U.S. and Iran in indirect talks over nuclear program and prisoners

The Biden administration is conducting indirect bilateral talks with Iran that it hopes, at a minimum, will curtail Tehran’s nuclear program short of weapons development, end its proxy attacks on U.S. forces in Syria and bring home three longtime American prisoners in exchange for limited access to some of Iran’s billions of dollars frozen overseas.

Begun several months ago, the talks are not a revival of negotiations over restoring the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, according to U.S., European and Middle Eastern officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the sensitive issue. Until President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the agreement in 2018, it eased U.S. sanctions on Iran in exchange for verifiable nuclear restrictions.

President Biden’s attempts to reinstate the deal ended last fall, after more than a year of sporadic negotiations, when Iran rejected what the United States and its European partners believed was a viable offer.

Instead, the current discussions are an attempt to draw clear red lines and reverse what has been a steady escalation in Iranian aggression and tensions, exacerbated by Tehran’s crackdown on protests and weapons shipments to Russia for use in Ukraine.

U.S. negotiators have warned that further attacks in Syria, the most recent of which took place in March, and continued high-level uranium enrichment that has come dangerously close to weapons grade levels will elicit a response - including military action - that neither side wants.

Administration officials have tried to downplay the scope of the diplomatic effort since reports that a new U.S.-Iran agreement was imminent first surfaced in Israeli media earlier this month. While not denying indirect contacts with Iran, U.S. officials have rejected any characterization of a pending “deal.”

White House and State Department officials declined to comment on the ongoing talks.

But the media reports have led to outspoken criticism by the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and some U.S. lawmakers.

House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) said in a Thursday letter to Biden that he was “deeply disturbed” that the administration was re-engaging with Tehran, “and that the results of these discussions have included the apparent greenlighting of sizable payments to Iran.”

Hours after McCaul released his letter, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters that “some of the reports that we’ve seen about an agreement about nuclear matters and detainees are simply not accurate or not true.”

The talks are part of the administration’s efforts to use quiet, high-level diplomacy to address problems in the Middle East and Persian Gulf, where China and Russia have expanded their presence as U.S. influence and interest have been perceived to be waning. Those efforts also include increased outreach to Saudi Arabia to nudge it toward relations with Israel and promote a settlement of the war in Yemen.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appeared last week to signal his approval for some sort of arrangement with the West, saying it was “not a problem,” as long as the country’s nuclear infrastructure was not “changed,” according to video footage of his remarks during a meeting with scientists and officials working in Iran’s nuclear industry.

Khamenei also said that Iran should maintain “cooperation and communication” with the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, while reiterating his longtime position that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons, which he said were “contradictory to religion.”

A senior European diplomat long involved in talks with Iran said the administration’s European partners were not entirely sure of the contours of the current discussions, but noted that “it is clear that they are aware that if the Iranian nuclear program continues at full speed the crisis is unavoidable.”

Representatives from Britain, France and Germany, who were signatories to the original nuclear agreement along with Russia and China, met in the United Arab Emirates last week with Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Bagheri Kani.

Heightened concerns about ‘breakout’ time

U.S. officials insist they have offered nothing to Iran in exchange for progress on the nuclear and Syria fronts beyond refraining from retaliation and the prospect of more substantive diplomatic discussions. The talks are “meant to be de-escalatory,” said one person familiar with them. “Nobody in this administration wants anything bad to happen in the next year and a half,” as the United States approaches elections in 2024.

“Everybody agrees that the JCPOA as written is not going to come back,” this person said, referring to the 2015 accord officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. “We’re not going to get a new agreement based upon some magic breakout time.” Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to limit uranium enrichment to 3.67 percent purity, with strict international monitoring that U.S. intelligence said would prevent any “breakout” development of weapons-grade fuel for at least one year.

Since U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA, Iran has enriched and stockpiled uranium at 60 percent purity, following a path that its government laid out in 2020. Breakout is now estimated at a few weeks, and inspectors in February discovered traces enriched to about 84 percent - barely below the 90 percent required for nuclear weapons - although the IAEA suggested the small amount might have been a “mistake.”

“We’re never going to get 3.6 percent enrichment caps again,” the person familiar with the talks said. “That was a one-time opportunity that we took. On the other hand, I see no rationale for 60 percent. . . . So it would be good to work to see if you could get the 60 percent . . . blended to 20 or 19.9 percent. . . . I think trying to go beyond that is just a fool’s errand.”

Still, the person said, “I think doing something is better than doing nothing.”

Others disagree. Olli Heinonen, who oversaw the IAEA inspections of Iran’s nuclear program in the 2000s, said the restrictions that have been described in news accounts - that the administration would be willing to settle for 60 percent enrichment - would barely blunt Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon quickly if it decides to do so. With Tehran’s current stockpile and vast underground assemblages of centrifuges, the timeline for a weapon would remain quite short, he said. And it might be impossible for outsiders to tell if the regime has made a decision to build a device.

