Iran's Former Top Diplomat Says Trump Invited Him To White House
Iran’s former foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in unprecedented revelations said that Donald Trump had invited him to the White House, but he was “not allowed” to go.
Iran’s former foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in unprecedented revelations said that Donald Trump had invited him to the White House, but he was “not allowed” to go.
Zarif was guest in a five-hour discussion session in Persian on the social media audio app, Club House, and around 40,000 people listened in.
The former foreign minister has long been a favorite target of Iran’s hardliners as the supposed architect of the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal and allegedly as a man pre-disposed to forge better ties with the United States and Europe. But in recent days these attacks intensified as Zarif began to tweet after a long silence.
Zarif without mentioning a name said, “A senator close to Trump came to see me in New York and said Trump had invited me to the White House. I relayed this message to Tehran and said if I fail [in resolving differences] I will accept punishment, but the message did not reach higher echelons and was rejected at lower levels.”
Although Zarif did not mention when this incident took place, media reports during his visits to New York show that it was most likely in the first half of 2019,or a year after Trump withdrew from the JCPOA.
However, his claim that his message was not relayed to top decision makers leaves question marks. The nuclear dispute with the United States, crippling sanctions the Trump administration imposed and the danger of a military confrontation at the time, made a meeting with Trump a crucial development for Tehran and such a message would have certainly been delivered to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the ultimate decision maker.
Zarif’s claim that lower-level people prevented him from meeting Trump, might be a tactic to protect Khamenei, whom many Iranians blame for the costly confrontation with the United States.
In fact, Zarif himself admitted during the discussion that “all reports were being relayed to Khamenei, and he expressed his opinion whenever he wanted…”
Zarif also spoke at length about his diplomatic efforts, trying to enlist the help of French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin to make an opening with the Trump administration.
Zarif claimed that Macron told him in Paris that Trump was ready to meet with him, but “I did not have permission to meet with Trump.”
“In contrast to Trump, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was a person, who driven by his ideology spoiled everything related to the JCPOA. The triangle of Benjamin Netanyahu, Mike Pompeo and [former national security adviser] John Bolton” did everything to prevent a meeting with Trump.
This statement somewhat contradicted Zarif’s earlier assertion that he was not allowed by Tehran to meet with Trump.
“I asked Vladimir Putin to directly relay Iran’s plan for the JCPOA to Trump, without [Secretary of State] Pompeo’s intervention, but Pompeo realized this and prevented it.”
Zarif speaking about Iran’s inability to pressure the US said, “Iran can pressure Europe but due to American economic clout the Europeans acted in a weak manner regarding Iran, but they helped the Islamic Republic to obtain management posts in the United Nations.”
The former foreign minister was referring to European banks and companies generally abiding by US sanctions and adding to the economic pressure on the Islamic Republic. However, he did not mention any details about the posts he claimed Europeans helped secure at the UN.
Regarding the JCPOA negotiations from 2013-2015, Zarif said, “We wanted to break the security consensus formed against Iran and for this reason we negotiated. Removing [international] sanctions was not our only goal.”
Zarif’s appearance and statements in the Club House discussion are bound to reverberate in Iran and lead to strong attacks by hardliners. It is not clear why he chose to speak now and to what extent this is a part of an orchestrated effort by top decision makers, who are facing similar international isolation and security threats as a decade ago.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ruled out importing United States and British made Covid vaccines in January 2021, arguing that Western countries could not be trusted and Iran was well placed to develop its own vaccines or should take them from more reliable sources.
At the time, the US-German Pfizer, US-made Moderna and the British-made AstraZeneca were the only vaccines approved internationally.
But in a new paper published in association with the British Medical Journal and Yale called, ‘A quantitative evaluation of the impact of vaccine roll-out rate and coverage on reducing deaths from COVID-19: a counterfactual study on the impact of the delayed vaccination programme in Iran,’ a team of experts have found evidence to show mass neglect on the part of the regime.
The paper, compiled by experts of Iranian descent, Mahan Ghafari, Sepanta Hosseinpour, Mohammad Saeid Rezaee-Zavareh, Stefan Dascalu, Somayeh Rostamian, Kiarash Aramesh, Kaveh Madani and Shahram Kordasti, compared Iran with eight model countries with similar income brackets and dominant COVID-19 vaccine types.
