 "Clearing hurdles to Iran nuclear deal with standoffs, shouts and compromise")
One by one, the roadblocks to a nuclear accord between Iran and the United States had been painstakingly cleared. But as the negotiations went into their third week in the neoclassical Coburg Palace hotel this month, a major dispute lingered: whether a ban on Iran's ability to purchase conventional weapons and missile technology would remain in place.
The American delegation, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, insisted on extending the ban. But Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister and his country's chief negotiator, was opposed. Backing him were the Russians and Chinese, equal parties in the talks, who saw a lucrative market in selling arms to Tehran.
A compromise was struck that fully satisfied neither side: a five-year ban on the sale of conventional weapons and an eight-year ban on ballistic missiles.
Privately, Kerry told his team that any lifting of the ban was bound to inflame many in Congress, where fears of empowering Iran would mix with presidential politics. But shortly before midnight on Monday he called President Obama, and together they agreed that it was not worth losing what they saw as the best chance to roll back Iran's nuclear program simply because there was a risk that sometime in the future Iran would be able to acquire far less dangerous weapons.
Over the 17 long days here in Vienna, the standoffs, trade-offs, shouts and confrontations - some real, some staged for negotiating advantage - sometimes obscured the fact that the two countries were negotiating with entirely different agendas.
As President Barack Obama made clear again Wednesday, the alternative he saw to the deal was a steady slide toward another war - perhaps, aides thought, in just a year or two as Iran's nuclear abilities accelerated. Throughout the talks, he had one goal: to diminish the prospect that Iran could develop an atomic bomb - or could race for one before the United States and its allies could react - and buy time to try to restructure the relationship.
For the president, everything else - Iran's support for terrorism, its imprisonment of dissidents and even some Americans, its meddling in Iraq and Syria, its arms trade - was secondary.
For the Iranians, this was a negotiation first and foremost to get rid of what Zarif often called the "unjust sanctions" while trying to keep their nuclear options open. And while they treasured their nuclear program, they treasured the symbolism of not backing down to American demands even more. But Zarif was walking his own high-wire act at home. While he had an important ally in Iran's president, Hassan Rouhani, hard-liners did not want to reach any deal at all; many were making a fortune from the sanctions because they controlled Iran's black markets. And conservatives around the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were looking for any signs that their Americanized chief negotiator, who studied at the University of Denver, was ready to give away too much nuclear infrastructure without getting Iran the sanctions lifted in return, as the ayatollah had decreed.
There was no single event, no heart-to-heart conversation between adversaries or game-changing insight that made the Iran deal happen. Instead, over a period of years, each side came to gradually understand what mattered most to the other.
For the Americans, that meant designing offers that kept the shell of Iran's nuclear program in place while seeking to gut its interior. For the Iranians, it meant ridding themselves of sanctions in ways they could describe to their own people as forcing the United States to deal with Iran as an equal, respected sovereign power. And it happened because a brief constellation of personalities and events came into alignment:
A sultan in Oman who convinced the White House that he could establish a back channel to the Iranians. The election of Rouhani, who Obama thought would be more receptive to his overtures than Iran's aging supreme leader. A series of insights from the Energy Department's nuclear laboratories that allowed the physics of enrichment to create new space for compromise among the political leaders. And the presence of two top diplomats, Kerry and Zarif, driven by the conviction that they could break an ugly 35-year history.
At one point last week the simmering tension between the two negotiators boiled over when Zarif felt his American counterpart was pressing too hard. "Never threaten an Iranian!" he shouted. At the other end of the table Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, who has had his share of disputes with Kerry, tried to break the tension. "Or a Russian!" he said, as the room broke out in nervous laughter.
But during a break on one particularly discouraging March day in Lausanne, Switzerland, where negotiations were held before adjourning to Vienna, Zarif struck a different tone as he invoked the names of the key figures on two sides, including Vice President Joseph R Biden Jr and the top energy officials of the United States and Iran, Ernest J Moniz and Ali Akbar Salehi.
