At my first opportunity, I appealed to the new U.S. ambassador, Glyn Davies, who had replaced Greg Schulte. Davies was an experienced career diplomat with a broad worldview and common sense. “Please,” I pleaded with him, “take care of this. We need this operation to go smoothly.” The provision of fuel for a research reactor, I told him, fell under the IAEA’s technical cooperation mandate. As such, there was no requirement to make it part of additional discussions at the Security Council or with the P-5+1.
Davies agreed. He said he would try to have Washington talk to Paris.
My next stop was New York: the UN Security Council Summit on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Nuclear Disarmament, hosted by Obama. When I arrived on September 21, there was a request from U.S. undersecretary of state Bill Burns to see me, together with his colleagues Bob Einhorn[16] and Gary Samore.[17]
I had first met Burns when he was ambassador to Russia and had quickly realized why he had a reputation as one of the finest career foreign service officers in the United States: he was sharp, humble, soft-spoken, and straightforward. I had also worked closely with Einhorn and Samore for over twenty years, both when they were part of the Clinton administration and when they were in think tanks during the Bush era.[18] They were two of the top U.S. experts on nonproliferation, in addition to being close friends. I went to see them at the Waldorf Astoria, where Obama was staying. The customary buzz of the Big Apple was subdued. Everything was in lockdown bunker mode because of security concerns for the summit.
Burns opened candidly: the United States was “stuck” on Iran. They saw the proposed fuel deal as an escape route; if it failed, they would be forced to move on further sanctions. Burns was keen to set a date to meet with Iran on the proposal. I told him I was working to pin down the logistics.
Then I mentioned that at Schwechat Airport in Vienna, just before flying out, I had received a cryptic letter from Iran. The gist of the message was that Iran was constructing another pilot enrichment plant. This was prefaced by an odd statement about Iran’s need to exercise passive defense and protect its human resources. I showed Burns, Einhorn, and Samore the letter, and Einhorn took a few notes.
An urgent request came the next morning: Gustavo Zlauvinen, head of the IAEA’s New York office, had gotten a call from Einhorn, who needed to see me that night at my hotel together with Samore. I was jetlagged and preparing for the summit, so I called Einhorn to ask the reason for the proposed visit.
Without preamble, he said they had known for two years about the Iranian facility under construction. A team representing the U.S., French, U.K., and Israeli intelligence agencies was preparing to go to Vienna to brief the Agency’s technical experts. He thought that he and Samore should tell me what they knew ahead of the Vienna briefing.
I asked why the IAEA had not been told before. It was yet another example of information being shared with the Agency selectively, at the time of the supplier’s choosing. They had not been sure of the nature of the facility, Einhorn said, which sounded like a bogus excuse. I suspected they were hoping to catch Iran operating the facility, giving the United States a “gotcha” situation to bolster their accusation that Iran had a nuclear weapons program. I was not pleased. Einhorn and I agreed to meet the following day, after the council meeting.
The new Iranian facility was located at Fordow, roughly thirty kilometers north of the city of Qom. The Americans claimed it was small, built to house just three thousand centrifuges, which, in their view, meant that it was not intended for industrial use and was therefore designed for military purposes. Iran, they said, had known since the spring that Western countries were onto the facility. This, they believed, was why the Iranians had finally decided to declare it to the IAEA.
The news was immensely disheartening: The Iranians’ failure to declare the Fordow facility to the IAEA at the time of beginning construction, as they were obligated to do, would only add to international distrust of Tehran’s intentions. Still, I resolved to press on with the fuel proposal. I held several telephone conversations with Salehi, in New York and then in India, my next stop on a multicountry visit. I was trying to pin down the Iranians on two dates: one for inspecting the new facility and one for the meeting on the fuel proposal. I also wanted some assurance, before the next P-5+1 meeting, scheduled for October 1 in Geneva, that Tehran agreed with the proposal in principle. Salehi was keen to move things forward, but he was waiting for a green light from Ahmadinejad. The new facility, he said, was not an industrial plant. It had been conceived as a backup enrichment facility during the Bush administration, when the threat of a military strike at Natanz seemed serious. The Fordow plant was carved into a mountain, designed for maximum protection from aerial attack. There was no need for it to be large, Salehi said. It was an expression of Iran’s resolve to preserve its nuclear enrichment technology and knowledge base, regardless of external threat.
As a date was finally set to discuss the fuel proposal, Salehi confirmed that the Iranians were generally in agreement with the plan, but he could not say so officially before the meeting. That was good enough for me to convey to Washington.
A few days later I was told that President Obama wanted to speak to me by phone. He began by thanking me for taking the time to meet with Burns and company on the day of my arrival at the summit in New York. I was impressed, as before, by the sensitivity of his approach. In his view, he said, it was extremely important for the Agency to gain early access to the new facility. “I do not want to interfere with your Agency’s work,” he said, “but I hope you will report promptly to the Board once you visit the facility and have made your own assessment.” He was pleased that we had a date for the fuel proposal meeting and that the Iranians had reacted positively.
While in India, I spoke to CNN-IBN about the revelation of Iran’s new enrichment facility as an unfortunate “setback to the principle of transparency, and to the effort by the international community to build confidence about the Iranian nuclear program.” I explained Iran’s argument about needing the facility as a backup in case of an attack, which is why “they could not tell us earlier on. Nonetheless, they have been on the wrong side of the law, you know, insofar as informing the Agency about the construction—and as you have seen, it has created concern in the international community.”
The Fordow facility notwithstanding, the signals from all sides indicated a desire to conclude the fuel deal. At the P-5+1 meeting in Geneva on October 1, my primary concern was to prevent the discussions from getting sidetracked, particularly by a loose statement from the French, who continued to speak provocatively about Iran’s nuclear program. We put great effort into ensuring that prior to the meeting all parties had a clear understanding of their own position as well as the stands that others might take. We wanted no surprises.
The meeting went off without a hitch, referred to by Obama as a “constructive beginning.” Regarding the fuel proposal and the inspection of the new facility near Qom, the participants largely restated the terms I had already mediated between the United States and Iran. The meeting served as public articulation of a private agreement. Not all the participants realized that things had been precooked.
17
Special assistant to the president and White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction, proliferation, and terrorism.
18
Einhorn had come to see me with Tom Pickering—another fine career diplomat—during the Bush administration, when they were working on the report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton.