By Hannes Artens

Yesterday the English daily The Independent dropped a potential bombshell:

"Iran and the United States have been engaged in secret "back channel" discussions for the past five years on Iran's nuclear programme and the broader relationship between the two sworn enemies, The Independent can reveal. One of the participants, former senior US diplomat Thomas Pickering, explained that a group of former American diplomats and experts had been meeting with Iranian academics and policy advisers "in a lot of different places, although not in the US or Iran". "Some of the Iranians were connected to official institutions inside Iran," he said in a telephone interview (…)

While the nuclear issue was "prominent", Mr Pickering said, "we discussed what's going on domestically in both countries and wide-ranging issues" affecting the US-Iran relationship. Although none of the group members was from the US or Iranian governments, he said that "each side kept their officials informed". The Bush administration "did not discourage us," he added."

If these talks in fact were tacitly approved back channel talks on a quasi-official level and if they were continued for five years without cease, no matter who is in power in Iran nor how close both countries had come to war in September last year, we would be forced to re-evaluate not only our assessment of the Bush Administration's saber-rattling and its Middle East policy, but also our own investigative analysis of U.S.-Iranian relations since 2003.

Let us pause for a thought and take stock of what we have believed to be the state of affairs till this week. On August 14, 2002, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, closely tied to MEK, revealed to the world details about Iran's nuclear facilities in Natanz and Arak that set off the ongoing confrontation between the West and Iran over the latter's nuclear program. Since then the EU-3 have tried with limited success to get Washington on board for direct talks between the conflict's prime antagonists. The first official bilateral talks between Ambassador Ryan Crocker and his Iranian counterpart in Iraq that were launched in May 2007 were explicitly limited to discussing Iraq, and the United States refused to discuss the nuclear stand off. The Bush Administration, so far, has categorically ruled out to extend these talks to a broader reflection on U.S.-Iranian relations or to model the efforts helmed by the EU-3 on the groundbreaking Six-Party-Talks with North Korea.

Is it conceivable that through all these years the Bush Administration has actually pursued a dual track diplomacy of carrying a big stick in public but speaking softly with Iran behind closed doors through the good services of private citizens/former officials; that despite its public refusal the U.S. has actually yielded to the EU-3's pleas for direct talks from day one on? In conflict resolution theory, this is exactly how "Track 3 Diplomacy" is applied, and in reality, such a strategy led to the Oslo Accords and the peace process in Northern Ireland. But who would have thought the Bush Administration capable of such visionary thinking and to ever exercise such wise restraint on Iran?

Two more aspects deserve our closer attention. First, the time factor. If the Pickering-talks have been really going on for five years now they must have been initiated around the time the 2007 NIE claims Iran to have stopped its nuclear weapons program. From Trita Parsi we know that in 2003 the Bush Administration was approached with an official Iranian attempt at reconciliation through the Swiss Ambassador in Tehran, Tim Guldiman, which they refused to consider. What if the Pickering-initiative constituted the Bush Administration's unofficial, easily deniable response to the Iranian opening? Second, the mystery's main protagonist. Thomas Pickering is a former, up-to-all-dodges career diplomat who served in Moscow, New Delhi, Amman, Tel Aviv, and at the UN under administrations from Carter to Clinton and under the latter as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs. Since his retirement he is on the board of the American Iranian Council, the Council on Foreign Relations and is affiliated with the International Crisis Group. In March 2008, he delivered a thorough analysis of the nuclear stalemate with Iran together with recommendations how to resolve them diplomatically through a grand bargain in The New York Review of Books. The Independent sums it up the following:

"The Luers-Pickering-Walsh initiative gives Iran the opportunity to prove that its nuclear intentions are peaceful by yielding to the Iranians' key demand for a uranium enrichment programme on Iranian soil. The enrichment activities would take place under the supervision of a jointly managed international consortium. The plan is the most detailed of its kind since 2005. Conditions to be negotiated with Iran would include:

• a UN Security Council resolution authorising the arrangement and specifying that if Iran breaks the agreement, member states would be authorised to take punitive action;


• Iran would be barred from producing highly enriched uranium, which is weapons grade fuel, or reprocessed plutonium, which can be an alternative route to producing a bomb;


• Iran would implement the stringent inspection measures in the Additional Protocol to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty;


• Iran would commit itself to building only "safe" light-water reactors."

What if these recommendations not only constitute Pickering's private, scholarly musings but the Bush Administration's unofficial bargaining position?

Needless to say, The Independent revelation could not have come at a more inopportune time for President Bush as he, Ambassador Crocker, and General Petraeus are leaving no stone unturned to convince the public that Iran is the true enemy American soldiers are fighting in Iraq, and as Republican candidate John McCain has built his entire campaign strategy on us-against-the-rest-of-the-world fear-mongering (in which Iran has been assigned the role of Adolf Hitler reincarnate). The fact, though, that while European and Middle Eastern (especially Israeli) media is abuzz with the intentional leak of the Pickering talks, American media at large has completely ignored it, is either embarrassingly shocking, particularly revealing, or both. Besides some negligible (for lacking any analysis) mention on Truthdig and US News and World Report, we find ourselves fobbed off with an as trivial as telling denial by "an unnamed State Department official." Given the fact that U.S. media - whether conservative or progressive, corporate or alternative - usually considers every literal fart from the White House in Iran's direction worth front page coverage, this meaningful silence alone is worth further scrutiny.

It is the nature and virtue of these kind of talks and quasi-official initiatives that they are easily deniable any time, and that a good part of their background as to who, why, and when will always remain in the dark. Let there be no doubt, it is too early to make any substantial statements about the true nature and scope of the Pickering talks, let alone assess their import on future U.S.-Iranian relations. But there is also no doubt that since yesterday the narrative of the Bush Administration's Iran policy is more complex than we thought it to be. Perhaps in years from today (as was the case with the 2003 Iranian offer) we will get a vague understanding of what was at stake, what the major protagonists' intentions were, what Iran's reaction was, and what status these talks were given by the Bush Administration. At worst, they were considered a diverting, meaningless pastime by some do-gooders and State Department old hands, at best, they constituted a true back-channel opening a future U.S. administration, if willing, can build up on. Only time and the election in November can tell.

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Hannes Artens is the author of The Writing on the Wall, the first anti-Iran-war novel.