14 Testy Months Behind Prisoner Swap With Iran

WASHINGTON — 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 finalized.

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 U.S. prisons, essentially returning to initial demands that had long since been rejected.

The Americans were flabbergasted. “We’ve already talked about this,” said Brett McGurk, lead negotiator. But the Iranians were adamant, according to U.S. 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.

And so McGurk and his team picked up their papers and walked out, putting an abrupt end to the meeting. McGurk’s interlocutors had come from Iran’s state security apparatus, a group that had barely, if ever, met Americans, much less negotiated with them. They did not have the well-traveled, English-speaking demeanor of the two senior Iranians who had been negotiating the larger nuclear deal with the United States for more than two years.

Eventually, the deal got put back together by Secretary of State John Kerry and the U.S.-educated Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. Five Americans left Iran over the weekend in exchange for seven Iranians freed by the United States.

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.

Along the way, Iranian negotiators berated their U.S. counterparts over historic grievances dating to the 1953 CIA-backed coup. And, as negotiations reached their conclusion, they even quibbled Sunday over who would be allowed on the flight out of Tehran.

The Iranians were not the only ones grappling with divisions within their government about a possible deal.

In Washington, 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 gains with Iranian criminals indicted or convicted under Western legal traditions.

In the end, officials said President Barack 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.

Even then, there was a last-minute dispute on the airport tarmac — what one U.S. official said “was like a scene out of ‘Argo’” — as Iran refused to allow the mother and wife of one of the prisoners, Jason Rezaian of The Washington Post, to leave with him.

Only after Kerry made an urgent phone call to the Iranian foreign minister did the plane receive permission to take off with all the passengers.

Republican critics, while celebrating the release of the Americans, questioned the cost. “I think it’s a very dangerous precedent,” Sen. 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.”

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. 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.