The Foreign Service Journal, December 2010

20 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 0 at the end of the year, Iran ap- proached the IAEA asking for fuel for the reactor. Officers at UNVIE reported the request to Washington and recommended we support meeting it to test Iran’s commitment to a civilian-only nuclear program. The United States came to view the TRR proposal as a positive step to help build confidence between Iran and the international commu- nity. If successful, such a step could put Tehran on the path to compliance with its obligations under Security Council resolutions and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and to the IAEA, and help tackle the more funda- mental question of its broader nuclear program. UNVIE officers played a key role in shaping our pol- icy on the matter. Mission staff met with senior officials in Washington and travelled with them to other countries to enlist their support in providing fuel to the reactor. Together with our E3+3 partners, the United States delegation (led by Under Secretary for Political Affairs Bill Burns and including current UNVIEDeputy Chief of Mission Robert Wood), informed Iran’s representatives in Geneva on Oct. 1, 2009, of our willingness to discuss items of concern to Tehran as well as our concerns about Iran’s nuclear program. The Iranian delegation agreed to sit down later that month in Vienna to discuss the TRR pro- posal. Three weeks later, four nations met with IAEA offi- cials and experts to negotiate the terms of the proposal, in- cluding detailed technical points like the amount of uranium to be provided and under what terms. Follow- ing three days of talks in Vienna, chaired by then-IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, the U.S., France, Russia and, dramatically, Iran, agreed ad referendum on a project and supply agreement to refuel the Tehran Re- search Reactor. Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Pone- man led our side. A dozen members of the U.S. mission were involved in the effort. The upshot was an agreement Iran could not refuse without putting the lie to its stated commitment to an ex- clusively civilian nuclear program. The Russian and French ambassadors and I joined together in a proposal, which IAEA Director General ElBaradei submitted to Iran, to send the country’s own available low-enriched uranium to Russia for further enrichment and then to France for fabrication into fuel, which would be returned to Iran for use in the safeguarded TRR reac- tor. At the time, this plan would have significantly reduced Tehran’s avail- able stockpile of low-enriched ura- nium, which is itself a source of anxiety in the international com- munity. It would also have ad- dressed a humanitarian need of the Iranian people, and served as a confidence-building meas- ure to create an opportunity for further dialogue. But in the end, Iran did not confirm the provisional agreement its representatives had made in Vienna. For almost eight months after the Vienna talks, Tehran twisted and turned, fulminated and raged, and threw up one spe- cious reason after another why the TRR deal was unac- ceptable. That was the context within which we achieved such a strong result in the Board of Governors condemn- ing Iran, and which represented an important prologue to our success in passing UNSCR 1929. While the TRR deal was a whole-of-government ef- fort, it was also, to a degree I have rarely seen in the For- eign Service, the result of a concerted intellectual, bureaucratic and diplomatic push by a relatively small number of officers at a modest-sized mission. Since I was new in town when all of this came to a head, I provided relatively little intellectual capital to the exercise; but boy, did I enjoy being along for the ride! The effort engaged officers in both high policy and meat-and-potatoes multi- lateral diplomacy. It required technical mastery of some pretty complex nuclear processes. We went toe-to-toe with Iran and gave better than we got. The result? We have built an international consensus to put pressure on Tehran to meet its international obli- gations, an effort whose scope and importance extends well beyond the IAEA to include the Security Council and coordinated efforts to apply sanctions on Iran. The Significance of Global Solutions Despite the growing importance of this work, as the Iran nuclear example demonstrates, some Foreign Serv- ice generalists take the view that a multilateral tour may not be good for their career. Language training is usually not offered. Nor are most multilateral positions at hard- ship posts, which are generally considered more career- F O C U S Concerns among some generalists that a multilateral tour may not be good for their career are valid, but can be overcome.