The former Spanish minister, former secretary general of NATO and former head of European diplomacy, Javier Solana, maintained for years a direct relationship with Ali Lariyaní, who was secretary of the National Security Council of Iran and.
Solana served as High Representative of the European Union for the Common Foreign and Security Policy between 1999 and 2009. And he met with Lariyaní more than a dozen times since 2003. Now, at 83 years old, the former socialist minister recalls in a telephone conversation the lunches and dinners that both shared in Rome, Madrid, Istanbul or Tehran. “He was very serious and a very tough negotiator, but rational. He was very sophisticated. He had a brother who is one of the most important judges in the country. And another who is a very good mathematician. He introduced me to both of them. There are many of those types of families in Iran; it is a very cultured country. He liked to show off the cultured side of his life. And I think he enjoyed talking to me,” he remembers.
There are two facets for which Larijani, who died at the age of 67 in a bombing, stood out: his role before the West as a negotiator of the nuclear agreement that would end up being forged in 2015 and his role as the person most responsible for the repression exercised by the regime in the recent protests in the Islamic Republic. . Larijani was in charge of the security apparatus.
The profile of a repressor does not seem to fit that refined man that Javier Solana remembers. “I wouldn’t have imagined him as a repressor. He liked to talk a lot about philosophy. And there he beat me. When we talked about atoms, however, I beat him, as I’m a physicist,” says Solana, smiling.
Solana began the negotiations representing the EU and later also on behalf of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China). “We took slow but sure steps,” he remembers. “Iranian television did a couple of very long interviews with me, where I explained the West’s point of view on what we were negotiating.”
Larijani’s disagreements with the then Iranian president, Mahmu Ahmadinejad, forced his resignation in 2007 as chief nuclear negotiator. But the foundations of what would be had already been laid. A pact that his successor, .
“I think they removed him from office because the regime thought he was making too many concessions to me,” says the former NATO Secretary General (1995-1999). Solana believes that those first steps of the nuclear agreement would have been unthinkable without the good relationship that was established between the two. “The most difficult meetings were held by the two of us alone, in English, without translators or technicians.”
In 2007, after the press conference in Rome in which the replacement of Larijani by Saeed Jalili as head of the Iranian negotiating team was announced, Solana remembers that he and Larijani ate together. “I remember he took off his jacket and smoked a cigar.” After that day, they saw each other sporadically. “I think that it must have affected him a lot that Trump broke the agreement that had been signed by the five members of the UN Security Council. And I think that Trump broke it under pressure from [el primer ministro israelí] Benjamin Netanyahu. Because the most important pressures that I had in the negotiation with Iran always came from Israel. The Israelis did not want, under any circumstances, for this negotiation to go well,” he remarks.
Despite the good relationship established between the two, Solana says that Larijani never criticized the Iranian regime. “When it looked like he was about to do it, he told me: ‘Don’t make me criticize my regime.’”