"We are not going to have another time in history when there is an Obama and a Biden and a Kerry and a Moniz again," he said, according to notes of the conversation. "And there may be no Rouhani, Zarif and Salehi."
Barack Obama came to office hoping for a dialogue with Tehran but focused on the problem of nuclear proliferation. After Ayatollah Khamenei responded to Obama's private letters with long diatribes about America's efforts, the president turned to squeezing the country economically.
"Obama seemed very comfortable with the shift to sanctions after the Iranians failed to reciprocate to his overtures," Gary Samore, then a senior White House aide. He pressed the Russians to delay selling the S-300, a sophisticated air defense system, to Iran, and sent a delegation to persuade Beijing to reduce China's purchases of oil.
But when an offer to help get secret talks started with the Iranians came from Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman, the president was intrigued. Eventually the White House turned to a trusted ally to tease out the possibilities: Kerry, then a senator from Massachusetts. Meeting in Oman in December 2011, the sultan said an accord could be reached.
There was a high likelihood, the sultan said, that a deal could be reached if the Obama administration showed its seriousness about a diplomatic solution. But making a point that would recur time and again - down to the last days of the Vienna talks - he said that a way would need to be found to allow the Iranians to "keep their honor."
It took seven months - until July 2012 - before secret envoys sent by Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with the Iranians, and that meeting went poorly. Then, in June 2013, came the election of Rouhani, whom the supreme leader had allowed to run, largely on a platform of ridding Iran of the sanctions that were squeezing the elite and middle class.
"The president said we had to work up a letter to him right away," one of Obama's senior aides said. "He sensed it was a moment we had to seize."
As Obama's aides sketched out how the negotiations might play out, they faced a threshold decision: Would they abandon the Bush administration's mantra that "not one centrifuge spins," a position they knew the Iranians would never accept? Or were they willing to allow a token Iranian program - a face-saving one - if the trade-off was two decades or so of restrictions?
A consensus quickly emerged that a contained program was far better than a smoldering confrontation that seemed headed toward a military strike. "The idea was that if we accepted enrichment it would be at a very small level," said Dennis B Ross, who served on the National Security Council during Obama's first term. "By being very limited, it would be a manifestation that they really had a peaceful nuclear program."
But it became clear that Iran envisioned something different: a sizable nuclear infrastructure that would take a pause of a few years, the price of ending sanctions, but then resume its march to "industrial scale" uranium enrichment. The gap between the American numbers of acceptable centrifuges and the Iranian numbers seem unbridgeable.
Looking for a way to break the deadlock without forcing the Iranians into a corner, the nuclear experts at the Energy Department began to present other, more complex options. The focus, they suggested, should not be simply on the number and type of centrifuges, but the "breakout time," the amount of time it would take for Iran, under a "best reasonable" estimate, to produce a single weapon's worth of material. Put simply, Iran could have centrifuges running if it agreed to a far smaller stockpile of fuel.
"There were many intense meetings on this," recalled Antony J Blinken, Obama's deputy national security adviser at the time, and now the deputy secretary of state. "We had to present a lot of permutations to the president to meet his bottom lines."
The military said it could live with a "breakout time" of a year; that was plenty of time to launch a strike to destroy Iran's production facilities. But the optics of allowing thousands of centrifuges to remain was not good.
"Throughout this process," Blinken said, "we've been faced with a choice between what is politically feasible and what is practically necessary."
It would be the first of many such choices.
A series of secret negotiations with the Rouhani team, led by Clinton's top aide, Jake Sullivan, and one of America's most experienced diplomats, William J Burns, explored the possibilities.
"I have about six months to get this through," Zarif said in New York in September 2013, on his first trip to the United Nations as foreign minister after many years of academic exile. After that, he feared, the opponents of dealing with the United States would rise again. He was wrong: It turned out the process went on for another 22 months.
A first agreement, just to get Iran to freeze its current nuclear activity and blend down some stockpiles of fuel that the West feared was approaching weapons-grade, took months to negotiate. Then came halting progress, as the Americans began to realize that at every stage the Iranians were fighting to preserve every major nuclear facility. "It was all about perception," one negotiator said. "They fought to keep the buildings and tangible equipment. It was easier for them to give up fuel or parts of the equipment people didn't see." That preserved a narrative that nothing had been surrendered.