The analysis revealed that faster roll-outs were associated with higher numbers of averted deaths. "While Iran's percentage of fully vaccinated individuals would have been similar to Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Turkey under counterfactual roll-out rates, adopting Turkey's rates could have averted up to 50,000 more deaths, whereas following Bangladesh's rates could have led to up to 52,800 additional loss of lives in Iran,” said the paper.
“Also, following Bahrain's model as an upper bound benchmark, Iran could have averted 75,300 deaths throughout the pandemic, primarily in the under 50 age groups.”
Just last year, it was announced in a shock move that Iran's Judiciary had accepted a lawsuit against the Supreme Leader and others for delay in mass vaccination and thousands of preventable deaths.
The 22-page litigation called for the prosecution of Khamenei and other officials, including former president Hassan Rouhani and member of the National Coronavirus Combat Taskforce, for "manslaughter of over 100,000 Iranians." Lawyers who filed the case, Mohammad-Reza Faghihi and Arash Kaykhosravi, were among six people arrested in August 2021 apparently after meeting to discuss their legal action over Covid, but later freed.
While Khamenei banned the Western vaccines, hundreds of millions of dollars were distributed among government-run companies with no experience in vaccine development to produce a homegrown variant.
One vaccine that was introduced into the local market in June 2021 was Barakat, developed by an affiliate of the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order Foundation, a charitable-cum-business entity controlled by Khamenei’s office. As a result, Iran, which was receiving very few vaccines from Russia and China until August lost precious months to vaccinate the majority of its population.
The Barakat vaccine with delays in production has only been used for inoculating a fraction of the population. Critics call these decisions and failures “Covid mismanagement”, which the lawsuit tried to pursue.
Vaccination suddenly jumped in August with Chinese and AstraZeneca vaccines, as the Khamenei ban was rescinded when Ebrahim Raisi, Khamenei’s candidate for president assumed office. Figures of total deaths are unclear due to the secretive nature of the regime, but officially stand around 150,000 according to declared numbers given to the World Health Organization.
Human Rights Watch called Khamenei’s ban “moves to politicize vaccine acquisition” but acknowledged that US ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions thwarted Iran’s access to vaccines.
This assessment is also questionable, because medicines are exempt from US sanctions and Iran regularly imports billions of dollars of drugs and raw material to produce medication from Europe, India and elsewhere.
The United States delivered a statement on verification and monitoring of Iran’s activities before France, Germany and the UK (E3) also issued a joint statement on Tehran’s implementation of its nuclear commitments under the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal, which is considered defunct.
Despite criticism by Israel accusing the IAEA of watering down its investigation into Iran's activities, both statements – by the US and the E3 – expressed gratitude to the Agency for its objective reporting on Iran’s nuclear program. “We would like to express our appreciation for the Agency’s professional and impartial work, and in particular, inspections of Iran’s facilities,” read the E3 statement.
Following unusually strong criticism by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that accused his agency of "capitulation to Iranian pressure," IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi told a news conference on Monday that "We never ever, never ever water down our standards.”
Last week the IAEA issued a report saying that Iran had partially cooperated in an investigation about three sites suspected of having been used as secret nuclear locations more than two decades ago.
Iran had tried to stymie the investigation since 2019. The IAEA had repeatedly denounced Iranian stonewalling, which spurred its 35-nation Board of Governors to pass a resolution last year demanding Iran to comply immediately. However, in a report to member states earlier in June, Grossi said Iran had provided explanation about depleted uranium traces at one site.
Although the E3 appreciated the IAEA’s “objective reporting,” they said: “We see no substantial change in Iran’s behavior. Over the reporting period, Iran has unabatedly continued escalating its nuclear program beyond civilian justification, and has displayed little will to implement the transparency commitments laid out in the Joint Statement agreed last March.”
Noting that the Director General’s report shows Iran continues down its path of significant nuclear escalation, they mentioned Tehran's expansion of its stockpile of 5%, 20% and 60% enriched uranium.
