Window Seat on the World

by Glen Johnson

  The secretary made the trip without his usual press corps—a rarity—and took only a few members of his staff. I was told not to take any photos, as would have been customary, before receiving different directions in an urgent message from the secretary.

  He asked me to join the group on the roof deck so I could snap a picture of him, the prime minister, and their teams talking as the sun set on the horizon.

  Later, I returned to the same spot and found the secretary dispirited. The prime minister had rejected a series of proposed parameters for renewing the peace talks.

  He did so even though Jordan and Egypt—leaders in the Arab world—had promised that all Arab nations would declare peace with Israel if it could reach a settlement with the Palestinians.

  _________

  THE SECRETARY MET ONCE more face-to-face with the prime minister, the last time on June 26, 2016, at the Parco dei Principi Hotel in Rome.

  Kerry was prepared to say he’d devoted three and a half years to trying to revitalize the peace process, but the prime minister hadn’t made an equivalent effort.

  “This is my break-up meeting with Bibi,” he told us.195

  The truth is, Kerry continued exploring ways to address Israeli concerns or build Arab support for an agreement with the Palestinians.

  His interest took on a special poignancy on September 30, 2016, when he made his final trip to Israel as he and President Obama attended the funeral of Shimon Peres. The Israeli president had been such an advocate of Secretary Kerry and his efforts to broker a settlement, and his death was another blow to the effort.

  By December 2016, the Obama administration was willing to show it wouldn’t blindly support the Israeli leadership. Kerry also followed through on his vow to publicly outline the proposals he’d offered throughout the peace talks, and how both sides had failed to make the moves necessary despite his best efforts to accommodate their needs.

  First, just before Christmas, on Friday, December 23, 2016, President Obama had the United States abstain from—rather than vote against—a UN Security Council resolution demanding a halt to all Israeli settlement construction in the territories it occupied.

  The resolution said such settlements have “no legal validity,” and halting their construction “is essential for salvaging the two-state solution.”

  Five years earlier, the United States had vetoed a similar resolution—the sole veto cast in the Council by the Obama administration.

  While the abstention triggered an outcry from Prime Minister Netanyahu and many Israelis, it wasn’t a first for the United States government.

  Almost exactly twenty-six years prior, on December 22, 1987, President Reagan—a Republican—had his UN ambassador abstain as the Council adopted a resolution deploring Israel’s handling of disturbances in the occupied territories.196

  That resolution also was approved by the same 14–0 Security Council vote as President Obama’s. President Reagan had also approved two prior abstentions on anti-Israel votes in December 1986 and September 1985.197

  UN ambassador Samantha Power said after the 2016 vote:

  The United States has consistently said we would block any resolution that we thought would undermine Israel’s security or seek to impose a resolution to the conflict. We would not have let this resolution pass had it not also addressed counterproductive actions by the Palestinians such as terrorism and incitement to violence, which we’ve repeatedly condemned and repeatedly raised with the Palestinian leadership, and which, of course, must be stopped.198

  Less than a week later, on December 28, 2016, the secretary walked into the Dean Acheson Auditorium at the State Department to deliver his own parting thoughts on Middle East peace.

  He stood alone at the podium, but he spoke for President Obama, Ambassador Power, and the rest of the administration. The goal wasn’t necessarily to put a thumb in the prime minister’s eye, but to outline why the chance for peace was on the verge of slipping away.

  “The two-state solution is the only way to achieve a just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” the secretary said. “It is the only way to ensure Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state, living in peace and security with its neighbors. It is the only way to ensure a future of freedom and dignity for the Palestinian people. And it is an important way of advancing United States interests in the region.”199

  Kerry urged the Palestinians to cease violence against the Israelis. He urged the Israelis to halt settlement activity. And he outlined the six basic parameters to a final-status agreement.

  First, a border based on the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed swaps.

  Second, two states for two peoples.

  Third, resolution for the refugee situation, with international compensation for the Palestinians.

  Fourth, Jerusalem as the capital for the two states.

  Fifth, security for Israel.

  And sixth, an end to all outstanding claims between the parties.

  In sum, the same endgame the secretary discussed in March 2013 during his first meetings with both sides.

  Kerry recalled his trip to Israel for President Peres’s funeral, and a conversation the two had about the disputed land during a Shabbat dinner in Jerusalem in June 2013.

  “The original mandate gave the Palestinians 48 percent. Now it’s down to 22 percent. I think 78 percent is enough for us,” the secretary quoted President Peres as saying.200

  Secretary Kerry concluded his speech—and his work on the most difficult topic—by telling the world: “As we laid Shimon to rest that day, many of us couldn’t help but wonder if peace between Israelis and Palestinians might also be buried along with one of its most eloquent champions. We cannot let that happen. There is simply too much at stake—for future generations of Israelis and Palestinians—to give in to pessimism, especially when peace is, in fact, still possible.”201

  John Kerry was optimistic to the very, very end.

  6

  THE IRAN DEAL

  AFTER AL GORE LOST the 2000 presidential election in a recount contested all the way to the Supreme Court, he grew a beard and gained weight. Then the former vice president headed to the private sector, where he salved his political wounds by making millions as an investor and Apple Inc. board member.

  After John Kerry lost another close election four years later, he also indulged his rebel streak. He got on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle and rode west, clearing his head as the miles rolled under his feet.

  But he also took advantage of a path not available to Gore, a fellow Vietnam veteran who’d once been elected to the US Senate as part of the same 1985 freshman class. Kerry returned to government and redoubled his efforts in public service.

  He rose not just to be chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; he developed a portfolio as a foreign policy emissary during the first term of the Obama administration.

  In 2009, then senator Kerry traveled to Kabul to convince Hamid Karzai to participate in a run-off election following doubts about the voting in Afghanistan’s presidential race. Karzai agreed after his visitor described his own bitter experience with a close presidential election.202

  In 2010, Kerry visited Damascus several times to meet with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, including once for dinner with their wives. The aim was to see whether Syria and its neighbor Israel could make any agreement as part of the coming Middle East peace negotiation.203

  In 2011, Kerry went to Pakistan when the Obama administration needed a negotiator. The president wanted to reclaim the stealthy tail rotor of a helicopter that crashed during the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.204

  Later that same year, Kerry was dispatched on another, far more secretive mission. It would lead to a diplomatic achievement offsetting his failure in the Israeli–Palestinian peace talks.

  _________

  IN DECEMBER 2011, SENATOR John Kerry boarded a commercial flight headed to Oman, a quiet, peaceful country sitting just across the Persian Gulf
from Iran. When he disembarked in Muscat, a port city that is Oman’s capital, he carried a gift for its long-serving ruler, Sultan Qaboos bin Said al Said.

  It was an antique book about Frederick Law Olmsted, the nineteenth-century Boston landscape designer who crafted the famed Emerald Necklace of parks ringing the city’s downtown.205

  The sultan had overseen Oman’s transition from dirt roads to modern highways, and was beloved by his countrymen for his benevolence. He also had a taste for design and the arts, so Kerry thought the gift would resonate.

  He made the trip not to deliver presents, though, but a message: the United States would be interested in reopening a quiet dialogue with Iran about its nuclear program, if the sultan could arrange it with his neighbor just across the Strait of Hormuz.

  The approach worked. In 2012, State Department diplomats—with the blessing and support of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton—met in Muscat with their counterparts from Iran. They agreed on the topics that would have to be covered in any negotiation about curbing the weapons program.

  By 2013, both the United States and Iran were ready for more serious conversations. The White House dispatched three senior US officials on their own secret missions to Muscat, senior White House Iran adviser Puneet Talwar, Deputy Secretary of State William Burns, and Jake Sullivan, Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser.

  Burns was the No. 2 person in the State Department, a classic and revered diplomat who spoke Arabic, French, and Russian. He’d previously handled sensitive situations in Moscow while serving as the US ambassador to Russia.

  Sullivan was a thirtysomething wunderkind who previously served as Clinton’s top foreign policy adviser. He’d been State Department deputy chief of staff and director of policy planning before transitioning to the White House shortly after Clinton finished her term at Foggy Bottom in January 2013.

  Sometimes joined by up to five technical experts, the group would often fly to the Middle East in an unmarked military Gulfstream jet and use side hotel entrances to get to their meetings.

  It was all an effort to maintain the secrecy of their mission.

  Kerry, by then secretary of State, was kept abreast of the talks through periodic conversations with Burns and Sullivan. They appeared on his schedule as calls to or from “Embassy Muscat.” When staffers started asking about the vague references to an otherwise sleepy outpost, the notation disappeared from his schedule altogether.

  The secretiveness was necessary because the United States and Iran had broken off diplomatic relations in 1979. That was when the pro-Western shah of Iran was overthrown and Iranian students—backed by fundamentalists—overran the US embassy in Tehran.

  They took fifty-two Americans hostage.

  Iranian hard-liners hated the United States for having supported Shah Reza Pahlavi, and the standoff lasted for 444 days—until hostages were released just as Republican Ronald Reagan replaced Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter as president on January 20, 1981.

  US officials themselves were bitter not just because the Iranians had violated the sanctity of an embassy. They also were angry because eight American service members had died in April 1980 in an aircraft crash during an aborted mission to rescue the hostages.206

  More than thirty years later, President Obama and Secretary Kerry acknowledged that history, but believed it was worth reaching out to Iran. It was progressing with a nuclear program that could conceivably produce a bomb.

  If it succeeded, that would further destabilize the Middle East.

  Israel, whose existence Tehran refuses to recognize, would likely launch a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. It did so in 1981, when it blew up an Iraqi reactor being built outside Baghdad. And should Iran obtain a nuclear weapon, far wealthier neighbors such as Saudi Arabia were sure to try to buy their own.

  Those two countries follow two different strains of Islam and are bitter opponents. Most Saudis live as Sunni Muslims, and their leaders maintain closer ties to the West. Most Iranians live as Shiites, and their leaders are closer to Russia, China, and Cuba.

