Not for the Faint of Heart by Wendy R. Sherman

Author:Wendy R. Sherman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2018-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

chapter five

BUILDING YOUR TEAM

As we made the push toward the final Iran agreement, the fifteen Americans on my core negotiating team sat around our delegation room at the Palais Coburg in Vienna casting the movie we seemed to be stuck in. We called it The Coburg Affair. Ted Danson was the obvious choice to play Secretary Kerry. The Spanish actor Javier Bardem’s coif in No Country for Old Men made him a dead ringer for Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz. Kevin Kline—with a mustache—would play Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns. Home Alone’s Macaulay Culkin was unquestionably the perfect Jake Sullivan, Burns’s eternally youthful partner in the back-channel negotiations. I was told that my part would be played by Meryl Streep in Devil Wears Prada mode, though I was assured that the likeness was due entirely to the similarities in our hairstyles, not to any resemblance between me and the dragon lady Streep portrayed in the movie. Our movie felt like one of those classic caper flicks that brings together a bunch of motley safecrackers, getaway drivers, dynamiters, and other specialists. Instead, we were a cast of nuclear experts, lawyers, and career diplomats.

Vienna may bring out the Hollywood in us Americans. It’s a natural movie-set backdrop, as you know if you’ve ever seen The Third Man, Orson Welles’s moody, conspiratorial evocation of postwar Vienna. It’s still a town so full of spies and diplomatic intrigue that we all just assumed that we were being overheard or electronically surveilled. My British counterpart and I discussed the number of centrifuges the deal would allow Iran to operate by passing slips of paper back and forth on the outdoor patio of my room.

Despite the glamourous setting, ours would have been a snoozer of a movie. It would have included far too many scenes of us huddled in hotel rooms, flipping through briefing books and calculating the intersecting variables of uranium enrichment levels, spent nuclear fuel rods, and centrifuge specifications.

And eating. One day in Vienna, our press liaison, Marie Harf (to be played by Kirsten Dunst), was looking for a color story to keep the expectant reporters happy and asked us to catalog our snacking habits. We reckoned that the fifteen of us on the American core negotiating team had worked our way through ten pounds of Twizzlers, thirty pounds of mixed nuts and dried fruit, twenty pounds of string cheese, and more than two hundred Rice Krispies treats, all in less than a month. The Coburg was solicitous of our stomachs as well. Conscious that our twenty-seven-day run would unexpectedly go through the Fourth of July, the manager set up an American-style barbecue on an outdoor patio, complete with hot dogs, hamburgers, and corn on the cob.

We had help from home too. After I wrote an email thanking all the spouses, partners, and families of the core team for their understanding over the weeks of being deprived of their loved ones, one family shipped over sock puppets to comfort and entertain us and homemade baked goods.

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