US held secret talks with Iran over Red Sea attacks

Financial Times-March 13th2024

Felicia Schwartz in Washington and Andrew England in London

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The US has held secret talks with Iran this year in a bid to convince Tehran to use its influence over Yemen’s Houthi movement to end attacks on ships in the Red Sea, according to US and Iranian officials. The indirect negotiations, during which Washington also raised concerns about Iran’s expanding nuclear programme, took place in Oman in January and were the first between the foes in 10 months, the officials said. The US delegation was led by the White House’s Middle East adviser Brett McGurk and its Iran envoy Abram Paley. Iranian deputy foreign minister Ali Bagheri Kani, who is also Tehran’s top nuclear negotiator, represented the Islamic republic. Omani officials shuttled between the Iranian and American representatives so they did not speak directly, the officials said. The talks underline how the Biden administration is using diplomatic channels with its foe, alongside military deterrents, in a bid to de-escalate a wave of regional hostilities involving Iranian-backed militant groups that was triggered by the Israel-Hamas war. US officials see an indirect channel with Iran as “a method for raising the full range of threats emanating from Iran”, a person familiar with the matter said. That included conveying “what they need to do in order to prevent a wider conflict, as they claim to want”.

A second round of negotiations involving McGurk was scheduled for February, but was postponed when he became tied up with US efforts to broker an agreement between Israel and Hamas to halt the war in Gaza and secure the release of Israeli hostages held in the strip, the US officials added. “We have many channels for passing messages to Iran,” a US state department spokesperson said. They declined to provide details “other than to say that, since October 7, all of them have been focused on raising the full range of threats emanating from Iran, and the need for Iran to cease its across-the-board escalation”. The last known talks between US and Iran were also so-called proximity talks last May. Since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel triggered the war, Iran-backed Hizbollah, the Lebanese militant movement, has traded daily cross-border fire with Israel; the Houthis have attacked dozens of ships, including merchant shipping and US naval vessels; and Iranian-aligned Iraqi militias have launched scores of missiles and drones against American forces in Iraq and Syria.