By Louis Charbonneau, Parisa Hafezi and Arshad Mohammed
GENEVA, Nov 25 (Reuters) – Saturday night had turned into
Sunday morning and four days of talks over Iran’s nuclear
programme had already gone so far over schedule that the Geneva
Intercontinental Hotel had been given over to another event.
A black tie charity ball was finishing up and singers with
an after party band at a bar above the lobby were crooning out
the words to a Johnny Cash song – “I fell into a burning ring of
fire” – while weary diplomats in nearby conference rooms were
trying to polish off the last touches of an accord. Negotiators
emerged complaining that the hotel lobby smelled like beer.
At around 2:00 a.m., U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and
counterparts from Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia
were brought to a conference room to approve a final text of the
agreement which would provide limited relief of sanctions on
Iran in return for curbs to its nuclear programme.
At the last minute, with the ministers already gathered in
the room, an Iranian official called seeking changes.
Negotiators for the global powers refused. Finally the ministers
were given the all clear. The deal, a decade in the making,
would be done at last.
Now that the interim deal is signed, talks are far from over
as the parties work towards a final accord that would lay to
rest all doubts about Iran’s nuclear programme.
“Now the really hard part begins,” Kerry told reporters. “We
know this.”
THAW
The deal, which represents the most important thaw between
the United States and Iran in more than three decades since
Iranian revolutionaries held 52 American hostages in the U.S.
embassy in Tehran, very nearly did not happen.
There was still ample ground to cover on the final day, when
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived, joining foreign
ministers from Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia.
Officials from several of the countries were doubtful that a
deal would be reached. Resentful-sounding European diplomats
said their foreign minister bosses had not wanted to come unless
a final text was on the table, but had felt obliged to come
anyway when Russia’s Sergei Lavrov showed up on Friday.
When the foreign ministers arrived, some junior diplomats
and journalists were evicted from their hotel rooms to clear
space for the VIPs.
After his trans-Atlantic flight on Saturday morning, Kerry
met his Iranian opposite number Mohammad Zarif, with European
Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who has led
negotiations on behalf of the powers.
According to a senior U.S. State Department official, Kerry
told Zarif there could be no more delay. President Barack
Obama’s administration would call for even tighter sanctions on
Iran unless a deal was reached now. Congress members were
demanding new sanctions and the White House would join them.
Kerry made the case that “there would be no way to hold back
new sanctions to give room for (a) new round and we would lead
the charge for more sanctions if we did not come to agreement,”
the State Department official said.
By Saturday evening, the final language was personally
approved by Obama in Washington. In a sign of how big a risk the
Obama administration was taking, the main U.S. ally in the
Middle East, Israel, decried what it called an “historic
mistake”, easing sanctions without dismantling Iran’s nuclear
programme.
But Obama said the deal put limits down on Iran’s nuclear
programme that would make it harder for Tehran to build a weapon
and easier for the world to find out if it tried.
“Simply put, they cut off Iran’s most likely paths to a
bomb,” Obama said in a late-night appearance at the White House
after the deal was reached.
Obama was not the only one taking a risk. Iran’s new
president, the relative moderate Hassan Rouhani, was elected in
June and inaugurated in August promising to ease the crippling
sanctions. But Iran has invested billions of dollars in a
nuclear programme, which its clerical and military establishment
believes is a cornerstone of national pride.
Before Zarif was sent to Geneva, he and Rouhani had a
meeting with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
whose approval was absolutely required for any deal.
“The leader’s main concern is his core supporters, who truly
believe that there should be no deal with America, and are
closely watching the developments to find a weak point or a
failure to blame on the negotiators for betraying the
leadership,” said a former Iranian official, a relative of
Khamenei.
SECRET TALKS
The deal was in part the result of months of secret talks
held with Iran in such out-of-the-way places as Oman, with U.S.
officials using military planes, side entrances and service
elevators to avoid giving the game away.
The talks, the most important contacts in more than three
decades during which Iran branded the United States the “Great
Satan” and the United States described Iran a part of an “axis
of evil” that also included Iraq and North Korea, were confirmed
by U.S. officials and a former Iranian official.
They illustrate a U.S. desire, dating to the start of
Obama’s administration in January 2009, to explore whether there
might be a way to reconcile two nations that have been hostile
since 1979 but were once allies.
According to the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of
anonymity, key Americans involved in the effort were William
Burns, the U.S. deputy secretary of state, and Jake Sullivan,
the national security adviser to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.
The two men, at times with other officials such as White
House national security staff member Puneet Talwar, met Iranian
officials at least five times this year, the official said.
Burns, Sullivan and technical experts arrived in Muscat,
Oman in March on a military plane – a way to preserve secrecy –
to meet Iranians, the official added.
That was months before the election of Rouhani, a sign that
Iranian officials were already coming round to the idea of talks
before he took power.
Rouhani defeated more hardline candidates based in part on
hopes he would ease sanctions that had taken an increasing
severe toll on the Iranian economy since they were sharply
tightened by the United States and European Union to hit Iran’s
crucial oil exports since 2011.
