by Glen Johnson
Kerry nodded and closed the door.
At 11:05 p.m., I was standing with others from the US delegation in the hall outside when the secretary called my name from behind the door.
When I walked in, he asked me to take a picture of the group.
They’d just reached agreement on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
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TRUE TO FORM, THINGS were not done until they were done.
The Russians weren’t happy because Lavrov had to leave for another meeting, yet the White House didn’t want to announce the deal until 8 a.m. Eastern time the following morning. That was 2 p.m. local time. The Russians wanted to do it at 5 a.m. local time—a nonstarter because that would be 11 p.m. back in the United States.
The EU high representative and Kerry also had to reconvene the rest of the P5+1 to tell them they’d worked out the final sticking points. That meeting started about 1 a.m. on July 14, 2015, and lasted about fifteen minutes. About 1:30 a.m., Zarif joined the group to mark the consensus.
He then held another one-on-one session with Kerry about 2 a.m. to resolve a final language dispute. That session lasted twenty minutes. About ten minutes later, our motorcade pulled up at the Hotel Imperial.
We caught a few hours of sleep before getting up to make final edits to Secretary Kerry’s public statement.
About 10:30 a.m., we were rolling to the Vienna International Centre, a complex hosting the United Nations Office at Vienna.
The P5+1 members and the Iranians held a ministerial meeting before standing for a group photo and then reconvening for a final group plenary session to cement the deal.
During the first of those sessions, various ministers made remarks. Secretary Kerry spoke last, and when he did, he recalled his service in Vietnam and the lesson it taught him about exhausting diplomacy before resorting to violence.
“‘When I was twenty-two, I went to war,’” Undersecretary Sherman recounted him saying. “And then he choked up, sort of like I did just a few minutes ago. He couldn’t get the words out. And everybody was completely spellbound. And he sort of re-got his voice, and said, ‘I went to war, and it became clear to me that I never wanted to go to war again.’ That’s what this was all about. Trying to settle these matters through diplomacy and peaceful means. And it was such a moving moment, that everybody in that small room applauded, including the Iranian delegation.”270
EU high representative Mogherini and Foreign Minister Zarif left the plenary and went off to address the press assembled at the neighboring Austria Center Vienna. Kerry sat backstage, reviewing his remarks and watching President Obama on an iPad as he spoke to the American people from the White House.
The president had moved up his speech an hour—to 7 a.m. EDT—to accommodate the Russians.
“This deal meets every single one of the bottom lines that we established when we achieved a framework earlier this spring,” President Obama said. “Every pathway to a nuclear weapon is cut off. And the inspection and transparency regime necessary to verify that objective will be put in place.”271
He then turned to the task at hand: winning congressional approval for the agreement.
“Without this deal, there is no scenario where the world joins us in sanctioning Iran until it completely dismantles its nuclear program. Nothing we know about the Iranian government suggests that it would simply capitulate under that kind of pressure,” the president said. “We put sanctions in place to get a diplomatic resolution, and that is what we have done.”
Kerry picked up the theme during his own remarks.
“Sanctioning Iran until it capitulates makes for a powerful talking point and a pretty good political speech, but it’s not achievable outside a world of fantasy,” the secretary said. “The true measure of this agreement is not whether it meets all of the desires of one side at the expense of the other; the test is whether or not it will leave the world safer and more secure than it would be without it.”272
Secretary Kerry finished by taking questions from three journalists. When a fourth begged for one more, our boss offered a bracing reminder about the physical challenge he endured during the long and stressful negotiations.
“You got to bear with me because this is the longest I’ve stood up for quite a while, guys,” he said, standing crutchless at a podium. “I’m going to move out.”273
We returned to the Hotel Imperial, where the secretary conducted an additional set of round-robin interviews with the US television networks.
About 6:30 p.m., we left the hotel for the final time and drove past sunflower fields en route to Vienna International Airport. After we took off, Energy Secretary Moniz—who has Portuguese roots—pulled out a bottle of Madeira wine given to him by a fellow Massachusetts resident, US ambassador to Portugal Robert Sherman. Moniz told Secretary Kerry he’d been saving it for a special occasion—and this qualified.
I snapped photos as Kerry clinked glasses with Moniz and Sherman.
They finished their drinks while the rest of us went to sleep for the rest of the flight home.
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SECRETARY KERRY WAS BACK at the State Department the next morning and sitting in his usual seat at the head of the table for his daily senior staff meeting.
“I thought the president did an outstanding job yesterday,” he told us, referring to President Obama’s televised remarks, “and we’re going to win [in Congress] because we have a better argument.”274
An hour later, the secretary got a taste of the pride his diplomacy had engendered. His assistant secretaries and other Department senior staff members applauded as he came in on his crutches and plopped down for their weekly meeting in the secure conference room on the 7th Floor.
