans for supporting democratic uprisings anywhere in the world. This includes providing dissidents with communications, money, and in extreme cases even arms. But in this case the White House ordered it to stand down. “ ‘Let’s give it a few days’ was the answer,” said a senior U.S. official present at some of the White House meetings in 2009. “It was made clear: ‘We should monitor, but do nothing.’ ” Other Obama advisors said it was clear that the president didn’t want to take any steps that might jeopardize the direct diplomacy with Khamenei. “If you were working on the nuclear deal, you were saying, ‘Don’t do too much,’ ” said Michael McFaul, who served as a senior National Security Council official at the White House before becoming ambassador to Russia in 2012.

  Obama went further, though, and publicly sought to squelch the perception that Iran was about to experience major change or move closer to the West. In a June 16 interview with MSNBC he cast Mousavi as a regime insider and a fundamental player in developing the Islamic Republic’s hostile policies toward the West. “Although there is amazing ferment taking place in Iran, the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as has been advertised,” Obama said. “I think it’s important to understand that either way, we are going to be dealing with a regime in Iran that is hostile to the U.S.”

  Obama also lagged behind European leaders, such as French president Nicolas Sarkozy, in forcefully questioning the legitimacy of the results. U.S. officials said they didn’t have enough of their own independent information to gauge the level of fraud in the vote. But this only fed the perception that the Obama White House didn’t want to stir the pot in Iran. The president’s desire to pursue a nuclear agreement trumped all other issues. “It is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be. We respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside Iran,” Obama said at the White House, also on June 16. “What I would say to those people who put so much hope and energy and optimism into the political process, I would say to them that the world is watching and inspired by their participation, regardless of what the ultimate outcome of the election was.”

  There was some dissent within Obama’s administration over this soft approach, largely from Hillary Clinton’s State Department; the internal conflict mirrored the differences exposed during the campaign. On June 17, as the Iranian regime moved to cut off Internet access, an office at Foggy Bottom communicated with the social media site Facebook to take steps to ensure that Iranians could continue communicating using its Web pages. The move by two young American diplomats, Jared Cohen and Alec Ross, was initially reprimanded by their higher-ups, according to former U.S. officials, fearful that it strayed from the president’s line of staying out of the Iranian controversy. But the State Department then reversed itself and publicized the two officials’ intervention with Facebook, a sign, these officials said, that Clinton was sensitive to criticisms that the United States wasn’t doing enough to support the Green Movement. It wouldn’t be the last time Clinton appeared to break from Obama on the issue of how directly to challenge Tehran. After leaving the Obama administration, Clinton said the failure to support the Iranian opposition—at the time of the uprising—was one of her greatest regrets during her time as secretary of state.

  Khamenei and Iran’s government forces utilized the general lack of international outrage, and the Green Movement’s own tactical errors, to regroup following the opposition’s takeover of Azadi Square. The movement’s leaders were divided, and Mousavi appeared reluctant to publicly challenge Khamenei. Inexplicably to some in the Green Movement, their own leaders called for protestors to return home after their massive show of force on June 17. They felt that momentum was on their side and that they needed time to recalibrate their strategy. They also believed that even some of Iran’s traditional revolutionary leaders, such as former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, would rally to their cause. There were clear fractures between Khamenei and many of the other leaders who had founded the Islamic Republic but wanted a more open system.

  However, the Green Movement had underestimated the skill and ruthlessness of Khamenei and, in particular, the Revolutionary Guard. Over the ensuing two months, it unleashed its paramilitary arm, the Basij, against the Green Movement’s leaders and its supporters across Iran. Iran’s security forces placed Mousavi and Karroubi under permanent house arrest, and they arrested thousands, incarcerating many in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. Even members of the Iranian elite, such as Rafsanjani’s daughter and Mousavi’s son, were detained in what quickly became the broadest crackdown in Iran since the revolution.

  The Iranian government’s selective use of terror and brutality also unnerved the world. A video on YouTube documenting the shooting and death on a Tehran street of a Green Movement protestor, a woman named Neda Agha-Soltan, shocked the opposition and served as a signal to the international community of the extent the regime would go to in order to push back its political challengers. Wide-scale use of rape and torture of men and women, particularly in prisons and hospitals where protestors were being held and treated, were reported, stunning the White House and other Western powers.

  Obama was finally forced to make a tactical shift and publicly condemn the regime in late June, after the crackdown was in full force. “In 2009, no iron fist is strong enough to shut off the world from bearing witness to the peaceful pursuit of justice,” the president said in a prepared statement ahead of a White House press conference. “The United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, the beatings, and the imprisonments of the last few days.”

  But the White House’s moves were too late. The IRGC and its Basij continued their roundup of the Green Movement’s leaders and the suppression of its supporters. Through the end of summer and early fall, Iranian state television aired show trials of opposition leaders confessing to being agents of the United States, Israel, and the West. Thousands of political activists fled to Turkey, France, Australia, or the United States to evade Khamenei’s security forces.

  Obama had bet that minimizing U.S. involvement in the Iranian crisis might soften Tehran’s response, or even win its gratitude. But in the end, the opposite was true. “There were a few days where the opposition held the streets and real change was possible,” said Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment, who regularly met with Obama administration officials. “But Obama didn’t realize that, regardless of his actions, Khamenei would paint the uprising as a Western plot.”

  The unexpected uprising was snuffed out nearly as fast as it started. At the time, U.S. officials downplayed that they had missed a major opportunity. But as Ahmadinejad consolidated his power and the nuclear negotiations stalled, criticism of the White House grew. Many Iranians said the biggest window to effect change in decades had closed.

  Even as the crackdown on the Green Movement continued, the Obama administration pressed forward with the pursuit of nuclear negotiations. Critics said engaging with Tehran so soon after the crackdown only legitimized Ahmadinejad’s reelection. It would also serve as a green light to Khamenei and his security forces that they could repress their population without any serious consequences. But Ahmadinejad’s government, possibly because it sought international acceptance, was declaring its willingness to engag
e in its first direct high-level contacts with the United States and other Western powers since Obama’s inauguration. And this came as Tehran’s nuclear capacity continued to grow.

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  ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF Geneva in late October 2009, in a town called Genthod, American diplomats joined with representatives of the P5+1—the UN Security Council members plus Germany—in a plush European villa to outline a plan to deter Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Just weeks earlier, the U.S., French, and U.K. governments had jointly announced that their intelligence sources had uncovered a new Iranian uranium enrichment facility buried in a mountain outside the holy Iranian city of Qom. U.S. officials believed that had the site been left undetected, Tehran planned to use the facility to produce the highly enriched uranium used in building a nuclear weapon. Iran admitted to hiding the construction of the site from inspectors at the IAEA, but stressed it wasn’t for weapons use. Tehran said it needed to keep the Qom site secret and underground in order to protect it from an Israeli or American military strike. The West believed this was a ruse.

  The U.S. and Iranian delegations to the Swiss negotiations were led by two mild-mannered and unassuming negotiators, William Burns on the American side and Saeed Jalili on Tehran’s. Jalili was the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and the personal representative of Ayatollah Khamenei. A veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, he, like most of Iran’s senior leaders, spouted anti-American catchphrases and railed against the double standards of the West. But the diplomat, with his trim beard, spiky silver hair, and collarless shirts, had the appearance of a religious scholar. He peppered his speeches with calls for world peace and “harmony” among the world’s religions and ethnic groups. Jalili’s press conferences could stretch on for more than an hour without making any headlines.

  Burns was a rare State Department diplomat who rose to the top of the Foggy Bottom bureaucracy without displaying any particular political leanings. Burns had served as the ambassador to Jordan and Russia under George W. Bush and was assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. His regional experience and apolitical nature placed him in a strong position to engage with Jalili and to break down Iran’s paranoia toward the United States, according to American and Iranian officials. His non-ideological diplomacy also appealed to the Russian and Chinese delegations at Geneva.

  Jalili entered the talks at Genthod maintaining the same line that Iran had expressed in its earlier negotiations with the Europeans: that Tehran had the right under the United Nations’ Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to enrich uranium and produce its own nuclear fuel. Iran also wouldn’t negotiate unless the United States first began unwinding the expansive economic sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic. The penalties were already starting to cut off Iran’s banks from the global economy, though they would become much worse. The United States, France, and the United Kingdom had been expecting Iran to take this unbending position, so Jalili’s comments were no surprise.

  But the United States, Russia, and other European countries had come to Switzerland with a highly technical offer that was designed to both test Tehran’s willingness to engage and significantly diminish its ability to build a nuclear weapon in the short term. Nuclear experts inside the U.S., French, and Russian governments, backed by advisors from the IAEA, devised the concept, called a “fuel swap.” It basically sought to call Iran’s bluff on its claims that it only sought civilian nuclear power by providing it with fuel that was sufficient to power a nuclear reactor but not of the quality and quantity needed to produce a bomb. For the White House, this marked the ideal first step toward a rapprochement with Tehran, if Jalili would accept the proposal. If not, the administration said, it was prepared to put in place more economic sanctions on Iran.

  Sitting at a conference table at the old Swiss villa, Burns and his partners detailed to Jalili the outlines of the plan. Iran would need to ship out two-thirds of its uranium stockpile, which had been enriched to 3.5 percent purity, to Russia, where it would be converted into the fuel plates used to power Tehran’s research reactor. French nuclear power companies would play a role in fabricating the fuel plates, which in that form couldn’t be used for nuclear weapons. In return, the P5+1 would lift sanctions on Iran’s airline industry, provide greater support to Iran’s civilian nuclear program, and support Tehran’s bid to join the World Trade Organization.

