According to revelations by The New York Times and The Washington Post, American officials secretly warned their Iranian counterparts about the risk of assassination attempts carried out by Israel, and this throughout the negotiations that had been taking place since April.
The two main Iranian negotiators in danger were Abbas Araghchi, Foreign Minister, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Speaker of the Parliament.
Washington feared that an attack on the Iranian negotiators would derail the delicate discussions started in April toward a tentative peace agreement between the United States and Iran. The Americans reportedly even asked, according to some of the sources of the American newspaper, other regional countries to discreetly warn Tehran.
The fear of undermining the negotiations
The elimination of senior Iranian officials had been part of the Israeli strategy since the war began on February 28 with an airstrike that killed the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and several other leaders. The Wall Street Journal had already revealed in March that Ghalibaf and Araghchi were on an Israeli target list before being temporarily removed at the time discussions with Tehran opened.
If American leaders indeed assessed, at the height of the conflict, that the two men could constitute legitimate military targets, the American administration would then, according to the NYT, have considered that their assassination would immediately end the negotiations and rekindle the fighting. According to The Washington Post this time, the American officials would have thus asked their Israeli counterparts as early as March to end their assassination campaign. “If you kill these men, you kill the pragmatists with whom Washington hoped to negotiate,” said an American official, speaking on condition of anonymity to the newspaper.
Despite these threats, the negotiations continued, with senior Iranian officials taking part in meetings in Qatar at the end of May, then in Switzerland in June, where they met J.D. Vance and the American delegation. For some observers, the American decision to warn Tehran about these assassination risks is a further illustration of the growing divergence between Washington and Israel’s war aims. But also of the limits of the influence and control that the Trump administration can exercise over the Benjamin Netanyahu government.
