The inside story of US-Iran talks revealed that the Trump administration bypassed Iranian negotiators to reach out to the Revolutionary Guard

On August 16, AXIOS quoted three people familiar with the matter as saying that when U.S. negotiators tried to reach an agreement with Iran in mid-May to end the war, they encountered a problem: they could not determine whether the Iranian representative across the negotiating table truly represented the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. So Trump administration officials took the unusual approach of bypassing Iranian negotiators and contacting directly with top leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The person chosen by the United States to be responsible for this secret channel of communication is Nechirvan Barzani, chairman of the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq. He has an extremely rare advantage: he enjoys the trust of both the U.S. and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leadership. An important reason why negotiations between the United States and Iran are so difficult is that Washington cannot determine who really has Iran's decision-making power. Although the United States and Iran did eventually reach a memorandum of understanding, it quickly broke down.