The long, necessarily cloak-and-dagger struggle to secure the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori is a story that started in New York and – via the Sultan’s palace in Muscat and a cold pavement in London’s King Charles Street – ended with nail-biting delays at Tehran international airport.
After the two British-Iranians were finally freed on Wednesday, the UK foreign secretary, Liz Truss, and her team received plaudits in the House of Commons for her role and quiet determination in overseeing this extraordinary endeavour.
Others will say it should never have taken so long, and in a moment of triumph she has resorted to some brutal realpolitik, leaving behind other British citizens, like Morad Tahbaz, in Iran – ostensibly released from prison on “furlough”, but in reality still under armed guard.
It is also true that Truss happened to be in office – the fifth foreign secretary to have the file – when the moment for a deal finally became ripe.
But the foreign secretary did invest significant personal effort in the negotiations with Iran, with no guarantee of success. She was on the phone to Richard Ratcliffe, Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband, within days of taking office, and made a point of meeting Iran’s new foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, in New York on the fringes of the UN general assembly in September, the first person-to-person meeting between the two countries since Jeremy Hunt returned empty-handed from a meeting in Tehran three years earlier. Most of the meeting was taken up with the discussion of how the issue of the £400m debt and the dual-national detainees could be progressed after two false starts earlier in the year.
But Truss was also galvanised by an unexpectedly successful 21-day hunger strike by Richard Ratcliffe outside the Foreign Office on King Charles Street in freezing November. With his small tent pitched so close to parliament, Ratcliffe’s cause became Westminster’s as MPs struck by his personal integrity developed a cross-party respect for him. The political momentum must have left the Foreign Office reeling. One meeting in Westminster Hall overflowed with MPs who had been to see Ratcliffe on hunger strike and were now demanding the debt be paid.
By then it had become clear to Truss, as to previous foreign secretaries, that no British detainee in an Iranian jail was going to be walking free until the £400m debt to the country had been repaid. In her own mind, the first issue – one of moral hazard – could be overcome: this was payment of a debt, not succumbing to a ransom demand.
The second issue increasingly became how to make the payment, which had been an obstacle for years, since US sanctions imposed after the collapse of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 closed off many avenues, such as payment to the Iranian Central Bank, the country’s preferred method. The evolving attitude of the Biden administration in the US became critical.
At the turn of the year Truss turned to a trusted intermediary – Oman’s foreign minister, Sayyid Badr Albusaidi, who she met at a Gulf Cooperation Council meeting on 20 December at her grace-and-favour residence, Chevening. Oman over the decades has acted as a home for discreet diplomatic back channels. Her own officials, including Laura Hickey, head of the Iraq desk, then travelled to Oman to finalise the details in Muscat.
Much of this was done in anticipation of talks on reviving the Iran nuclear deal coming to a successful conclusion in Vienna – a potential turning point in British-Iranian relations, and indeed relations between the west and Iran.
In Oman there were detailed exchanges between British and Iranian officials on how the debt would be paid. Iran argued that the monies were payable to its Ministry of Defence. The UK ruled that out and said paying it to the Iranian Central Bank or in cash, an idea once advanced by Boris Johnson, was not possible since it would be “fungible” – it would seep into other parts of the Iranian financial system, and possibly become subject to sanctions.
Instead the actual conduit used was via the Bank of Oman. Another route examined by the Foreign Office was that the money be paid first as a UK credit to the US, and the money then transferred to the Saman Bank using the Swiss Humanitarian Trade Arrangement, a channel set up in 2020 by the Trump administration to allow for humanitarian trade to flow into Iran.
The precise sum, and the issue of interest, had already been settled in earlier court cases that saw the UK’s high court rule that due to sanctions, no interest was payable to Iran on the debt, which was outstanding from the collapsed sale of Chieftain tanks to Iran in the 1970s.
The third issue was “the third man”: Tahbaz, a conservationist with British, American and Iranian citizenship, accused of espionage after tracking endangered species with cameras.
A previous UK attempt to settle the debt had collapsed partly over Tahbaz. In the interim between Biden’s election as US president and Donald Trump’s departure in January 2021, Dominic Raab, the then foreign secretary, proposed a deal to Tahbaz in jail whereby he would be left in Iran on furlough – out of jail but not free – while Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh would come home. The Iranians regard Tahbaz as American and so did not see him as a legitimate part of any bilateral British trade-off.
Tahbaz, according to his family, rejected the Raab deal from his prison, and so did the US. At the time the outgoing Trump administration was not eager to see £400m flood into Iranian coffers. As a result the UK backed off, leaving Anoosheh and Zaghari-Ratcliffe in detention.
But reviewing the issue last month, the Foreign Office evidently decided to change tactics. By then a former British council employee, Aras Amiri, had been released. The reasoning became: if the UK could get its two most high-profile detainees home, they should accept the offer, even if it was tough on Tahbaz and his wife, who is also trapped in Iran. The Tahbaz family only heard of the imminent Zaghari-Ratcliffe release through the British press on Tuesday, and battled to find anyone in the Foreign Office to admit to them that this time he had become expendable. The nail-biting delay before Zaghari-Ratcliffe left the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ hands was fruitless last-minute haggling over the terms of Tahbaz’s furlough.
It feels like a dreadful betrayal for the conservationist, even if he is no longer in jail. He is the only British-born person among the three high-profile hostages and his family in the US and UK have been left wondering if they took the right course in not campaigning in public as much as the other families. His birth certificate, showing he was born in Hammersmith hospital, London, was of no use in persuading the British to stand by him.
When it comes to the deal struck this week, there remain points of factual difference. Iran says it received the money – nearly £394m – from the British on Monday. The UK says the money did not touch the Iranians until Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Ashoori were safely off Iranian soil. Iran stands by its story that the two were spies. The UK says they are innocent. Iran claims an Iranian prisoner has been released by the British as part of the deal. The UK says that is untrue.
But the bigger truth after the celebratory homecomings and hugs is that the Foreign Office needs to reflect on whether this release needed to have taken so long or to have been so painful. Equally, the families of those who have waited so long for their loved ones’ return will one day deserve frank answers from the diplomats and shadowy figures in the defence industry.
It can hardly be a matter of celebration that British nationals were held in jail for so long when the solution – the payment of an outstanding and long-acknowledged debt – was self-evidently at hand. The Foreign Office reply remains to this day that the two issues – the debt and detentions – are separate, but this partition is a diplomatic fiction demonstrated by the fact that the detainees were put on a small plane to Oman only once the £394m had finally landed in an Iranian bank account.
It should not have taken the personal courage and blind persistence of two ordinary citizens, Richard Ratcliffe and Sherry Izadi, the wife of Ashoori, to force the British state finally to do the right thing.
• This article was amended on 17 March 2022. An earlier version stated that the UK debt to Iran was “paid first as a UK credit to the US, and the money then transferred to the Saman Bank using the Swiss Humanitarian Trade Agreement”. This delivery method was considered, but not used, by the Foreign Office, which instead chose to use the Bank of Oman as a conduit. Also, the mechanism is called the Swiss Humanitarian Trade Arrangement, not “Agreement”.
