Revista de prensa

Politics and a Ruptured Tendon Don’t Faze Lead Iran Negotiator

Published: November 30, 2013

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It is an argument that she will be repeating over the next six months, as she tries to buy time in Congress while secreting herself away with intelligence analysts looking for any signs that Iran may be cheating. “She understands the fragility of what she’s just negotiated,” an administration colleague said. “If there’s any evidence of some secret nuclear site the Iranians forgot to tell her about, this is over.”Ms. Sherman was not the negotiator for President Clinton’s 1994 “freeze agreement” with North Korea, but as the assistant secretary for legislative affairs at the State Department, she had to sell that deal. She defends it to this day, noting that “during the Clinton administration not one ounce of plutonium was added to the North Korean stockpile.”In 2000, she was in a different job, as counselor to Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, and the two women, now friends, traveled to Pyongyang together to deal directly with Kim Jong-il, the country’s dictator, in an effort to curb his missile program.When President George W. Bush was in office, it became clear Mr. Kim had ordered creation of another pathway to a bomb — enriching uranium, in facilities similar to those in Iran — that was not explicitly covered by the freeze accord. “It’s clear that they all recognize how they got played before,” said George Perkovich, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Thomas Pickering, who under Mr. Clinton held the job Ms. Sherman holds now, said it also seemed clear “they have tried to sew up the loopholes, remembering the history.”

For example, in the negotiating sessions in Geneva, Ms. Sherman insisted on the daily inspections of the most worrisome Iranian sites, far more frequent than the inspections called for in North Korea’s case. She pressed for a full halt on construction at the heavy water reactor at Arak that resembles facilities that the North Koreans used for their weapons development.

This time, unlike the North Korea negotiations, Ms. Sherman is not talking directly with the man who she says “holds the nuclear file,” Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Instead, in a series of covert and public meetings, she has been dealing with Iran’s American-educated foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, while American intelligence officials try to figure out how much real authority he possesses.

“We are only going to find out by testing him,” said Ms. Sherman. “He’s very charming, but I’m not naïve. The president has said we must give diplomacy a chance, and I agree.”

Ms. Sherman’s colleagues say she is best in direct talks; she found 18 months of signal-sending with Iran frustrating. “Wendy enjoys negotiating,” Mr. Blinken said, “and that’s essential.”

Those skills were honed before she was a diplomat, first by running teen centers as she worked her way through Boston University after leaving Smith College, in rural western Massachusetts, which she found “no place for an urban-studies major.”

At the 1988 Democratic convention, she was sent to negotiate a truce between the presidential nominee, Michael S. Dukakis, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who wanted a speaking role to lay out goals that differed from those of Mr. Dukakis.

Her journalist husband, Bruce Stokes, says that when he ran into his wife at the hotel bar and tried to make sure the story about the negotiations he had written was right, he got a ringing no comment, delivered with a twist. “You’ll just have to see in the morning,” she told him.Since Ms. Sherman took over as under secretary of state for political affairs two years ago, reporters have had similar success getting her to talk about the administration’s deliberations on negotiating strategy, and its secret channel of talks with the Iranians in Oman, run by Mr. Burns.

Ms. Sherman is preparing for more briefings on the Hill, and says she learned something from briefing through the pain of her ruptured tendon. “It may have been the most focused briefing I’ve given on the subject,” she said. “But it would be nice to do one that didn’t end in the emergency room.”