Nuclear diplomacy and Italo disco

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1:08Hello and welcome to the History Hour from the BBC World Service with me, Max Pearson, featuring interviews from the Witness History podcast with people who experienced major events firsthand. This week, we're in the room as the Greek debt crisis nearly collapsed the Eurozone in 2015. And Merkel gets up and says, I'm going. I can't accept this, the German people won't accept this. And Tusk, who was then president of the council, says I'm locking the door, nobody's leaving. Also how Canada and Spain came to blows over fishing rights in the 1990s. These are.50 caliber machine gun mounted on our vessel which fired across the bow of their vessel.

1:49Which was, if you're at sea, quite a powerful warning shot. And the history of the international broadcaster Voice of America. It was a wild place. Every week a new language service began. In the Far East, the Near East, in Central and South America, in Western and in Eastern Europe. That's all coming up later. But first, in the wake of last month's US bombing raid on Iran's nuclear facilities, an opportune moment to look at the recent history of attempts to keep Tehran's suspected weapons program in check. This mainly relates to the 2015 deal under which Iran agreed to temporarily limit its nuclear activities in return for economic sanctions relief.

2:28But what was it like to be in the room or rooms where it happened, where the deal was done? Ben Henderson has been hearing from someone who was there. The deal was agreed by Iran and six countries, the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, China and the EU. Nuclear negotiations had been on and off with limited success for many years. But in late 2009, Baroness Cathy Ashton was tasked with injecting some urgency. I'd become the first EU High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy. It's an enormous job title. And the second day, one of my senior officials just mentioned in passing, Cathy, by the way, you do realise that in your brief are the nuclear negotiations with Iran.

3:12And I realised that this was an extraordinary element of the work that I was going to have to do because it was the biggest global issue of the time. The six other countries worried Iran was building a nuclear weapon, which would violate a nuclear non-proliferation treaty from 1970. But Iran denied this, claiming its nuclear programme was purely for civilian purposes. It was obvious to us that they were indeed moving towards building a bomb for one very simple reason. If you have a civil programme, what you want is to enrich your uranium to about 3.67 % or up to 5%. Once you get beyond that, certainly 20 % plus, the only reason to do that is to create a nuclear weapon.

3:56As chair of negotiations, it was Ashton's job to prevent future nuclear war. No pressure then. When we had the NATO summit in Chicago, President Obama was in the room and starts talking to me. And at the end of the conversation, he said, well, it's not like the pressure of the world's on you. Well, actually, it is. And sort of smiled at me and walked off. Ashton arranged for the seven participating countries to meet in Switzerland in October 2013. The aim was to thrash out a text that would act as the foundation for the eventual deal. All of the discussions took place in the hotel in Geneva. And that meant, of course, that real people, ordinary people were also there.

4:38So we did have a situation one night where security had to stop somebody. I think there'd been a bet of some kind. Could she break into the talks? How far did she get? She got right up to the doors, I think, but then got stopped. We sort of heard something vaguely. Reaching a deal was as much about building relationships as grasping the detail as Ashton found with Russia's foreign minister. Sergei Lavrov was very mischievous in his nature and dangerous in his profession. Lavrov always loved to doodle in meetings and they were always fascinating He could draw really well and there would often be a word usually in Russian and then doodled around it always in black ink geometric in shape but he would spend a long time doing it and occasionally at the end of a meeting I would say to him do you mind if I keep that because it seemed to me the ultimate souvenir really Do you think it meant he wasn't paying attention or was he able to do both at the same time?

5:34Oh, I think like many people, this was a way of continuing to pay attention, that the doodle was always relevant to the subject. But there was something that slipped almost everyone's attention. The US was carrying out secret bilateral negotiations with Iran behind the backs of the other countries. For the Europeans particularly, they felt they'd been left out. There was a feeling this could collapse at any time. when the Americans were able to give us the document that they had been working on with the Iranians. I went round the different countries and the Americans had said to me, you know, they can do little tweaks, but really we cannot have amendments, which is not an easy thing to sell.

