Retired-FBI agent Robert Levinson who went missing on the Iranian island
of Kish in March 2007 and Levinson's family received these photographs
of him in April 2011. In secret face-to-face talks with Iran, aimed at a
deal to slow Iran's nuclear program, the U.S. team in a March 2013
meeting also raised concerns about Syria, Tehran's threats to close the
Strait of Hormuz and the status of Levinson.
WASHINGTON (ASSOCIATED PRESS) — The United States and Iran secretly
engaged in a series of high-level, face-to-face talks over the past
year, in a high-stakes diplomatic gamble by the Obama administration
that paved the way for the historic deal sealed early Sunday in Geneva
aimed at slowing Tehran's nuclear program, The Associated Press has
learned.
The discussions were kept hidden even from
America's closest friends, including its negotiating partners and
Israel, until two months ago, and that may explain how the nuclear
accord appeared to come together so quickly after years of stalemate and
fierce hostility between Iran and the West.
But the secrecy of the talks may also explain some of the tensions
between the U.S. and France, which earlier this month balked at a
proposed deal, and with Israel, which is furious about the agreement and
has angrily denounced the diplomatic outreach to Tehran.
President Barack Obama personally authorized the
talks as part of his effort — promised in his first inaugural address —
to reach out to a country the State Department designates as the world's
most active state sponsor of terrorism.
The talks were held in the Middle Eastern nation of
Oman and elsewhere with only a tight circle of people in the know, the
AP learned. Since March, Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and
Jake Sullivan, Vice President Joe Biden's top foreign policy adviser,
have met at least five times with Iranian officials.
The last four clandestine meetings, held since
Iran's reform-minded President Hassan Rouhani was inaugurated in August,
produced much of the agreement later formally hammered out in
negotiations in Geneva among the United States, Britain, France, Russia,
China, Germany and Iran, said three senior administration officials.
All spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not
authorized to discuss by name the highly sensitive diplomatic effort.
The AP was tipped to the first U.S.-Iranian meeting
in March shortly after it occurred, but the White House and State
Department disputed elements of the account and the AP could not confirm
the meeting. The AP learned of further indications of secret diplomacy
in the fall and pressed the White House and other officials further. As
the Geneva talks appeared to be reaching their conclusion, senior
administration officials confirmed to the AP the details of the
extensive outreach.
The Geneva deal provides Iran with about $7 billion
in relief from international sanctions in exchange for Iranian curbs on
uranium enrichment and other nuclear activity. All parties pledged to
work toward a final accord next year that would remove remaining
suspicions in the West that Tehran is trying to assemble an atomic
weapons arsenal.
Iran insists its nuclear interest is only in
peaceful energy production and medical research. The diplomatic gamble
with Iran, if the interim agreement holds up and leads to a final pact
preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, could avert years of
threats of U.S. or Israeli military intervention. It could also prove a
turning point in decades of hostility between Washington and Tehran —
and become a crowning foreign policy achievement of Obama's presidency.
But if the deal collapses, or if Iran covertly
races ahead with development of a nuclear weapon, Obama will face the
consequences of failure, both at home and abroad. His gamble opens him
to criticism that he has left Israel vulnerable to a country bent on its
destruction and that he has made a deal with a state sponsor of
terrorism.
The U.S. and Iran cut off diplomatic ties in 1979
after the Islamic Revolution and the storming of the U.S. Embassy in
Tehran, where 52 Americans were held hostage for more than a year. But
Obama has expressed a willingness since becoming president to meet with
the Iranians without conditions.
At the president's direction, the United States
began a tentative outreach shortly after his inauguration in January
2009. Obama and Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, exchanged
letters, but the engagement yielded no results.
That outreach was hampered by Iran's hardline
former president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, whose re-election in a disputed
vote in June of that year led to a violent crackdown on opposition
protesters. The next month, relations seemed at another low when Iran
detained three American hikers who had strayed across the Iranian border
from Iraq.
Ironically, efforts to win the release of the
hikers turned out to be instrumental in making the clandestine diplomacy
possible. Oman's Sultan Qaboos was a key player, facilitating the
eventual release of the hikers — the last two of whom returned to the
United States in 2011 — and then offering himself as a mediator for a
U.S.-Iran rapprochement. The secret informal discussions between
mid-level officials in Washington and Tehran began.
Officials described those early contacts as
exploratory discussions focused on the logistics of setting up
higher-level talks. The discussions happened through numerous channels,
officials said, including face-to-face talks at undisclosed locations.
They included exchanges between then U.S. Ambassador to the United
Nations Susan Rice, now Obama's national security adviser, and Iran's
envoy to the world body, the officials said. National Security Council
aide Puneet Talwar was also involved, the officials said.
