IRGC Commander Plotted out Russian Action in Syria

From the U.S. Treasury terror list noted in 2011:

During the Iranian negotiations Iran was plotting, punking all of the P5+1 members. The head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Commander Soleimani, who has sanctioned travel restrictions violated the sequestration and traveled to Moscow twice. The plotting begins including maps and tactics.

Guessing here that once again, Obama missed his presidential daily briefing on his specially designed iPad, but the distribution list included many others such as John Kerry, Susan Rice, and global military command centers.

Crickets….

How Iranian general plotted out Syrian assault in Moscow

By Laila Bassam and Tom Perry

 Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander Soleimani stands at the frontline during offensive operations against Islamic State militants in the town of Tal...

BEIRUT (Reuters) – At a meeting in Moscow in July, a top Iranian general unfurled a map of Syria to explain to his Russian hosts how a series of defeats for President Bashar al-Assad could be turned into victory – with Russia’s help.

Major General Qassem Soleimani’s visit to Moscow was the first step in planning for a Russian military intervention that has reshaped the Syrian war and forged a new Iranian-Russian alliance in support of Assad.

As Russian warplanes bomb rebels from above, the arrival of Iranian special forces for ground operations underscores several months of planning between Assad’s two most important allies, driven by panic at rapid insurgent gains.

Soleimani is the commander of the Quds Force, the elite extra-territorial special forces arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, and reports directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Senior regional sources say he has already been overseeing ground operations against insurgents in Syria and is now at the heart of planning for the new Russian- and Iranian-backed offensive.

That expands his regional role as the battlefield commander who has also steered the fight in neighboring Iraq by Iranian-backed Shi’ite militia against Islamic State.

His Moscow meeting outlined the deteriorating situation in Syria, where rebel advances toward the coast were posing a danger to the heartland of Assad’s Alawite sect, where Russia maintains its only Mediterranean naval base in Tartous.

“Soleimani put the map of Syria on the table. The Russians were very alarmed, and felt matters were in steep decline and that there were real dangers to the regime. The Iranians assured them there is still the possibility to reclaim the initiative,” a senior regional official said. “At that time, Soleimani played a role in assuring them that we haven’t lost all the cards.”

“SEND SOLEIMANI”

Three senior officials in the region say Soleimani’s July trip was preceded by high-level Russian-Iranian contacts that produced political agreement on the need to pump in new support for Assad as his losses accelerated.

Their accounts suggest planning for the intervention began to germinate several months earlier. It means Tehran and Moscow had been discussing ways to prop up Assad by force even as Western officials were describing what they believed was new flexibility in Moscow’s stance on his future.

Before the latest moves, Iran had aided Assad militarily by mobilizing Shi’ite militias to fight alongside the Syrian army, and dispatching Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps officers as advisors. A number of them have been killed.

Russia, an ally of Damascus since the Cold War, had supplied weapons to the Syrian army and shielded Damascus diplomatically from Western attempts to sanction Assad at the United Nations.

Their support did not prevent rebels – some of them backed by Assad’s regional foes – from reducing Assad’s control of Syria to around one fifth of its territory in a four-year-long war estimated to have killed 250,000 people.

The decision for a joint Iranian-Russian military effort in Syria was taken at a meeting between Russia’s foreign minister and Khamenei a few months ago, said a senior official of a country in the region, involved in security matters.

“Soleimani, assigned by Khamenei to run the Iranian side of the operation, traveled to Moscow to discuss details. And he also traveled to Syria several times since then,” the official said.

The Russian government says its Syria deployment came as the result of a formal request from Assad, who himself laid out the problems facing the Syrian military in stark terms in July, saying it faced a manpower problem.

Khamenei also sent a senior envoy to Moscow to meet President Vladimir Putin, another senior regional official said. “Putin told him ‘Okay we will intervene. Send Qassem Soleimani’. He went to explain the map of the theater.”

RESIDENT IN DAMASCUS

Russian warplanes, deployed at an airfield in Latakia, began mounting air strikes against rebels in Syria last week.

Moscow says it is targeting Islamic State, but many of Russia’s air strikes have hit other insurgents, including groups backed by Assad’s foreign enemies, notably in the northwest where rebels seized strategically important towns including Jisr al-Shughour earlier this year.

In the biggest deployment of Iranian forces yet, sources told Reuters last week that hundreds of troops have arrived since late September to take part in a major ground offensive planned in the west and northwest.

Around 3,000 fighters from the Iranian-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah have also mobilized for the battle, along with Syrian army troops, said one of the senior regional sources.

The military intervention in Syria is set out in an agreement between Moscow and Tehran that says Russian air strikes will support ground operations by Iranian, Syrian and Lebanese Hezbollah forces, said one of the senior regional sources.

The agreement also included the provision of more sophisticated Russian weapons to the Syrian army, and the establishment of joint operations rooms that would bring those allies together, along with the government of Iraq, which is allied both to Iran and the United States.

One of the operations rooms is in Damascus and another is in Baghdad.

“Soleimani is almost resident in Damascus, or let’s say he goes there a lot and you can find him between meetings with President Assad and visits to the theater of operations like any other soldier,” said one of the senior regional officials.

Syria’s foreign minister said on Monday that the Russian air strikes had been planned for months.

 

How we get to World War III

(Videos courtesy of Popular Mechanics)

by Danielle Pletka, AEI: NATO’s SecGen Jens Stoltenberg today warned the Russians about their violation of Turkish airspace in ongoing Russian air operations over Syria. It was only the latest warning from NATO about Russian violations of various NATO nations’ airspace and assorted other antics. But today’s incursion — which prompted a nasty threat from Turkey about what would happen if the Russians make the same mistake again — only underscores what a dangerous place the world has become since Barack Obama became president.

History teaches us that large wars begin for many complex reasons, and that notwithstanding our obsession with poor old Archduke Ferdinand, it was probably not simply his shooting that spawned World War I. But… there are now so many global flashpoints that we cannot rule out the notion that a conflict between major powers could break out simply based on circumstance. Consider:

  • NATO aircraft scrambled more than 500 times in 2014, with only a few exceptions, in reaction to Russian incursions into NATO member airspace. Russians planes reportedly often switch off transponders and fail to file flight plans, which has resulted in several near misses, including with a passenger plane. (Not to speak of the Russian shoot down of the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet.)

  • In 2014, Japan scrambled aircraft almost 1000 times, with all but a few of these incidents attributed to either Russian or Chinese warplanes.
  • Russian bombers entered US airspace 10 times in 2014, double the previous average.
  • On July 4th, as Americans celebrated Independence Day, the US Air Force scrambled fighter jets to intercept two pairs of Russian bombers skirting US airspace off the coast of California and Alaska.
  • The United States is preparing, reportedly, a show of force with “freedom of navigation operations” in the South China Sea, a reaction to increasingly aggressive land reclamation/military construction in disputed territory.

  • On the eve of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Washington, two Chinese fighters intercepted a US Air Force surveillance plane over the Yellow Sea.
  • The US is planning on stepping up air operations over Syria at the same time that Russia advances its own war on Assad’s opponents. Washington and Moscow aim to “deconflict” (whatever that means).
  • Russia is consistently violating its obligations under the Minsk Accords and continues to make claims on Ukrainian territory. Facing few consequences for his actions in Ukraine, there are fears that Putin may choose to move on NATO members Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia.