6:18So I started with the Russians and the Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who was pretty cross, white-faced. And then I went to the Chinese and I did the same thing. and they just looked incredibly resigned. Then I went to the French. It looked at me like I was completely out of my mind. Germans accepted it, not happy, but accepted it. And then to the Brits, who were very understanding of my position, shall we say. And then I got back and by this point it's dawn and I'm exhausted and the Americans come into the room and say, Cathy, we're really sorry. We gave you the wrong version. It was the only time they said that they saw me get really cross because I then had to run back down the corridors and try and catch all the people who'd merrily sent it off.

7:05Ashton scrambled to get the correct version of the text sent to each government. Then all she could do was wait for their responses. I was sitting with my chief of staff, James, in a room. We'd been at this for 17 or 18 hours and you get bored in a negotiation when you're just waiting. So he invented a game because in Geneva there was always a lot of chocolate in the hotel rooms and he put over the water bottles on the sort of sideboard at the end of the room and we played Skittles where we would throw the chocolates, see if we could hit them. But it kept us occupied for a couple of hours. Fueled by Swiss chocolate, Ashton finally received positive news.

7:47We realised we'd got the deal and the Iranians were comfortable And so I took the decision that we were going to go across to the UN building from the hotel at five o 'clock in the morning and we were going to announce it. Ashton and the foreign ministers lined up for the world's media. Secretary of State John Kerry represented the US. And I realise it's all men and me. And as people will know, in Iran, for religious reasons, Iranian men do not shake hands or touch a woman who's not of their family. It's a mark of respect. so I knew what was going to happen which is all these men were going to hug each other and slap each other on the back and I would be kind of left and so I asked John Kerry I said please don't leave me on my own and so we went out and I announced to the world that we had an agreement with Iran and then John Kerry gave me this huge hug he's a very tall man which went everywhere and became a kind of symbol I suppose of the work that we'd all been doing.

8:45This interim agreement was signed in November 2013. It temporarily froze Iran's nuclear programme and lifted some of the sanctions. Ashton then represented the EU in talks to iron out the fine prints of the deal. Her term as EU foreign policy chief ended in 2014, but she was kept on in an advisory role. Then, in July 2015, foreign ministers gathered in Austria's capital, Vienna, to sign the final deal. The negotiating teams led by the foreign ministers of Iran and the six world powers looked euphoric and exhausted. Two years of negotiations have produced a hugely complex set of commitments to shrink Iran's nuclear capability in return for the lifting of some, not all, sanctions.

9:29There are small differences, but the fundamental building blocks that we had worked on for all those months was all there. So I could take some pride in feeling that it was done. I got honoured by the UK and by Germany. I got a wonderful message from President Obama. But a few months after, a letter found its way to me from an Iranian family. And it just was a letter to say thank you. We know that you've been really important in getting these talks. And we can finally wake up without fear because we know we have a future. And it made me realise that it's all, in the end, about real people. In 2018, President Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Iran nuclear deal.

10:14calling it defective to its core and imposed economic sanctions. He argued the deal only limited Iran's nuclear programme for a fixed period. It failed to stop the country developing ballistic missiles and, in his view, lifting sanctions handed Iran a slush fund for weapons, terror and oppression. Since 2019, Iran has retaliated by breaching the nuclear deal, including the production of enriched uranium. If we'd stuck with it, we'd have known where all of the stockpiles were. instead of what we have now. So I look back on it with great pride and sorrow that we missed an opportunity to do something that would have made the world much safer.

10:55Baroness Cathy Ashton, the EU's former High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, was talking to Ben Henderson. So 2015, the deal is nailed down. 2018, President Trump pulls the US out of the deal. Dina S. Vandiyari is the Middle East Geoeconomics lead at Bloomberg economics. So Dina, was Iran always building a bomb before 2015 and that deal? No, they weren't actually. In the lead up to the deal, US intelligence and most Western intelligence agencies, along with the IAEA, the organization in charge of oversight on Iran's nuclear program, had all assessed that Iran had stopped all of its weaponization activities around 2003.

