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By Trevor Hunnicutt and Steve Holland
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President-elect Donald Trump is now considering tapping Richard Grenell, his former intelligence chief, as special envoy for Iran, two people familiar with the transition plans said.
“He’s definitely in the running,” said a person familiar with the transition deliberations, who asked not to be identified.
Trump has yet to formalize final decisions on either personnel or strategy for Iran, including whether to impose new sanctions on the country, pursue diplomacy or both to halt the nuclear program.
Neither Trump’s team nor Grenell responded to requests for comment. Trump’s plans for the role have not been previously announced.
But his consideration of a key ally for such a deployment sends a signal to the region that the new US president may be open to talks with a country he has previously threatened and whose elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attempted to assassinate him, the US government said. Iran rejected the claim.
In that role, Grenell is expected to be tasked with talking to countries in the region and beyond on the Iran issue, as well as taking Tehran’s temperature on possible negotiations, one of the people said.
Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian, who is considered a relative moderate, said after Trump’s election that Tehran had to “deal with the US” and “manage” relations with its arch-enemy.
Iran has suffered a series of strategic setbacks, including Israel’s attack on Tehran’s Hamas militias in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon and the ousting of Iran’s ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
But tensions remain high more than a year after Hamas attacked southern Israel, triggering the Gaza war. Meanwhile, other Iranian proxies have attacked American, Israeli and other Western targets, and Tehran has accelerated its nuclear program while limiting the UN nuclear watchdog’s ability to monitor it.
It’s not the first job Trump has considered for Grenell, who was Trump’s ambassador to Germany, the president’s special envoy for Serbia-Kosovo peace talks and acting director of national intelligence during Trump’s 2017-2021 term.
After campaigning for Trump in the run-up to the Nov. 5 election, he was a top contender for secretary of state and special envoy for the war in Ukraine. Those jobs went to US Senator Marco Rubio and retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg (NISE:), respectively. Trump takes office next month.
During his first term in office in 2020, Trump ordered a US airstrike that killed top Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani.
In 2018, Trump also scrapped the nuclear deal struck by his predecessor Barack Obama in 2015 and reimposed US economic sanctions on Iran that had been eased. The deal limited Iran’s ability to enrich uranium, a process that can produce fissile material for nuclear weapons.
Iran is now “dramatically” accelerating its enrichment of uranium to 60 percent purity, close to the roughly 90 percent weapons-grade level, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog told Reuters last week. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.
