Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has again denied his responsibility for Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Speaking to a student audience, he said it had not been his place to interfere in the negotiations that led to the JCPOA being signed and implemented, and that he had not approved of the way the matter had been handled.

“It was said during the talks that the ratification of the JCPOA was attributed to the Leader. You can see and hear and can observe everything,” said Khamenei on May 22 while meeting with university students. “Read the letter regarding the JCPOA and the conditions set for its ratification. But if these conditions were not met, the Leader is not in charge of intervention…But the way the JCPOA was handled, I did not really believe in it, and mentioned this to the president and the foreign minister and warned them several times.”

So why does Ayatollah Khamenei keep denying his role in and responsibility for the ratification of the JCPOA? Does the responsibility for this deal really lie with somebody other than him?

1. The First Contact with the US President, Six Years before JCPOA

The first direct contact between the US president and Ayatollah Khamenei goes back to 2009, six years before the JCPOA. These first attempts to normalize relations and resolve differences, including differences over Iran’s nuclear program, continued beyond the end of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s second term and led to the secret meeting between the Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister and the US Under Secretary of State in Oman.

William Burns, the US Under Secretary of State who was informed of the communication between President Barak Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei from the very beginning, writes in his book The Back Channel that, in his first reply to Obama’s letter, Khamenei did not oppose the continuation of direct contact or the appointment of representatives for face-to-face negotiations.

And, in a speech in June 2015, shortly before the final agreement on the JCPOA, Khamenei took credit for the deal, saying it was his own work and that it had begun prior to the presidency of Hassan Rouhani [Persian link].

Conclusion: It was Ayatollah Khamenei who kept open direct communication lines with the US president that led to nuclear negotiations and the JCPOA.

2. Agreement with President Obama on Two Key Provisions of the JCPOA

The direct secret negotiations between the US and Iran toward the end of Ahmadinejad’s presidency had gone so well that Ayatollah Khamenei and President Obama had reached agreement on the overall provisions of the nuclear deal. Obama sent a letter to Khamenei through Oman’s Sultan Qaboos, agreeing that, in exchange for Iran’s guarantee to the world community that it would not build nuclear weapons, Iran would be allowed to continue enriching uranium and nuclear sanctions would be lifted [Persian link].

Ayatollah Khamenei’s two key demands were that America consent to Iran continuing its uranium enrichment project and that it lift sanctions that it had imposed because of Iran’s nuclear program. President Obama agreed with both these demands. “We were a little bit into negotiations when the gentlemen started to demand more and more,” declared Khamenei in the same speech in June 2015. “Every day they had an excuse. Six months turned into a year and then longer. The negotiations took many shapes.”

Conclusion: Ayatollah Khamenei had reached an agreement with President Obama on the most crucial aspects of the nuclear deal before the details and text of the JCPOA were finalized.

3. Rouhani knew nothing about secret nuclear negotiations before his presidency.

At the time that the secret direct negotiations between Iran and the US were taking place, Hassan Rouhani was the Supreme Leader’s representative at the Supreme National Security Council. The negotiations were going well at the time and the basic framework for a nuclear deal had already taken shape.

Despite this progress, the fact that negotiations were taking place was kept secret from Hassan Rouhani, even though he was Khamenei’s own representative at the Supreme National Security Council. It was only after he won the presidency that he was told about the secret negotiations with the US. Ali Akbar Salehi, then the Iranian Foreign Minister, writes in his memoirs that following Rouhani’s victory in the 2013 presidential election, he asked his deputies at the foreign ministry to inform Rouhani’s team about the secret negotiations in Oman. A few days before the inauguration, Salehi himself presented the documents about the negotiations to the president-elect. Rouhani found it difficult to believe, according to Salehi’s memoirs.

As the presidential election of 2013 approached, Ayatollah Khamenei temporarily suspended the secret negotiations with the US pending the outcome of the election. Both former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Akbar Velayati, currently Khamenei’s senior advisor in foreign affairs and foreign minister from 1981 to 1997, had said that both the nuclear negotiations and the JCPOA were the result of Ayatollah Khamenei’s personal initiative [Persian video].

“We entered [the negotiations] cautiously from the very first,” said Khamenei in his 2015 speech. “We believed that if they stuck to their guns, well, it was all right and we could give concessions.” And in a speech in 2018 he again took responsibility for the nuclear negotiations, saying that “the JCPOA negotiations were a mistake” and adding: “I was deceived” [Persian link].

Conclusion: Ayatollah Khamenei transferred a half-finished deal to Rouhani, a deal that later became known as the JCPOA. The secret negotiations with the US were revealed only after Rouhani’s victory in the presidential election, and it was Khamenei himself who had started and guided the process.

