VIENNA — International inspectors confirmed Saturday that Iran had dismantled large sections of its nuclear program, as agreed in a historic agreement last summer, paving the way for the lifting of oil and financial sanctions by the United States and other world powers.
The announcement came just hours after Iran said it had released four Americans, including The Washington Post reporter, Jason Rezaian, as part of a prisoner swap with the United States. U.S. officials said the two deals were negotiated separately, but Secretary of State John Kerry had made it clear in recent weeks that he was engaged in behind-the-scenes talks on the fate of the Americans, and clearly wanted the issue cleared up before the nuclear agreement went into effect.
In a statement, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Yukiya Amano, said that "agency inspectors on the ground verified that Iran has carried out all measures required under the JCPOA, to enable implementation day to occur," using the acronym for the accord, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
In recent weeks, Iran has shipped 98 percent of its nuclear fuel out of the country, destroyed the innards of a major plutonium-producing reactor and mothballed more than 12,000 of the centrifuges that enrich uranium.
For President Barack Obama, the lifting of the sanctions — a step attacked by Republicans in Congress, who voted unanimously against the nuclear deal — is a major step in ending more than three decades of hostility between the two countries. In the waning months of his presidency, it fulfills a promise Obama made to reverse course in the countries' relations, and will clearly be one of the defining elements of his legacy.
Iran's actions, he has argued, will assure the United States at least a year's notice if Iran races to build a bomb, and it ends peacefully a confrontation that led to some of the most severe economic sanctions ever, sabotage of Iran's facilities by a U.S.-Israeli cyberoperation and periodic threats of military action if Iran failed to relent. His critics in Congress claim that the effort is dangerously naïve, and that Iran will use the roughly $100 billion in frozen assets it will receive to support terrorism and other misadventures and, after a few years, when attention has turned elsewhere, will return to surreptitiously building a nuclear weapon.
The completion of the deal comes at a crucial time for the Iranian government of President Hassan Rouhani, who came to power vowing to get rid of the crippling sanctions and faces a critical parliamentary election at the end of February. Iranian officials raced to dismantle the facilities quickly — U.S. intelligence agencies had estimated it would take far longer — so that they could go to the polls with news that the frozen assets, mostly from oil sales, had been released, and could be used to prop up an ailing, contracting economy.
Facing intense criticism at home from military officials who fought giving up Iran's nuclear abilities, Rouhani will also argue that he succeeded in getting lifted the restrictions that kept Iranians from transferring funds with overseas relatives and trading in everything from carpets to crude oil.
He and Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif have an uphill battle: hard-liners did not want to reach any deal at all. Many were making a fortune from the sanctions, and others viewed the ability to build a nuclear weapon, even if they did not yet possess one, as critical to standing up to Israel and Saudi Arabia, both avowed enemies.
So for the United States, and for Obama, the arrival of "implementation day," as it was called in the nuclear accord, represents a huge roll of the dice.
The president and Kerry, with a little over a year left in office, are hoping to foster a new dialogue that will bear fruit in other areas, from ending the war in Syria to moving, slowly, to the eventual restoration of diplomatic relations.
But the past few weeks have been a reminder of the rocky path ahead: Just in the seven months since the deal was signed, Iran has violated a United Nations ban on missile tests — for which the United States has drafted but not announced new sanctions, different from those being suspended on Saturday — and doubled down on its support for Bashar Assad, the Syrian president and, at times, Iranian puppet.
At the same time, Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps also released, within 24 hours, 10 U.S. sailors who apparently drifted into Iranian waters inadvertently earlier this week. Obama administration officials said the quick release would not have been possible without the kind of relationship born of the intense diplomacy between Kerry and Zarif. Nor would Saturday's prisoner release, officials argued.
And, of course, the four imprisoned Americans have now been released.
The president's critics, including several of the Republican presidential hopefuls, say the deal has created a blindness in Washington to everything else: Iran's support for terrorism, its imprisonment of dissidents and even some Americans, its meddling in Iraq and Syria and its arms trade. They seized on the imagery of those sailors being held at gunpoint, hands behind their heads, to argue the opposite case, that Iran is running roughshod over the United States.