11:40So what Iran was doing was amassing the raw materials necessary if it decided one day to go for a nuclear weapon. But at that stage, it hadn't built a bomb. So in that sense, was the JCPOA from Iran's point of view, the deal in 2015, was that a good deal? What did Iran get out of it? It was a good deal for everyone because everybody walked away from the deal disappointed. And that's a mark of a deal that can last because everybody has to give in a little bit. From Iran's perspective, what it wanted was sanctions relief. Iran had been facing a multi-layered international sanctions regime that was squeezing its economy.

12:26So Iran wanted to come out of isolation, and it was using its nuclear program as a bargaining chip to get as much as it could in the negotiations on sanctions relief. So post-2015 and the lifting of some sanctions, did life change for the ordinary Iranians? Well, unfortunately, it didn't. And the reason for that is simple. The sanctions relief that Iran got from the Europeans and most of the others was indeed comprehensive and permanent. But the sanctions relief that it got from the United States was actually temporary. The way that the U.S. had built these sanctions meant that if it wanted to remove them permanently, it would have to go back to Congress and get them to vote on it.

13:10Congress was deeply anti-Iran and was not really in favor of such a deal. So what the Obama administration did was give Iran temporary sanctions relief that would be renewed every six months. But that meant that a lot of international businesses based in Europe and even in the U.S. were nervous about going back into Iran because that sanctions relief was not permanent. And so in the end, Iran was not able to reap many of the benefits of the deal. So then Trump pulls the U.S. out of the deal. Some analysts suggest that the Iranians began working more towards weapons-grade uranium. But was that in retaliation for Trump's pulling the U.S.

13:53out of the deal or would Iran have been doing that anyway? It was 100 percent in retaliation for the U.S. president pulling the U.S. out of the deal. It didn't make sense from Tehran's perspective to spend years and years negotiating a nuclear agreement, finally reaching one, starting to see some benefits, albeit small ones, and then suddenly turning around, changing their mind and making a dash for the bomb. It was absolutely not what they wanted to do. There was a great deal of nuclear fatigue in Iran. Iranians were tired of hearing about this program and tired of feeling the consequences of having the entire international community focused on their nuclear program.

14:35Again, this is something of a judgment call, but in your opinion, had the U.S. stuck to the deal, would the international community have been in a better position now to oversee and control what Iran was doing with its nuclear programs? It's absolutely undeniable that if the US had stuck to the deal, and as a result, Iran had stuck to the deal, we would have been in a much better place today when it comes to knowing what was going on on Iran's nuclear program. The JCPOA gave the international community oversight over Iran's program. The deal's motto was, don't trust, but verify. And that's exactly what the deal did.

15:12That's Dina S. Van Diary from Bloomberg Economics. And if you want to know a great deal more about the history which has led to Iran's current position in the world, we have a dedicated collection on Iranian history on our website. Search for bbc.com slash witness history, then click on the collections tab. Next, we're going to a moment 10 years ago when the Eurozone stood on the brink of an existential crisis. Greece owed billions of euros to various countries and banks within Europe. The terms of a financial bailout package were put to the Greek people in a referendum in 2015. They rejected it.

15:48Yanis Varoufakis resigned as finance minister, and Euclid Sakalotos was brought in to replace him. His job, as he's been explaining to Josephine McDermott, was to steer Greece towards a compromise with the EU at a crisis meeting in Brussels. It was not easy. The leaders here today are grappling with one of the biggest challenges the European Union has ever faced. Greece's debts now stand at a staggering£230 billion. That is about 180 % of what Greece's economy produces each year, almost double the size. EU finance ministers today arrived to hear what Greece is now proposing after it rejected their reform plan in its referendum.

