History of Negotiations and Deals Between Iran and the U.S.; The Return of the Key Cake?

Donald Trump is not the first U.S. President to propose negotiations and dialogue with the officials of the Islamic Republic; previous presidents have also made this offer, and even George H.W. Bush called Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, but the call went unanswered due to lack of readiness. While officials of the Islamic Republic avoid direct and public negotiations with the U.S., they scramble for secret negotiations, to the extent that Mir Hossein Mousavi wrote in his resignation letter in 1988 that contacts were being made with the U.S. through 'five different channels' without his knowledge. Negotiating with the U.S. has also been a significant opportunity for factions in power, competing to take the lead in these negotiations. Hassan Rouhani, Mehdi Karroubi, and Sadegh Tabatabai are among the prominent figures who have had unconfirmed reports about their secret negotiations with U.S. officials. Public negotiations with U.S. officials effectively became a taboo after the U.S. embassy was seized. Shortly after the issue of the release of American hostages became entangled with the parliament that was supposed to convene three months later in June 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini took control of the situation. Ultimately, after extensive discussions, the parliament allowed the government to negotiate for the release of the hostages, and Behzad Nabavi was tasked with this responsibility. With the signing of the Algiers Accord on January 19, 1981, the hostages were released on January 20 of the same year, but the legal repercussions of this accord plagued Iran for years. Abolhassan Banisadr, the President of Iran, also filed a complaint against Behzad Nabavi due to this agreement. Banisadr wrote that Ayatollah Khomeini disrupted his plans to resolve the hostage issue and that Sadegh Tabatabai, his son-in-law's brother, was sent to Germany to negotiate with Warren Christopher, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, and promised the release of the hostages. He also accuses Khomeini's close associates of negotiating with Ronald Reagan's associates to prevent the hostages from being released before the presidential election. According to Robert Parry's book 'October Surprise,' William Casey, Reagan's campaign manager, claimed that during a meeting with Mehdi and Hassan Karroubi in Madrid, he expressed interest in having the hostages released but only after Reagan's inauguration. Among the Islamic Republic's officials, Hashemi Rafsanjani's close associates had the most secret negotiations with the U.S. Ali Hashemi, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's nephew, is among those who negotiated with Reagan's and George H.W. Bush's administrations. In an interview with the Shahrvand newspaper, he said: 'During George H.W. Bush's time, one day, coordination was made between the Iranian Foreign Minister and Iran's representative at the UN to see if a conversation could be arranged between Bush and Mr. Hashemi Rafsanjani. The next morning, Mr. Bush called the Iranian presidential office and was left on hold. He wanted to speak with Mr. Hashemi, but the presidential office was not prepared at all, and the calls were cut off. However, apparently when the Iranian representative at the UN spoke with the Foreign Minister, his aim was to inquire about whether this phone call would take place, and the Iranian Foreign Minister, without realizing the situation, said it was fine, and this message was conveyed.' The most famous disclosed negotiation between Iran and the U.S. remains McFarlane's trip to Iran. Hassan Rouhani, Mohammad Ali Hadi Najafabadi, Mohsen Kangerlou, Ahmad Vahidi, and Fereydoun Varidnejad were among the Iranian officials present in this trip and before and after it in negotiations with U.S. officials. According to some accounts from Islamic Republic officials and some government opponents, these negotiations were revealed by close associates of Mehdi Hashemi, the brother of Ayatollah Montazeri's son-in-law, but other accounts attribute the disclosure to Israel and Hafez al-Assad, the President of Syria. During George H.W. Bush's presidency, negotiations also took place between representatives of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and the U.S. President, resulting in the release of American hostages in Lebanon. Alongside these secret negotiations, proposals for direct negotiations between Iran and the U.S. were also put forward. Saeed Rajai Khorasani, Iran's representative at the UN and a figure close to the conservative faction, was among those who proposed this. However, an article advocating direct negotiations written by Attaollah Mohajerani, Rafsanjani's parliamentary deputy, in the newspaper Ettelaat in May 1990 received the broadest response at the time, but Ayatollah Khamenei called these remarks 'naivety.' At that time, Ayatollah Khamenei was not the only one opposed to negotiations with the U.S.; the majority of the third parliament, chaired by Mehdi Karroubi, also strongly opposed Mohajerani and proposed a plan to legalize the severance of relations with the U.S. Mohajerani resigned due to this pressure, but Rafsanjani did not accept his resignation. Ultimately, Ayatollah Khamenei wrote a letter to Mohajerani stating, 'I have criticized an idea and did not intend to insult anyone, and if you were insulted