A leaked recording of Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has prompted allegations that John Kerry gave classified information to Iran, but the former secretary of state’s most persuasive defense could depend on his willingness to explain whether he undercut former President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure campaign” against Tehran.
Zarif’s statement that Kerry notified him about “more than 200 attacks on Iranian forces in Syria” strikes some Republican lawmakers as an indication that Kerry betrayed Israeli secrets. Other observers, including the London-based Persian outlet that first published the audio, think it more likely that Zarif is referring to comments made during meetings after Kerry left office, when the Israeli barrages were well known — and the new U.S. administration suspected that their Democratic critics were encouraging Iranian officials to defy Trump’s use of economic sanctions to pressure them to begin negotiating a stricter nuclear deal.
“This is an impetus, many of us have been waiting for, to press current senior officials to disclose as much detail as possible about their ongoing relationships with senior officials of the leading state sponsor of terrorism over the last four years,” said Richard Goldberg, one of Trump’s top Iran advisers. “How did these now-current officials of the U.S. government actively undermine the United States of America in front of a leading state sponsor of terrorism. That’s the outrage.”
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The trajectory of the controversy could depend on the timing of Kerry’s conversations with Zarif, provided that the dialogue took place as the Iranian diplomat says. (Kerry maintains that “this story and these allegations are unequivocally false,” as he tweeted Monday.) Iran International, a media outlet reviled by the regime in Tehran, published the audio but assessed that Kerry was referencing public information well after leaving office.
“The number of Israeli airstrikes mentioned by Zarif can perhaps give us a hint about the time frame,” Iran International suggests. “Before March 2017, Israel had conducted several airstrikes in Syria, but from all indications in public record, the total number was not even close to 200. … This could lead one to assume that the conversation took place perhaps sometime in late 2017 or in the first half of 2018. This is when someone like Kerry could have spoken of 200 airstrikes.”
That assessment undermines the “treason” allegation that has arisen from the idea that Kerry revealed secret Israeli operations conducted during President Barack Obama’s administration. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated in 2017 his determination to target conduct airstrikes in Syria “whenever the Iranians smuggle advanced arms.” The Israeli Defense Forces announced in September of 2018 that they had “conducted airstrikes against over 200 Iranian targets in Syria since 2017,” as the Times of Israel put it at the time.
Iranian officials may have been provided insight into the operations from Russian officials. The Kremlin has a high-level partnership with Iran but also maintains contact with Netanyahu and declined to defend Iranian forces from Israel.
“Russia was not 100% unhappy with some of those strikes limiting Iranian engagement in Syria,” said a European official with experience in Syria and the Middle East. “Everybody knew that [the Israelis] are doing it, and this was, somehow, the rule of the game.”
In any case, Trump’s national security brain trust has been simmering about the Kerry team’s interregnum contact with Iranian officials since 2018, when then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo faulted him for meeting Zarif at the Munich Security Conference. “I am reasonably confident that he was not there in support of U.S. policy,” Pompeo said that September.
Kerry denied “coaching” Zarif on how to respond to Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal. “What I have done is tried to elicit from him what Iran might be willing to do in order to change the dynamic in the Middle East for the better,” he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.
Pompeo’s team suspects that Kerry and the former officials stiffened Iran’s resolve not to negotiate under pressure from Trump, with the expectation that a Democratic president elected on a platform of restoring the nuclear deal would end the pressure campaign.
“It definitely negatively impacted one of our goals, which was to get Iran to the negotiating table as a result of our sanctions, because Iranians felt they had a possible out coming to them in November 2020,” former State Department official Gabriel Noronha said.
Noronha, a liaison between the State Department and Congress during Pompeo’s tenure, believes that Iranian officials regarded Trump’s overtures to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as a sign that a conversation may be fruitful. “There was very much a [sense that if] you call Donald Trump on the phone … you never know what kind of deal he’s going to be in the mood for, and if it’s right before the election and he wants an election win, in their minds, they could get a good deal out of it.”
That complaint encompasses not only Kerry but other Obama administration alumni who now hold high office. Current Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman acknowledged in 2018 that she had met with Zarif but added she gave the Pompeo team advance notice. “The criticism of us is ludicrous on so many levels,” Sherman, a top negotiator of the Iran deal under Kerry, said in response to Pompeo’s criticisms.
Another senior member of Obama’s national security team, Robert Malley, who is now Biden’s special representative for Iran at the State Department, also met with Iranian officials in his capacity as International Crisis Group president.
Former Ambassador Dan Shapiro, who represented the U.S. in Israel during Obama’s tenure, defended the meetings as “completely legitimate” when Jewish Insider revealed them in 2019, with the caveat that his colleagues should “guard against giving Iranian officials the impression that they are an alternative outlet to debate U.S. policy. We have one government and one president at a time.”
Goldberg said he hopes that the renewed controversy over Kerry’s contact with Zarif will reveal if they violated that axiom.
“Is he acting as adviser for a leading state sponsor of terrorism of how to counter efforts by the U.S. government to pressure that state sponsor of terrorism, and what does that mean for John Kerry? In either case, it does merit some kind of investigation immediately,” Goldberg said.
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“We need to have professionals who oversee his security clearance question both John Kerry and also any other individuals who may have been in the room with Kerry,” he continued. “And based on that investigation, draw a conclusion as to whether he is in violation of laws associated with his obligation to safeguard classified information, and/or whether or not his association with Zarif during the period of time this occurred is deemed inappropriate and thus unbecoming of a U.S. official.”