The world has always been a dangerous place, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons has only made it more so. But not since the Cold War have there been so many potential triggers for major power conflicts. Will we get into a shooting war? Perhaps not, and almost not certainly with the current Commander in Chief. But each time there is a near miss without consequence, as most are, bad actors are encouraged to believe there will never be any consequence. Still, notwithstanding Barack Obama, the United States does have red lines, treaty obligations (to the Philippines, to Japan, to NATO allies) that could force us into conflict where none was planned.

A Quick Preview of the Start of World War III

What Russia’s newest ICBM looks like when it takes off.

Popular Mechanics: The RS-24 was developed in secret by Russia, but public tests of the fifth-generation ICBM began in 2007 in response to a possible missile shield being built in Europe, and the Yars became operational in 2010. The RS-24 has been “MIRVed,” meaning it has multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles—in other words, each missile has multiple warheads that can hit multiple targets. Each of the RS-24’s four nuclear warheads has a yield of about 150 to 250 kilotons (the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had yields of 15 and 21 kilotons, respectively).

The RS-24 is powered by solid-state fuel, meaning that it can be ready to be launched within minutes, and is built to accelerate extremely quickly, giving opposition forces little time to react to a launch. It also can deploy a series of anti-missile-defense measures to evade attempts to shoot it down. The Russian government reports it to have an effective range of 6,800 miles, traveling at top speeds of 15,220 miles per hour, or just a shade under Mach 20. It can be launched from a silo, as seen above, or from a mobile launch vehicle, meaning the Russian government can essentially tuck one of these away anywhere in the vast wilderness that makes up so much of its territory.

What makes the Yars perhaps even more unsettling is that it’s an upgrade to the Topol-M ICBM, a weapon that Tyler Rogorsky over at Foxtrot Alpha called “scary as hell.” The Topol-M was the first ICBM to be developed by Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, and is now being phased out in favor of the RS-24.

The Yars and Topol-M, along with America’s own state-of-the-art ICBMs, the LGM-30G Minuteman-III and UGM-133 Trident II, are stark reminders that mutually assured destruction continues to define nuclear warfare, despite various nuclear arms treaties. It’s easier to add more warheads to an ICBM than to build a missile defense system that can effectively shoot down those additional warheads, meaning there isn’t much either side can hope to do once a nuclear power decides to launch—except fling off their own set of ICBMs and irradiate the other side of the globe as well.

Will Putin Prevail in Syria – Iraq Operations?

Is it incompetence or willful that Russia is operating with impunity in the skies above Turkey and Syria? It is also likely Russia may include Iraq in air strike operations. So, who is going to stop Russia and with what cause exactly?

Allies Respond to Russia’s Violations of Turkish and NATO Airspace

The North Atlantic Council met today to hold consultations on the potential implications of the recent dangerous military actions of the Russian Federation in and around Syria.

Allies expressed their deep concern with regard to the Russian military build-up in Syria and especially the attacks by the Russian Air Force on Hama, Homs, and Idlib which led to civilian casualties and did not target Da’esh. Allies call on the Russian Federation to immediately cease its attacks on the Syrian opposition and civilians, to focus its efforts on fighting ISIL, and to promote a solution to the conflict through a political transition.

Russian military actions have reached a more dangerous level with the recent violations of Turkish airspace on 3 October and 4 October by Russian Air Force SU-30 and SU-24 aircraft in the Hatay region. The aircraft in question entered Turkish airspace despite Turkish authorities’ clear, timely and repeated warnings. In accordance with NATO practice, Turkish fighter aircraft responded to these incursions by closing to identify the intruder, after which the Russian planes departed Turkish airspace.

Allies strongly protest these violations of Turkish sovereign airspace, and condemn these incursions into and violations of NATO airspace. Allies also note the extreme danger of such irresponsible behaviour. They call on the Russian Federation to cease and desist, and immediately explain these violations.

Meanwhile, late last week due to the aggressions of Russia in the region, the Obama White House and National Security Council decided to dust off the solutions, the battle plans and strategies offered by the Pentagon but ignored. It is alleged that the White House may go forward with protections of a 90 mile border region of Syria and Iraq as well as supporting the Kurds, an ally the White House has refused to acknowledge.

As the Defense Department Secretary, Ash Carter and the White House are telegraphing that Russian operations in Syria is a losing proposition, when it comes to Putin seeking and gaining power, that model is working.

Another interesting twist to Russian operations in Syria is the terror factions on the ground.

Nusra Front Bounty ISIS Syria Russia

Al-Qaeda Affiliate Issues Bounty for Capture of Russian Soldiers in Syria

A prominent spiritual leader and financier of Al-Qaeda’s official branch in Syria, the Nusra Front, issued a bounty worth three million Syrian pounds ($15,900) for the capture of a Russian soldier in Syria on Thursday, a day after Russia carried out its first airstrikes against rebel groups in the country.

A poster shared on social media offers one million Syrian pounds ($5,300) paid to the fighter who captures a Russian soldier and two million ($10,600) paid to the fighter’s faction.

“To the heroic Mujahideen brothers, a prize of a million [Syrian pounds] to anyone who takes hostage a Russian soldier,” wrote Abu Hassan al-Kuwaiti, a spiritual leader of the Nusra Front, in a tweet that has been retweeted more than 150 times and shared widely among online jihadi sympathizers on Twitter.
Although Newsweek could not independently verify that the account was owned by al-Kuwaiti, Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, an expert in the monitoring of online extremists and a fellow at the U.S.-based think tank The Middle East Forum, told Newsweek by email that the bounty had been publicized by al-Kuwaiti, describing him as an “important figure” in the terror group’s structure.

The two bounty posters appeared on social media for the capture of a Russian soldier after al-Kuwaiti’s announcement. One poster shows pictures of al-Kuwaiti, a Kuwaiti citizen whose real name is Ali bin Hamad al-Arjani, as well as Nusra Front’s top military commander, Maysar al-Jubouri, who is known by the nom de guerre Abu Maria al-Qahtani. A third man, who has not been identified, appears in the picture.

According to Laith Alkhouri, co-founder and Middle East and North Africa director of research and analysis at U.S.-based Internet monitoring group Flashpoint Intel, al-Kuwaiti is believed to act as both a spiritual figure and a financier to the Nusra Front. Alkhouri, who tracks online extremists, also confirmed that al-Kuwaiti posted the bounty from his official account, which is widely followed by other jihadi accounts vetted by Flashpoint. While the bounty is in the low thousands, Alkhouri says that it would provide vital funds for Nusra’s factions in rural areas of northern Syria.

“The motivation to capture a Russian soldier is not necessarily going to be the financial reward,” he says. “It’s not a massive amount of money, but that kind of money can really facilitate the movement and operations for a lot of soldiers and it actually is significant for Syrians themselves.”

Abu Hassan Al-Kuwaiti
While little is known about al-Kuwaiti, he has been quoted in the Kuwaiti media previously and regularly posts tweets about radical Islam and blog posts criticizing ISIS. In one post uploaded in July he complains that the rival group attempts to “sow strife in the ranks” of the Nusra Front.

The Nusra Front has been energized by Russia’s entry into the Syrian civil war and is likely using the offer of a bounty as a tool to attract jihadis from the former Soviet republics, says Michael Horowitz, security analyst at the Tel Aviv-based geopolitical risk consultancy The Levantine Group.