The talks took on added weight eight months ago,
when Obama dispatched the deputy secretary of state Burns, the top aide
Sullivan and five other officials to meet with their Iranian
counterparts in the Omani capital of Muscat. Obama dispatched the group
shortly after the six powers opened a new round of nuclear talks with
Iran in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in late February.
At the time, those main nuclear negotiations were
making little progress, and the Iranians had little interest in holding
bilateral talks with the United States on the sidelines of the meeting
out of fear that the discussions would become public, the U.S. officials
said.
So, with the assistance of Sultan Qaboos, officials
in both countries began quietly making plans to meet in Oman. Burns,
Sullivan and a small team of U.S. technical experts arrived on a
military plane in mid-March for the meeting with the Iranians.
The senior administration officials who spoke to
the AP would not say who Burns and Sullivan met with but characterized
the Iranian attendees as career diplomats, national security aides and
experts on the nuclear issue who were likely to remain key players even
after the country's elections this summer.
The goal on the American side, the U.S. officials
said, was simply at that point to see if the U.S. and Iran could
successfully arrange bilateral talks — a low bar that underscored the
sour state of relations between the two nations.
Beyond nuclear issues, the officials said the U.S.
team at the March Oman meeting also raised concerns about Iranian
involvement in Syria, Tehran's threats to close the strategically
important Strait of Hormuz and the status of Robert Levinson, a missing
former FBI agent who the U.S. believes was abducted in Iran, as well as
two other Americans detained in the country.
Hoping to keep the channel open, Secretary of State
John Kerry then visited Oman in May on a trip ostensibly to push a
military deal with the sultanate but secretly focused on maintaining
that country's key mediation role, particularly after the Iranian
election scheduled for the next month, the officials said.
Rouhani's election in June on a platform of easing
sanctions crippling Iran's economy and stated willingness to engage with
the West gave a new spark to the U.S. effort, the officials said. Two
secret meetings were organized immediately after Rouhani took office in
August, with the specific goal of advancing the stalled nuclear talks
with world powers. Another pair of meetings took place in October.
Burns and Sullivan led the U.S. delegation at each
of those sessions, and were joined at the final secret meeting by chief
U.S. nuclear negotiator Wendy Sherman. The Iranian delegation was a mix
of officials the Americans had met in March in Oman and others who were
new to the talks, administration officials said. All of the Iranians
were fluent English speakers.
U.S. officials said the meetings happened in
multiple locations, but would not confirm the exact spots, saying they
did not want to jeopardize their ability to use the same locations in
the future. But at least some of the talks are believed to have taken
place in Oman.
The private meetings coincided with a public easing
of U.S.-Iranian discord. In early August, Obama sent Rouhani a letter
congratulating him on his election. The Iranian leader's response was
viewed positively by the White House, which quickly laid the groundwork
for the additional secret talks. The U.S. officials said they were
convinced that the outreach had the blessing of Ayatollah Khameni, but
would not elaborate.
As negotiators continued to talk behind the scenes,
public speculation swirled over a possible meeting between Obama and
Rouhani on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, which both
attended in September in New York. Burns and Sullivan sought to arrange
face-to-face talks, but the meeting never happened largely due to
Iranian concerns, the officials said. Two days later, though, Obama and
Rouhani spoke by phone — the first direct contact between a U.S. and
Iranian leader in more than 30 years.
It was only after that Obama-Rouhani phone call
that the U.S. began informing allies of the secret talks with Iran, the
U.S. officials said. Obama handled the most sensitive conversation
himself, briefing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a
Sept. 30 meeting at the White House. He informed Netanyahu only about
the two summer meetings, not the March talks, in keeping with the White
House's promise only to tell allies about any discussions with Iran that
were substantive.
The U.S. officials would not describe Netanyahu's
reaction. But the next day, he delivered his General Assembly speech,
blasting Rouhani as a "wolf in sheep's clothing" and warning the U.S.
against mistaking a change in Iran's tone with an actual change in
nuclear ambitions. The Israeli leader has subsequently denounced the
potential nuclear agreement as the "deal of the century" for Iran.
After telling Netanyahu about the secret talks, the
United States then briefed the other members of the six-nation
negotiating team, the U.S. officials said. The last secret gatherings
between the U.S. and Iran took place shortly after the General Assembly,
according to the officials.
There, the deal finally reached by the parties on
Sunday began to take its final shape. At this month's larger formal
nuclear negotiations between world powers and Iran in Geneva, Burns and
Sullivan showed up as well, but the State Department went to great
lengths to conceal their involvement, leaving their names off of the
official delegation list.
They were housed at a different hotel than the rest
of the team, used back entrances to come and go from meeting venues and
were whisked into negotiating sessions from service elevators or unused
corridors only after photographers left.
Follow Bradley
Klapper at http://twitter.com/bklapperAP, Matthew Lee at
http://twitter.com/APDiploWriter, and Julie Pace at
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