Concessions Fueled Iran Nuclear Talks by Jay Solomon and Carol E. Lee
http://www.wsj.com/articles/concessions-fueled-iran-nuclear-talks-1428021667?mod=trending_now_3
U.S. gave up on eliminating most of Iran’s nuclear program, while Tehran took steps such as agreeing to mothball centrifuges
Top Obama administration officials entered negotiations with Iran in September 2013 hoping to dismantle most of the country’s nuclear infrastructure—but carrying gnawing doubts such an outcome was possible. Those concerns were quickly confirmed when U.S. and Iranian diplomats sat down for their first formal meeting the following month at the United Nations offices near the shores of Lake Geneva.
Iranian negotiators made clear that a dismantling of their facilities, including eliminating tens of thousands of centrifuge machines, a plutonium-producing reactor and an underground fuel-production site, wasn’t feasible, senior U.S. officials said. “It’s our moon shot,” Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told a U.S. official at one point, arguing that the program’s economic and scientific benefits were that important to Iranian society and national pride.
Crucially, the goal of the talks shifted—away from dismantling structures and toward a more complex set of limitations designed to extend the time Iran would need to “break out” and make a dash toward a nuclear weapon.
That early yield would set the tone of the negotiations to come, with the U.S. making steady concessions over the course of the talks. But the Iranians also took steps—mothballing thousands of centrifuge machines, expanding the role of U.N. inspectors and diminishing its stockpile of fissile material—that many experts doubted they would.
The deal announced Thursday followed months of negotiation, topped off by marathon negotiating sessions in the last few days. U.S. officials called it a historic success because it places limits on all elements of Iran’s program, and introduces a system to verify them. “This framework would cut off every pathway that Iran could take to develop a nuclear weapon,” President Barack Obama said.
But he added: “Iran is not going to simply dismantle its program because we demand it to do so. That’s not how the world works, and that’s not what history shows us.” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, for his part, said that while Iran will abide by the deal, “our facilities will continue.”
The framework now has to be turned into a final and formal agreement, by a deadline of June 30. Meanwhile, it will be at the core of bitter debate—at home and abroad—over whether the U.S. conceded too much, particularly by allowing Iran to retain its basic nuclear infrastructure, though in shrunken form.
“I’m a little puzzled by the political agreement,” said Olli Heinonen, a previous inspections chief at the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. “You’re going to leave Iran as a threshold state. There isn’t much room to maneuver.”
A recounting of some 19 months of direct negotiations between Washington and Tehran, through interviews with American, European and Iranian diplomats, reveals a president single-minded in his focus on forging a landmark nuclear agreement with Iran.
Talks have been going on almost continuously—and through three extensions—since negotiators reached an interim agreement in November 2013 that capped parts of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for an easing of some Western economic sanctions.
ENLARGE At that time, Mr. Obama said U.S. negotiators were still focused on dismantling much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, including a heavy-water reactor in the city of Arak, a fortified underground enrichment facility called Fordow and advanced centrifuge machines which spin uranium gas into nuclear fuel.
But in the resumed negotiations, many of which were held in Vienna, Iran’s diplomats stuck to the line that none of the country’s nuclear facilities would be dismantled. Mr. Araghchi, the deputy foreign minister, told American officials that his country’s nuclear pursuit was equivalent to the U.S.’s space program during the height of the Cold War. But he denied, as have all Iranian officials, that the nuclear program had any military dimensions.
Tehran’s unbending position succeeded in substantially shifting Washington’s overall objective for the talks by early 2014, according to current and former U.S. negotiators.
While negotiations initially focused on substantially reshaping Iran’s overall program, the aim shifted to trying to deny Iran the ability to quickly “break out” from any restrictions and accumulate enough weapons-grade fuel for a bomb. U.S. scientists concluded that 12 months was enough time for the West to detect any moves by Tehran to assemble a bomb and to respond. Negotiators began focusing on that goal.
“We understood as soon as we got into a serious negotiation with them that at the end of the day they were going to have to have some domestic capacity because there’s no other deal that they’d say ‘yes’ to,” said the senior U.S. official who was briefed on negotiations.
As talks proceeded past two deadlines last year, the U.S. agreed to a stream of concessions. The American positions at times drew ire from other negotiating powers, particularly France, and U.S. officials acknowledged publicly for the first time that a final deal would leave many of Iran’s nuclear sites in place.
Talks centered on reducing the nearly 20,000 centrifuges Iran had assembled at its two main enrichment facilities in the cities of Natanz and Qom. Secretary of State John Kerry’s chief interlocutor was Mr. Zarif, a U.S.-educated diplomat who was appointed by Iran’s newly elected President Hasan Rouhani. But the White House knew Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was the ultimate arbiter on the nuclear issue, and that he held deep reservations about any engagement with Washington.