“The bounty is meant as a PR campaign to attract more jihadists,” he says. “For the Nusra Front, Russia’s intervention is a good opportunity to bolster its recruitment and to start unifying the mosaic of foreign fighters that are fighting the regime. The fact that Al-Qaeda, via its official branch in Syria, is once again fighting Russian forces, decades after the USSR was defeated in Afghanistan, is also a powerful image that could serve to unify jihadist groups in northern Syria. Nusra will most certainly try to use this image and any operation against Russian forcesincluding the kidnapping of a Russian soldierto gain momentum in the deadly competition with Islamic State [ISIS].”

Another prominent jihadi cleric linked to the Nusra Front also recalled Russia’s war in Afghanistan on Friday, warning that Syria will become a “graveyard for invaders,” the Associated Press reported.

“Oh Russian people, did you forget the Afghan quagmire? Do you want to enter a new quagmire? The people of the Levant will stand up to you,” Abdullah al-Muhaysini, a Saudi militant based in Syria, said in a video statement.

At least two radical Islamist groups from the former Soviet republics operating in northern Syria—one from Uzbekistan and one led by Chechens—officially joined Al-Qaeda in recent weeks, amid increasing signs of a Russian military build-up in Syria.

Al-Kuwaiti tweeted to his 3,000-plus followers on Friday, ordering them to follow Abu Jaber Dagestani, a prominent Russian-born member of the radical Caucasus Emirate group, which has previously received funding from Al-Qaeda. The pledges of allegiance and tweets highlight the close links between Al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate and the radical fighters from the Caucasus that Moscow considers to be a domestic security risk.

The Caucasus Emirate group is banned in Russia and considered a terrorist organization by the U.K., U.S. and U.N. A number of the group’s warlords declared their allegiance to ISIS in June, according to Russia’s federal security services (FSB). However, Dagestani tweeted at the time: “Do not believe everything you hear, not all jihadists of Caucasus swore allegiance to the Islamic State,” he wrote. “Those who declared allegiance have nothing to do with Sharia laws at all.”

 

Doctor Without Borders, Not What you Think

Doctors Without Borders, known internationally by Médecins Sans Frontières, is a wing of consultation for the United Nations. The medical and humanitarian organization is not without its own controversy. It was expelled from Myanmar.

As written previously on this site in March of 2015, Kayla Mueller from Arizona was working with Doctors Without Borders while both were supporting the International Solidarity Movement currently behind the fresh hostilities in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza. After relocating to Syria, Kayla was in Raqqah, taken as a sex slave by ISIS and later killed.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter is in Spain and was asked about a hospital facility hit by a U.S. airstrike, leaving several dead and others wounded along with a burning building. His responses are here.

A senior defense official said US special operations forces in an “advise and assist” role in Kunduz had been taking fire and called in air support from an AC-130. The plane opened fire but the military wasn’t “positively certain” it hit the hospital, the official said.

Several facts need to be noted. Kunduz is a region where the Taliban had not previously been in control until that is the new leader of the Taliban Mullah Mansour, who rose to power after the secret was telegraphed that Mullah Omar had been dead for two years.

Mullah Mansour is an opportunist and takes the inch of a given order beyond the mile and he has something to prove and did so by taking over the Kunduz region which the Afghan forces with the assistance of the NATO forces took back in a matter of 2 days, yet it remains contested.

From the LWJ in part: While fighting for control of the provincial capital of Kunduz, the Taliban launched a wider offensive in the Afghan north aimed at seizing control of districts in four provinces: Badakhshan, Baghlan, Kunduz, and Takhar. Since Sept. 28, the Taliban has taken control of nine districts in these four provinces and another in the western province of Farah. “Control” means the Taliban is openly administering a province, providing services and security, and also running the local courts. Often, the district centers are under Taliban occupation or have been destroyed entirely. The Taliban does not always hold the districts it takes. It occasionally will seize a district or the district center, occupy it and fly the flag, leave after a few days, then return at a later date. These districts are considered contested at best.

Mansour has a nasty and long history with the Taliban, the Haqqani and the Pakistan intelligence wing known as the ISI. The ISI allowed much of the Taliban and Mansour himself to live and operate with impunity. He is the terror list but travels freely to Dubai where he owns a home as he also does in a Taliban enclave in Pakistan.

Further, when it comes to U.S. air operations in Afghanistan, there are no ground controllers, meaning any coordinates or airstrikes are called in by Afghan forces. Doctors Without Borders tells the story that they provided exact location coordinates to NATO and to Centcom to keep them from being bombed. Logical decision except were those coordinates accurate, later distorted or altered by the Taliban or moles in the Afghan forces in the area? Further, the pilot in not culpable and in a region of hostilities, the U.S. is immune from hitting wrong targets due to responsibility placed on home military unites because of insecure data, insecure Afghan personnel and because the Taliban follow the same terror model of placing weapons, people and sensitive material in hospitals, schools, mosques as other terror networks.

When the investigation is complete, it may omit these details posted below.

It’s Time to Treat Doctors Without Borders as a Terrorist Organization

End non-profit status for them and for any organization that funds them

“Doctors Without Borders has a long history of collaborating with and defending terrorists. And even being terrorists. The issue came up just last month in relation to Hamas.

Its current attacks on America and collaboration with the Taliban are completely unacceptable. Doctors Without Borders’ personnel are once again lying through their teeth, denying the facts put forward by US and Afghan personnel and covering up the use of medical facilities by the Taliban Jihadists as human shields.

This is the same tactic that we’ve seen with Hamas.

It’s time to deal with Doctors Without Borders, a cynical name for an organization in bed with Islamic terrorists.

The acting governor of Afghanistan’s northern Kunduz province said Sunday that Taliban fighters had been routinely firing “small and heavy” weapons from the grounds of a local hospital before it was apparently hit by a U.S. airstrike over the weekend.

In an interview, Hamdullah Danishi said the Doctors Without Borders compound was “a Taliban base” that was being used to plot and carry out attacks across the provincial capital, Kunduz city.

“The hospital campus was 100 percent used by the Taliban,” Danishi said. “The hospital has a vast garden, and the Taliban were there. We tolerated their firing for some time” before responding.

Doctors Without Borders is lying and denying everything. The media is predictably taking the side of the extremist left-wing group. But the solution is obvious.

1. Treat Doctors Without Borders members just like ISIS recruits when it comes to international travel. At no point in time should they be allowed to travel to conflict zones since it is manifestly clear that they do so to aid terrorists. If they lie about their travel plans, they should go to jail.

2. End non-profit status for them and for any organization that funds them.

3. End any special status that they have when operating in conflict zones since they aren’t medical personnel, just terrorist auxiliaries who were aiding the Taliban takeover of Kunduz.”

 

Iran Deal, Complete with Rubik’s Cubes and Tired Bones

Do you ever wonder how global diplomacy really works? Back channels, unmarked aircraft, secret letters, meetings in hallways, slamming fists, exploitations of outsiders, lots of money, lies and games.

