Window Seat on the World Page 23

  This transfer was followed by two more cash payments in which the additional $1.3 billion in interest was sent to Iran, a sum that sent critics of the deal howling.286

  Senator Cotton, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as a member of the Army, accused President Obama of paying “a $1.7 billion ransom to the ayatollahs for US hostages.”287

  Others accused the administration of trying to conceal the settlement.

  In fact, this wasn’t true.

  President Obama mentioned it in nationally televised remarks he delivered on January 17, 2016, his first on the agreement’s implementation.

  “For the United States, this settlement could save us billions of dollars that could have been pursued by Iran,” the president said. “So there was no benefit to the United States in dragging this out. With the nuclear deal done, prisoners released, the time was right to resolve this dispute as well.”

  Secretary Kerry also issued a statement that day detailing payment of the claim and the accompanying interest.

  “Iran’s recovery was fixed at a reasonable rate of interest, and therefore, Iran is unable to pursue a bigger Tribunal award against us, preventing US taxpayers from being obligated to a larger amount of money,” the statement said.

  By some estimates, Iran could have received $10 billion through a judgment in its favor.288

  The Hague settlement coincided with an even bigger deal, at least in media circles. Journalists throughout the United States and the world had taken up Rezaian’s cause, thanks to an intense lobbying effort by his family. Relatives also reported that Rezaian had fallen ill in Tehran’s infamous Evin Prison and could die in captivity.

  Secretary Kerry brought up the case repeatedly in his negotiations with Foreign Minister Zarif, not directly linked to the nuclear deal but taking advantage of any face-to-face meeting to pursue this second track of conversation.

  In fact, I snapped a photo of Kerry buttonholing the foreign minister and Hossein Feridon, the brother of Iranian president Rouhani, urging them to win Rezaian’s release. I took that photo backstage in Vienna after the nuclear deal was announced on July 14, 2015.

  Now his diplomacy continued six months later with a phone call to his Iranian counterpart as implementation of the agreement hung in the balance.

  “Javad, how are you?” the secretary asked from London at midday on January 15, 2015. When the foreign minister apparently repeated the question back to him, Kerry laughed and said, “I’m fine; wrestling with alligators—as you are.”289

  Kerry worked on details of implementation, the Hague settlement, and the Rezaian release throughout the day. He also took a walk through London, even stopping at a gun shop to look at hunting rifles. Throughout dinner at a Chinese restaurant, his iPhone screen illuminated his face as he typed an email to the foreign minister.

  At 12:55 a.m. on January 16, 2015, the day the Iran deal was supposed to be implemented, now chief of staff Jon Finer and I walked into Kerry’s suite at the Grosvenor House Hotel. We found the Boss on his iPad.

  “What are you doing?” we asked.

  “Playing Internet Scrabble,” he answered.

  Incredulous, Finer asked, “Does the person you’re playing realize he’s playing against the secretary of State?”

  Kerry smiled and said, “Nope.”

  We laughed as he asked us for a four-letter word ending in “nt.”

  When we suggested “tint,” he replied, “That’s good, but it only gets you five [points]. You need to get at least twenty, or you’re dead. Right now, I’m ahead.”290

  _________

  SIX HOURS LATER, WE were just about to leave the Grosvenor House when Finer got a message from the team in Vienna.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “Jason Rezaian is leaving the prison in forty-five minutes. This is happening.”291

  Yet like everything else in each phase of the Middle East peace talks or the Iran nuclear negotiations, things were not that simple.

  We flew from London to Vienna because EU high representative Mogherini refused to allow the implementation to occur in Geneva, where the P5+1 ministers had planned to meet.

  Soon we found ourselves in a familiar place: in the Palais Coburg, and facing a familiar opponent: the French.

  Throughout numerous negotiations during Secretary Kerry’s tenure, we found French foreign minister Laurent Fabius and his team to be particularly frustrating as counterparts.

  The foreign minister, who viewed himself as French presidential timber, would routinely announce that France was “a great country” or “a proud country” needing to be respected. His political director for Iran, Nicolas de Riviere, wasn’t above playing one side against the other, or leaking details of the negotiations to make France look good and other parties look bad.

  In that context, both of them also weren’t beyond stalling progress in the P5+1 talks while they lined up potential business deals in Iran for Airbus, the French airplane maker, Citroën and Peugeot, both French automakers, or any number of other French businesses.

  Both Kerry and Undersecretary Sherman took the unusual step of publicly admonishing France after a business delegation representing more than one hundred French firms traveled to Tehran in early 2014. That happened just as the rest of the P5+1 was trying to reinforce with Iran that it needed to come to terms on a final nuclear deal. They warned it risked losing the temporary sanctions relief it received in the November 2013 interim agreement.

  “This is not helpful,” Sherman testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 4, 2014. “Tehran is not open for business because our sanctions relief is quite temporary, quite limited, and quite targeted.”292

  Now, nearly two years later, France’s Fabius was the lone holdout as the P5+1 ministers sought to implement the nuclear deal. It, in fact, would provide permanent sanctions relief.

