The Iran Wars

by Jay Solomon

  Beginning in 2010, Ismaily began shuttling between Muscat and Tehran to secure the Americans’ release. His mission was made urgent by growing concerns about the captives’ health in prison. All three had been held for various periods of time in solitary confinement and told their parents they were enduring self-imposed fasts and bouts of depression and weight loss. Sarah Shourd discovered a lump on her breast and was worried she might be suffering from early-stage cancer. Senior U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, maintained a constant drumbeat of calls demanding the Americans’ release. But there were no signs the Iranians were close to capitulating.

  Ismaily, though, unbeknownst to the Western media, was seeking to make the Americans deliver on the Iranian wish list he had already delivered to the White House a year earlier. Dozens of Iranian prisoners were detained in the United States and Europe on charges of arms smuggling and violating the draconian sanctions the West had imposed on Iran over the past decade. Many, like the American hikers, had become cause célèbres in their home country, and Tehran’s leadership saw political gains to be made in securing their release. A former Iranian ambassador to Jordan, Nosratollah Tajik, was under house arrest in London for allegedly smuggling night-vision equipment back to Iran. An Iranian mother of two, Shahrzad Mir Gholikan, was serving a five-year sentence in Minnesota for shipping the same equipment. Her daughters tearfully took to Iranian television to call for her release.

  Ismaily secretly worked out a plan that would gain the release of the Iranians in exchange for the return of the hikers. It would be a sequenced exchange playing out over three years, according to U.S. and Omani officials who took part in it. But it would allow both Washington and Tehran to claim political victories at home while building a bridge to pursue the nuclear negotiations. Ismaily also persuaded the Obama administration to eventually double the number of Iranian students allowed to enter the United States. And the State Department imposed sanctions on a Pakistan-based militant group that had been launching terrorist attacks against the Revolutionary Guard in eastern Iran.

  In September 2010, Ismaily got approval from the Iranian government to bring a payment to Tehran to secure Sarah Shourd’s release. The amount was $500,000, but neither the United States nor Oman would say whether the families, Sultan Qaboos, or another party provided the funds. Ismaily personally flew to Tehran in September 2010 to accompany the thirty-one-year-old back to Muscat, where she was reunited with her family. Tehran made it clear the espionage charges against Shourd stood, while she said she wouldn’t stop campaigning until her two friends returned.

  It took Ismaily another year to gain the release of Bauer and Fattal, which took place in September 2011. Again, the price was $500,000 each—fueling criticism in Congress that the U.S. government was essentially paying ransom to Tehran for the hikers’ return. But for the Obama administration, Ismaily’s ability to deliver the Americans made it clear to the White House that Oman was a country the United States could use in its sensitive dealings with Iran. It was a channel President Obama and other U.S. officials would repeatedly rely on in the ensuing years.

  “The Omanis came to us indicating that, ‘Hey, if you ever want to have a conversation [with Iran], keep us in mind,’ ” Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said. “So we always knew that was there. Then we negotiated the hikers through the Omanis, and that worked out well.”

  Out of the spotlight of the American media, Ismaily quietly brought back to Tehran four Iranians held in the United States and the United Kingdom. These included Tajik and Gholikan. They were photographed at Oman’s international airport, essentially making the same trip as the hikers had, but in reverse. In a few of the photos, Ismaily can be seen standing quietly in the background on the tarmac with a wide smile. He’d taken a key step in his plans to build a bridge between Washington and Tehran.

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  JOHN KERRY WAS AMONG the most keen to take the Omanis up on their offer to facilitate a dialogue with Iran. The Massachusetts politician was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in late 2011 and was pursuing an aggressive diplomatic agenda from his office in Congress, sometimes in league with the White House, but not always. The former presidential candidate had established his own connections with Salem Ismaily and saw an opportunity in the Oman channel. He began communicating to the Iranians via Muscat months before he assumed the leadership at Foggy Bottom.