Politico:

The inside story of the Obama administration’s Iran diplomacy. (full text)

They made 69 trips across the Atlantic together and celebrated nearly everyone’s birthday at least once overseas, far from their own families. Sleep-deprived and sometimes giddy, the U.S. team negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran imagined which Hollywood star would play them if the movie were ever made: They cast Ted Danson as Secretary of State John Kerry, Javier Bardem as Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, and Meryl Streep as State Department negotiator Wendy Sherman. Along the way, they suffered no shortage of casualties: Sherman broke her nose in Vienna when she crashed into a glass door late at night running to brief Kerry on a secure phone, and her pinky finger rushing from one classified briefing to another. Kerry, incensed after Iranian backtracking in May, slammed his hand on a table, sending a pen flying across the room at an Iranian deputy foreign minister, and then shattered his leg in three places after he slammed his bike into a curb the next day, frustrated and distracted.

The U.S. team was skeptical for most of the two years they were at it that they ever would close the deal. Sherman, the detail-oriented workhorse of the talks who was caricatured as a deceptive fox by an Iranian cartoonist—prompting her aides to make “Team Silver Fox” T-shirts in a nod to her wave of white hair—compared the challenge to unscrambling a Rubik’s Cube, since no issue could be solved in isolation.

On each trip, Sherman started a tradition of going around the table at a team dinner in various European cities—De Capo Pizzeria in Vienna was the crowd favorite—and asking each official what odds they placed on reaching a final accord. At almost every gathering, most guesses were below 50 percent. A veteran nonproliferation expert who had negotiated with the Soviets kept his guesses to the low single digits till the very end. Richard Nephew, a sanctions expert, was sometimes 50 points above every bet, alone in believing that economic pressure forced Iran to the table and made a final deal just a matter of time. Sherman never voted.

Last week, against long odds, the deal that even President Barack Obama doubted would come together until the final days of negotiations in Vienna cleared its final hurdle in Washington.

Despite a well-funded summer campaign by groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, opponents were unable to muster enough lawmakers to block the deal by last week’s September 17 deadline for congressional review. The accord designed to block Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon in exchange for lifting crippling economic sanctions goes forward, with adoption day expected October 18, when Iran is to begin curtailing its various nuclear activities for 10 to 25 years. The historic deal sealed between Iran and the so-called P5+1—the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, China and Germany—alters Iran’s relationship with the world and, for better or worse, represents the cornerstone of Obama’s foreign policy legacy.

Covering the path to that deal was the main focus of my beat at Bloomberg News for the past seven years. I traveled more than 140,000 miles and spent months at hotels in Europe, New York, the Middle East and Central Asia, reporting on talks by Kerry and U.S. nuclear negotiators. Now that the deal is done, 12 current and former Obama administration officials intimately involved in the negotiations spoke to me last week, revealing new details for the first time. This story of the behind-the-scenes calculations along a seven-year road to a deal is based upon those accounts, as well as on hundreds of hours of reporting on the talks I did as they unfolded in recent years in capitals across three continents.

Interviews with officials from the White House and the Departments of State, Energy and Treasury point to multiple inflection points along the way: the exposure of a covert Iranian nuclear facility; Iran’s rejection of a nuclear fuel-swap backed by world powers; the $54 billion Iran lost in one year of oil sanctions. Those factors precipitated two other turning points: Obama’s decision to greenlight secret talks and the election of President Hassan Rouhani, who won on a pledge to resolve the nuclear crisis and get sanctions lifted.

Over the past two years, negotiators and experts from U.S. nuclear laboratories spent countless hours sketching nuclear “break-out” scenarios on white boards that were wiped clean daily to protect intelligence. There were back-to-back all-night negotiations fueled by hundreds of espresso pods and 60 pounds of strawberry Twizzlers, string cheese and mixed nuts in the final month alone. There were near-breakdowns and eventual breakthroughs to get the deal that even Obama acknowledged was no more than 50 percent likely until the final days.

The first step toward the most significant and hard-fought diplomatic achievement of Obama’s presidency began with an uncomfortable night in a vacant house far from Washington, D.C.

In early July 2012, Obama’s senior White House adviser on Iran, Puneet Talwar, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s right-hand man, Jake Sullivan, arrived in the sleepy Arabian sultanate of Oman, 150 miles across sparkling Gulf waters from the Iranian coast. It was the first significant back-channel contact with Tehran since the disastrous Iran-Contra scandal three decades earlier, and the two trusted envoys dispatched by the president were keenly aware they couldn’t repeat that debacle. The stakes were high after years of futile diplomacy, mounting economic sanctions and warnings of military options had failed to halt Iran’s defiant nuclear progress. With deep distrust, historical grievances and toxic third-rail politics in both Washington and Tehran, the rendezvous had to be top-secret or it would be doomed before it started.

To conceal their presence, Talwar and Sullivan crashed on couches in an empty U.S. embassy residence in the Omani capital of Muscat rather than risk being spotted in a hotel. Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said promised absolute discretion, and with the mercury just shy of a 115-degree record set a few days earlier, there was little chance any reporter would be staking out the palace.

Four Americans—Talwar, Sullivan, a White House logistics specialist and a translator—sat across from four Iranians at a massive burl wood table large enough for a Cabinet meeting. With its soaring ceiling and crystal chandeliers, the immense salon was hardly an intimate setting for a delicate first encounter.

The Iranians wanted an understanding up front that the U.S. would recognize their “right” to enrich uranium. The Americans said no. They were willing to listen to the Iranians, but they had their own concerns, including the regime’s repeated violations of United Nations resolutions and International Atomic Energy Agency suspicions that Iran was seeking a nuclear weapon.

More clandestine meetings followed the next year, this time in a private seaside villa of the sultan, a discreet setting that kept the negotiations secret even from Washington’s nervous and watchful allies in nearby Israel and Saudi Arabia. The talks paved the way to an interim freeze on Iran’s most sensitive nuclear activities in November 2013. That laid the groundwork for a comprehensive, long-term deal reached July 14, three years to the month after that first secret contact. But the path to get there was anything but smooth.

The Oman meeting was the first U.S.-Iranian, face-to-face contact, but the diplomatic process began in the first minutes of Obama’s presidency. On January 20, 2009, he used his inaugural address to tell Iran and other longtime foes that he was willing to “extend a hand” if they were willing “to unclench your fist.” Within days, the new president instructed advisers to undertake a strategic review of U.S. policy toward Iran, which took six weeks. The State Department brainstormed over how to restart stalled nuclear talks; the Treasury Department studied how to squeeze Iran financially; the Pentagon reviewed force posture and military options. Intelligence officers are said to have disrupted Iranian weapons flows to terrorists, accelerated cyber warfare to disable Iranian centrifuges, and increased surveillance—leading to the discovery of a covert underground Iranian nuclear facility.

The president initially prioritized diplomatic outreach. He needed to convince allies who felt bulldozed by President George W. Bush that the new U.S. leader would attempt diplomacy before resorting to punitive measures or military force. “President Obama was proceeding from the logic that we needed to remove Iran’s excuses and show them to be the obstacle,” says one former White House official who, like most of the others interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity to be candid about delicate international diplomacy.

In March, Obama recorded a YouTube message to the Iranian people to mark the Persian New Year. In the Nowruz greeting—the brainchild of a junior State Department employee named Erica Thibault—Obama became the first U.S. president to refer to the longtime adversary as “the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the country’s official name ever since the 1979 revolution that ruptured relations with the U.S. and saw American diplomats held hostage for 444 days. European allies and reform-minded Iranians praised Obama’s video for setting a new tone after decades of enmity.

Within a month, Oman, which enjoyed friendly ties with both the U.S. and Iran, quietly offered to broker talks between the longtime foes. It was one of several offers from would-be intermediaries including Japan, Switzerland and private envoys. The White House politely declined, hopeful that the first African-American president—who had won the Nobel Peace Prize for campaigning to restore U.S. diplomacy and moral leadership—might break through decades of enmity himself.