16:30But Greece's new finance minister came clutching not a plan, just some scribbled notes to the dismay of other countries. That's our witness, Euclid Sakalotos. he's talking about in that BBC News report on the 7th of July 2015. He steps out of a silver minibus wearing a light blue suit, a little more casual than the other finance ministers. He's clutching a beaten up brown leather satchel and he has a bunch of papers under the other arm which look slightly crumpled. He raises his eyebrows managing a cross between a smile and a grimace as he walks past half a dozen press microphones. It's his second day in the job as Greece's finance minister.

17:10And this is what it was like when he got inside to meet his European counterparts, his country having just voted against the help package they'd offered. It was a nightmare. It was very, very aggressive. The ministers from Finland, from Austria, from the Baltic states were very aggressive. Indeed, when I left that meeting, a lot of officials came to me and actually apologised that they'd never seen such an attack on a Minister of Finance ever before in the whole history of the Eurogroup. You must remember I was 28 years in England, so that sort of minimises emotional responses a little bit. It's going to be emotional, and in the end, it's only going to be sorted out by someone being locked in a room.

17:53But more about that later. First, let's back up a bit. When the global financial crisis hit in 2008 and the cost of borrowing money from banks rose, Greece was unable to repay the debt it had racked up. It had no choice but to ask for help from its partners in the European Union and from the International Monetary Fund in the form of massive loans. These came with conditions attached which compounded Greece's woes. More austerity, welfare cuts, reduced pensions. About a third of adults and half of Greece's young people were unemployed. When it came to a third bailout to stop the country going bankrupt, the Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, made a surprise move to put it to a referendum.

18:38And the Greek people voted no. It is about our future, about our children, about the next ten generations. I don't know. It's going to be awful. Our welfare, our well-being, our lives are at stake. You know, the banks are closed. We cannot get our money out. We have worked for it all our lives. In Brussels, the EU leaders will either agree a deal and avert the banks collapsing, or there'll be no deal and Greece will leave the eurozone, the monetary union with its shared currency, a scenario being coined as Grexit. But this will go to the heart of what it stands for. To put it in sort of non-economics terms, a monetary union is a fixed exchange rate.

19:24What is a monetary union? It's an irredeemable promise that no country will ever devalue. And so if one country devalues, it's really like adultery. If you've done it once, the suspicion is you're going to do it another time. So that actually puts the whole of monetary union in a very difficult situation. Parachuted in on Tuesday, having only replaced Yanis Varoufakis as finance minister the day before, Mr Sakhalotos sets to work. We were given instructions with the help of the French government to prepare the basic ingredients of a possible common landing place, a possible compromise. We have made no progress towards the deal today as we didn't get any concrete proposals from the Greek side.

20:12The time is of the essence here. They're promising for tomorrow. If a Greek government is all every time maniana, for us always can be manana every day. On Wednesday, Don Claude Juncker sets a new deadline. The European Commission president said Greece has until Friday to submit new proposals for discussion and gave this warning the starkest yet. The Commission is prepared for everything. We have a Grexit scenario prepared in detail. I'm strongly against Brexit, but I can't prevent it if the Greek government is not doing what we are expecting the Greek government to do. On Thursday, Greece submits its proposals, capitulating to demands and raising hopes that a rescue deal can be signed at an emergency weekend meeting of EU leaders.

21:05But then, on Friday, Germany's finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, said they didn't go far enough. Schäuble was an odd politician. He was a federalist. He wanted closer political union for Europe, but he only wanted it for a select club. He wanted to punish Greece for having a referendum, for having the gall of actually voting no. And so he tried to up the ante to impose even harsher measures on the Greek government. He wants 50 billion euros worth of Greek assets to be transferred to a privatisation fund, or else a five-year time-out from the eurozone for Greece. So it's on to the weekend gathering of leaders, including Angela Merkel from Germany, Greece's biggest creditor, where they should have been rubber stamping a deal.

