Iranians 'twisted themselves into pretzels' on enrichment

US officials say diplomatic path was at dead end when Trump approved Iran strikes

Top Trump officials accuse Iran of trying to drag US along during three rounds of talks, claiming it wouldn’t seek a nuclear weapon while insisting on maintaining the means to do so

WASHINGTON — Senior US officials said Tuesday that President Donald Trump ordered strikes on Iran after Tehran demonstrated during three rounds of nuclear talks last month that it was not serious about giving up the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon.

“They basically offered us a lot of political wins and some concessions, but they were unwilling to give up the building blocks of what they needed to preserve to get to a bomb,” said one of the two senior US officials who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity.

The two officials used the opportunity to offer new details on the three rounds of negotiations that were held, offering more context on Trump’s decision to launch Operation Epic Fury amid mounting criticism from Democrats and some MAGA Republicans regarding the urgency, strategy and timeline of the operation.

Echoing comments made on Monday by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the second official added that Iran was trying to move additional nuclear facilities underground, this time without “air shafts,” which were used by the US to identify Tehran’s three main nuclear sites in strikes last year.

Laying out Washington’s objectives in the negotiations, the second senior US official said they were for Iran to hand over all of its highly enriched uranium; ensure that the three nuclear facilities hit by the US last year — Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan — would be decommissioned forever; guarantee that Iran would cease its support for proxy militia groups; and dismantle Iran’s ballistic missile program.

The senior US official acknowledged that the latter two issues were not addressed in the three rounds of talks mediated by Oman. However, he said that the US decided those issues would be raised in separate talks that would include Arab allies, who are impacted by Iran’s missile program and support for proxies.

While Trump’s top negotiators Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff informed their Iranian counterparts during the talks that they expected Tehran to negotiate with its Arab neighbors on its missiles and proxy support, Iran never did so.

“That was one of the first tells — that while we agreed in good faith to allow the region to take on these two issues, the Iranians made no attempt whatsoever to convene the region and talk about them,” the first US official said.

A peaceful underground program?

During the first round on February 6, Iran’s top negotiator, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, asserted that Iran had an “inalienable” right to enrich uranium and that it already had enough of it to produce 11 nuclear bombs, the US official said, echoing revelations made on Monday by Witkoff in a Fox News interview.

Joining Witkoff and Kushner at that meeting was US Army Central Command chief Adm. Brad Cooper, leading Araghchi to ask the Trump aides if they were trying to “threaten” Tehran by having him there.

“No, he just happened to be in the neighborhood,” Witkoff quipped in response, according to the first US official.

The American negotiators used the opportunity to press the Iranians on why they needed to be building their nuclear facilities underground, to which Araghchi responded that they don’t want their sites to be bombed.

“If there’s nothing nefarious being done there, then you shouldn’t be worried about a bomb,” Kushner responded, according to the first US official.

“We were very clear from the first meeting that we had with Araghchi that President Trump’s goal was to leave the region and the world safer than before, and if they wanted to act like a normal country, then we can have a really amazing relationship,” the US official recalled.

“You would think that with these guys at their weakest point ever, with President Trump — who is proven not to be a bluffer — moving real assets to the region, we thought they would show real movement toward creating a real deal. But all we got were games and tricks and denials,” the first US official lamented, indicating that talks got off on the wrong foot.

Araghchi ‘slips up’

In the second meeting on February 17, Araghchi told Witkoff and Kushner that Iran would never let the Americans “achieve something diplomatically that [they] weren’t able to achieve militarily,” the first US official recalled, characterizing it as a slip-up that the Iranian foreign minister tried to later walk back.

Also during that second meeting, the US negotiators asked their Iranian counterparts to put together a full proposal detailing the concessions Tehran would be willing to make, the second US official said.

While Washington asked to receive the proposal before the third round convened on February 26, Iran did not comply.

Instead, its negotiators showed up to the third meeting with a one-page declaration professing that it does not want a nuclear weapon.

When Witkoff and Kushner asked if the Iranians had the detailed proposal that was requested, the latter handed over a roughly half-a-dozen-page document that tried to make a case for Tehran to be allowed to have a limited, “needs-based” enrichment program over a ten-year period, the second US official recalled.

Iran barred the American negotiators from taking the document back to Washington for consultation, but the US official said he did a quick review of it on site and was “dismayed.”

While it detailed Iran’s handover of nuclear material to the US, it “essentially would have allowed them to enrich at a multiple of five times what was allowed under the JCPOA,” the US official said, referring to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which capped enrichment at 3.67% purity. Trump abandoned the deal in 2018, and Iran subsequently massively increased its enrichment toward weapons-grade levels.

The Iranian proposal’s details regarding the existing Tehran Research Reactor also set off alarm bells for Witkoff and Kushner, the US second official said.

When the Americans shared the document with International Atomic Energy Agency director Rafael Grossi — who was also participating in the talks — they concluded that Iran was asking to be able to produce over seven times as much uranium as what would be needed for medical purposes, the US official said.

“The claim that they were using a research reactor to do good for the Iranian people was a complete and false pretense to hide the fact that they were [trying to] stockpile there,” the official added, claiming that the proposal would have kept Iran only weeks away from enough weapons-grade material to produce a nuclear bomb.

The ‘free fuel test’

Witkoff and Kushner used the third meeting to test Iran’s claim of merely seeking a peaceful civil nuclear program by offering for the US to provide Tehran with free fuel to do so.

“They really twisted themselves into pretzels to try to explain how enrichment was their national right and their national pride,” the first US official said.

While the Iranians and the Omani mediators wanted the US to publicly project positivity about the third round of talks, Witkoff and Kushner felt there was not enough to be upbeat about, the official said.

Reporting back to Trump after last Thursday’s talks, Kushner told him, “Look, if you want us to make an Obama kind of deal, maybe it would be an Obama-plus deal, we could probably get one done. But it would take months because these guys were not looking to make a quick deal,” the first US official recalled.

“If you’re asking us at the end of the day if we’ll be able to look at you and say we’ve actually solved the issue, I said, look, it’s going to take a lot for us to get there because they’re basically playing games,” Kushner told Trump, according to the senior US official.

The next afternoon, Trump authorized the launch of Operation Epic Fury against Iran, in conjunction with Israel’s Operation Roaring Lion.

Witkoff has not spoken to Araghchi or any Iranian representative “since this thing went kinetic,” the second US official said.