In May 2003 the Iranian government approached the U.S. government with an urgent request to open up negotiations. There had been only one other official communication between Iran and the United States since Iranian radicals seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran during the Carter administration. Now the initial U.S. success in Iraq had the Iranians coming to the bargaining table as supplicants.
“The Iranians came to us through the Swiss ambassador after they saw how fast we moved through Afghanistan and Iraq,” Wilkerson says. “This was in 2003, right after [the invasion of] Iraq.” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was not yet president and the moderates in charge in Iran wanted to deal.
The letter delivered by Swiss ambassador Tim Guldimann offered concessions on Iran’s nuclear program, Israel policy, and al-Qaeda. “Israel policy,” of course, involved Tehran’s support of Hezbollah. According to Wilkerson, the Iranians offered to exchange al-Qaeda prisoners they held for Mujahedeen e Khalq prisoners the United States had in custody. The MEK was a guerrilla group Saddam Hussein had used in his war against Iran. After the war they engaged in terrorist attacks against Iran and are designated terrorists by the U.S. State Department.
More than a hundred billion dollars, thousands of American and Iraqi lives, America’s allies’ unflagging opposition to the war, and a deeply divided public. Finally it was all paying off. One of the countries Bush had placed in the Axis of Evil was coming in out of the cold.
“We told them no,” Wilkerson says in an interview at George Washington University. “Not only did we tell them no — we wrote a letter of protest to the Swiss for interfering in our foreign policy.”
The entire diplomatic endeavor was immediately curtailed. Asked if he knows who made the decision to reject the Iranian request for negotiations, Larry Wilkerson didn’t miss a beat.
“Yes, I know,” he says. “It was the vice president of the United States.”