  Kerry crisscrossed the globe during Obama’s first term to advance Washington’s (and his own) foreign policy agenda. He repeatedly met with Afghan president Hamid Karzai to keep the mercurial leader behind the U.S. war against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Kerry’s efforts to woo Syrian president Bashar al-Assad into the American camp ultimately failed, but they also solidified the U.S. politician’s reputation as a man who would take great risks to advance a diplomatic cause. Kerry even plotted to fly to Tehran in a bid to become the first senior American to hold a dialogue with Iranian officials in their capital since the 1979 revolution. The White House publicly backed such a trip by Kerry in late 2009, despite concerns that it could lend legitimacy to President Ahmadinejad, whose reelection was still being challenged by a nationwide protest movement. The Iranians, however, never came through with an invitation.

  Following Oman’s successful effort to broker the three American hikers’ release, Kerry saw his opening to establish a U.S. channel to Iran. On December 8, 2011, the senator conspicuously missed a Senate confirmation vote in Washington on President Obama’s nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Richard Cordray. Kerry’s absence sparked questions from the Capitol Hill press corps about his whereabouts, which Kerry’s office refused to answer. As it turned out, he was already on an overnight commercial flight to the Persian Gulf.

  The next day, Kerry had an audience of more than two hours with Sultan Qaboos at his ornate palace on the outskirts of Muscat. The vast whitewashed facility overlooked the Persian Gulf’s azure waters from a perch on Oman’s dry coastline. “I began long conversations to try and lay the groundwork for” direct U.S.-Iranian talks, Kerry told me in describing the development of the Oman channel. “The sultan and I really became quite friendly….We got to know each other very well, and he got to trusting me.”

  There was really only one topic on the meeting agenda: could the sultan actually facilitate a high-level discussion between the Americans and the Iranians in Muscat, solely focused on the nuclear issue? President Obama wanted to resolve the issue peacefully, Kerry told the monarch, but believed the time for such diplomacy was running out because Tehran was advancing to the point where it could produce a bomb. The White House wanted the discussion to be held in secret, shielded from the prying lenses of the global media. Not even the United States’ closest Mideast allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, could know about it, Kerry said. There were real fears these countries might try to sabotage the process, due to their deep distrust of Tehran.

  Kerry returned to Washington and briefed President Obama’s national security team about the sultan’s offer. He directly described the channel to Hillary Clinton, who was open to it. “We didn’t approach this with the sense this was definitely going to happen,” Kerry said. “We approached it as a possibility.”

  The Americans were encouraged by the response from the Iranian side. Ismaily had been communicating with two of Supreme Leader Khamenei’s closest advisors. This included his top foreign policy aide, Ali Akbar Velayati, and Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi. Both men were U.S.-educated and had spent significant time living in Baltimore and Boston, respectively. But they were seen as hard-liners in the Iranian system and were understood to speak for Khamenei. The White House didn’t seem to be at risk of communicating with officials who couldn’t deliver in a negotiation.

  Kerry, however, walked a fine line in his communications with the Iranians and tended to make assurances he wasn’t authorized to make. The White House didn’t want to offer any concessions before formal negotiations took place. B
ut the senator did indicate that Washington would likely be willing to accept Tehran maintaining its capability to enrich uranium, provided there were strong safeguards put in place.

  “Kerry was actually talking substance with the Omanis….We were very careful to make clear that we were not taking negotiating positions,” Ben Rhodes said of the senator’s efforts. “Kerry actually was, in his non-official capacity, floating proposals, talking about things like enrichment.”

  So the Iranians came to negotiations believing they had already bagged a major concession.

