Diplomatic Exit

Even unofficial dialogue between Washington and Tehran has been an elusive goal since the Carter administration broke off relations after the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy. Each country has made overtures to the other, but rarely at the same time. The one connection imploded in the disastrous arms-for-hostage swap during the Reagan administration.

Indyk, who served in the Clinton administration, recalls when he and two other State Department officials went to New York for a speech to the Asia Society by then-Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi. They dispersed around the room, Indyk says, to try to meet him. But when a mutual contact offered to make introductions, Kharrazi apparently got wind of it and quickly left.

On another occasion, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright attended a small U.N. meeting on Afghanistan in part to have contact with her Iranian counterpart, Indyk says. But the Unites States knew so little about what Iranian officials looked like that they did not realize he had sent his deputy. The foreign minister had skipped the meeting to avoid the potential controversy at home of meeting with Albright.

After the 9/11 attacks, diplomats from the two countries began to actually meet when they were in the same room. In 2001, Zarif was Iran's emissary to U.N. talks on the future of Afghanistan after the Taliban's ouster. In Bonn, Germany, he met daily with U.S. envoy James Dobbins, who credits Zarif with preventing the conference from collapsing because of last-minute demands by the Northern Alliance to control the new government.

"It was about 2 in the morning," Dobbins recalls. The Northern Alliance, an ethnic faction backed by the United States, Iran and Russia, insisted on 18 of 24 ministries, excessive given the population and political realities, Dobbins says.

"Finally, Zarif took him aside and whispered to him for a few moments, after which the Northern Alliance envoy returned to the table and said, 'Okay, I give up,' " says Dobbins, who is now director of the Rand Corp.'s International Security and Defense Policy Center.

Assigned to the United Nations in 2002, Zarif met three times in 2003 with then-National Security Council staffer Zalmay Khalilzad or Ambassador Ryan Crocker about Afghanistan and Iraq, a tentative behind-the-scenes effort that died after a massive suicide bombing by al-Qaeda in Riyadh that initially appeared to have possible Iranian links.

Since then, Zarif has continued "Track 2" diplomacy. In 2005 he agreed to a dinner-party debate on Iran's nuclear program with Robert Einhorn, former assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, sponsored by the International Crisis Group and hosted by board member George Soros.

Einhorn is among those who believe that Iran is worth dealing with -- eventually. "I'm not sure it would be productive at this juncture," he says. "But in six to 12 months, if Iran comes to the conclusion that it's playing a losing hand and it needs a better deal, there is no one better than Zarif to do that."

Last year Zarif participated in a Princeton seminar -- by video, as he could not get State Department permission to travel from New York -- when he was pressed on Iran's position on the Holocaust. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had just questioned whether it truly happened. As he has often said publicly, Zarif said he believed the Holocaust took place and that it was genocide and a crime against humanity. He then countered that the Palestinians should not have to pay the price for mass murder by the Germans. Only later did he learn that the questioner was Uri Lubrani, Israel's envoy to Iran before the 1979 revolution.

"I asked him a very tough question. He is a very loyal and able servant of his masters," Lubrani recalls. "But I have a notion -- only a notion -- that he did not agree with his boss."

And when former secretary of state James A. Baker III was working on the Iraq Study Group report, he went to dinner at Zarif's elegant diplomatic residence across from Central Park to talk about cooperation on Iraq. The most controversial section of the final report recommended diplomatic outreach to Iran and Syria to help stabilize Iraq.