14 Testy Months Behind U.S. Prisoner Swap With Iran - The New York Times - 0 views
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For a year, Obama administration officials had been meeting in secret with Iranian counterparts, seeking to free Americans imprisoned in the Islamic republic. Finally last fall, a deal for a prisoner release seemed all but sealed.
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But the Iranians arrived at the latest clandestine session in a Geneva hotel suite with a whole new proposal that insisted on the release of dozens of Iranians held in American prisons, essentially returning to initial demands that had long since been rejected.
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The Americans were flabbergasted. “We’ve already talked about this,” said Brett McGurk, the lead negotiator. But the Iranians were adamant, according to American officials informed about the meeting. Something back home had changed, part of the continuing battle inside Iran over how to deal with the United States. Someone in power in Tehran, it seemed, did not want a deal after all.
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Eventually, the deal got put back together by Secretary of State John Kerry and the American-educated Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. Five Americans were released in Iran over the weekend in exchange for seven Iranians freed by the United States.
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But it took 14 months of turbulent talks punctuated by high diplomatic drama and multiple near-collapses that paralleled the final year of nuclear negotiations. The secret negotiations were weighted by the baggage of a bitter history as the Iranian representatives berated their counterparts over past grievances, including the C.I.A.-backed coup in 1953 and American support for Iraq in its war with Iran in the 1980s.
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The Iranians were not the only ones grappling with divisions in their government about a possible deal. The Obama administration was engaged in a vigorous debate about whether to trade Iranian prisoners and, if so, which ones, with Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch objecting to any deal that equated innocent Americans seized for political gain with Iranian criminals indicted or convicted under Western legal traditions.
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In the end, officials said President Obama decided that to spare the Americans years — if not life — in an Iranian prison, he would make what he called a “one-time gesture” by releasing Iranians who had been accused or convicted of violating sanctions that he was lifting anyway as part of the nuclear agreement.
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Republican critics, while celebrating the release of the Americans, questioned the cost. “I think it’s a very dangerous precedent,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a leading Republican presidential candidate, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “The result of this, every bad actor on earth has been told to go capture an American. If you want terrorists out of jail, capture an American and President Obama is in the let’s-make-a-deal business.”
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Mr. Obama authorized a secret diplomatic channel to Iran to negotiate for their release, even as he was seeking a deal on Tehran’s nuclear program. Mr. McGurk, a top State Department official who had just brokered the departure of Iraq’s problematic prime minister, was tapped in October 2014 to lead the new talks with Iran.
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Brought together by the Swiss, who represent American interests in Tehran, Mr. McGurk’s team sat down with their Iranian counterparts in Geneva for the first time in November 2014, according to an account by several American officials on the condition of anonymity.