without my intention, I apologize.' During Mohammad Khatami's presidency, during his first trip to New York, there were high hopes for direct negotiations between the two countries, and Bill Clinton was eager to meet Khatami, but Khatami hid to avoid meeting him, and according to reports, the U.S. President only shook hands with Khatami's bodyguard. During that period, Mehdi Karroubi, the Speaker of the Sixth Parliament, in September 2000, when he traveled to New York to participate in an inter-parliamentary conference, encountered Arlen Specter, a U.S. Congressman, during a visit to the Metropolitan Museum and agreed to a brief conversation at their request. This meeting is recorded as the only meeting of an Iranian parliament speaker with U.S. officials and was not repeated in other parliaments. Prior to this meeting, several requests for direct negotiations between Iranian parliament representatives and U.S. senators had been made, including by Joseph Biden, who pursued this proposal through the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Gholam Heydar Ibrahim Bay Salami, the then-head of the Inter-Parliamentary Council of Iran, sent the request from the Inter-Parliamentary Union to Khatami, who referred it to Hassan Rouhani and the then-Foreign Minister, and ultimately no response was provided. Gholam Heydar Ibrahim Bay Salami also proposed direct negotiations between Iran and the U.S. in his capacity as spokesperson for the Special Committee on Afghanistan in the Sixth Parliament. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, however, extensive communications occurred between Iranian and U.S. officials, and the two countries agreed on many details of the Loya Jirga. During Khatami's presidency, there were also reports of an informal dinner meeting between two U.S. senators and Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran's then-representative at the UN. Prior to these reports, Kamal Kharrazi, the Foreign Minister, met with Joseph Biden, a Democrat member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on the sidelines of the Davos summit in Switzerland. After this meeting, Kharrazi announced that Biden informally approached him during the Davos summit and expressed his willingness to talk. Subsequently, there were numerous reports about the readiness of several U.S. senators to travel to Iran. For instance, in the Seventh Parliament, Mohammad Reza Bahonar, the Deputy Speaker, reacted to these requests by stating, 'If U.S. parliamentary officials want to come to hear Iran's perspective, there is no objection, because otherwise they should know that we have heard their words very well.' In the Eighth Parliament, U.S. senators also sent several letters to the Iranian Parliament. In this parliament, Mohammad Reza Tabesh, a representative from Yazd and Khatami's nephew, along with Gholam Reza Mesbah Yazdi and Kazem Delkhah, conservative parliament representatives, visited the office of one of the Congress representatives during their trip to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund autumn conference and had discussions with him. During Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency, officials from both countries also negotiated publicly at least twice and once secretly. In 2007, Hossein Kazemi Qomi and Ryan Crocker, the ambassadors of Iran and the U.S. in Iraq, directly negotiated with each other. In October 2009, William Burns, the U.S. representative in the Geneva negotiations, met with Saeed Jalili, the Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, on the sidelines of the 1+5 negotiations with Iran. At the end of Ahmadinejad's presidency, the two countries also negotiated at the level of deputy foreign ministers in Oman. However, during Hassan Rouhani's presidency, for the first time since the severance of relations, the presidents of the two countries had telephone conversations, and the foreign ministers of both countries negotiated several times. These negotiations resulted in the Vienna nuclear agreement. Ayatollah Khamenei, however, has repeatedly emphasized that these meetings were only about the nuclear issue. Nevertheless, the foreign ministers of both countries also spoke with each other several times by phone, and according to some analysts, in the case of the detention of American sailors, their communication was able to prevent a crisis. Now, Donald Trump has proposed a meeting with Hassan Rouhani at a time when the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA has thwarted all of Rouhani's plans. Hassan Rouhani was the most prominent figure in negotiations with McFarlane and other American officials; in a trip where the American delegation brought a cake shaped like a key as a gift, symbolizing the unlocking of relations between the two countries. Perhaps Hassan Rouhani was inspired by that key cake in the 2013 presidential election. Now, Trump's proposal could be a sign for Rouhani of the return of that key cake and a spare key for Rouhani's broken lock. However, it is unlikely that Ayatollah Khamenei will allow Rouhani to benefit from this spare key. The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, however, has no problem with secret negotiations, and according to political activist Reza Alijani, Iranian officials are more eager for these negotiations than U.S. officials, but Trump’s administration is seeking to exert more pressure through sanctions to gain more concessions in these negotiations.