Highlighting that Iran’s total enriched uranium stockpile is now more than 21 times the JCPOA limit, the E3 said the stockpile has increased by almost one third, to 114.1 kg in the form of UF6 (uranium hexafluoride or hex).
"This is almost three times the amount of nuclear material from which the possibility of manufacturing a nuclear explosive device cannot be excluded,” they warned.
They also expressed worries about Iran continuing to install additional advanced centrifuge cascades, which permanently improved its enrichment capabilities.
The three also referred to the detection last January of uranium particles enriched to 83.7% U-235, highlighting the seriousness of Iran’s continuing escalation. “This enrichment was grossly inconsistent with the level declared by Iran and constituted an unprecedented and extremely grave development, for which there is no credible civilian justification,” they underlined, adding that the significance of the detection of undeclared changes made to the cascade configuration at Fordow should be fully understood.
“Iran is still using a configuration which can enable the production of highly enriched material at levels considerably over 60%, showing Iran’s disregard for the gravity of this development,” the E3 stated.
They argued that the circumstances of such a discovery “through an unannounced inspection,” as well as the "accumulation of highly enriched uranium continue to ring alarm bells.”
They pointed to Iran’s decision to remove IAEA’s surveillance and monitoring equipment, saying the move had detrimental implications for the Agency’s ability to provide assurance of the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program.
They urged Iran to re-install all equipment in all the locations deemed necessary by the IAEA, and to provide all the footage from the cameras, including data recorded from February 2021 to June 2022, during which the nuclear watchdog had no access to data on centrifuge and component manufacturing.
Referring to the talks to revive the JCPOA, which collapsed due to Iran’s strenuous demands beyond the nuclear accord, they expressed deep regret that Iran did not accept a "fair and balanced deal" tabled by the EU almost a year ago, and instead chose to accelerate its program. “Iran bears full responsibility for this situation.”
The statement by the US was somewhat similar in concept but a little different in wording. Ambassador Laura S.H. Holgate also expressed concern about the enrichment of uranium to 60%, saying, “No other country in the world today utilizes uranium enriched to 60 percent for the purpose Iran claims.”
“Iran argues it is unfairly targeted by others. The reality remains that Iran continues to single itself out through its own actions. Iran should cease its nuclear provocations that pose grave proliferation risks,” read parts of the US statement.
According to the statement, Iran ended hopes of a mutual return to JCPOA implementation last September by demanding that safeguards obligations be implemented differently in Iran than in all other states.
“Such demands are simply impossible to accept” as “nowhere in the world would IAEA inspectors ignore possible undeclared nuclear material and activities, and the detection of nuclear material particles at multiple undeclared locations.”
Earlier in the day, Mohammad Marandi, the advisor to the Iranian negotiating team in the nuclear talks, reiterated that Iran will not sign a nuclear deal until the IAEA declares all outstanding cases resolved.
On Tuesday, Gilad Erdan told The Jerusalem Post Annual Conference in New York that “the real bad news is that apparently there is an interim agreement that is being discussed these days with Iran.”
It “would put the Iranian nuclear program on hold but won’t roll back the enriched uranium or the nuclear facilities of Iran and in exchange, they will get economic benefits,” he stressed.
He made the comments a few days after National Security Advisor Tzachi Hanegbi and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer met with the US National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan at the White House to discuss Iran's pursuit of atomic bombs at a time when Tehran has enriched uranium close to weapons-grade levels.
There is concern in Israel that Washington will attempt to revive the defunct 2015 nuclear pact between the six world powers and Iran.
Moscow's military ties to Tehran, as well as its use of Iranian-made drones against Ukraine, have led the Biden administration not to discard that possibility.
“The international community has failed, totally failed to block Iran from advancing itself to becoming a nuclear threshold state,” Erdan noted.
IAEA Director General on Monday presented the latest report on Iranian verification and monitoring.
“Iranian enriched uranium stockpiles have risen by more than a quarter in three months, according to Rafael Grossi.
He reminded the Board that in March this year, Iran and the IAEA agreed to take additional appropriate measures for monitoring and verification. “Some progress has been made but not at the level, pace and sustained rhythm that I would expect,” Grossi said.
“The inventory of enriched uranium is growing at a very fast pace, and the activities are also growing. So, the presence of the IAEA should be commensurate with that,” added Grossi.
