Yahoo News
January 13, 2012
The United States has used a secret communications channel to dispatch a diplomatic communication to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warning against any threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, the New York Times reports.
The Obama administration employed the back channel "to warn Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that closing the Strait of Hormuz is a 'red line' that would provoke an American response, according to United States government officials," the Times' Pentagon correspondents Elizabeth Bumiller, Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt wrote Thursday.
The Times' sources would not describe the means of contact.
But analysts tracking military relations between the United States and Iran said they believe that Obama officials are likely using a trusted third-country intermediary to get its message to Khamenei. Such a figure, they speculate, would be a classic diplomatic go-between, carrying communiques from leader to leader.
"It's not a red phone, it's a letter," said Patrick Clawson, deputy director of research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in an interview with Yahoo News Friday.
Clawson also suggested that the courier in question might be Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who traveled to Iran last week saying he was carrying a message from the West.
"My first suspicion is that Davutoglu was instructed to give to the Supreme Leader" a letter from Obama, he said.
"We have a number of ways to communicate our views to the Iranian government, and we have used those mechanisms regularly on a range of issues over the years," White House spokesman Jay Carney said in answer to a question Friday on the matter at the White House press briefing.
"So we obviously have means of communicating with the Iranian government.," he added. "We use those means and methods and -- but our message privately -- we deliver the same message in private that we deliver in public.
"It's highly desirable to have a line to the national leadership," said Michael Eisenstadt, a military analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in an interview with Yahoo News.
"How to get to the Supreme Leader, who doesn't give newspaper interviews, and doesn't do a lot of interactions with other government officials, but is the ultimate decision maker, is a question that has bedeviled us since the 1980s," Eistenstadt continued. "How do you make sure you get the message to the guy, and that it won't be diluted?"
"Keep in mind, the administration has sent two prior letters to Khamenei," he continued. "Apparently the channel, if this is the same channel, sounds very much like we have established this channel early on, if it didn't already exist."
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