  Fabius complained about wording in a section of the agreement relating to inspections that would have to be performed by the International Atomic Energy Association.

  Zarif, who’d flown to Vienna for an Implementation Day announcement, came to Kerry’s room at the Palais Coburg to complain about the delay.

  He said it “humiliated” President Rouhani after all the work on the nuclear agreement, the Hague dispute, and the Rezaian affair. Kerry and Zarif then walked together to High Representative Mogherini’s suite, surprising an aide who casually answered their door knock.

  Soon, all three of them were in the secretary’s suite as Kerry unloaded a depth charge to break the stalemate.

  Speaking on his cellphone, he called Fabius and told him, “We’re really feeling quite vital to reach a resolution.”

  Then Zarif spoke up on the speaker phone, saying, “Hello, Laurent. We are all on the same side! . . . Let’s get this done, before this gets out of hand.”

  He added, “I am worried, my good friend, that this will be misunderstood back in Tehran.”

  With that, Kerry read aloud the wording for the upcoming statement being delivered by Zarif and Mogherini.

  Zarif asked, “Is that good to Laurent?”

  The French foreign minister, who’d later complain he was both taken by surprise and outnumbered by the three-way call to his personal phone, replied, “Yes.”293

  Several minutes later, we called in some of our traveling photographers to capture the scene as Kerry formally signed paperwork lifting the US sanctions against Iran. When the secretary was done writing his name on each page, he pulled the papers together, banged them down on the table to straighten the stack, and prepared to leave for the Vienna International Centre, the UN compound where the deal had been announced the previous July.

  Less than five minutes later, though, he found out there was a problem. Rezaian had arrived at a military plane set to fly him to freedom in Switzerland, but he was refusing to climb aboard because neither his wife, an Iranian reporter named Yeganeh Salehi, nor his mother had not been allowed to join him. Although American-born, Mary Rezaian had come to Iran to
advocate for her son’s release.

  Feeling exposed after having just provided Iran with its sanctions relief, Kerry once again called Zarif on his cellphone.

  “The document is clear,” he said. “I need your immediate intervention here.”294

  Chief of Staff Finer soon told the secretary that while the two sides had agreed Rezaian’s wife and mother would join him, the text did not specifically guarantee it. This omission frustrated Kerry, so he raced over to the VIC to press the point with Zarif before delivering his own remarks commemorating Implementation Day.

  Adding to the tension was an unyielding deadline. Under the Air Force crew-rest rules, if we didn’t take off by 11:20 p.m., we wouldn’t make it back to Washington before the flight crew’s duty day expired. That would force us to spend another night in Vienna.

  Groundhog Day.

  Kerry cited those “very tight constraints” as he began his speech, then raced through the text without taking questions from the media afterward.

  “Today, more than four years after I first traveled to Oman at the request of President Obama to discreetly explore whether the kind of nuclear talks that we ultimately entered into with Iran were even possible, after more than two and a half years of intense multilateral negotiations, the International Atomic Energy Agency has now verified that Iran has honored its commitments to alter—and in fact, dismantle—much of its nuclear program in compliance with the agreement that we reached last July,” he said.

  Kerry added: “I think we have also proven once again why diplomacy has to always be our first choice, and war our last resort. And that is a very important lesson to reinforce.”295

  We raced from the Vienna Convention Centre back to the airport, skipping our customary courtesy photos on the tarmac with embassy staffers and our police escort.

  When the door closed and the wheels started to roll, I looked down at my watch. It read, 11:20:35 p.m.

  The US Air Force had given us a thirty-five-second grace period. We took off several minutes later, as Kerry continued to work the phones in his cabin.

  Five minutes afterward, he called the White House.

  “Crisis resolved,” the secretary declared.

  Authorities in Tehran had awakened a judge and got his consent for “Yeghi” Salehi and Mary Rezaian’s departure from Iran.

  As our plane and the one carrying the Rezaian family flew west through the night sky, a cargo plane took off from Switzerland and began to fly east toward Iran.

  Secretary Kerry and the P5+1 had consummated the Iran nuclear deal. Jason, Yeghi, and Mary Rezaian, as well as two other Americans on a separate commercial flight, had won their freedom.

  And the Iranians were about to reclaim money they paid for fighter jets back in 1979, shortly before those students climbed over the walls of the US embassy in Tehran.

  Secretary Kerry asked for company during an outing in Oslo, Norway, that took us to another unexpected place.

  It was the home where he and his family lived while his father was stationed in Scandinavia for the State Department.

  The homeowner, Hedda Ulvness, greeted us and invited us inside, where her two boys excitedly showed the secretary of State what they knew only as their house.

  Kerry looked around, in part with a face of familiarity, in part puzzlement while trying to recall exactly how things looked when it was his own family’s home.