“Never has an act of sitting down received such a response,” he said to laughter.275
He told the group that both Vienna and the Hotel Imperial were great, “but it could still feel like a prison.”276
In truth, the historians told us, the time he’d spent in Vienna was the most any secretary had ever spent in one foreign city during peacetime.
Now that he was back in the United States, Kerry couldn’t revel in his accomplishment. He and President Obama had to work to ensure the United States held up its end of the deal—something that wasn’t guaranteed despite their best efforts.
As we’d been overseas negotiating in Geneva, Lausanne, and Vienna, Congress had been asserting itself back home in several ways.
First, it had called on Kerry to come up to Capitol Hill and testify after the Joint Plan of Action had been reached. This, the secretary had complained, forced him to speak publicly about all he had won in the interim deal before heading back overseas and negotiating with Zarif about the terms of the final deal.
Then, in the midst of the talks to reach the framework for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, House Republican leaders issued that invitation to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a Joint Session of Congress.
That decision to invite a foreign head of state to address the US legislative branch, in opposition to a foreign policy pursuit of the president and the executive branch, left Secretary Kerry infuriated.
“I, personally, as an ex-Member of Congress, take umbrage that they will be manipulated this way,” he told us during our February 25, 2015, senior staff meeting.277
On March 9, 2015, US Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, enlisted forty-six other Republican senators to endorse an open letter he wrote to the leaders of Iran.
In it, Cotton explained that under the Constitution, any deal not approved by Congress was considered nothing more than an executive agreement with the sitting president. He also noted that President Obama’s term would end in January 2017, while many members of Congress would remain in office “perhaps decades” beyond that date.
“What these two constitutional provisions mean is that we will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by Congress as nothing more
than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khomeini. The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time,” Cotton and his colleagues wrote.278
A month later, US senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, publicly called Secretary Kerry “delusional” for thinking he could negotiate phased sanctions relief with the Iranians. He also said, “I don’t know who’s more believable”—Secretary Kerry or Ayatollah Khameini—amid the competing narratives about the terms of the framework agreement that had just been negotiated in Lausanne.
That prompted a rebuke from President Obama, who said such acts by Cotton, McCain, and others were “an indication of the degree to which partisanship has crossed all boundaries.”279
In May 2015, US senator Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican chairing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, succeeded in passing the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act. It required congressional review of any final nuclear agreement with Iran before the president could waive any sanctions.
The timing of the bill not only left the secretary urging the Iranians to commit to a deal Congress might ultimately reject, but it included a trigger affecting the pace of the final negotiations. If an agreement wasn’t reached by July 9, 2015, the law said a thirty-day period for Congress to review it would double to sixty days.
While that ostensibly was to allow Congress time to take its annual August recess, it also gave critics even more time to mount their opposition to the deal.
One of the early complaints about the final Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was that it contained sunset clauses. For example, Iran had to place two-thirds of its uranium-enriching centrifuges in storage, but only for ten years. It also was required to limit its enrichment of uranium to 3.67 percent and cap its stockpile at 660 pounds, both below levels needed to build a bomb, but only for fifteen years.
All in all, the “breakout time”—the interval required for Iran to produce enough fissile material for one bomb—was increasing from two months before the negotiations began to at least a year for a period of more than ten years.
The secretary expressed his exasperation about concern over the sunset clauses on July 20, 2015, not even a week after the final deal was reached.
“If they’re worried about what happens in Year 15, they’re going to move it up to tomorrow” by killing the deal and leaving Iran’s nuclear program unrestrained, he told his senior staff.280
He noted Iran had agreed to live in perpetuity with an enhanced protocol with the International Atomic Energy Association for ensuring it had a peaceful nuclear program.
The secretary also argued congressional rejection of the deal not only would destabilize the Middle East and leave the United States isolated from its P5+1 partners, but would undermine the United States in seeking any nonproliferation agreement with a country that already had nuclear weapons: North Korea.
While that sentiment may have been overzealous, his concerns about US credibility were rooted in fact.
The agreement also had to be viewed beyond the chasm of the country’s partisan political divide.
While Kerry and the United States were the lead negotiators for the Iran deal, the early meetings and final agreement were facilitated by the twenty-eight-member European Union—an organizing body for the disparate nations of Europe.
The final deal, meanwhile, also was accepted by the P5+1 nations—the Permanent Members of the United Nations Security Council, namely the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China, plus Germany. All of whom are nuclear powers.
When, some asked, had the UN Security Council agreed to anything? Its lack of consensus, and the irksome practice of Russia vetoing many US-led initiatives, made its unity about the Iran agreement noteworthy.
The whole of the Security Council voted 15–0 to endorse the deal.
In a volatile area of the world, with nuclear proliferation a concern for the region, the United States had brokered a deal receiving support from the EU and the full UN Security Council. That was an achievement in and of itself.
