Iranian Foreign Minister Clarifies Diplomacy Comments After Leaked Audio

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has said he favors a “smart adjustment” between the military and diplomatic spheres, in his first public comments after a controversial leaked audio clip.

Zarif wrote on Instagram on April 28 that the “main point” of his remarks in the recording — in which he said the Iranian army and the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) were too influential in diplomacy — was “the need for a smart adjustment of the relationship between these two wings.”

He also saw a need for “setting priorities through legal structures and under the great purview of the supreme leader.”

Zarif’s comments in the audio clip have dominated the discussion in Iran since its publication by media outlets outside Iran on April 25, and sparked a furious reaction from conservative media and politicians.

“In the Islamic republic, the military field rules,” Zarif said in the three-hour-long recording, quoted by The New York Times. “I have sacrificed diplomacy for the military field rather than the field servicing diplomacy.”

Among other things, Zarif complained in the recording about the extent of influence that the late Major General Qasem Soleimani had over foreign policy, hinting that the top IRGC commander tried to spoil Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers by colluding with Russia. Solemani was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020, greatly intensifying tensions between the United States and Iran.

In his Instagram post, Zarif said he deplored the fact that “a secret theoretical talk regarding the need for synergy between diplomacy and the [military] field…turns into domestic infighting.”

“Honest and passionate” argument in a private setting had been misconstrued as “personal criticism,” the minister wrote.

The previous day, a government spokesman announced that President Hassan Rohani has ordered the Intelligence Ministry to identify who leaked the “stolen” recording, calling the leak “a conspiracy against the government, the system, the integrity of effective domestic institutions, and also against our national interests.”

The Foreign Ministry had described the recording as “selectively” edited, and said it represented just a portion of a seven-hour interview that included “personal opinions.”

Meanwhile, the Tehran prosecutor’s office said it had opened a criminal case into the matter, Fars reported.

According to another semiofficial news agency, ISNA, the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission has summoned Zarif.

The leak comes ahead of a presidential election on June 18, which will see the moderate Rohani step down after two terms in office and after conservatives fared well in parliamentary elections last year.

With reporting by AFP and RFE/RL’s Radio Farda