  Burns, Sullivan, and the rest of the US team met with the Iranians first in March 2013. They held at least five more meetings in Oman and Switzerland during the rest of the year while working to further frame the negotiation.

  Kerry maintained his own line of communication with the Iranians through Omani government official Salem ben Nasser al-Ismaily. I unwittingly photographed him giving the secretary a secret letter when the two met on the sidelines of a World Economic Forum conference in Jordan in May 2013.

  I didn’t know who al-Ismaily was at the time, but I figured something was up when a colleague pulled me aside and told me not to post the picture on the State Department’s social media sites.

  Fueling the US support for the talks were changes occurring in Iran itself. On June 14, 2013, Iranians elected Hassan Rouhani as their new president. He was considered a moderate, especially in comparison to the hard-liner he replaced, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

  Ahmadinejad, Iran’s sixth president, had drawn worldwide criticism for his anti-Israeli rhetoric, including his 2005 statement that the Holocaust was a “myth.”207 He also suggested the United States was behind the 9/11 attacks on New York City, Pennsylvania, and Washington.208

  His successor, President Rouhani, was sworn in August 3, 2013. Burns and Sullivan met again with their Iranian counterparts later that month.

  On September 26, 2013, Secretary Kerry held his first face-to-face meeting with Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif. It was a half-hour conversation in a room at the United Nations Headquarters. The only thing remotely close to dialogue between two leaders at that level came in 2007, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice exchanged pleasantries with Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki during a luncheon in Egypt.209

  Later that same day, Kerry and Zarif reconvened for a broader conversation with foreign ministers representing the other permanent members of the UN Security Council: China, Russia, the United Kingdom, and France. Germany also attended, given its outsize role in Europe’s economic and defense sectors.

  Joining the group was a representative of the twenty-eight-nation European Union.

  The following day, President Obama spoke with President Rouhani by phone for fifteen minutes—the first conversation between US and Iranian heads of state in more than thirty-five years. President Obama said afterward he hoped they’d set the conditions for constructive dialogue.

  “While there will surely be important obstacles to moving forward and success is by no means guaranteed, I believe we can reach a comprehensive solution,” the president said. “The test will be meaningful, transparent, and verifiable actions, which can also bring relief from the comprehensive international sanctions that are currently in place.”210

  And with that, an idea that germinated after a failed presidential campaign blossomed into a full-fledged item on John Kerry’s agenda as secretary of State, a job that would conclude his reengagement in public service after he was denied the chance to live in the White House.

  _________

  IRAN LAUNCHED ITS FIRST nuclear reactor in November 1967, when the five-megawatt Tehran Research Reactor began operation.

  Both the reactor itself and the uranium fueling it were supplied by the United States.211 The United States did so under its “Atoms for Peace” program.212

  The shah of Iran had ambitious goals for his country at the outset of its own nuclear program. In the mid-1970s, he announced plans to build twenty-three nuclear power plants and generate 23,000 megawatts of energy over twenty years.

  His plans foundered when he was deposed, the Islamic Revolution occurred, and the United States and Iran broke off diplomatic ties following the 1979 hostage-taking.

  His drive for a peaceful program was replaced by the specter of a nation on the make for a nuclear weapon. Iran did little to dispel that notion with its internal activities or international relations—especially its hostile rh
etoric toward Israel and “the Great Satan,” the United States.

  “Death to America” was a regular Iranian chant reverberating from Tehran back to Washington.

  In 1984, the State Department added Iran to its list of state sponsors of terrorism, triggering sweeping economic sanctions. In 2002, suspicions about the country’s atomic program were bolstered when an Iranian dissident revealed the existence of two undeclared nuclear facilities at Natanz and Fordow, Iran.213

  In 2006, the International Atomic Energy Association decided to refer Iran to the UN Security Council, after passing a resolution declaring Iran needed to suspend its enrichment-related activities.214 The IAEA said Iran wasn’t in compliance with its duties as signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.215

  A little more than two months later, Iran announced it had enriched uranium for the first time. That was a potential problem, because it moved Iran from a pure consumer of externally supplied fuel to the producer of a fuel that could be reconfigured to ignite a nuclear weapon.216

  Two months after that, the “P5+1”—the name for the five permanent Security Council members, plus Germany—proposed the framework of a deal offering incentives for Iran to halt its enrichment activities. Negotiations about how precisely to do that languished for the next decade.

  During that span, Iran increased its number of centrifuges from 164 in 2003 to roughly 6,000 in 2009, President Obama’s first year in office.217 The total reached more than 19,000 by the time the Iran nuclear talks began in earnest.218

  As with the Middle East peace talks, the Iranian negotiations centered on a set of concrete issues. The main one related to Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium. A related issue dealt with reprocessing, in which spent atomic fuel could be turned into weapons-grade plutonium.

  President Obama’s talk about a verifiable agreement highlighted his demand for external monitoring of Iran’s program, which would have to be guaranteed by any deal. Iran, meanwhile, wouldn’t agree to a deal that didn’t provide relief from economic sanctions that had accumulated over the years through United Nations and US congressional votes.