Mr. Obama decided to write a secret letter to Mr. Khamenei in October arguing that Washington and Tehran could cooperate in fighting Islamic State rebels if a nuclear accord was reached, according to people briefed on the correspondence.
The Road to a Deal
January 2003: The International Atomic Energy Agency begins to investigate Iran’s nuclear program.
December 2006: U.N. Security Council imposes first of several sanctions on Iran, including a ban on nuclear-related trade.
July 2010: President Barack Obama signs a law banning from the U.S. financial system foreign companies that do business with sanctioned Iranian entities.
November 2013: After three rounds of talks in five weeks, Iran and the six powers reach an interim deal offering Iran modest sanctions relief in exchange for curtailing the most advanced parts of its nuclear program.
Sept. 2, 2014: After talks in Tehran, Iran agrees to allow U.N. atomic experts additional access to nuclear-related sites and pledges to address Western suspicions that Iran worked on weaponizing its program.
Feb. 24, 2015: After talks in Geneva, a senior U.S. official says there has been progress toward a deal.
March 26-April 2, 2015: Iran and the six world powers agree on the parameters of a deal to block Iran from developing nuclear weapons in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.
In early November, the U.S. delegation passed on an eight-page document to Mr. Zarif’s team at meetings in Oman that they believed showed flexibility in solving the technical aspects of the nuclear dispute. It focused on the number of centrifuges Iran could run and the types of nuclear research it could pursue. A week later, the chairman of an Iranian parliamentary committee, Ibrahim Karkhaneh, made the proposal public and blasted it as aimed at bringing the country’s nuclear program “back to zero.”
This discord caused Washington and Tehran to miss a second deadline, on Nov. 24, to reach a comprehensive agreement. The White House decided to extend the talks again.
By January, opposition in Congress had gained steam as lawmakers saw the White House’s initial demands for the talks continue to slip. Mr. Obama, trying to manage the pressure to take a harder line, decided that month to tell lawmakers that the U.S. wouldn’t agree to another extension.
At the same time, during a series of meetings in Europe, Iran signaled a willingness to make a vital shift, according to senior Western diplomats.
The U.S. had for more than a year insisted that a final deal needed to put Iran at least a year away from being able to amass enough nuclear fuel for a bomb. In those January meetings, Iranian officials began asking questions about exactly what such a condition would entail.
By the time the world’s top diplomats gathered in Munich in early February for a security conference, the U.S. got clear word that Iran was willing to accept a deal structured around the one-year demand, said one of the diplomats in the talks.
From there, other stalled pieces began to fall into place.
Negotiators homed in on the number of centrifuges Iran would be allowed to operate—and Iran finally agreed to reduce them to 5,060. U.S. officials acknowledged in February that while they were aiming for a deal that would last 15 years or more, Iran would be able to scale up its enrichment activities and possibly its nuclear research in the final years of a deal.
When negotiators gathered in Switzerland in mid-March, enrichment had been pushed down the list of issues to resolve. But political pressure on Mr. Obama was as intense as it had been since talks began in 2013. U.S. lawmakers were moving toward a veto-proof bipartisan majority to override Mr. Obama’s promised veto of legislation that would give Congress the authority to approve or reject a deal. Mr. Obama’s relations with Israel were in tatters after its increasingly shrill denunciation of the deal being negotiated.
By the time they arrived in Lausanne on March 26, Mr. Kerry and his team had developed an increasingly close relationship with the Iranian delegation. In addition to Mr. Zarif, it included President Rouhani’s brother, Hossein Fereydoun, and Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization. The nuclear scientist received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s at the same time U.S. Energy Secretary Ernes Moniz was teaching there, though they never met. Mr. Moniz joined the U.S. delegation.
The primary issues during the final round were the pace at which U.N. sanctions would be lifted on Iran and the future scope of Iran’s nuclear research and development, according to U.S. and European officials. Messrs. Kerry and Zarif went into talks almost immediately upon arriving at Lausanne’s Beau-Rivage Palace, an 18th century estate.
The crunch point came on Wednesday, more than a day after the March 31 deadline passed. The two men met for more than eight hours in a conference in a bid to resolve their differences.
One of the final sticking points was over Iran’s future nuclear research and development, U.S. officials said. Negotiators met at 9 p.m. that Wednesday, Switzerland time, and continued until Messrs. Salehi and Moniz reached an agreement on it at 6 a.m. Thursday.
It was midnight in Washington when Mr. Obama got a call from National Security Adviser Susan Rice. Mr. Obama gave them the go-ahead to close out a deal. “People know what my bottom lines are,” he said.
Mr. Obama signed off Thursday morning around 10 during his daily presidential briefing in the Oval Office. He began calling world leaders, first talking to British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President François Hollande of France. He also spoke with King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, but left a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for later in the day because, a senior administration official said, that conversation “is going to take longer.”
Write to Jay Solomon at jay.solomon@wsj.com
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