21:53But still, no one can agree. Merkel was always sitting on a couch, very determined, trying to tell us she's bending over backwards to help Greece and that any greater compromise will not be understood by the German and Dutch people and so on. Alexis is cool. We've arranged what our bottom line is and what we're going to try to convince and what we're going to give up. Tusk is doing his best to get people to talk about the issues and not to just say this is unacceptable, but actually to spell out what people think about this. And it's very tense. I have a feeling I didn't eat anything for 24 hours.

22:39I don't think my stomach could actually keep anything down, to be honest. You know, a lot of knots were in that stomach. It's the evening of Sunday the 12th of July. The pressure is on to end this before the financial markets open on Monday morning. The negotiations broke up about four times on that evening. and we would go down and say, will we accept the deal? Won't we accept the deal? And the last time we go up, Alexis and I, the last, this must be eight o 'clock in the morning, the last remaining issue was whether it would be, Merkel was saying 75 % should go to the debt from this privatization fund and 25 % should go to the growth of the Greek economy.

23:21And we said 50%, 50%. And Merkel gets up and says, I'm going. I can't accept this. The German people won't accept this. And Tusk, who was then president of the council, says, I'm locking the door. Nobody's leaving. You're reaching a compromise or you're not leaving this room. I don't know if that's generally known, that fact. And in the end, we reached a compromise of 50-50. So that ends about, we're now about nine o 'clock in the morning, if I remember correctly. Donald Tusk addresses the world's press from Electon. Today we had only one objective, to reach an agreement. After 17 hours of negotiations, we have finally reached it.

24:06Someone can say that we have an agreement. Given how tired he is, you can excuse the lame joke. Greece officially completed its bailout programme worth 61.9 billion euros in 2018 and remains part of the Eurozone. Josephine McDermott, she was speaking to Euclid Sakalotos, who's now a professor of economics at the University of Athens. And if economic history is your thing, then do look for witnesses to such events on our website, including the end of the gold standard and the oil crisis of 1973 and plenty more. Go to bbc.com slash witness history.

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25:46Still to come, as Trump tries to shut it down, the history of the international broadcaster, Voice of America. And, like it or not, the birth of Italo Disco. And I say, Mama, this song, today I heard the song that I will sing, this song will sell one million copies. But first, the Great Turbot War of 1995. That was when Canada and Spain found themselves in a bitter confrontation over the fishing of turbot in the Atlantic Ocean. Shots were fired. Jane Wilkinson has been getting the story from one of the key players on the Canadian side. The European Union has accused Canada of organised piracy for seizing a Spanish fishing boat in international waters.

26:33It's the latest episode in a bitter row over fishing quotas. Canadian patrol vessels using guns arrested the Spanish trawler Estai in the rich fishing grounds off Newfoundland. But before we get to the fighting, Let's find out about the fish. What exactly is a turbot? It is a lovely, attractive flatfish, kind of a flounder. You have to fish it deep. It is a ground fish. It's on the bottom. Of course, the characteristics everybody remembers is it's the fish with two eyes on the same side of its head. Meet Brian Tobin, who back in 1995 was Canada's Minister for Fisheries and Oceans. A beautiful eating fish.

27:12Truly a delight. Very tasty, very lovely. The turbot had become so popular that Canada was worried the population would collapse, as had happened to their cod stocks. To protect numbers, a 200-mile or 320-kilometre controlled fishing zone was already in place around the country's North Atlantic coast. And fishermen had to stick to set quotas. But according to Canada, some boats from the European Union were catching far more turbot than had been agreed. Frankly, we had asked diplomatically every country to deal with this overfishing. And of course, there were all the diplomatic exchanges back and forth and all the meetings of ambassadors and all the meetings of ministers, the government conversations.

28:00None of that worked. So Brian, with the backing of his prime minister, Jean Chrétien, decided it was time for action. It was a full on operation. We were using the Department of National Defence submarines, Coast Guard aircraft and Department of Fisheries and Oceans vessels all to triangulate and track a multitude of vessels that were just parked right on the 200 mile limit. One particular Spanish trawler came into their sights on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. We were watching the Estai, had been tracking it for some time, and we had given warnings that if you cross the line, we'll come get you.