The American delegation, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, insisted on extending the ban. But Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister and his country's chief negotiator, was opposed. Backing him were the Russians and Chinese, equal parties in the talks, who saw a lucrative market in selling arms to Tehran.
A compromise was struck that fully satisfied neither side: a five-year ban on the sale of conventional weapons and an eight-year ban on ballistic missiles.
Privately, Kerry told his team that any lifting of the ban was bound to inflame many in Congress, where fears of empowering Iran would mix with presidential politics. But shortly before midnight on Monday he called President Obama, and together they agreed that it was not worth losing what they saw as the best chance to roll back Iran's nuclear program simply because there was a risk that sometime in the future Iran would be able to acquire far less dangerous weapons.
Over the 17 long days here in Vienna, the standoffs, trade-offs, shouts and confrontations - some real, some staged for negotiating advantage - sometimes obscured the fact that the two countries were negotiating with entirely different agendas.
As President Barack Obama made clear again Wednesday, the alternative he saw to the deal was a steady slide toward another war - perhaps, aides thought, in just a year or two as Iran's nuclear abilities accelerated. Throughout the talks, he had one goal: to diminish the prospect that Iran could develop an atomic bomb - or could race for one before the United States and its allies could react - and buy time to try to restructure the relationship.
For the president, everything else - Iran's support for terrorism, its imprisonment of dissidents and even some Americans, its meddling in Iraq and Syria, its arms trade - was secondary.
For the Iranians, this was a negotiation first and foremost to get rid of what Zarif often called the "unjust sanctions" while trying to keep their nuclear options open. And while they treasured their nuclear program, they treasured the symbolism of not backing down to American demands even more. But Zarif was walking his own high-wire act at home. While he had an important ally in Iran's president, Hassan Rouhani, hard-liners did not want to reach any deal at all; many were making a fortune from the sanctions because they controlled Iran's black markets. And conservatives around the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were looking for any signs that their Americanized chief negotiator, who studied at the University of Denver, was ready to give away too much nuclear infrastructure without getting Iran the sanctions lifted in return, as the ayatollah had decreed.
There was no single event, no heart-to-heart conversation between adversaries or game-changing insight that made the Iran deal happen. Instead, over a period of years, each side came to gradually understand what mattered most to the other.
For the Americans, that meant designing offers that kept the shell of Iran's nuclear program in place while seeking to gut its interior. For the Iranians, it meant ridding themselves of sanctions in ways they could describe to their own people as forcing the United States to deal with Iran as an equal, respected sovereign power. And it happened because a brief constellation of personalities and events came into alignment:
A sultan in Oman who convinced the White House that he could establish a back channel to the Iranians. The election of Rouhani, who Obama thought would be more receptive to his overtures than Iran's aging supreme leader. A series of insights from the Energy Department's nuclear laboratories that allowed the physics of enrichment to create new space for compromise among the political leaders. And the presence of two top diplomats, Kerry and Zarif, driven by the conviction that they could break an ugly 35-year history.
At one point last week the simmering tension between the two negotiators boiled over when Zarif felt his American counterpart was pressing too hard. "Never threaten an Iranian!" he shouted. At the other end of the table Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, who has had his share of disputes with Kerry, tried to break the tension. "Or a Russian!" he said, as the room broke out in nervous laughter.
But during a break on one particularly discouraging March day in Lausanne, Switzerland, where negotiations were held before adjourning to Vienna, Zarif struck a different tone as he invoked the names of the key figures on two sides, including Vice President Joseph R Biden Jr and the top energy officials of the United States and Iran, Ernest J Moniz and Ali Akbar Salehi.
"We are not going to have another time in history when there is an Obama and a Biden and a Kerry and a Moniz again," he said, according to notes of the conversation. "And there may be no Rouhani, Zarif and Salehi."