At the same time, the so-called P5+1—the five original nuclear powers and permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany—sent an April letter inviting Iran to restart nuclear talks that had gone nowhere in the previous six years, as Iran installed more centrifuges and boosted its stockpile of enriched uranium.

“The idea was if direct engagement works, great. If not, no one can claim we’re not trying, and we can use that as a cudgel to expand sanctions and pressure on Iran,” says Richard Nephew, a former senior sanctions negotiator who worked on Iran from 2004-2014 at the Department of Energy, the White House and the State Department. “The crazy idea of the Bush administration was that suspension of enrichment was a precondition for talks. We changed that because it was just upsetting our friends and partners and giving them an easy excuse to avoid sanctions.”

Iran has always insisted its atomic program is for civilian energy and medical research and that alleged evidence of work toward a nuclear weapons capability was falsified. Yet over the past 12 years, Iran had failed to address concerns of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency about potential military dimensions of its program.

Weeks before Iran’s June 2009 presidential election, Obama penned a secret letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hoping to open dialogue. Khamenei responded, but soon, Iran was in turmoil over stolen elections and a violent government crackdown on the so-called Green Revolution. “I don’t know if there was any receptiveness on Khamenei’s part to Obama’s diplomacy, but if there ever was, the Green Revolution turmoil pretty much killed that,’’ says Gary Samore, who served as Obama’s nonproliferation adviser.

Suddenly, with images beamed around the world of government-backed thugs attacking peaceful protesters, “it was a hell of a lot easier to talk about sanctions in Europe than when it was just a dry nuclear issue,” Nephew recalls.

A month later, three Americans who strayed across an unmarked border while hiking in Iraq were taken into Iranian custody and accused of espionage, complicating any U.S. outreach over the nuclear question.

By September, Western intelligence discovered Iran had secretly built a fortified nuclear facility called Fordo, dug into a mountain near the holy city of Qom. An outraged Obama stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the French and British leaders, condemning the Iranian deception to the world during a G-20 leaders’ meeting on September 25 in Pittsburgh.

Weeks later, Iran rejected an offer that it had solicited and earlier agreed to for the international community to supply nuclear fuel plates it needed for its medical research reactor. “The failure of the Tehran Research Reactor deal was a major inflection point,’’ says Nephew. Frustrated that diplomacy had come to naught, Obama was ready to switch to the pressure track, targeting Iran’s economy.

By February 2010, Iran had started to enrich uranium to nearly 20 percent in the underground bunker at Fordo. Though the enrichment was ostensibly for use in its medical reactor, Tehran had inched one step closer to making bomb-grade fuel. Obama personally appealed to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao to support a new U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Iran’s actions.

“We hit them with a Mack truck’s worth of sanctions from the 9th of June all the way through September of 2010,” Nephew recalls. “Every day, we wanted the supreme leader and [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad to wake up to a newspaper with bad economic news,” putting them under pressure to make nuclear concessions.

Amid the drumbeat of sanctions, there was one ray of hope. Sarah Shourd, one of the American hikers held for more than a year, was sent home thanks to intervention by the sultan of Oman. Obama’s closest advisers were impressed. For more than a year, Omani diplomats had been offering to broker a back channel to the Iranians over the nuclear program. But before investing in a high-risk endeavor, the president needed to be convinced Oman could deliver.

In November 2010, Dennis Ross, the White House’s Middle East coordinator, and Talwar made a secret visit to Muscat to meet Sultan Qaboos, who assured them he had a viable channel to Khamenei. Whether anything would come of it was another question.

Meanwhile, the international community’s effort to revive official talks ended in abject failure. The six powers met in Istanbul in January 2011, and the Iranian delegation insisted the world must accept their right to enrich uranium and drop all sanctions as a precondition for resuming talks. “That was the worst single meeting we had. It was shocking how ridiculous their position was,” recalls Robert Einhorn, who was then a State Department nuclear negotiator. “Everyone was outraged, including the Russians and the Chinese. It was over a year before we met with the Iranians again.”

Each passing month seemed to bring one step forward and one step back. In August, Iran convicted the two remaining U.S. hikers of espionage, before releasing them in September, again thanks to the efforts of the sultan of Oman.

In a bizarre twist in October, U.S. authorities said they foiled an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington while he dined at Café Milano, a chic Georgetown restaurant. On November 11, the U.N.’s atomic energy agency suggested Iran was on a path to building a nuclear weapon.

Obama advisers were still hoping a direct channel to the Iranians might break the deadlock, and a new player entered the stage. John Kerry, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made two undisclosed trips to Oman starting in December 2011 and came back convinced that the sultan had a viable channel to the supreme leader. Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-National Security Adviser Tom Donilon were skeptical, according to Kerry’s notes from the time. Two dozen phone calls between Kerry and Omani officials followed. Kerry came to believe “that the supreme leader was aware of and comfortable with the conversations and the kinds of constraints on Iran’s program that the U.S. would need,” a senior State Department official recalls.

By the end of 2011, frustration was at an all-time high on Capitol Hill and heated debates were underway over how to squeeze Iran to force concessions. At a cringe-inducing Senate Foreign Relations hearing in December, an apoplectic Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, lambasted Sherman and then-Treasury Undersecretary David Cohen for seven minutes straight, denouncing the administration’s failure in the face of Iran’s march to a nuclear weapon. Menendez and Illinois Republican Mark Kirk wanted to cut off Iran’s central bank and oil payments system from the global financial system. Administration officials told senators privately that could tank the world economy: Iran was a major crude supplier to U.S. allies in Asia and the European Union.

A revised bill demanded buyers slash oil imports from Iran or be cut off from the U.S. banking system. Obama signed it into law December 31, 2011, and State Department and Treasury officials spent the next six months persuading Iran’s biggest oil buyers—especially China, India and South Korea—to significantly reduce their imports.

In January 2012, the European Union voted to impose its own oil embargo on Iran, even though the decision was costly for those hard-hit by the recession. When the ban went into effect July 1 in tandem with U.S. sanctions, the effect was dramatic. Over the next 12 months, the number of countries buying Iran’s oil dropped from 21 to five. Iran lost an estimated $54 billion—more than half its annual revenue from its leading export.

Running in parallel for the first half of the year was a concerted effort to rekindle diplomacy, with the six powers meeting in Istanbul in April, in Baghdad in May and in Moscow in June. Each round flailed as the Iranians recited the same lecture—a history of grievances and an assertion of Iran’s nuclear “rights.”

Meanwhile, Talwar and Sullivan were in Muscat in July to open the secret back channel to Iran. The Omanis advised the Americans that tone, not just substance, mattered: the Iranians “had to be treated with respect and understanding—that was a continual piece of advice,” said a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Iran sent foreign ministry diplomats, not the hard-line national security team that was running the official nuclear talks. But the Iranians kept insisting on their right to enrich uranium as a starting point.

Over the next six months, debate at the White House centered on whether to dangle an American willingness to consider limited Iranian enrichment with intrusive inspections, if Iran would accept strict curbs on its overall nuclear program.

Iran’s economy, meanwhile, was tanking as more and more sanctions on energy, banking, mining, ports, insurance and more piled on. New restrictions barred Tehran from repatriating oil earnings. Gross domestic product plummeted, inflation soared and the rial collapsed, fueling bank withdrawals, consumer panic and a black market for gold trade.