A former nuclear negotiator, Rouhani replaced the combative
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But ultimately no negotiations would have
been possible without a nod from the supreme leader, Khamenei.
‘GREEN LIGHT’
“The leader gave the green light but was not optimistic
about the result,” said a former Iranian official, who
participated in one round of the secret talks. He said the
hardest meeting was the first one because of Khamenei’s
scepticism.
The Oman channel itself had been nurtured by Kerry, who, as
chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee before
he took over as Secretary of State, made an unannounced trip to
the Gulf state to meet Omani officials.
After Kerry replaced Hillary Clinton as the top U.S.
diplomat on Feb. 1, it was decided the Oman channel would
continue to help feed into multi-lateral talks led by the EU’s
Ashton on behalf of the five permanent U.N. Security Council
members plus Germany, the P5+1. Kerry visited Oman himself in
May for talks with Omani officials.
Around the time that Kerry was taking over the State
Department, Zarif’s predecessor, Ali Akbar Salehi – then serving
as foreign minister under Ahmadinejad – sent an extraordinary
three-page, hand-written letter to Khamenei, calling for “broad
discussions with the United States”.
The supreme leader, though cautious about the prospect, sent
a reply to Salehi and the rest of the cabinet: he was not
optimistic but would not oppose them if they pursued the
initiative, several sources said.
“Salehi endangered his career – and even his security,” said
a source who knows Salehi and saw the letter. “But he said this
letter will be registered in history.” In August, Rouhani put
Salehi in charge of Iran’s nuclear agency.
The senior U.S. official said that four of the secret
U.S.-Iranian meetings took place since Rouhani’s August
inauguration, a sign that the United States was trying to
exploit the opportunity presented by the Iranian official’s
ascent.
Kerry met Iran’s foreign minister at the U.N. General
Assembly in September and, soon thereafter, Obama and Rouhani
spoke by telephone, marking the highest-level contact between
the United States and Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Kerry also spoke to the Iranian foreign minister by
telephone on Oct. 25 and Nov. 2 – discussions that were not
revealed by the State Department at the time.
In recent months there has been noticeable change in body
language when diplomats from the United States and Iran are in
the same room. Whatever the relations between their countries,
officials from both sides now appear – normal.
During talks in Geneva earlier this month, Reuters spotted
U.S. Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy
Sherman chatting alone in a hotel lobby with Iran’s Deputy
Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi. Such casual, cordial meetings in
public would have been unthinkable just months ago.
Nevertheless, the United States was so eager to keep the
role of Burns and Sullivan secret that it brought them to Geneva
twice this month for wider talks between Iran and the major
powers but left their names off the official delegation list and
made them use hotel side entrances and service elevators to keep
the secret.
FINAL PUSH
When the time came for the final push in Geneva, diplomats
expected their bosses would not show up until the text was
nearly complete. Journalists waited drinking $9 capuccinos and
$29 bloody marys at the Intercontinental.
Even after the foreign ministers arrived, officials sounded
downbeat about the prospected of a deal on the final day.
“It’s not a done deal. There’s a realistic chance but
there’s a lot of work to do,” said German Foreign Minister Guido
Westerwelle.
One final bone of contention was the Iranian heavy water
reactor at Arak, where Western countries suspect Tehran could
one day make plutonium for a bomb.
“Defining limits on that and what should take place there in
this six month period has proved to be quite a task,” British
Foreign Secretary William Hague said. “However, that has now
been agreed. It was the resolution of that problem that helped
unlock the agreement.”
French officials had been holding out in public for a tough
line on Iraq, although several Western diplomats said the French
were more flexible behind closed doors.
The Arak issue was tough, but it wasn’t the toughest. Iran
and the powers would still have to find language that both sides
could find acceptable over what Iran considers its fundamental
right to enrich uranium.
Before heading to Geneva, Zarif had a crucial meeting with
Khamenei in the presence of Rouhani, a senior member of the
Iranian delegation said.
“The leader underlined the importance of respecting Iran’s
right to enrich uranium and that he was backing the delegation
as long as they respected this red line,” said the delegate.
According to another source in Iran, Zarif and Rouhani,
along with their top allies, later held a three-hour meeting and
discussed various “face-saving solutions” of wording designed to
be acceptable to both sides.
Sunday’s agreement said Iran and the major powers aimed to
reach a final deal that would “involve a mutually defined
enrichment programme with mutually agreed parameters consistent
with practical needs, with agreed limits on scope and level of
enrichment activities, capacity, where it is carried out, and
stocks of enriched uranium, for a period to be agreed upon.”
Iranian officials can point to the mention of an enrichment
programme as a victory that shows they will be allowed to keep
it. Western officials say it means no such thing and emphasise
all the limits described in the text.
The differences in interpretation underscore how difficult
it may be to move towards a final deal that would resolve
differences once and for all. Progress could easily be stymied.
Still, for those on both sides committed to the agreement,
it represented an historic victory.
“We took a risk,” said the former Iranian official who
participated in the secret talks with the United States. “But we
won.”
(Additional reporting by John Irish and Justyna Pawlak; Writing
by Peter Graff; Editing by Grant McCool)
