Read: The audacity of Iran’s foreign minister

I first met Zarif in 2003, when he was Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, and I regularly interviewed him while working as an analyst with the International Crisis Group. He was unique among Iranian officials—astute, accessible, and affable—and openly engaged with diaspora Iranians like me, rather than treating us as a potential danger. When Iranian authorities confiscated my passport in 2005 and prohibited me from leaving the country, he offered helpful connections to get me out. When my employer wanted me to return to Tehran, I asked Zarif to check my file. “Under no conditions go back!” he urged me, days later. “The problems will start as soon as you arrive at the airport.” Absent his candor, I would have ended up like many friends and colleagues who spent months or years in Evin Prison.

I often wondered back then whether Zarif’s occupation ever gave him a crisis of conscience. Why would someone with his family wealth and education—a doctorate in international relations from the University of Denver—and seemingly cosmopolitan outlook represent an Islamist theocracy that treats women as second-class citizens, persecutes gays and religious minorities, represses free speech, and is the world’s No. 1 per capita executioner? In face-to-face meetings, he sometimes lamented to me that he chose a career in politics over academia.

When the Holocaust-denying Tehran Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became Iran’s president in 2005, Zarif sounded like a Paykan salesman in Manhattan, grudgingly selling a product he knew to be bankrupt. I attended his farewell reception at the United Nations in 2007, offering him a gift of pajamas now that his work-induced sleep-deprivation would be ending.

After several years in political hibernation teaching graduate students in Tehran, Zarif saw his fortunes abruptly changed following the surprise victory of Hassan Rouhani, a pragmatic cleric, in Iran’s 2013 presidential elections. Zarif became Iran’s foreign minister and Tehran’s lead negotiator in multilateral nuclear-nonproliferation talks. When a nuclear deal—known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—was signed after two years of exhaustive diplomacy, Zarif became a national hero in Iran and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee.

At the time, there was a widespread hope that the goodwill developed between Zarif and then–Secretary of State John Kerry could foster greater regional cooperation between Washington and Tehran and lead to an eventual rapprochement. What was poorly understood then, and now, was the nature of Zarif’s job as foreign minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran. When this role required him to negotiate a nuclear deal to rid Iran of economic sanctions, he delivered. But when this role also required him to embrace war criminals, lay wreaths for notorious terrorists, defend hostage taking, deny Iran’s attempted assassinations in Europe, and lie about repression, Zarif also delivered.