“He doesn’t play games,” she told me. “He doesn’t produce incendiary sentences. He is thoughtful. He is real. He wants to help his people and lead them in a different direction. That’s important to me in my measurement of a person.”

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As Iran’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 2002 until 2007, Zarif met with Vice-President Joseph Biden and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel during their Senate days. In 2007, the Bush Administration allowed a rare exemption from the twenty-five-mile travel limit on Iranian diplomats in New York, so that he could give farewell speeches in Washington and pay a courtesy call on Capitol Hill. “Zarif is a tough advocate, but he’s also pragmatic, not dogmatic,” Biden told me then. “He can play an important role in helping to resolve our significant differences with Iran peacefully.” At a luncheon hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, Martin Indyk, the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, told Zarif, “We’re going to miss you.”

Yet in January Zarif met Nasrallah in Lebanon, and laid a wreath of showy white flowers at the grave of Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah military commander. Mughniyeh was linked to the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed two hundred and forty-one peacekeepers. Zarif then travelled to Damascus, for talks with Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, now in the fourth year of a war against his own people.

“In order to practice dialogue, you need to be able to set aside your assumptions and try to listen more than you want to talk,” Zarif told me. “It’s not always politically correct to be able to do that, but it can give you a better sense of the reality. I have benefitted from the knowledge and the information that all these people have been able to provide to me. I have disagreements with some and more agreements with others. But that doesn’t mean I cannot listen to those I disagree with.”

Some American critics don’t buy it. “There are worse Islamic revolutionaries out there, but, make no mistake, he’s an Islamic revolutionary,” Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. officer and now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told me. “He understands the Islamic revolution as being incompatible with the United States. Only in the Byzantine world of revolutionary politics do the differences between Zarif and what some call hard-liners gain importance.”

The son of an affluent merchant who wanted him to be an engineer, Zarif grew up without television or newspapers. The family was conservative and devout, but his father did not support the revolution. Shiites have historically been so-called quietists—passive politically and opposed to the clergy’s involvement in politics. The return to the ideal Islamic state, they believed, should wait for the reappearance of the Mahdi, the Muslim messiah. So the revolution was as distressing for some of the faithful as it was for the Shah’s supporters, and left deep fissures within the Zarif family. When I noted that dinner-table discussions must have been interesting, Zarif replied, “Out of respect to my father, I usually listened.”

At seventeen, Zarif left Tehran to attend a prep school in San Francisco, before enrolling at San Francisco State University. During the fourteen months of the revolution, Iranian students at California colleges clustered around the Muslim Students Association in Berkeley. So many of them rushed home to enlist in the new Islamic Republic that they were known as the Berkeley mafia. Zarif stayed behind, to continue his studies, and became the Berkeley group’s representative to Iran’s San Francisco consulate, assigned to insure that it did not deviate from the new political creed. When he started graduate school, in New York, at Columbia, the revolution’s Ambassador to the United Nations hired him.

“At the time, anybody who prayed and knew English was a rare commodity,” Zarif recalled. As the mission purged monarchists, he did everything from visa work to writing letters to the Secretary-General about the Iran-Iraq War. “Nobody else in the mission either knew how to do it or was trusted to do it,” he said.

After a year at Columbia, Zarif left to earn his doctorate at the University of Denver’s School of International Studies, where he had some of the same professors who had taught Condoleezza Rice. “One of my professors once told me, ‘In Denver, we produce liberals like Javad Zarif, not conservatives like Condi Rice,’ ” Zarif said, smiling.

“Condi and Javad had many common traits,” Ved Nanda, who taught both and was on Zarif’s dissertation committee, recalled. “They were both good in the classroom. At that time, I would not have thought of her as Secretary of State, though I would have told you that she would go places. But him—I thought he’d play an important part in his country’s life.”

Zarif’s dissertation, written during the Iran-Iraq War, was about using force in violation of international law. Its themes echoed Iranian-American relations, before and after the revolution. “No political, military or economic justification can be advanced to explain with legal validity a unilateral resort to force in the absence of prior armed attack,” he wrote. Intervention to restore law and order in foreign lands “can find no legal grounds in universally accepted norms of law.”

Nanda particularly remembered Zarif’s bitterness about American support for Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Iran in 1980. As U.S. officials later admitted, the Reagan Administration provided satellite intelligence to Baghdad about Iranian troop movements which was used for some of Iraq’s chemical-weapons attacks. The C.I.A. once estimated that Iran suffered at least fifty thousand casualties, including thousands of deaths—the largest loss of life from toxic nerve and mustard gases since the First World War.

Since leaving Denver, in 1988, Zarif has been at the center of Iran’s diplomatic pivots. Jan Eliasson, a Swede who is now the United Nations Deputy Secretary-General, led negotiations to end the Iran-Iraq War. Zarif was the youngest diplomat in the Iranian delegation, Eliasson recalled, but he worked the hardest to talk to the Iraqis, even between sessions. The former U.N. hostage negotiator Giandomenico Picco, an Italian, detailed, in his memoir, Zarif’s “invaluable” role, between 1989 and 1991, in freeing Western hostages held by Iran’s allies in Lebanon. One had been held for almost seven years. Picco called his work with Zarif over a period of some two decades the closest professional relationship of his career. “The proof is the hundred and twenty-three lives that we brought back to their families and homes,” Picco told me. “He’s a craftsman.”

In testimony before Congress, James Dobbins, currently the State Department’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, credited Zarif with help on Afghanistan. At the 2001 International Conference, in Bonn, the Afghan opposition balked over terms for a new government. At two in the morning, after pressure from American, Russian, German, Indian, and U.N. diplomats proved futile, Zarif took the Afghan representative aside and whispered for a few moments in his ear. It worked. “Zarif had achieved the final breakthrough without which the Karzai government might never have been formed,” Dobbins said.

In 2002, Zarif became Iran’s U.N. envoy. The next year, he wrote the final draft of a master statement—nicknamed “the grand bargain”—that sought to resolve all outstanding issues with the U.S. Like earlier attempts, it never took off. After hard-liners gained control under Ahmadinejad, Zarif was squeezed out of the foreign service, in 2007. “I don’t think that the West interpreted our openings and accommodations the way they should have,” he told me then. “Since it was misinterpreted, the reaction was disappointing, and in fact only heightened tension and increased mistrust.” He said that he would return home from the U.N. seen as “a stupid idealist who has not achieved anything in his diplomatic life after giving one-sided concessions.”

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He retired from government service at the age of forty-seven. Afterward, he taught, played with architectural plans—a hobby of his—and kept a low profile during six months of protests following the disputed 2009 Presidential elections. The uprising was quashed, but simmering discontent produced Rouhani’s stunning election, last year. The political tide had turned. Three of the six Presidential candidates asked Zarif to be their foreign minister, and a popular news Web site has since posited him as a future Presidential candidate. “Not a chance! Don’t even say that,” he replied, when I asked about his prospects. “I’m not a politician!”