By early 2013, the nuclear program was no longer proceeding as quickly as it had over the previous two years because of a stranglehold of sanctions. But the U.S. and EU felt they were running out of viable options to tighten the screws without a boomerang impact on the world economy.

“We were getting to the point where we’d have to sanction the entire Iranian economy or pursue different pressure that would eventually lead down the military path,” Nephew recalls. “We knew the sanctions were going to stop having an effect. You can only get $54 billion away from them in a year of lost oil sales once.”

“They were having technical difficulties with their program, which was hamstrung by our sanctions. So we were facing one pressure—their nuclear clock was not being slowed enough by our sanctions clock. And they were facing another pressure— sanctions were strangling their economy, and their nuclear program wasn’t moving fast enough to give them any better leverage in the talks,” he says. Both sides, he says, “entered 2013 in a much worse place than we wanted to be.”

The result, according to several officials, was that both governments realized it was time for a change. “On their side, they were ready to accept restrictions on their nuclear program. On our side, we were willing to accept the idea of an Iranian enrichment program in the long term,” along with intrusive inspections and safeguards, Nephew says.

As those views were slowly taking shape in the White House and in Tehran, at the official negotiating table, talking points remained the same. The next round of P5+1 talks in Almaty, Kazakhstan, began in February 2013.

The Americans bemoaned that Iran’s then-lead nuclear negotiator, a hard-liner named Saeed Jalili, spent the bulk of the sessions lecturing on Iran’s rights and dignity, leaving little time to discuss practical nuclear solutions. Half the day was taken up by translations. Jalili droned on about the historical wrongs against Iran, while at the same time claiming the world was doing them a favor by sanctioning their economy, forcing them to become stronger and more self-sufficient.

Meanwhile, planning for the secret channel was proceeding in tandem. Hillary Clinton had been dubious at first but had backed the involvement of her trusted deputy chief of staff, Sullivan. By now she had left office, and Sullivan became Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, staying on the Iran talks for the next two years.

On March 1, Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns led a U.S. delegation to Muscat that included Sullivan, Talwar and Einhorn. They were transported on a noncommercial plane to ensure they wouldn’t be recognized, and met with the Iranians at the remote villa. They managed to agree on a two-step framework for negotiations. First, they would freeze some nuclear activities in exchange for limited sanctions relief. That would be a building block for a long-term deal.

The EU, Russia and China were oblivious to the side channel, and the next round of P5+1 talks in Almaty went forward in April. A State Department official described a change in the atmosphere. Jalili and Sherman shared photos of their grandchildren, perhaps the first exchange of niceties that humanized the other side.

A month later, Kerry, who by now had succeeded Clinton as secretary of state, stopped in Muscat on an official visit to privately express his gratitude to the sultan for supporting the secret channel.

Then, in June, something happened that changed everything. Hassan Rouhani, a former Iranian nuclear negotiator, won the backing of moderates and was elected president on a promise to restore Iran’s economy and end his nation’s isolation by resolving the nuclear dispute once and for all.

A young cleric and follower of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei during the Islamic revolution, Rouhani had credibility among the clerical establishment and the gravitas to talk directly to the supreme leader. At the White House, Obama’s closest advisers, including National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes debated what his election would mean for talks.

“We weren’t certain then if anything would change,” admits one U.S. official. Rouhani had been a nuclear negotiator, he knew the system, he was savvy and he was unlikely to be bulldozed by the apparatus. But ultimately, it was up to the supreme leader to accept a nuclear compromise. Obama sent a congratulatory letter to Rouhani calling for progress in talks, and waited to see what happened.

After Rouhani’s inauguration, the change was immediate and almost dizzying, considering the lack of progress in the previous 4½ years. He selected a cadre of Western-educated diplomats, naming as foreign minister a smooth former ambassador to the United Nations with deep contacts in the U.S., Mohammad Javad Zarif. The MIT-educated physicist Ali Akbar Salehi, who as foreign minister had favored starting secret talks with the U.S., was put atop Iran’s atomic energy establishment. Overnight, new life was breathed into the diplomatic channel.

In August, at a third round of secret talks in Muscat—the first after Rouhani’s election—Burns said for the first time that the U.S. would be willing to consider limited enrichment with proper verification, inspections and curbs on Iran’s overall work. “Offering enrichment—that was the breakthrough moment,” says a senior administration official who was involved.

Trita Parsi, an advocate for the deal and author of the forthcoming Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Legacy of Diplomacy, rejects the critique that Obama caved in by accepting enrichment, or that any president could have gotten a better deal. “That’s like saying the Catholic Church made a ‘concession’ to Galileo. … Iran was already enriching, and they were never going back. Within the P5+1, the U.S. had almost no support for its zero enrichment demand,” Parsi says.

American negotiators acknowledge that’s true. “Everybody understood that talks weren’t going to move forward” if the U.S. didn’t agree to limited enrichment, the senior negotiator says, “but there were hundreds of other details that still had to be worked out.”

Another “key moment that was a harbinger of things to come was Secretary Kerry’s first meeting with Zarif. It was meant to be just a handshake,” a senior State Department official recalls. But Kerry, who puts a lot of stock in personal relationships as a key to diplomacy, pulled the Iranian into a side room next to the U.N. Security Council chamber and spent half an hour talking. They exchanged contacts, and Sherman and her staff shared emails and phone numbers as well. It was all part of setting “the foundation for what was obviously a very technical set of negotiations, but was also very much driven by relationships between the key principals,” the State Department official said.

Eighteen months after Kerry met Zarif, Moniz, the U.S. energy secretary, a nuclear physicist who taught at MIT while Iran’s atomic chief Salehi was a graduate student, was brought into the talks. He played up that connection, reminiscing with Salehi about Cambridge in the 1970s and bringing him an MIT baby onesie and other logo gifts when Salehi’s first grandchild was born.

Without that kind of personal outreach, “it would’ve been very hard to surmount 30 years of mistrust to work constructively with the people on the other side,” the State Department official says. As the working relationship grew, Kerry and Zarif, Moniz and Salehi, and Sherman and Iran’s deputy negotiators Abbas Araghchi and Majid Takht-Ravanchi were on a first-name basis.

Meanwhile, there had been discussions at the White House about whether Obama should shake hands with the new Iranian leader when he came to address the U.N. Though Rouhani’s rhetoric was conciliatory compared with that of his predecessors, he was still a stalwart of the Islamic revolution, and with an insatiable appetite for sanctions on Capitol Hill and no nuclear deal in sight, it was politically inconceivable. Instead, Obama placed a short phone call while Rouhani was on his way back to the airport. That small step became the highest-level contact between the nations since 1979.

The secret talks that began in Oman were now continuing in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. The teams were well along in drafting an interim agreement that would buy them time. The idea was to stop Iran’s most sensitive work—the enrichment of uranium to nearly 20 percent—and dramatically increase inspections in exchange for limited sanctions relief.

The U.S. team arrived in Geneva in October for official nuclear talks that were now back on track with the Europeans, Chinese and Russians. Burns and Sullivan stayed in different hotels so they wouldn’t be spotted and used a back entrance to continue secret bilateral talks with Iranians. They now had a draft that was 75 percent done by the time they presented it to foreign ministers who were meeting in Geneva in early November. Sherman went to Israel to tell the government. The Israelis were upset the Americans had concealed the secret talks from them; U.S. officials suspect the Israelis knew by then, and they insist they were always transparent about the president’s determination to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and his diplomatic endgame.

