There are parts of the Iran nuclear agreement so secret that not even John Kerry has seen them yet
Nevertheless, there are parts of a major related agreement signed the same day as the deal that not even the US Secretary of State has seen yet.
During a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Tuesday, and then again during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday, Kerry acknowledged that he had not seen the details of the side agreements reached between the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran on on July 14.
These agreements likely deal with the implementation of a "roadmap" meant to resolve nearly a decade of Iranian stalling on disclosing the extent of its suspected nuclear weaponization program.
That roadmap is public. It gives the IAEA until Dec. 15 to issue a report on Iran's disclosure of its previous weaponization activities, a process aimed at giving weapons inspectors much-needed knowledge of Iran's illicit supply lines, level of expertise, weaponization infrastructure, and military oversight of components of its nuclear program.
The "roadmap" will help create an inspection baseline for future monitoring of Iran's nuclear program and is considered crucial to the successful implementation of the nuclear deal, which is known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
The side agreements, which probably lay out the terms by which the IAEA will actually perform its five-month investigation under the "roadmap," aren't public. And they're so secret that the US Secretary of State isn't able to read them.
Kerry told the Foreign Affairs Committee that he had been briefed on the documents but hasn't had a first-hand look at them.
"No, I haven't seen it," Kerry said, adding that "we don't have access to the actual agreement."
Kerry also clarified that national security advisor Susan Rice had not seen them either.
On Wednesday, Kerry told the Senate Armed Services Committee that a single US diplomat, possibly Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, "may have" looked at the side agreements during a meeting at an IAEA facility.
But he couldn't recall whether that official had seen the final version: "I don't know whether she read a summary or a draft," said Kerry. "I have no idea."
During both hearings, Kerry contended that the IAEA often enters into highly technical agreements with individual governments that are not made available to other states. In other words, the administration is advocating for the secrecy of documents that its top diplomats acknowledge they haven't seen yet.
And Kerry's logic implies that, on at least the narrow question of divulging its side agreements with the IAEA, Iran is entitled to the same treatment as any other Non-Proliferation Treaty signatory. Neither does the importance of the broader nuclear deal seem to necessitate the utmost possible transparency.
In fact, the IAEA was "using Iranian language" in framing how disclosure issues would be settled, as the Royal United Services Institute's Aaron Stein put it in an interview with Vox. And in a conference call with reporters a few days after the deal was announced, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace nonproliferation expert George Perkovich, who has a positive view of the deal, speculated that "you're never going to have many of these questions fully resolved."
As The Wall Street Journal notes, Ali Akbar Sahelhi, the head of Iran's atomic energy agency, recently said "the IAEA's investigation was independent of the broader deal."
At the same time, the Journal notes that the US and IAEA officials have said "that sanctions on Tehran won't be lifted if the country doesn't cooperate in the probe."