Will U.S., Iran negotiate?

Bush has been clear on Iran: no one-on-one talks. But with no good military options, and Tehran's putting out feelers, will that change?

Americans and Iranians don't talk to each other—officially, anyway. Apart from a furtive arms-for-hostages deal in the Reagan era, the two sides haven't sat down since Ayatollah Khomeini incited his youthful Islamist radicals in Tehran—among them Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the current president—to confront the Great Satan in 1979. So the question arises: what was Mohammad Nahavandian, a close adviser to Iran's top nuclear negotiator, doing wandering around Washington last month? U.S. authorities say they had nothing to do with his visit. In fact, they claimed to be a bit shocked to learn that Nahavandian had a green card entitling him to enter and leave the United States freely. Nahavandian himself, who had taught economics at George Washington University before he joined the government in Tehran, said he was here on private business, including showing his son some sights of America, according to U.S.-based Iranians who met him.

But that's not the whole story. During his several-week-long visit, Nahavandian briefed Iran's ambassador to the United Nations in New York, Javad Zarif. He also held a meeting with officials of the International Crisis Group, a Washington-based activist organization that recently proposed a way out of the U.S.-Iranian nuclear impasse. Its compromise plan: to acknowledge Iran's right to enrich small amounts of uranium, but to freeze the program for three years and place Iranian facilities under a tough international inspections regime. At a luncheon, Nahavandian made a passionate case to the group's Middle East director, former Clinton administration official Robert Malley, that current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was eager to broaden Tehran's tentative cooperation with Washington over Iraq to other subjects. Ideally that would lead to a "grand bargain" addressing all bilateral issues, including nuclear, trade and security. One participant who did not want to be identified because it might harm his relations with Tehran said that Nahavandian was clearly "putting out feelers."

Iranian President Ahmadinejad is, too, in what appears to be a struggle among Tehran's power elite to outdo each other diplomatically. The Iranian leader—who alternates between frightening, apocalyptic rhetoric at home and good-will tours abroad—sent a rambling 18-page letter to President George W. Bush last week. While the letter took a harsh, lecturing tone toward American power, it also represented the first leader-to-leader message between Tehran and Washington since the 1979 revolution. "We can see that Iranian officials are determined to talk to the U.S. directly," says Saeid Shariati, the spokesman for Iran's reformist Participation Front Party. "Now we have to wait for signals from the other side."

So far Bush's hard-line stance hasn't changed: no one-on-one talks, period. Instead, Washington is still subcontracting Iran diplomacy to Britain, France and Germany. But as the diplomatic impasse continues, and Pentagon officials voice misgivings about future military options, the administration's firm line may be wavering. The chief U.S. negotiator, Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns, has indicated to colleagues that he is mainly waiting for the right moment, when America's leverage and its chances of success are maximized. "Whereas in recent months the U.S. response was 'It's impossible to do direct talks,' now the refusals from Washington are not so unequivocal," says a senior European envoy who works with Washington and wants to remain anonymous because of diplomatic sensitivities.

After finding itself isolated over Iraq, the United States aims to avoid further isolation in the standoff with Iran. The Bush administration is seeking to appease its own partners, especially German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who has argued publicly that only Washington can break the impasse with Tehran. Bush may be feeling a bit chastened, too, by a new balkiness within his own military. The preparation and updating of U.S. target lists for Iran continues, but according to two officials who spoke anonymously because they are not authorized to brief the media, the Pentagon brass has told Bush that the military is pessimistic about the efficacy of airstrikes against Iranian sites.

Even Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seems apprehensive. Last week, when asked if faulty intelligence about Iraq made him question what he knew of Iran's nuclear program, he responded, "You bet." Rumsfeld also called Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and asked him to avoid hearings that would play up the military options. (Warner responded that he wasn't planning them, his spokesman John Ullyot said.) Military officers say they are concerned that the Iranian nuclear program is already so widely spread out that strikes would set it back only partially, and the Iranians could retaliate in any number of places: Iraq, Afghanistan, the gulf, southern Lebanon (against Israel) and through terrorist acts in the West.

Critics like Flynt Leverett, a former Bush administration official, say that prolonging the diplomatic stalemate means that Tehran will end up closer to a nuclear bomb in the end. Leverett says Bush rebuffed an initiative from Tehran in 2003, passed on by the Swiss, to launch direct talks. "If we had pursued this three years ago and been able to work out a deal, the Iranians wouldn't have 164 centrifuges today," says Leverett. "Now if we do a deal with them we're probably going to have to accept centrifuges and some kind of small-scale enrichment activity. If we wait three years from now, who knows what the bottom line will be?" Only talking may tell.

With Maziar Bahari in Tehran and John Barry and Dan Ephron in Washington

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