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Features

Zarif's Book, Part IV: The Behind-Closed-Doors Nuclear Shouting Match

September 20, 2021
Faramarz Davar
6 min read
ccording to The Sealed Secret, a meeting between Foreign Minister Zarif and Yukiya Amano, the late Director-General of the IAEA, nearly came to blows
ccording to The Sealed Secret, a meeting between Foreign Minister Zarif and Yukiya Amano, the late Director-General of the IAEA, nearly came to blows
Abbas Araghchi, right, was present at the charged meeting after the IAEA kept its investigation into Iran's nuclear activities open, contrary to Iran's expectations
Abbas Araghchi, right, was present at the charged meeting after the IAEA kept its investigation into Iran's nuclear activities open, contrary to Iran's expectations

In his last weeks in office, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who served as foreign minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran from 2013 to 2021, published a six-volume treatise on Iran’s nuclear negotiations with the P5 + 1:  the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany.

Entitled The Sealed Secret, the book carries the subtitle “An Immense Endeavor for Iran’s Rights, Security and Development”. Besides Zarif’s own memoirs, the book also includes contributions and quotations from Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency during the pre-JCPOA nuclear talks, former deputy foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and Majid Takht-Ravanchi, a senior nuclear negotiator and Iran’s permanent representative to the UN.

Our fourth article on this book covers revelations about a tense meeting between Zarif and Yukiya Amano, Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, over the agency’s case for investigating the “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear program.

***

The most serious obstacle for Iran on its way to reaching a nuclear agreement (the 2015 JCPOA) with the P5+1 countries, and to put an end punishing international sanctions, was the case of “possible military dimensions” (PMDs) the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had opened to investigate Iran’s nuclear program.

The case was mostly concerned with nuclear activities that were conducted before 2003 under the supervision of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a former deputy defense minister and the shadowy figure behind Iran’s nuclear program, who was assassinated in November 2020. The Islamic Republic, however, officially abandoned these activities when the United States attacked Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in March 2003.

According to The Sealed Secret, contrary to an order by Ayatollah Khamenei as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, nuclear negotiators under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had allowed IAEA representatives to inspect the Parchin military complex near Tehran in the course of their investigations for the PMD case.

Afterwards Olli Heinonen, the IAEA’s Deputy Director-General, officially announced that Parchin was “history” and promised any future request for inspecting military sites would be made only within the framework of the Additional Protocol for verification of nuclear safeguards. But the IAEA continued to ask for another inspection of Parchin.

After necessary agreements aiming to close the case were reached in Iran — the result of cooperation between Fakhrizadeh and Abbas Araghchi, a senior nuclear negotiator — the task of reaching a final agreement with Yukiya Amano, IAEA’s Director General, was given to Foreign Minister Javad Zarif.

“The meeting with Mr. Amano was a strange one,” Zarif’s book relates. “The start was challenging and the ending was bitter. Dr. Zarif frankly told the IAEA’s Director General: ‘If you do not endorse the validity of your deputy’s view you will be undermining the credibility of your agency, and then you will have to come to Iran personally to negotiate. Also, if the agency does not fulfill promises made by your deputy and does not announce that it accepts Iran’s explanations about [nuclear] detonators, the Islamic Republic of Iran will not cooperate in answering the next two questions.”

Based on the evidence at its disposal, the IAEA had claimed that Iran had been testing detonators that could be used in nuclear weapons. It had asked for an explanation as to why, and to what purpose, it had been testing them. Even though the Islamic Republic had permitted IAEA representatives to inspect Parchin and, according to Iranian officials, Olli Heinonen had said the case was closed, Amano was clearly less than convinced and had kept the PMD case open.

This was what led to the tension in the meeting between Zarif and Amano. The Sealed Secret narrates the story as told by Abbas Araghchi, who was present at the meeting: “During the meeting I was sitting next to Dr. Zarif. These two officials spoke so sharply to each other that for a moment I thought Dr. Zarif was going to get up and come to blows with Amano.

“They were talking really harshly. The reason was that the agency’s deputy director had come to Iran, come to an agreement with Iranian official, closed the case and returned, but in Vienna Mr. Amano rejected the mutual agreement. At first I was to meet Mr. Amano. I told him that Tehran had an agreement with his deputy. He said ‘There’s only one man in this town’ – himself. When he said this I got angry. I said: ‘I cannot work with an organization whose deputy I can’t trust the word of.”

According to the book, Amano’s choice of phrasing –  “There’s only one man in this town” – was later echoed by Iranian officials during the P5+1 negotiations as a quip to indicate how difficult it was to work with the IAEA.

The Very Narrow Table

Until now, the public has never learned what happened at the meeting between Zarif and Amano over the detonators issue. “For the first time,” writes Araghchi, “I witnessed Dr. Zarif’s hands and voice shaking when he spoke in anger at that meeting. Amano, unlike usually, replied in kind...Earlier, Dr. Zarif had said more than once that ‘When my hands shake and my voice loses clarity and becomes unintelligible, it means I’m not in my normal state, and perhaps I have lost control’... This was clearly visible while he was at the meeting with Mr. Amano.”

Araghchi writes that the table between Zarif and Amano was very narrow, and they were physically very close: “I followed the bitter and snarling conversation with trepidation. I feared that Dr. Zarif, who was overflowing with anger at the irrationality of the other side, would get up and even get into a fight or slap the agency’s director general in the face. Amano was also very angry and shouted.”

When the situation deteriorated after a point, Araghchi decided to intervene and asked Zarif if he could speak. This calmed the situation somewhat: “Of course, the negotiations continued with the same severity. Since the documents about these long negotiations can only be published after the period that the law demands, perhaps for several decades, nobody would learn how difficult and excruciating the road that we took to close the PMD case was. Now, perhaps, historians will arrive at the conclusion that it was the most difficult negotiation mission in the diplomatic history of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

The Iranian negotiation team, according to The Sealed Secret, conveyed Amano’s refusal to accept his deputy’s agreement on detonators to Catherine Ashton, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, and to American officials. Eventually, with the help of the US Secretary of State John Kerry, Zarif’s proposal for closing the PMD case was put on the nuclear negotiators’ agenda.

Zarif argued that since the case belonged to the past it could not be closed with a definitive answer and the IAEA could never be 100 percent sure about it. He proposed that the IAEA announce that there were differing answers to the issues raised, and Iran’s answers were more credible and believable. Therefore, he said, “the PMD case can be closed without taking sides, and the parties involved can leave this issue behind them and move towards the future.”

Lifting international nuclear sanctions against the Islamic Republic depended on closing the IAEA’s case on PMDs. This eventually happened at the eleventh hour in December 2015 with the signing of a bilateral agreement between the Islamic Republic and the IAEA, and with the support of President Obama’s administration.

 

Related Coverage:

Zarif's Book, Part III: Mohsen Fakhrizadeh's Role in the Nuclear Talks Revealed

Zarif's Book, Part II: The Obama Meeting that Never Happened

Zarif's New Book Lifts Lid on Iran's Nuclear Strife

Zarif's Farewell Letter to Parliament Reveals Obstacles Blocking a JCPOA Return

Zarif Apologizes After Khamenei Reprimands Him in Telling Speech

Revolutionary Guards Raid President and Foreign Minister's Offices

48 Hours of Tumult: The Aftermath of Zarif's Interview

Zarif Blames Russia and the Guards for Harming the JCPOA in Leaked Interview

Zarif vs. the Guards: A New Round

IranWire Exclusive: Javad Zarif is "Frustrated" With the Guards and the Government

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