The Israeli UN ambassador reiterated this Tuesday, saying “what we have been seeing in the last year proves that everything that Israel has been saying has been proven correct,” Iran only becoming more bold.
“I do not see any sanctions that are being discussed and might be imposed against the nuclear program of Iran,” he said, claiming there is no deterrent against the regime’s capability building.
“We always believed that the only formula to deter Iran’ which is a rogue and ruthless regime, is through a credible military threat,” he reiterated.
A ceremony to present Fattah missile on Tuesday was attended by President Ebrahim Raisi, Revolutionary Guards Chief Commander Major General Hossein Salami, and IRGC Aerospace Force Commander Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh as well as a dozen other senior officials.
Boastful statements by IRGC commanders about the unprecedented level of cooperation between the Raisi administration and the IRGC, which – given the occasion it was announced – will work as a prod to heighten Western concerns about Iran's missile capabilities.
Iran claims its hypersonic missile has a range of 1,400 kilometers, can breach and overcome all anti-missile shields, and hits speeds of Mach 13-15, which means about 13 to 15 times faster than the speed of sound -- known as Mach 1.
Currently available technology perhaps support hypersonic missiles flying at 5-8 Machs, so Iran's claim of 15 mach speed seems an exaggeration.
For a missile to be called hypersonic, it should fly at least five times faster than the speed of sound. The threshold of Mach 5 is used because a range of physical effects start becoming a significant engineering challenge at that speed.
In addition, a true hypersonic missile should also be maneuverable to be useful, which poses a significant challenge not only to Iran but even for great military powers, such as the United States, which still has not fielded such a weapon.
The term is also used generally to refer to two types of weapons that are being developed through contemporary defense programs: Hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) and hypersonic cruise missiles (HCMs). It is not clear which type Fattah is. However, since Iran described it as ballistic, it is most probably an HGV.
But even that description is misleading. An HGV is a relatively large projectile lifted by a ballistic missile into the atmosphere, which at a certain point begins gliding toward its target.
An HCM is a cruise missile, which means it does not glide but is self-propelled at a hypersonic speed.
No Iranian official has elaborated on when Fattah would hit hypersonic speed: during its first phase of flight powered by a ballistic missile, or when it is gliding toward the target.
Unless Iranian authorities say at what altitude the missile will hit Mach 15, the claim is not even verifiable.
The IRGC claims that with a solid fuel propulsion system and a second-stage mobile nozzle, the missile has the ability to reach very high speeds and perform various maneuvers in and out of the Earth’s atmosphere in order to overcome all types of air defense systems. Hajizadeh saying Iran is now among only four countries that have the technology to manufacture hypersonic missiles. He did not name the countries he had in mind.
According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the reports about such missiles demonstrate how confusing -- and potentially distorting -- the term ‘hypersonic’ is, noting that some of the news coverage of similar events have indicated “a lack of understanding of the different types of ‘hypersonic missiles’, the role of their speed and maneuvering capabilities, the physics behind them, and their military capabilities and missions.”
Hajizadeh added that unlike other types of missiles, Fattah cannot be countered by any defense system, noting that the hypersonic missile cannot be destroyed by any missile due to its cross-range maneuvers, meaning movement in various directions and heights.
However, a Brookings Institution report in May– titled ‘Don’t believe the hypersonic hype’ -- , debunked several such claims, and mentioned the case of the Russian Kinzhal missile, which President Vladimir Putin had announced in 2018 as a “hypersonic” weapon that could overcome all existing air defense systems. However, in May, Ukraine used US-supplied Patriot batteries to down several Kinzhals, shattering the myth of a Russian hypersonic weapon.
SIPRI says that the questioning why certain actors adopt this terminology – given a lack of understanding of the limitations of this descriptor -- can “help reveal motivations and vested interests in the hype around hypersonic missiles, i.e. to appear threatening.”
Highlighting that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has supported and approved the missile activities and even has chosen the name 'Fattah’ -- which means ‘the opener,’ Hajizadeh said “Our activities in this field do not end with the manufacturing of this missile. We will continue this path so that no enemy even imagines attacking Iran.”