For their part, Kerry’s counterparts among the six powers were shocked they had been kept in the dark, though some relished that so much progress had been made. Getting an accord in three months “was extraordinary, lickety-split” compared with the previous five years of circular talks, says Einhorn, who was involved in both the public and private diplomacy.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius was miffed that the other powers who were toiling on the Iran nuclear file for a decade, long before the Americans joined, had been left out, and he denounced parts of the deal to the media. U.S. officials said at the time that his outburst was calculated to demonstrate France’s “relevance” and to portray France as taking a hard line. A deal couldn’t be sealed, and ministers went home, returning to Geneva three weeks later. Kerry, Zarif and Catherine Ashton, the then-EU high representative who coordinated the talks, stayed up well past midnight negotiating the details and announced the accord to an exhausted press corps in the middle of the night before jetting home.

Zarif had told his counterparts he had limited political capital in Tehran and had to deliver a final deal to end all sanctions within six months. The ministers gave themselves until late July 2014, never imagining it would take them an additional year beyond even that to seal the deal.

On January 20, 2014, the so-called Joint Plan of Action was adopted. It would hold Iran’s nuclear work in place and expand international monitoring in exchange for releasing $700 million a month from Iran’s frozen oil assets. It was a stopgap measure to give negotiators time and space to hash out the far more complicated final accord.

Before each important round of negotiations—the U.S. team made 11 trips to Vienna alone in 2014 and seven more this year—Obama would gather top negotiators to review his goals and red lines and assess progress in the talks. These sessions made the negotiators’ stance in the talks “easy,” one White House official explains, laying out the boundaries that would be acceptable back home in Washington. “The president has been insistent on his red lines from the beginning. He had a very clear concept from the start of what kind of a deal he could live with and what he couldn’t,” the official says. Obama’s goal was to ensure that for a minimum of a decade, Iran would remain at least one year away from amassing sufficient fissile material for a single bomb. “He really did trust Kerry completely on this, and would say, ‘I want you to come back to me if you have any uncertainty about meeting my red lines.’”

U.S. nuclear laboratory experts offered numerous permutations of how to achieve that goal. The formula was equal to a certain number of centrifuges plus a certain stockpile of low-enriched uranium. If one number went up, the other had to come down.

Obama insisted all of Iran’s paths to a nuclear weapon—uranium, plutonium or covert development—must be blocked. That meant coming up with solutions to modify the heavy-water reactor at Arak and to prevent enrichment at the underground Fordo facility that could be harder to detect and destroy in a military strike.

The president insisted on a “red team” of internal and external nuclear experts with security clearances to test the assumptions of a one-year breakout time against the most demanding audience. Israeli government nuclear scientists were asked for their input and judgment, and were very helpful, a senior administration official says.

Running parallel to the nuclear discussions was the sanctions negotiation—what pressure to relieve and when. The White House decided no further sanctions would be eased until a final deal was accomplished, and penalties would be waived once the U.N.’s atomic agency verified Iran had curbed its program as promised.

Ahead of every new round, the president would summon Kerry, Moniz and Sherman to remind them, “ʻYou have my guidance and my red lines and I want you to know that you are empowered to walk away, I have no problem with that,’” recounts a senior official who attended the meetings.

Given the mind-bending challenge to make all the parts match up, Sherman adopted the mantra that “nothing is agreed till everything is agreed,” and routinely compared the challenge to solving a Rubik’s Cube, when one side inevitably gets messed up, forcing the puzzle-solver to find a new solution. Energy Department scientist Kevin Veal ordered 40 colorful Rubik’s Cubes imprinted with their difficult tasks, and Susan Rice, Kerry and his chief of staff, Jon Finer—who were spending almost as much time on the Iran deal as the experts—got them too. By the end, the negotiators were virtually living in Vienna, and their one bit of freedom was a choice among a handful of approved hotels—some favored the Marriott for its gym, others preferred the Imperial or the Bristol for old world ambiance and Austrian cuisine.

Sherman traveled so often for nuclear talks that by 2013 she had already been awarded lifetime status in United Airlines’ Global Services program, an invitation-only perk for the world’s top frequent flyers. She and her team were escorted personally by a United VIP concierge at each connection (I was allowed to tag along when I was on the same flight). It was hardly a glamorous life, though; the government only pays for economy, and the hours in airports and hotels were interminable. Once, I was coincidentally assigned the seat next to Sherman on a commercial flight to Vienna. She raised her eyebrows in disbelief upon seeing me, before closing a black ring binder and joking that she now had an excuse to watch “Quartet,” a film starring Maggie Smith, instead of reading her briefing book next to a journalist.

With hundreds of technical details and the possible military dimensions of Iran’s program to address, the original six-month time frame for a final deal was unrealistic, U.S. officials say now, given that Iran was unwilling until negotiations reached the final months to accept the curbs the international community was demanding. Progress was also partly slowed down by lingering misgivings among the other foreign ministers who suspected the U.S. and Iran of trying to cut a deal without them.

“Our partners forced us to double down” on inefficient large group sessions in which no real decisions could be made, says Nephew, who believes talks “didn’t really get serious” till the first deadline was extended on July 19, 2014. By then, U.S. partners were confident in the process and glad for Kerry and Zarif and their expert teams to hold direct talks to help break through logjams to save everyone else time.

Even so, Washington got help from sometimes unexpected quarters. Diplomats describe Russia’s nuclear negotiator, Sergei Ryabkov, as a creative problem solver who was a favorite of the six powers. The Ukraine crisis and sanctions on Russia were somehow kept separate from the Iran talks, where Russia stood firm with the other powers. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, a smooth, multilingual veteran diplomat, was loath to waste his time, and on several occasions in the final months, Lavrov broke stalemates by telling Zarif that Russia was united with the other powers. At a Vienna photo opportunity when talks were stubbornly dragging on and Lavrov had other places to be, Zarif politely asked how he was that morning, while smiling for the cameras. The Russian made a sour face and in front of the assembled press replied, “Angry.”

China usually took a back seat in the talks but will play a key role in implementing the deal by modifying Iran’s heavy-water reactor. Germany’s Steinmeier used dry humor to lighten the mood and was a dead ringer for Ryabkov, creating confusion among journalists staking out the negotiators.

As the months dragged on, incremental progress was made against a backdrop of growing turmoil in the Middle East. The Syrian conflict raged on, with Iran propping up Bashar Assad while the U.S. demanded he go, all while the Islamic State terrorist group, an avowed enemy of both Iran and the U.S., was on the rise.

Medical mishaps delayed progress. Zarif suffered stress-induced back pains that forced him to conduct early negotiations in a wheelchair and landed him in the hospital upon his return to Tehran. Sherman broke her nose in Vienna and her finger on her way to a briefing for Congress, bursting into tears after she took the last question.

At a particularly frustrating negotiation in Geneva where Zarif was trying to backtrack in May of this year, Kerry got uncharacteristically angry, slamming his hand on the table and sending a pen flying. Frustrated and off-center, he suited up for a bike ride the next day to refocus. Distracted by the noise of a motorcycle in his security detail, he slammed into a curb before he even left the parking lot, breaking his femur in three places and requiring surgery. One of the first get-well messages Kerry received was from Zarif. The secretary remained on crutches, propping up his foot and doing daily physical therapy through the end of the negotiations two months later.