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  SIX MONTHS LATER, Ismaily and the Omanis followed through on their promise to bring the Americans and Iranians together in Muscat. A motley diplomatic team led the U.S. side at this first meeting. Jake Sullivan was Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff in July 2012, and the youngest-ever director of the State Department’s policy planning office. He was a golden boy inside the Democratic political and foreign policy establishment. A Minnesota native, the Yale-educated lawyer played a major role in shaping the 2008 presidential campaign, tutoring first Clinton and then Barack Obama on debating tactics and strategies. Sullivan had been a Rhodes scholar and edited the Yale Law Journal. Many Democrats assumed Sullivan, just thirty-six at the time, would one day become secretary of state or national security advisor on his own, particularly if Clinton was elected president.

  Accompanying Sullivan was Puneet Talwar, a man who assiduously kept a much lower political and diplomatic profile in Washington. Talwar was the National Security Council’s point man on Iran and issues dealing with the Persian Gulf. The Indian American was the White House’s representative to all the international negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program that had been held up to that point. Talwar purposely kept out of the public eye and almost never spoke to the media. He was the perfect “gray man,” to use the espionage term, to take part in such a secret trip to Oman—loyal, dependable, and someone who easily blended in among the businessmen and traders who traveled to Muscat.

  Talwar benefited from another asset no one else in President Obama’s national security staff possessed: extensive dealings with Iranian government officials. During much of the 2000s, Talwar was a staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then headed by Joe Biden. As part of his duties, Talwar intermittently attended international conferences focused on nuclear proliferation and ending the crisis over Tehran’s program. The events were described as “track two” diplomacy, as no active American officials attended the meetings, which took place at universities and hotel conference rooms in European cities such as Stockholm and Vienna. Iranian diplomats who would gain top positions in the governments of Presidents Ahmadinejad and Rouhani, however, did take part. Among them were Javad Zarif and Ali Akbar Salehi.

  The White House hoped Talwar could capitalize on his experience, and these contacts, to smooth the way for a direct dialogue with Tehran. He and Sullivan were a diplomatic one-two punch: Talwar the consummate low-key bureaucrat, and his younger partner a politically connected, emerging Democratic star. “In an administration where the White House dominates Iran policy, it makes sense that Puneet played this role” of interlocutor, said a former Western diplomat who discussed the secret diplomacy with Talwar at the time. His ties to Obama were crucial.

  Sullivan and Talwar were uncertain whom they would meet upon their arrival in Oman on a warm July evening. Iranian media had run articles suggesting that a close advisor to Ayatollah Khamenei would likely be the emissary for any direct discussions with the Americans. Some of the stories focused on Ali Akbar Velayati, a physician and onetime foreign minister. Velayati would be a controversial choice: as previously noted, an Argentine prosecutor had issued an arrest warrant for him in 2007 after charging the Iranian with helping to plot the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Tehran had repeatedly denied the charges. But the American delegation was reluctant to meet an Iranian official with such an allegedly bloody past.

  Sullivan and Talwar met neither. A midlevel Iranian diplomat of whom very few Americans had ever heard arrived in Muscat as part of a small Iranian delegation. Ali Asghar Khaji was deputy foreign minister and headed the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s North American division. He had extensive experience dealing with the West, having served as Tehran’s ambassador to the European Union. He met regularly with then EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton while in Brussels and even conferred with officials at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, rare for an Iranian diplomat. He didn’t seem to have real political power in Tehran or the direct line to Ayatollah Khamenei that Salehi or Velayati had. But the Americans were still encouraged. “The main purpose for us was: who were they going to send from their side?…The Iranians sent some real people,” Rhodes said. “At that point, we knew the Omanis could set up a real meeting.”

  Sitting down with Khaji in Muscat, the Americans quickly realized the Iranian brought no new Iranian diplomatic overtures, nor was he empowered to do so. Instead, he repeated the same line Ahmadinejad’s negotiators had presented during numerous earlier rounds of negotiations with the United States and other global powers. If the West lifted sanctions on Iran and accepted Tehran’s right to produce nuclear fuel, then there could be discussions on how to address international concerns that Tehran was seeking to develop nuclear weapons. Until that happened, Khaji said, there wasn’t much more to discuss. Sullivan, Talwar, and their team left Oman dejected and worried about the future of the diplomacy. “We essentially hit the same brick wall,” said one of the Americans who took part in the meetings.

