Zarif's Book, Part V: Foreign Minister First Tried to Resign in 2014

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 fifth article on this book covers the events that followed a March 2014 meeting in Tehran between Catherine Ashton, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, and six Iranian woman activists that drove Zarif to the brink of resigning just six months after he took on the foreign ministry brief.

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In The Sealed Secret, Zarif writes that in March 2014, a mere six months into his job as foreign minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran, he came under such pressure that he felt compelled to resign. On March 17 he was preparing to leave for a round of nuclear negotiations in Vienna, and also had his letter of resignation ready to send to President Hassan Rouhani’s office by a special courier. But — through “God’s will”, as he puts it — he left the letter in his bag by mistake, and later changed his mind.

Zarif would attempt to resign again five years later in February 2019. That resignation letter, which Rouhani rejected out of hand, was well-publicised even at the time. But the ex-foreign minister has not related the 2014 episode until now.

The letter Zarif planned to send that year, as reproduced in the book, clearly evinces his mindset at the time of writing. “Today, I am leaving for the second round of the landmark nuclear negotiations in a situation where victories are presented as defeats, honor and dedication to national interests are met with insults and lies, the foreign policy apparatus is dealing with financial and structural misery, and instead of gratitude towards the foreign minister and his colleagues, we receive reprimands.”

Much of the letter hinges on the domestic pressure that Zarif says bore down on him after a meeting took place in early March at the Austrian embassy in Tehran between Catherine Ashton, then-High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, and six Iranian women’s and civil rights activists, including veteran advocate Narges Mohammadi and Gohar Eshghi, the mother of an Iranian blogger who died in custody.

This meeting, Zarif claims, had taken place without the knowledge of the Foreign Ministry. In the grand scheme of things, it was not all that unconventional: Iranian presidents have previously met with anti-Israel rabbis while in New York to attend the UN General Assembly, and have never been reprimanded by the US government over these meetings.

But as Zarif lays out, the political climate in the Islamic Republic was different. “The perverted and dishonest reaction to Ms. Ashton’s meeting with a few people,” he asserts, “made the mighty Islamic Republic’s regime so vulnerable it has led not only to a parliamentary fact-finding commission, but also to haste, finger pointing and lying.

“To cover his own weaknesses, the responsible official lied to the parliament’s National Security Committee... and told them that he had warned the Foreign Ministry before the meeting took place. In fact, not only had he known nothing about the meeting until about 18 hours later, but he had also told the deputy foreign minister it had taken place on Sunday night (a day later) at the residence of the Greek ambassador, not at the Austrian embassy (the real meeting place). Even worse, to pretend he had done his duty and it had been the Foreign Ministry that had ignored his warning, he produced a defective version of a private conversation between two government officials and [misrepresented] to MPs a totally principled statement by the deputy foreign minister, who had told him, as a colleague, that the regime was too strong to care about such meetings.”

Characteristically, Zarif’s text is stuffed with ambiguities and obfuscation. His original letter of resignation may well have been more explicit in its narration of what had gone on. Either way, Zarif then says that security official’s report found its way into the hands of Ayatollah Khamenei: “[this] totally untrue report upset the Exalted Supreme Leader, who strongly reprimanded me.”

While the Foreign Ministry was still insisting it had not known about the meeting, Catherine Ashton’s own spokesperson then made life all the more difficult for Zarif and his colleagues: the host, they said on March 10, had indeed been informed about the meeting ahead of time.

Parliamentarians close to the Revolutionary Guards were outraged. They called the meeting a sign of “interference in Iranian affairs” and the “selling out of national honor” on the part of the Foreign Ministry. In an unusual intervention, General Masoud Jazayeri, Deputy Commander of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, also declared that the meeting had been “a prelude to further interference.”

Ten days after the meeting on March 17, amid unprecedented turmoil, Zarif and the nuclear negotiating team were poised to leave for Vienna. On the agenda for the first day of the talks was a banquet at the Iranian embassy – in honor of Catherine Ashton.

The day before the group left, The Sealed Secret relates how Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi scrambled to meet with the German ambassador in Tehran, telling him before their departure: “Dr. Zarif is upset about the meeting [between Ashton and the woman activists] and he’s under heavy pressure inside the country. He is not convinced that a banquet will be beneficial before negotiations begin."

Because the perceived slight had taken place at the Austrian embassy, Araghchi also suggested at the eleventh hour that the talks be moved to a city other than Vienna. This unsurprisingly did not come to pass.

Before leaving Tehran, the Iranian negotiating team emailed Helga Schmid, Catherin Ashton’s deputy, and informed her that the banquet at the embassy in Vienna had been cancelled. If a meeting became necessary, they said, it could be held at the deputy level instead. 

Talks between the deputies were duly held in Vienna on March 18. According to The Sealed Secret, Araghchi took the opportunity to “complain bitterly” to Schmid about “the unconventional meeting held by Ms. Ashton... and asked why the spokesman had incorrectly stated the meeting had been coordinated with the Iranian government.

“Ms. Schmid showed surprise, and asked, ‘Is all these anger and ill temper because Ashton has met with a few Iranian women?’... At the end of the meeting Ms. Schmid also expressed her unhappiness over the cancellation of the working dinner. She claimed that Ms. Ashton had been extremely annoyed, and felt she had been insulted.”

Eventually Zarif and Ashton compromised by meeting the next morning. The Sealed Secret gives only Zarif’s side of that meeting, but claims he sharply rebuked her for meeting with Iranian women activists, telling her: “Your action not only did not help to strengthen human rights, but it made the situation worse.”

Conciliatory Words Attributed to EU Foreign Affairs Chief

The book proclaims: “After harsh words from Zarif, her frowning face changed and she tried to justify her meeting in Tehran from a defensive stance.” Ashton reportedly told Zarif that she had told the Iranian ambassador in Brussels about her planned meeting: “I take pride in speaking with the women of any country that I visit,” she is cited as saying. “Another reason for the meeting was that it coincided with the International Women’s Day. I had no bad intentions; there was no reason to hide anything from you. I gave the Council of Europe a positive assessment of my visit to Iran.”

The Sealed Secret further quotes her as having said: “After the meeting, I didn’t give interviews, I didn’t issue a statement, and I said nothing whatsoever about human rights in Iran. After my visit, Iran’s standing in the European Union improved... All the women I met told me the situation in Iran had improved. They were all worried about the continuation of sanctions. They asked for sanctions to be lifted and I reported this to the Council of Europe.”

The book does not say how Zarif and his colleagues reacted to the simple and honest explanation it records her as having given. But it would have made little odds; hardline elements of the Islamic Republic had already fully exploited the incident to sabotage the nuclear talks and undermine Khamenei’s trust in the negotiators.

“I believe it is impossible for me to continue my service,” Zarif had written in his letter of resignation the day before. “With God’s help...I will complete this round of negotiations no matter what, but afterwards, I have to be excused.”

Some years later, in 2019, Zarif decided to resign for a second time. This time it was in protest against a meeting between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Ayatollah Khamenei and Hassan Rouhani in Tehran, which had taken place without his knowledge or presence. That discussion had been arranged by General Ghasem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force, and even Rouhani had barely heard a word of it beforehand.

“Sometimes,” Zarif reflects in The Sealed Secret, “I think it was a pity I didn’t send that [first] letter of resignation. When the plane took off, I saw that I still had it; I’d planned to give it to the head bodyguard to deliver to the president’s office. Once I was in the sky, I arrived at a new conclusion: if God had wanted this letter to get to its destination, it would not be flying like this.”

 

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