Iran’s atomic energy chief Salehi was hospitalized and missed key meetings following a colon procedure. Talks were deadlocked in the final round until Zarif flew home and brought his convalescing colleague back.

There were several times when negotiators now acknowledge the talks were on the verge of collapse. Two weeks before a November 2014 deadline, the Iranians dug in their heels with Kerry and other foreign ministers in Oman, trying to roll back earlier agreements. The talks were a disaster, and negotiators knew they needed yet another extension.

Another near breaking point was February 21 this year, when Sherman phoned Kerry in London warning him not to board his plane to Geneva; the Iranians were demanding a much greater enrichment capacity than the U.S. could ever agree to. “This was really stuck,” a senior official recalls. Kerry told Sherman to say he was “ready to go back to the U.S. and get on with his life.” Several hours later, she called back and said talks were back on track. Kerry flew in.

By the time talks moved to Lausanne, Switzerland, in March, the deadline for a framework agreement was looming. The Americans made clear it would be impossible to fend off new congressional sanctions on Iran if the two sides couldn’t agree on the outline of a final deal that month. The task was immense: to agree on the size of Iran’s enrichment program, time limits for research and development, inspections and verification and changes to Iran’s heavy-water reactor so that it couldn’t produce plutonium that could be another path to a weapon.

The details were mind-numbing and emotions ran high as Zarif and Salehi said they couldn’t be pushed farther than their leaders in Tehran would allow. In July 2014, a week before a previous deadline, Supreme Leader Khamenei had announced Iran needed 190,000 centrifuges for an industrial-sized atomic energy program—10 times what it currently had. That public red line had thrown off talks for months.

Holed up in the Beau Rivage Palace, a grand 19th century hotel overlooking Lake Geneva, with no room left for an extension, the Iranians continued to make what the Americans saw as unreasonable demands. Kerry got so frustrated that he arranged to visit Zarif one night in his hotel suite. “If you can’t do this deal, if you’re not serious, go back to Tehran and get some instructions,” Kerry told the Iranian, according to a senior State Department official.

After two nine-hour, all-nighter sessions in a row, the diplomats “cracked the DNA of the deal,” in the words of another senior negotiator. They agreed on April 2 that for 10 years, Iran would be allowed to use only 5,000 of its centrifuges to enrich uranium and would reduce its low-enriched uranium stockpile by 98 percent. The framework included a face-saving solution to convert Iran’s Arak heavy-water reactor and underground Fordo facility so Iran could say it had kept them open, but neither would produce fissile material.

The final round of talks moved back to Vienna and would drag on for 18 days (many of them all-nighters), starting in late June. More than 600 journalists from around the world and dozens of pro- and anti-deal activists and academics descended on the media tent and lobby of the Vienna Marriott, fueled by an endless supply of Mozart Kugeln chocolate marzipan balls and Manner hazelnut wafers provided by the Austrian government. Security was tight at the neoclassical luxury Palais Coburg Hotel, nicknamed the “Asparagus Palace” for its ornate columns, where the talks took place across from the Marriott. During negotiations, no one got past a metal detector and X-ray machine without an official badge, though the hotel somehow also managed to host wealthy Austrians celebrating special family gatherings, creating some odd juxtapositions in the lobby and banquet areas.

Diplomats and journalists incurred huge laundry bills and bought new clothes in desperation when the days turned to weeks, missing birthdays, anniversaries and another Fourth of July at home. U.S. negotiators spent rare free moments on FaceTime with their families. Kerry, powered by pasta Bolognese, his go-to meal during the months on the road, was hobbling on crutches and undergoing daily physical therapy. He started to slip out a back exit to avoid press when he needed fresh air. The 10-year-old son of my Vienna-based Bloomberg colleague was feeding ducks at a city park one day when Kerry, surrounded by an intimidating security retinue, arrived on a rare break to do the same.

It was not until that final stretch in Vienna that American and Iranian delegates, who spent countless hours together over the previous two years, actually shared a meal. It was an impromptu invitation from Zarif on July 4th, the second Independence Day that many Americans had spent in Vienna rather than at a barbeque. When Kerry hosted his own Independence Day party on the Coburg terrace a few hours later for his entourage and the small press corps that travels on his plane, the negotiators were still talking about how much better the Persian banquet was than what they ate in the U.S. delegation’s dining room.

There were also far less pleasant encounters, evenings of high drama as both sides dug in on final offers, sometimes disintegrating into shouting matches. On July 5, Kerry and Moniz were arguing with Zarif and Salehi, who were backtracking on how many years the restrictions on Iran should last. The debate got so heated that a Kerry aide entered the room to tell the men they could be overheard by random guests. The next morning, Steinmeier quipped to Kerry that the talks must have been productive. “The whole hotel could hear you,” the German said, his eyes twinkling.

The joke, though, hid a darker truth: The foreign ministers of the P5+1 nations were losing their patience. Most of the nuclear elements had been agreed upon three months earlier, and the offer to lift sanctions only after nuclear curbs were verified was non-negotiable. The next night, the ministers presented Iran with a final proposal, and the EU’s Federiga Mogherini said if Zarif was trying to rewrite the terms set in Lausanne, they might as well all go home. Cornered by the world powers, Zarif lashed out angrily, “Never threaten an Iranian!”

In an effort to lighten the tense moment, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov chimed in dryly, “Or a Russian.” It allowed Zarif to save face, but on the substance, the Russians were sticking with the other powers.

The talks had ground past the June 30 deadline, and both sides knew this was their last chance to negotiate their best deal or walk away. At a P5+1 foreign ministers’ dinner on July 12 at the swanky Sofitel rooftop with its stunning skyscraper view of Vienna’s imperial architecture, Kerry urged his impatient partners who were threatening to go home to stick together and see the process to the end.

The last two days were spent arguing with Iran over how to “snap back” U.N. sanctions if Iran cheated on the deal, and how to maintain an arms and missiles embargo which, under the original U.N. resolution, was meant to be lifted once Iran addressed concerns over its nuclear program. On the final evening, Kerry, Zarif, Lavrov and Mogherini stayed up till nearly 3 a.m. hashing out the final language of the U.N. resolution. Aides drafted the technical documents by dawn.

Later that morning on July 14, after a few hours of sleep and showers, the ministers met at the U.N. offices in Vienna. With only a handful of top aides as witnesses, they spoke in alphabetical order by country, trying to express in a few solemn words the significance of a long-awaited day many had thought would never come.

France’s Fabius grandly noted that the deal was finalized on Bastille Day and said he hoped the accord would have as distinguished a history as the French Republic. Zarif was righteous, saying the agreement marked the end of the unjust isolation of his country. Kerry spoke last, noting he had gone to war in Vietnam as a young man, and was forever changed. His voice broke, and he paused to collect himself. While force was sometimes necessary, he said, diplomatic means must always be exhausted first. His voice quivered, and when he finished, several diplomats, including Iranians, were seen wiping their eyes.

Kerry put down his crutches and sat backstage to watch Obama’s live remarks from the Rose Garden on an iPad. When it was over, in a distant echo of the moment they first met in a U.N. office in New York two years earlier, Zarif sought out Kerry to pat him on the back, shake his hand and tell him to keep in touch.