Were the United States to walk away from it, whether because it didn’t like the terms or because it felt continued or additional sanctions would earn a better bargain, the rest of the world seemed to disagree.
In that case, the United States faced the specter of being abandoned in the broad sanctions regime that had ultimately brought Iran to the negotiating table, during which it accepted diplomacy over military confrontation. Other nations, meanwhile, stood on the cusp of doing business with Iran, to the detriment of the US economy.
“Rejecting this agreement would not be sending a signal of resolve to Iran; it would be broadcasting a message so puzzling most people across the globe would find it impossible to comprehend,” Secretary Kerry said in September 2015 at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. “They’ve listened as we warned over and over again about the dangers of Iran’s nuclear program. They’ve watched as we spent two years forging a broadly accepted agreement to rein that program in. They’ve nodded their heads in support as we have explained how the plan that we have developed will make the world safer.”
He said: “Who could fairly blame them for not understanding if we suddenly switch course and reject the very outcome we had worked so hard to obtain?”281
Less than a week later, the administration won relief. US Senator Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat set to retire in 2016, announced she supported the deal. She was the thirty-fourth senator to do so, ensuring President Obama had the votes to support a veto of any Republican resolution disapproving the deal.
“No deal is perfect, especially one negotiated with the Iranian regime,” Mikulski said in a statement, but the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is “the best option available to block Iran from having a nuclear bomb.”282
On September 9, 2015, all hopes for defeating the deal ended when, by a Senate vote of 58–42, opponents failed to win a procedural vote against the agreement. The forty-two senators now in opposition were enough to ensure a filibuster could block any vote against the deal under the Corker law.
The congressional review period lapsed on September 17, 2015.
All that was left was one last hurdle: implementing the terms of the final agreement.
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SECRETARY KERRY AND DEFENSE Secretary Ashton Carter were meeting with their Filipino counterparts in the Ben Franklin Room on January 12, 2016, when aides approached each one and passed them identical notes.
Ten US sailors had been detained by Iranian naval forces after their boats had strayed into Iranian waters off Farsi Island. Not only was it in the middle of the Persian Gulf, but it had been used as a base for Iranian Revolutionary Guard speedboats since the 1980s.
The timing couldn’t have been more explosive, given Kerry was due to return to Vienna in four days for Implementation Day of the Iran nuclear deal.
The secretary excused himself and came down to his office to call Foreign Minister Zarif on his cell phone.
“Do you know what this could do to the deal if it’s not resolved promptly?” he said to his Iranian counterpart.
After at least four more calls with the foreign minister and several rounds with National Security Adviser Susan Rice and General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Zarif pledged the sailors would be released at sunrise the following day.
“Well, we handled a hot potato today,” the secretary later said to me as he sat calmly at his desk.283
In fact, he argued, the incident underscored the value of his diplomacy with Iran in several ways.
First, because of his personal engagement with the foreign minister, Kerry had a cell phone number and Gmail address that immediately put him in direct contact with his peer. Second, because the two had worked out other differences previously, they trusted each other and could speak without hyperbole.
Finally, because both
sides stood to gain from implementing the deal, each also had something to lose if they repeated the 1979 hostage crisis.
“We can all imagine how a similar situation might have played out three or four years ago,” Kerry said the following day at the National Defense University in Washington. “These are situations which, as everybody here knows, have the ability, if not properly guided, to get out of control.”284
We left later that day for London, where the secretary met with Saudi Arabian foreign minister Adel Al-Jubeir to talk about Syria, Iran, and Middle East peace. The bulk of his agenda, though, was to work from his United Kingdom staging area on the final terms of implementation with Iran.
The lever was controls on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. While Iran took steps through the summer, fall, and early winter of 2015–2016 to ship out uranium stockpiles, shutter centrifuges, and deactivate plants, the details of the sanctions relief rested on some technicalities.
The two sides were also trying to resolve two other separate but related issues.
First, Iran wanted to close a case at an international tribunal in The Hague under which it sought to regain $400 million, plus interest. It had paid the money to the United States for fighter jets that went undelivered after the two sides broke off diplomatic relations in the late 1970s.
Meanwhile, the United States wanted to win the release of a group of Americans, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, an Iranian American who’d been held hostage in Tehran on espionage charges since 2014. US officials said they were trumped up to give Iran leverage in its dealings with the United States.
Resolution of The Hague case involved an ugly transaction in which Iran demanded the United States refund its $400 million payment—in cash. Iran also wanted the money sitting on a plane destined for Tehran before Rezaian was allowed to leave the country through the other negotiation.
That led to the headline-grabbing story a month later in which The Wall Street Journal reported that “wooden pallets stacked with Euros, Swiss francs, and other currencies” were flown to Iran on an unmarked cargo plane.285