January 22, 2021
President Joe Biden is bringing into his administration a number of people who dealt with Iranian issues during the Obama Administration.
The man who will oversee Iranian policy is Brett McGurk, who has been named the Middle East coordinator on the staff of the National Security Council in the White House. McGurk, 47, was a career Foreign Service officer and one of several State Department figures who resigned when President Trump announced he was pulling all US troops out of Syria two years into his presidency.
Under McGurk will be Barbara Leaf, a former ambassador to the UAE and, earlier, the first director of Iranian affairs in the State Department. She, too, has been a career Foreign Service officer whose focus over the years was the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf. She speaks Arabic.
Biden has also chosen Wendy Sherman, who was in charge of the negotiations with Iran on the nuclear agreement, as the deputy secretary of state, the number two position in the State Department. Sherman, 71, spent part of her career working on Capitol Hill for Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, before joining the Clinton Administration and then the Obama Administration.
The head of the CIA will be William Burns, who was the deputy secretary of state under Obama and helped kick start the talks for the nuclear deal early in the Obama Administration by handling the then-secret back-channel negotiations with Iran.