Politics and a Ruptured Tendon Don’t Faze Lead Iran Negotiator

US State Department, via European Pressphoto Agency

Wendy Sherman, the State Department's No. 3 official, with Secretary of State John Kerry last weekend after the deal with Iran.

WASHINGTON — On her way to brief highly skeptical members of Congress about the deal she was still negotiating in secretive talks with the Iranians, Wendy Sherman, the State Department's No. 3 official and its lead negotiator with Tehran, fell and ruptured a tendon in her finger. She packed it in ice, went to a secure room, and continued her briefing on uranium enrichment levels and current intelligence about the intentions of America's longtime adversary. Only then did she head to the emergency room.

The story quickly whipped through the White House. "She is both extraordinarily focused and extraordinarily tenacious," said Antony J. Blinken, the deputy national security adviser, who has coordinated the Iran strategy. "She's not the kind to pay attention to pain."

That focus over the past two years helped prepare the ground for talks with Iran that gained momentum, both in public and through a secret channel, once Hassan Rouhani was elected Iran's president last summer. But now Ms. Sherman's tenacity and toughness will be tested by two different challenges. She must persuade Congress not to go ahead with imposing further sanctions that could imperil the preliminary deal reached in Geneva last weekend. And over the next six months, she must coax the Iranians to actually dismantle a multibillion-dollar nuclear infrastructure that so far it has agreed only to freeze in place.

Many strategists were behind the drive that could become the Obama administration's signature achievement in foreign policy, or end in failure. William Burns, the deputy secretary of state, ran a secret negotiating channel with the Iranians in Oman that Ms. Sherman occasionally joined; Secretary of State John Kerry flew to Geneva — twice — to act as the closer and sent a seven-minute video to Capitol Hill to persuade members of Congress not to break the momentum of the talks. President Obama has immersed himself in the details of the Iranian plants since 2009, when he approved covert operations to sabotage them — part of the effort, along with sanctions, to drive the Iranians to the table.

But for the past two years it has been Ms. Sherman who had to master the technological detail, the flow of intelligence reports and the treacherous politics of striking a deal with a country still on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terror.

"It's the job at which you can't be at the 30,000-foot level, you have to be immersed in the details," said Robert Einhorn, her partner in the effort until last summer. "And Wendy's absorbed everything." The next few months will test everything the 64-year-old diplomat has learned during a career that began as a social worker in Boston, segued into politics as an operative for the Democratic Party and Senate campaign aide, and turned to foreign policy in the Clinton administration.

Along the way, Ms. Sherman was the State Department's chief strategist in dealing with the North Korean nuclear program. It was a searing experience, in both its temporary successes and long-term failure, that prepared her for the complexity of the Iranian negotiations, and has made her a target for those on Capitol Hill who argue that history is about to repeat itself.

"The American people need an insurance policy to prevent a rerun of North Korea," said Senator Mark Kirk, Republican of Illinois, who said that Iran could blindside the United States with a secret nuclear fuel program, much as North Korea did more than a decade ago. The Israelis constantly raise North Korea comparisons, as do some Democrats.

Ms. Sherman has learned to push back — hard — with the argument that comparisons to North Korea are tempting, but overly simplistic sound bites.

"There was a lot to learn from that experience, but the two situations are quite different," Ms. Sherman said last week before leaving Geneva, her voice still weary from the negotiations over a historic, if temporary, accord to freeze Iran's program while a bigger negotiation begins.

"It's a different time, a different culture, a different system," she said. By the time the Clinton administration began negotiating with North Korea, American intelligence agencies had assessed that the country already had weapons-grade fuel for one or two bombs; in Iran's case, Ms. Sherman argues, "No one believes they are there yet." There are other differences, too, she said. "Iran has a middle class" that the United States is trying to appeal to by giving it a taste of sanctions relief. "It's people who travel, within limits, and see the world." Those factors, she believes, create the kind of leverage that was missing in talks with North Korea, whose citizens are almost completely isolated from the rest of the world.

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