  Burns and other Western diplomats reveled in the plan, because they believed it would keep Iran from acquiring enough fissionable material to produce a nuclear bomb for at least another year. Negotiators believed this would give the United States enough time to launch military strikes on Iran if it decided to break out and try to assemble a bomb. If the first stage succeeded, more negotiations could be held to permanently scale back Iran’s program. At the time, Iran had 1,800 kilograms of uranium that had been enriched to 3.5 percent purity. Tehran was estimated to need an additional 1,200 kilograms to construct one bomb, if it was processed further into weapons-grade material.

  Burns personally laid out the importance of the deal in a forty-five-minute one-on-one meeting with Jalili in Genthod. The American also raised issues such as Iran’s human rights record and the June elections, and Jalili responded that Iran wanted to broaden its dialogue with the United States to include the topics of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf. This illustrated the delicate balance of the diplomacy: the United States wanted a deal focused on the nuclear question but found it difficult to exclude other security issues. Still, to the Americans’ surprise, Jalili tentatively accepted the fuel swap arrangement, stirring a collective sigh of relief in Washington and European capitals. “This limits Iran’s ability to have the breakout ability needed to have nuclear weapons,” an aide to Burns told reporters in Geneva at the time. The diplomats in Switzerland decided to hold follow-up discussions at the IAEA’s headquarters in Vienna to finalize the technical details of the plan.

  But, as with much of the West’s diplomacy with Iran since 1979, this initial euphoria over the Geneva agreement quickly turned into confusion and then heartbreak. Just a day after Jalili’s agreement with the P5+1, senior Iranian officials were quoted by state media denying they had struck an accord on the fuel swap. Senior Iranian officials and politicians then began publicly attacking the deal, arguing that Western countries such as France couldn’t be trusted to deliver the nuclear fuel to Tehran on time. They wanted a simultaneous exchange of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium for the fuel plates, and they wanted it to take place in a matter of weeks, something the IAEA said wasn’t technically possible. American officials were again confused about who was calling the shots in Iran, and if Khamenei had even blessed the talks to begin with.

  A major internal battle inside Iran ensued, according to Iranian and European officials, and exposed major cleavages inside the country’s political system. Ahmadinejad had initially told Jalili to accept the agreement—in part, these officials said, to enhance the president’s political standing, both internationally and inside Iran, in the wake of the disputed June vote. The president’s critics in Tehran, particularly those close to Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard, began attacking the deal and charging that the president was selling out to the United States and Israel, a tactic designed as much to weaken Ahmadinejad as to satisfy substantive opposition to the agreement.

  Ultimately, Ayatollah Khamenei ruled against the agreement, according to Iranian and European officials, fearful of losing leverage internationally if Tehran shipped out the majority of its fissile material. Some people involved in the diplomacy said they believed Ahmadinejad never consulted with the supreme leader before instructing Jalili to accept the deal. This was a maneuver that ultimately doomed the original agreement and created significant distrust between the two Iranian leaders for the remaining four years of Ahmadinejad’s second term. The fallout from the failed deal also rekindled fears inside the White House that the United States couldn’t reach a sustainable deal with an Iranian government that was so fractured i
nternally. “The failure of the Geneva agreement really marked a shift to a more confrontational stance towards Iran,” said Dennis Ross, who closely advised Obama on Iran at this time. “Hopes for a successful engagement with Khamenei began to fade.”

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  IN THE WAKE OF the failure in Geneva, the Obama administration and its European allies began preparing to implement the “crippling” sanctions that the White House had promised if diplomacy failed. And the Obama administration seemed correct in its assessment that seeking engagement with Tehran, even if unsuccessful, would force the Europeans, Russians, and Chinese to support sanctions. The responsibility for the failure of the diplomatic approach clearly fell on Tehran.

  This latest push for sanctions focused on implementing a fourth round of economic penalties on Iran through the UN Security Council. It also included unilateral sanctions by Washington and the European Union that were being developed by the U.S. Treasury Department and the Congress and which would increasingly target Iran’s oil revenues.

  A last-ditch diplomatic effort spearheaded by two developing economic powers, Turkey and Brazil, emerged in the spring of 2010 to head off this call for more economic penalties on Iran. The initiative, pursued by Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, illustrated how the Iranian nuclear crisis was increasingly dividing the Western powers from the developing nations, many of whom supported Tehran’s position on uranium enrichment. The Brazilians and the Turks said they coordinated their diplomacy with Washington, but many U.S. officials viewed it as an affront to their efforts to isolate Tehran. Erdogan and Lula both saw their countries as emerging powers and together presented an alternative to U.S. hegemony.