The IAEA has been wrangling with Iran to restore full compliance with inspections and monitoring. Without that, it is an open question whether inspectors could spot a small enrichment plant that might be “the size of a supermarket,” said Heinonen, now a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank.

An escalating, dangerous back-and-forth

The talks began several weeks after a March 23 drone attack on U.S. forces in Syria that killed an American contractor. Within hours, the United States had responded with an airstrike on an Iranian facility in Syria that killed a number of Syrian proxy fighters. Iran, which has maintained a channel of direct communications between its U.N. ambassador and Robert Malley, the chief U.S. negotiator to the now-defunct JCPOA talks, then sent indications it wanted to talk at a higher level.

Two meetings have since taken place between Iranian officials and Brett McGurk, the top Middle East official on the National Security Council, with the Persian Gulf sultanate of Oman serving as the venue and go-between and nearby Qatar also playing a role.

According to people familiar with the talks, McGurk told them that on the current path Tehran was on - with enrichment at 60 percent and inspectors being blocked from crucial tasks - there was no chance for renewed diplomacy that might lead to a reduction in sanctions.

Negotiations over the detainees - Iranian American businessmen Emad Shargi, Morad Tahbaz and Siamak Namazi - imprisoned on what the United States considers bogus espionage charges, are technically separate and conducted through Swiss officials.

But McGurk has reiterated the administration’s long-standing position that it could not envision real progress on other issues until the prisoners are released and Iran accounts for the 2007 disappearance there of retired FBI agent and CIA contractor Robert Levinson, who is presumed dead.

It is on the detainee issue that officials, and reports from the region, have indicated some progress.

“I can say they are close,” Omani Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi said in an interview Wednesday with Al-Monitor, a Washington-based website covering the Middle East. “This is probably a question of technicalities,” he said. “They need to have a framework [and] a time frame of how this should be orchestrated. I think they’re ironing those things out.”

“Those things,” Albusaidi made clear, referred to a potential release tied to the release of a portion of Iranian funds that have been held overseas for years under U.S. sanctions in conjunction with freeing of the detainees.

He spoke just a day after Iranian Finance Minister Ehsan Khandouzi said that at least some money would be released “in the coming weeks,” according to Iranian media reports. Khandouzi made no reference to a prisoner release.

A political time bomb

Allowing frozen Iranian assets to flow to Tehran is particularly fraught in political terms. The release of billions of frozen Iranian dollars concurrent with the freeing of U.S. hostages and implementation of the JCPOA in January 2016 brought harsh criticism for the Obama administration, which Republicans charged had handed over “pallets of cash” that Iran would use to fund terrorists.

The money under discussion would come from about $7 billion held in two South Korean banks under an arrangement initially authorized by the Trump administration that allowed for sanctioned purchases of Iranian oil, as long as payments for it were deposited in banks to which Iran had no access.

Under current regulations, theoretically, the money could be released to pay third parties for non-sanctioned Iranian humanitarian purchases, such as food and medicine, a pathway that India and other Iranian energy customers have used. But South Korean banks have declined to release any of the funds without explicit and unequivocal U.S. agreement that until now has not been forthcoming.

Although any agreement is believed to be months away, if it even can be reached, the Treasury Department is studying an arrangement under which the money would be transferred from South Korea to a U.S.-monitored account in a third country. Iran would apply for funds to go directly to a humanitarian organization, with each individual transaction being approved by Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. None of the money would pass through the U.S. or Iranian financial systems.

But while Biden could claim credit for freeing the detainees, even the closely monitored release of funds would encounter strong political head winds, both at home and in Israel.

Israel’s security establishment has been bracing for an announcement of a U.S. deal with Iran since media accounts began to emerge. Netanyahu, who encouraged Trump to pull out of the original accord in 2018 and warned that restoring the agreement could force Israel to act militarily against Iran, has repeated those warnings in recent days.

Referring to a recent phone call with Blinken, Netanyahu told his cabinet last week, “I reiterated our consistent position that returning to the nuclear agreement with Iran will not stop the Iranian nuclear program and will only enable Iran to channel funds to the terrorist organizations that it sponsors in the Middle East and around Israel’s borders.”

In private, however, the prime minister reportedly has downplayed the likely impact of the more limited discussions taking place in Oman. At a closed door briefing for the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Tuesday, Netanyahu characterized that potential agreement as more palatable to Jerusalem than the original nuclear accord, saying it’s “not a nuclear deal, it’s a mini-deal,” according to reports in Hebrew-language media that cited participants in the meeting.

“We will be able to handle it,” Netanyahu reportedly said.

Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Herzog, in recent remarks to a Jewish group in Washington, said Israel will reserve its right to “freedom of action,” meaning to strike Iran if it senses an imminent threat. But he also offered praise for Washington’s efforts to negotiate with Tehran.

“As far as we’re concerned, diplomacy in and of itself, and such understandings, are not necessarily bad to the extent that they can help deescalate a situation,” Herzog said, according to the Times of Israel.

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Hendrix reported from Jerusalem. Kareem Fahim in Istanbul and Michael Birnbaum in Washington contributed to this report.