How Nespresso and a whiteboard sealed the Iran deal (must read)

The constant whir of the Nespresso machine in the US negotiating room became the soundtrack of the almost round-the-clock negotiations in the final days. Experts and negotiators continued their consultations over room service meals delivered to the negotiating suites. The last days of the talks, from March 31 to April 2, US and Iranian team members got a maximum two hours sleep a night.

“A lot of it surprised me,” former US nuclear negotiator Robert Einhorn told Al-Monitor on April 7. “It’s much more detailed and comprehensive than I expected. The constraints, especially in the first 10 years, are greater than expected. The verification measures were especially impressive.”

The detailed preliminary accord announced by Mogherini, Zarif and US Secretary of State John Kerry on April 2 was the culmination of grueling, sleepless, round-the-clock negotiations that lasted over nine hours the final night, until 6 a.m. April 2. Negotiators broke for an hour of sleep and breakfast before resuming talks later that morning.

One weary US expert at one point accidentally used permanent marker on the erasable whiteboard the Americans were using to track all the elements of a framework deal they needed to get in place. It took 20 minutes for him to erase the apparently classified numbers of the calculation on a nuclear issue from the board, officials said.

Eight days earlier, on March 25, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman sat down with her two Iranian counterparts, Deputy Foreign Ministers Abbas Araghchi and Majid Ravanchi, at a meeting room in Lausanne’s Beau Rivage Palace Hotel with an erasable whiteboard, “and just sort of took stock,” the senior US administration official said.

“So we put up all the elements on a whiteboard,” the US official said, noting the erasable chalkboard was useful because it did not create a paper trail that diplomats would have to immediately report back to Tehran.

“What we did with Abbas [Araghchi] and Majid [Ravanchi] on Wednesday night [March 25] was sort of go through all of the elements: what had been … (tentatively) agreed, where had we sort of locked in a solution, what yet had to be resolved, sort of what’s going to be our work plan for the week … how were we going to use the time, how were we going to get this done,” the US official said.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/04/iran-deal-inside-look-lausanne-kerry-zarif-coffee.html