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  HASSAN ROUHANI WAS ELECTED Iran’s new president almost a year later—in June 2013—and immediately shook up the global diplomatic establishment. His victory shocked Washington, which had expected a more hard-line politician to win. An Islamic cleric who studied judicial law in Glasgow, Scotland, in the 1990s, Rouhani campaigned on a platform of ending Iran’s diplomatic isolation and reviving its moribund economy, ravaged by the West’s international sanctions. He advocated for the immediate resolution of Iran’s dispute with the West over its nuclear program through new negotiations. And he viciously attacked Ahmadinejad’s eight-year rule for needlessly alienating Iran from a global community Rouhani believed Iran should help lead. The 2013 election showed that Iran, despite being a theocratic state with a supreme leader, still had one of the Middle East’s more open political systems.

  Rouhani’s victory posed a quandary for the Obama administration and its allies in Israel and Saudi Arabia. While he preached moderation, the sixty-four-year-old was still a regime insider and a close confidant of Khamenei’s. For a decade Rouhani had led the government’s most powerful national security body, the Supreme National Security Council, which advised the supreme leader on foreign policy. And Rouhani was no stranger to the West, having served as Tehran’s chief nuclear negotiator from 2003 to 2005, when talks took place between Iran and the so-called EU-3 (Britain, France, and Germany). In 2004, Rouhani’s team had agreed to freeze Iran’s nuclear work in exchange for economic incentives, a major breakthrough at the time. However, the deal later fell through as both sides charged the other with failing to follow through on their commitments. Rouhani perplexed the West: he appeared more moderate and accommodating but was still a regime stalwart.

  Rouhani’s political position offered both opportunities and challenges for U.S. foreign policy. The new president’s close relationship to Khamenei meant Rouhani might facilitate a compromise with the West on the nuclear issue that Iran’s previous reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, couldn’t, because of his lack of political support in Tehran. Some U.S. officials compared Rouhani to Richard Nixon, seeing both men as conservative politicians who had the political and diplomatic strength at home to make peace with a long-standing enemy, be it communist China or the Great Satan. Engaging with Rouhani, American officials argued, could also strengthen moderate political forces in Tehran that had been marginalized during Ahmadinejad’s rule.

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bsp; Israeli and Saudi officials, however, feared Rouhani was part of an elaborate Persian ruse. They argued that in Iran’s theocratic system, political leaders often fluctuated between hard-liners and moderates, but that ultimately it didn’t matter, because only one man—Khamenei—made the policy decisions, and he was committed to conflict with the West. They also doubted Rouhani was seriously committed to dismantling Iran’s nuclear program; rather, they thought, he was solely focused on removing the financial and diplomatic pressures being imposed on Iran by the West. They cited comments Rouhani had made in Tehran following his term as the nuclear negotiator, when he claimed his diplomacy provided Iran with cover to move forward with its nuclear work. “While we were talking with the Europeans in Tehran, we were installing equipment in parts of the facility in Isfahan [the uranium conversion plant], but we still had a long way to go to complete the project,” Rouhani said in a 2006 speech. “In fact, by creating a calm environment, we were able to complete the work on Isfahan.”

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  ROUHANI WASTED LITTLE TIME in projecting himself as a moderate and pragmatist who wanted to build bridges to the West. He spoke of loosening the social restrictions put in place during Ahmadinejad’s tenure, attracting foreign investment, and ridding Iran of the corruption he said was a cancer eating away at the Iranian economy. He also called for a quick resolution of the nuclear stand-off. “The only way to interact with Iran is to have dialogue from an equal position, creating mutual trust and respect and reducing enmities,” Rouhani said in his inaugural August 2013 speech. “Let me state it clearly that if you want a positive response, talk to Iran not with a language of sanctions but a language of respect.”