Hassan Al-Somal
Elite Member
US official says Oman was "duplicitous" during Iran negotiations
By Jennifer Hansler
CNN
A senior US administration official told reporters Monday that Oman was “duplicitous” during negotiating efforts with Iran — so they “threw them out” of the mediation role.
“We were very unhappy with the job the Omanis did. We felt they were very duplicitous and almost like employees of the Iranians in the way that they maneuvered, so we kind of threw them out of this process,” the official said.
It’s the latest sign of the Trump administration’s disapproval of a country that has historically been a key interlocutor for the US in the Middle East. In recent weeks, the administration threatened both sanctions and military actions against Oman.
The senior administration official said one of the challenges in negotiating with Iran was establishing “the right channels of communication with the Iranian regime.” They noted that “the old way” involved the supreme leader giving directions to Iran’s National Security Council, through “the political class” and then through Oman.
In other words, they were using these channels of communications to find out where the senior leadership, including the SL, is located, but that is no longer the case.
“We wanted to figure out what the new channels would be to communicate with, and obviously we decided on Pakistan and Qatar,” the official said.
This sounds like a scripted language.
They also noted that the “political mechanism” that had been used in the past “was mostly disabled” because of actions at the start of the war and “most people were hiding in bunkers,” so that also made communication challenging. A number of high-level Iranian figures were killed at the start of the war.
In other words, the Iranian senior leadership are now taking their safety and security very seriously, and the Epstein coalition can't figure out where they are located.







