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Iran’s economic peril helped drive nuclear deal, CIA chief says

CIA Director John Brennan spoke at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University on Tuesday.Gretchen Ertl/REUTERS

CAMBRIDGE — The director of the CIA has provided the first public glimpse of US intelligence assessments about why Iran’s leadership agreed to the tentative nuclear accord last week, saying that Iran’s president persuaded the nation’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that their country’s economy was “destined to go down” unless he reached an understanding with the West.

CIA director John O. Brennan, speaking Tuesday night at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, suggested that a key to the deal was the election of President Hassan Rouhani, who had hardly been the supreme leader’s first choice. It took more than two years, he suggested, for the new president, a former nuclear negotiator himself, to convince the far more isolated Khamenei that “six years of sanctions had really hit,” and that the economic future imperiled the regime.

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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 has also 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, 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 hourlong interview conducted by Graham T. Allison, a Harvard professor who has specialized in nuclear strategy. “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.”

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Brennan, who like other intelligence officials works to protect “sources and methods,” did not say how the agency knew such details about the supreme leader — through spies, electronic intercepts, or analysis of other intelligence.

Even so, Brennan’s views are considered important because President Obama had said in recent days that he had sought an assessment of Khamenei’s intentions from the intelligence community, telling a New York Times columnist on Saturday that “he’s a pretty tough read — I don’t have great insight beyond what I think I get from our intelligence folks.”

While Obama is usually deeply suspicious of intelligence reporting, his relationship with Brennan has been an especially tight one since the 2008 campaign. In Obama’s first term, Brennan was his top intelligence adviser.

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 J. 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” the problem was to get sanctions lifted.

Brennan’s description of Rouhani as a man who “has a history of engaging with the West, and he is much more practical and reasonable individual,” is bound to inflame Israel’s government.

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In 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.”