  The boys raced him up the stairs to the second floor, where they showed him their rooms. One excitedly jumped on his bed as the Boss asked them about school and their lives in Norway.

  Afterward, we went into the backyard, where the secretary posed with the family against a backdrop of their shared residence.

  Secretary Kerry’s brother, Cam, had the best memory of where they lived, and he was able to pinpoint the location from a Google Maps satellite image.

  Diplomatic Security Service agent Seth Emers had the task of walking up to the front door, knocking, and asking Ulvness if she’d be willing to have a visitor.

  She smiled, agreed, and opened her door to a familiar stranger.

  7

  RUSSIA

  JOHN KERRY WAS AT the end of a quick trip to Europe when he and British foreign secretary William Hague stepped up to a pair of podiums at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London on September 9, 2013.

  They were there for a routine news conference following a typical meeting between two established allies.

  Both men told reporters their working breakfast covered the Middle East peace talks, counterterrorism efforts, and the civil war in Syria.

  The latter topic was timely, since Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was accused of using chemical weapons to kill more than 1,200 of his own people in an attack three weeks earlier.

  “Our government supports the objective of ensuring there can be no impunity for the first use of chemical warfare in the 21st century,” said Hague. “As an international community, we must deter further attacks and hold those responsible for them accountable.”296

  The United States, with Secretary Kerry taking the lead, had initially built the case for an immediate military response, but then President Obama decided to seek congressional approval for a strike. He switched just days after members of the British Parliament voted against Prime Minister David Cameron’s request to join any US-led attack.

  “The United States of America, President Obama, myself, others are in full agreement that the end of the conflict in Syria requires a political solution. There is no military solution,” Kerry told reporters. “If one party believes that it can rub out countless numbers of his own citizens with impunity using chemicals that have been banned for nearly 100 years because of what Europe learned in World War I, if he can do that with impunity, he will never come to a negotiating table.”297

  When it came time for questions, Margaret Brennan, the State Department correspondent for CBS News, stood up and directed one to Kerry.

  Referring to Assad, she asked, “Is there anything at this point that his government could do or offer that would stop an attack?”298

  The secretary scoffed and delivered a tongue-in-cheek reply.

  “Sure. He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that,” he said.

  “But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.”299

  How prescient the question and how bated the response.

  We left the media center and briefly returned to our hold room before heading to the airport. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki told Kerry she was concerned about his remark. Reporters, she said, were likely to seize upon it just as the administration was trying to strengthen its diplomatic hand by winning support for a military option against President Assad.

  What neither she nor her boss anticipated was that someone else also was ready to latch onto the comment.

  As Psaki answered questions from the traveling press corps during our flight back to Washington, the phone rang in Kerry’s cabin.

  The caller was Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. He had an intriguing proposal: If Russia were able the get the Syrian regime to comply with the secretary’s off-the-cuff demand, would the United States be willing to go along?

  Kerry was intrigued but noncommittal. Yet by the time we landed, the idea had circulated within the White House and State Department.

  The consensus was that Russia should be put to the test.300

  It was the beginning of a long and complicated relationship with our former Cold War opponent throughout Secretary Kerry’s tenure. It would tack from unity over Syrian chemical weapons to division over the bifurcation of Ukraine, back to unity during the Iranian nuclear negotiations, before a final split after accusations of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.

  Less than nine months after we left office, Lavrov delivered a tart assessment of US–Russia relations em
blematic of the power plays, strategic leveraging, harsh language, and selective memory permeating our dealings. The Russian minister even included a potshot at a former president of the United States.

  “US-Russia relations are suffering not from the fact that there are conflicts but rather because the previous US administration was small-hearted and they were revengeful,” Lavrov told reporters attending the 2017 UN General Assembly. “They put this time bomb in US-Russia relations. I didn’t expect that from a Nobel Peace Prize winner.”301

  The United States may have an economy dwarfing that of Russia, and it may be the country where people from around the world—including Russians—want to visit and live, but the two nations had crept into being adversaries in a second Cold War.

  _________

  SECRETARY KERRY FLEW AWAY from the UK after that news conference because he had to get back to Washington to brief Congress that evening before a potential vote on using force in Syria.

  He was back on Capitol Hill the next day and addressed the Russian proposal during testimony to the House Armed Services Committee.

  “We have made it clear to them—I have in several conversations with Foreign Minister Lavrov—that this cannot be a process of delay, this cannot be a process of avoidance,” he said. “It has to be real, has to be measurable, tangible. And it is exceedingly difficult—I want everybody here to know—to fulfill those conditions. But we’re waiting for that proposal, but we’re not waiting for long.”302

  He didn’t have to. The two sides agreed to meet in two days in Geneva to see if they could reach an agreement.

  Our bags barely unpacked after returning from London, we got back on our plane on the evening of September 11, 2015, for another flight to Europe. When we arrived the next morning, the secretary met first with Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special envoy for Syria, before holding an evening meeting and working dinner with Lavrov.

  Fortunately, the groundwork had been laid.