Barack Obama came to office hoping for a dialogue with Tehran but focused on the problem of nuclear proliferation. After Ayatollah Khamenei responded to Obama's private letters with long diatribes about America's efforts, the president turned to squeezing the country economically.
"Obama seemed very comfortable with the shift to sanctions after the Iranians failed to reciprocate to his overtures," Gary Samore, then a senior White House aide. He pressed the Russians to delay selling the S-300, a sophisticated air defense system, to Iran, and sent a delegation to persuade Beijing to reduce China's purchases of oil.
But when an offer to help get secret talks started with the Iranians came from Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman, the president was intrigued. Eventually the White House turned to a trusted ally to tease out the possibilities: Kerry, then a senator from Massachusetts. Meeting in Oman in December 2011, the sultan said an accord could be reached.
There was a high likelihood, the sultan said, that a deal could be reached if the Obama administration showed its seriousness about a diplomatic solution. But making a point that would recur time and again - down to the last days of the Vienna talks - he said that a way would need to be found to allow the Iranians to "keep their honor."
It took seven months - until July 2012 - before secret envoys sent by Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with the Iranians, and that meeting went poorly. Then, in June 2013, came the election of Rouhani, whom the supreme leader had allowed to run, largely on a platform of ridding Iran of the sanctions that were squeezing the elite and middle class.
"The president said we had to work up a letter to him right away," one of Obama's senior aides said. "He sensed it was a moment we had to seize."
As Obama's aides sketched out how the negotiations might play out, they faced a threshold decision: Would they abandon the Bush administration's mantra that "not one centrifuge spins," a position they knew the Iranians would never accept? Or were they willing to allow a token Iranian program - a face-saving one - if the trade-off was two decades or so of restrictions?
A consensus quickly emerged that a contained program was far better than a smoldering confrontation that seemed headed toward a military strike. "The idea was that if we accepted enrichment it would be at a very small level," said Dennis B Ross, who served on the National Security Council during Obama's first term. "By being very limited, it would be a manifestation that they really had a peaceful nuclear program."
But it became clear that Iran envisioned something different: a sizable nuclear infrastructure that would take a pause of a few years, the price of ending sanctions, but then resume its march to "industrial scale" uranium enrichment. The gap between the American numbers of acceptable centrifuges and the Iranian numbers seem unbridgeable.
Looking for a way to break the deadlock without forcing the Iranians into a corner, the nuclear experts at the Energy Department began to present other, more complex options. The focus, they suggested, should not be simply on the number and type of centrifuges, but the "breakout time," the amount of time it would take for Iran, under a "best reasonable" estimate, to produce a single weapon's worth of material. Put simply, Iran could have centrifuges running if it agreed to a far smaller stockpile of fuel.
"There were many intense meetings on this," recalled Antony J Blinken, Obama's deputy national security adviser at the time, and now the deputy secretary of state. "We had to present a lot of permutations to the president to meet his bottom lines."
The military said it could live with a "breakout time" of a year; that was plenty of time to launch a strike to destroy Iran's production facilities. But the optics of allowing thousands of centrifuges to remain was not good.
"Throughout this process," Blinken said, "we've been faced with a choice between what is politically feasible and what is practically necessary."
It would be the first of many such choices.
A series of secret negotiations with the Rouhani team, led by Clinton's top aide, Jake Sullivan, and one of America's most experienced diplomats, William J Burns, explored the possibilities.
"I have about six months to get this through," Zarif said in New York in September 2013, on his first trip to the United Nations as foreign minister after many years of academic exile. After that, he feared, the opponents of dealing with the United States would rise again. He was wrong: It turned out the process went on for another 22 months.
A first agreement, just to get Iran to freeze its current nuclear activity and blend down some stockpiles of fuel that the West feared was approaching weapons-grade, took months to negotiate. Then came halting progress, as the Americans began to realize that at every stage the Iranians were fighting to preserve every major nuclear facility. "It was all about perception," one negotiator said. "They fought to keep the buildings and tangible equipment. It was easier for them to give up fuel or parts of the equipment people didn't see." That preserved a narrative that nothing had been surrendered.
© 2015 The New York Times News Service