00:00Right. I mean, you must be one of a very small number of high-ranking American officials who's ever sat across the table or sat across the room from the Supreme Leader.
00:10I mean, what struck you about him as a person?
00:13I mean, you say a lot of what you saw in him sort of corroborated with what you'd read about him.
00:20Just tell us a bit about, you know, what you mean by that.
00:23Well, I mean, the sort of common understanding in Washington based on intel reports, based on analyzing media, reports based on analyzing his statements and speeches, is not based on knowing him personally.
00:37Because, again, the U.S. has not had an embassy in Tehran, operational embassy, since the Iranian Revolution, and no one has met him.
00:46I hear I'm the only former U.S. official that's ever sat down with him, at least since he became Supreme Leader.
00:53And his – the fact that he used a meeting with the Secretary General of the United Nations on the margins of the non-aligned summit to deliver a very, very long monologue about the United States.
01:08Again, in sort of a – with a benevolent expression on his face.
01:11The expression on his face and his words did not coincide, did not match.
01:15But it affirmed what we had thought when I was still working in the U.S. government.
01:24And it makes the – to me, it makes the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal from 2015 that President Trump abrogated his first term, that much more miraculous that the Supreme Leader authorized his officials, his negotiators to come up with that nuclear deal.
01:48And, of course, then he did it again with the negotiations with Steve Whitcock, because the identity of the Islamic Republic of Iran is rooted in an anti-American and anti-Israeli ideology that he has to overcome to go into these negotiations.
02:03I think it makes it a particular challenge now.
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