4. It was Oman’s Sultan Qaboos that wanted secret negotiations revealed, not Rouhani

According to Ayatollah Khamenei himself, secret negotiations with the US in Oman were revealed at the request of Sultan Qaboos, not Rouhani. In his June 2015 speech, around three weeks before the JCPOA was finally agreed upon, Khamenei publicly revealed how negotiations with the US had started.

“The subject of negotiations with the American goes back to the time of [Ahmadinejad’s] administration,” he said, without mentioning Sultan Qaboos by name. “A regional grandee visited us as an intermediary and explicitly said that the US president had asked him to visit Tehran and tell us about the American offer for negotiations…Of course, we told that intermediary that we do not trust the Americans and what they say, but because the intermediary insisted we agreed to try this once more and the negotiations started.”

Conclusion: The revelation of negotiations between the US and Iran and their continuation was not at the request of President Rouhani but at the request of the king of Oman and, ultimately, due to the approval of Ayatollah Khamenei.

5. Guiding the Details of the JCPOA

In his speeches, Khameini laid the ground for the nuclear agreement immediately following the revelations about the US-Iran negotiations. In September 2013 he talked about “heroic flexibility” and said that, in the face of “barbaric sanctions,” certain concessions could be justified. During the nuclear negotiations he insisted on his conditions, the most important of which were the two that President Obama agreed to — the continued enrichment of uranium and an end to sanctions. He demanded that Fordow Enrichment Plant stay in operation and called a halt to the production of heavy water a “red line” that must not be crossed. Ayatollah Khamenei’s conditions were very detailed and they lasted until the end of the negotiations [Persian links].

When these demands were met, he insisted that before Iran could carry out its obligations under the JCPOA, sanctions must be lifted. When the JCPOA was signed after more than two years of negotiations, President Khamenei said that on occasion, Iranian negotiators had said that some of his conditions were impossible to achieve but that he had ordered them to follow the wishes of the Supreme Leader.

In the end, nothing remained of any of the smaller conditions Khamenei set, and they did not make their way into the agreement. However, once the deal was finalized, the Leader slowly changed course. Instead of setting the stage to accept the deal as he had done before, he started to criticize it. For instance, before the agreement was signed, one of his conditions was that the negotiations not last for an extended period, but afterward he criticized the negotiators for rushing to finalize the deal [Persian link].

Conclusion: Ayatollah Khamenei directed negotiations in detail and put his own conditions on the agenda, but then he reverted to his usual pattern of behavior by refusing to accept responsibility and playing the role of a critic of the JCPOA.

6. Khamenei’s Pressures to Approve and to Implement the JCPOA

The government did not start implementing the JCPOA until Ayatollah Khamenei approved it. The Supreme Leader wanted the parliament’s approval but Rouhani’s government was against this and considered it harmful to Iranian interests because other parties to the agreement had not referred it to their own parliaments.

Nevertheless, the agreement was sent to the Iranian parliament for its approval. However, on the day it came to the floor a number of principlist conservative representatives were ready to oppose it. Reportedly, Ali Asghar Hejazi, an influential member of Ayatollah Khamenei’s office, talked to Speaker Ali Larijani and told him that the JCPOA had to get the parliament’s seal of approval. Then, in a session that lasted less than half an hour, the parliament approved the deal and the Guardian Council’s approval quickly followed.

Then, in a letter, Ayatollah Khamenei approved a resolution by the Supreme National Security Council on the implementation of the JCPOA. This resolution was passed about two months before the parliament approved the deal, meaning that the decision had already been made during the two-month period when the parliament was reviewing the nuclear agreement.

All of this took place after Khamenei had speculated that the Islamic Republic institutions might not approve the JCPOA, even though he was quite aware how the situation would develop [Persian link].

Conclusion: Parliament’s approval of the JCPOA could not have happened so quickly without the pressure that Khamenei’s office brought to bear on its considerable number of opponents. And the resolution by the Supreme National Security could not have become operative without the approval of the Supreme Leader. By guiding two fundamental institutions of the Islamic Republic and by approving their decisions, Ayatollah Khamenei continued his vital role in shaping and implementing the JCPOA, a role that started with the secret nuclear negotiations. Were he not in favor of the JCPOA, he could have refused to approve it.

A 30-Year Pattern of Behavior

Now, in his latest attempt to deny responsibility for the nuclear deal, Ayatollah Khamenei has asked the students whom he met with on May 22 to read his letter approving the Supreme National Security Council resolution. In that letter, he set new conditions and made the government responsible for carrying them out in spite of the fact that the JCPOA had already been finalized and signed. With this letter, he left the door open to deny responsibility and to hold the government accountable for the deal. This ploy — interfering in details while evading responsibility — has been Khamenei’s pattern of behavior throughout his 30 years as the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic.

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