CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The director of the CIA provided the first public glimpse of U.S. intelligence assessments about why Iran's leadership agreed to a tentative nuclear accord, saying the country's president convinced its supreme leader that the economy was "destined to go down" unless he reached an understanding with the West.
The director, John Brennan, speaking Tuesday night at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, suggested a key to the deal was the election of President Hassan Rouhani. It took more than two years, he said, for the new president, a former nuclear negotiator himself, to convince the far more isolated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that "six years of sanctions had really hit," and that the economic future imperiled the regime.
During this time, the ayatollah kept referring publicly to Iran's "resistance economy," a phrase that resounded among hard-liners who liked to portray the country as thriving by confronting the United States and its allies.
Brennan also suggested that Khamenei, who has not spoken publicly about the accord but also has not permitted hard-liners to speak out against it, had performed a careful political calculation. If the effort to reach an accord collapsed, or the price seemed too high, prominent members of Rouhani's government could be blamed, starting with the lead negotiator, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.
"I think Khamenei was in the position of being able to say to Rouhani and Zarif, 'OK, see if you can get a deal,"' said Brennan, speaking to hundreds of students in an hour-long interview. "Because if you do, Khamenei is going to be able to derive the benefits from it, and if you don't get one, Rouhani has Zarif to blame."
President Barack Obama has said in recent days that he had sought an assessment of Khamenei's intentions from the intelligence community.
The process of getting Iran to negotiate took time, Brennan said, playing out long after two secret envoys from the Obama administration -- a former deputy secretary of state, William Burns, and a former close adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton, Jake Sullivan -- made the first efforts to draw the Rouhani government into a conversation.
"I think over time Rouhani was able to explain to Khamenei just how challenging the economic environment was in Iran right now, and it was destined to go down," he said. "The only way they were going to address" it was to get sanctions lifted.
Brennan described Rouhani as a man who "has a history of engaging with the West, and he is much more practical and reasonable individual."
That contrasts with statements from the leader of Israel, a longtime enemy of Iran. In October 2013, speaking at the United Nations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Rouhani "a wolf in sheep's clothing, a wolf who thinks he can pull the wool over the eyes of the international community."
In the same speech he described the Iranian president as a man who "thinks he can have his yellowcake and eat it, too," referring to the raw uranium ore that can be processed into nuclear fuel.
But Brennan suggested that the provisions of the accord that allow international inspectors to trace Iran's efforts back to its uranium mills and mines, and track the fuel as it is sent off for processing -- including into yellowcake -- was important to improving intelligence collection about Iran's nuclear capabilities.
Brennan also dismissed as "wholly disingenuous" Netanyahu's claim that the framework accord reached last Thursday in Lausanne, Switzerland, would provide Iran with a "pathway to a bomb."
Without naming Netanyahu directly, but quoting from his language, Brennan said he was "pleasantly surprised" that the Iranians had given up as much as they did. He also backed the Obama administration's assessment that the accord would greatly extend the amount of time it would take Iran to put together a bomb, either from plutonium or uranium.
"When I look at the concessions that they made, going from 19,000 centrifuges to 6,000 centrifuges with 5,000 still operating, nobody thought they would do it," Brennan said.
And Brennan expressed confidence that the CIA would be able to build on the international inspections and detect any new covert nuclear activity, saying "we've gone to school" on Iran's nuclear infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Obama discussed the emerging Iranian nuclear deal with Sen. Bob Corker in a phone call Wednesday as the White House seeks to stave off the Tennessee Republican's bill that would give Congress an up-or-down vote on the agreement.
The president spoke with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman the week before the panel is set to consider the bill, which is co-sponsored by eight Democrats and an independent.
The White House has threatened to veto the legislation, but supporters say they have almost enough votes to override a veto.
Many Senate Republicans "view the Corker bill as a vehicle for undermining negotiations" with Iran, which they oppose, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said.
Obama said over the weekend that he hoped the White House could work with lawmakers to "find something that allows Congress to express itself" without undermining his ability to negotiate.
Also on Wednesday, Iran accused the five nuclear powers of failing to take concrete action to eliminate their own stockpiles and called for negotiations on a convention to achieve nuclear disarmament by a target date.
Gholam Hossein Dehghani, Iran's deputy United Nations ambassador, told the U.N. Disarmament Commission that "a comprehensive, binding, irreversible, verifiable" treaty is the most effective and practical way to eliminate nuclear weapons.
He accused the nuclear powers -- the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France -- of promising nuclear disarmament but making no significant progress.
The commission, which includes all 193 member states, is supposed to make recommendations in the field of disarmament but has failed to make substantive proposals in the past decade.
Its three-week meeting is taking place ahead of the five-year review of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which begins April 27.
Information for this article was contributed by David E. Sanger of The New York Times; by Justin Sink of Bloomberg News and by Edith M. Lederer of The Associated Press.
A Section on 04/09/2015