This was what I was told about Iran in a background briefing from a senior administration official this morning.
- The United States is still days away from signing a deal with Iran to “destroyand remove” its entire enriched uranium stockpile,reopen the Strait of Hormuz without tolls, and stop supporting its terrorist proxies.
- The official expressed “75 percent confidence” that a memorandum of understanding to be signed in coming days “eliminates the nuclear program for the long term… opens the Straits of Hormuz [and] accomplishes what the president set out to accomplish with this military campaign…
“Do we have a deal yet? No.
“But I think that we are very close... That’s not 100%.… There's always some level of uncertainty when you're dealing with the Iranians. But I'm calling 75% confidence that we're going to be signing this agreement soon.”
- The Iranians have agreed “in principle” to allow IAEA inspectors and the US to “destroy and remove the nuclear material,” the official said.
“How that happens is highly technical and something we plan to work out…
“The deal contemplates an inspections regime [and] a verification regime.”
Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium is stored in three locations in Iran, said the official. “We feel quite confident that we know where all of it is.”
Recent US strikes helped drive the seeming Iranian change of heart. US forces struck Iran Wednesday in retaliation for an Iranian drone hitting an American Apache helicopter over the Strait of Hormuz Monday night. After the apparent breakthrough Thursday, President Trump called off a threatened invasion of Iran’s Kharg Island.
The Iranians came back to the negotiating table when they saw President Trump is “willing to go kinetic” and the fact that oil and gas on cargo ships have started flowing through the Hormuz Strait under US protection, said the official.
“There is a broad recognition [in Iran] that [the Strait] is a weakening point of leverage for them…
“While there are some people in the Iranian system, some ultra-hardliners, that don't want to give the United States anything, our sense is that …both the IRGC and the civilian people don't think it's in their interest to return to full combat operations.”
Iran claimed their attack on the Apache helicopter was an accident and not an attempt by the IRGC to derail the deal, said the official.
“I think that what happened is the IRGC is ostensibly trying to exercise greater control over the Straits of Hormuz, and they screwed up…. [They were] very aggressively back-channeling after that happened that they did not mean to cause any problems. Obviously, we laughed about that, and we responded as the president ordered.”
The official described the new agreement as the “antidote to the JCPOA [the Obama administration’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal] because the very stockpile that was allowed to be built up [under the JCPOA], is the thing that we’re going to eliminate as part of our agreement.”
The agreement is built on a “pay-for-performance” model.
“The way the deal is structured [is] the economic benefits to the Iranians won’t come until they deliver the weapons on the nuclear program ... that we require…
“The more they perform, the more they receive,” said the official.
Sanctions relief and potential infrastructure investment from Gulf Arab countries, estimated by the official to be $200 billion, would be provided only after Iran delivers on its end of the deal.
“The biggest benefit for Iran would not be from any unfrozen assets. [It] would be from the sanctions relief and from the Gulf Arab countries investing in their country.
“What the president wanted us to do is to accomplish our objectives, primarily, that Iran not have a nuclear weapon,” the official said.
“They’re going to be rewarded for acting like a normal country rather than the largest state sponsor of terrorism.”
President Trump briefed Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on details of the deal Thursday. 1/2