WASHINGTON » One aide slipped off a Hillary Rodham Clinton trip in Paris and flew to the Persian Gulf. Two others ducked out of the White House periodically to catch commercial flights to Ottawa, Ontario, or Toronto. A top adviser vanished from the West Wing during the waning weeks of the midterm election campaign to travel to Beijing.

Three of President Barack Obama’s top diplomatic achievements — the reopening of ties with Cuba, announced this week; the interim nuclear agreement with Iran; and the climate-change pact with China — resulted from secret negotiations. Some were conducted in exotic locales like the Vatican and the Arab sultanate of Oman; others in less exotic places like Boston.

Not since Henry Kissinger’s secret trip to China in 1971 has a president embraced undercover diplomacy with the enthusiasm of Obama. For an administration that likes to promote its transparency, this White House has concluded that some deals are best pursued with all the openness of a drone strike against distant terrorists.

What the Cuba, Iran, and China talks have in common — aside from their cloak-and-dagger allure — is a small team of negotiators, strict discipline, and tight control by the White House. They also attest to Obama’s willingness to entrust historic projects to close aides, some of whom are young and have little experience in diplomacy.

In the case of Cuba, the entire U.S. delegation consisted of two White House officials, one of whom, Benjamin J. Rhodes, is a 37-year-old speechwriter who has worked for Obama since his 2008 campaign and has become an influential voice in the administration. The Iran and China negotiations were also led by trusted Obama aides.

Using non-diplomats helps preserve the veil of secrecy, a senior official said, because such people are less apt to arouse less suspicion among colleagues or the press. The three countries with which they were negotiating, the official said, were also able to keep a secret.

"Negotiations are like mushrooms: They grow in the dark," said Martin S. Indyk, the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. "That’s especially true of negotiations between longtime adversaries, where the domestic politics on both sides make it impossible to reach a deal if the negotiations are conducted in public."

Indyk knows firsthand the hazards of conducting diplomacy in open view. As the administration’s special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, he struggled to bring together distrustful parties under a white-hot media glare. While the details of the talks were kept under wraps, the very public nature of the process made it vulnerable to scrutiny from all sides.

The last time Washington had a vigorous debate over the need for secrecy in diplomacy was in 2010 when WikiLeaks released 250,000 confidential State Department cables, forcing the Obama administration to mend fences with foreign leaders and others who had been slighted in the reports that diplomats sent in from the field. The damage from the WikiLeaks disclosures proved less severe or long-lasting than many people in the government predicted. But it did nothing to dissuade the Obama administration that fledgling initiatives need to be shielded from the public and the press.

In plotting its Cuba overture, the administration drew on the success of its secret back-channel talks with Iran. The United States had taken part in multiparty talks with Iran over its nuclear program. But with those talks frozen in late-2011, Clinton, then secretary of state, authorized one of her aides, Jake Sullivan, to make direct contact with Iranian officials.

In July 2012, Sullivan met with Iranian representatives in Oman, where Sultan Qaboos bin Said had taken on the role of middleman between two longtime enemies. Sullivan, 38, and a colleague crashed on a couch in a house belonging to the U.S. Embassy. The effort proceeded in fits and starts, but suddenly became serious with the election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s president in June 2013.

Sullivan, now joined by a more seasoned deputy secretary of state, William J. Burns, continued to meet secretly with Iran in Oman, the United Nations, and Geneva. By the time the other Western powers arrived in Geneva for decisive talks with Iran in November 2013, they discovered that much of the deal had already been sewn up.

Rhodes worked closely with Sullivan when he was at the State Department and recruited him to the White House after Clinton stepped down. The two teamed up to support another diplomatic opening — to the military rulers of Myanmar — and they shared a conviction that a thaw with Cuba was long overdue.

This time, Rhodes volunteered to lead the effort. He was joined by Ricardo Zuniga, a 44-year-old Cuba expert who served in the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, and was chosen to fill the Western Hemisphere post at the National Security Council because the White House planned an overture to Cuba in Obama’s second term.

The administration’s agreement with China on greenhouse gas emissions was less dramatic. It was quietly negotiated over months by the State Department’s climate negotiator, Todd D. Stern, and the White House’s adviser on climate issues, John Podesta, who went to Beijing a week before Obama to try to nail down the details.

But it, too, had its made-for-the-memoir moments. In October, Secretary of State John Kerry played host in Boston to China’s top foreign policy official, Yang Jiechi. Over lunch at a Legal Sea Foods restaurant, Kerry pointed to Boston Harbor, saying it had been cleaned up by environmental regulations.

The visit evidently made an impression on Yang: A month later, Obama and President Xi Jinping stood together in the Great Hall of the People to announce they had reached a landmark deal.

The pact was less of a bolt-from-the-blue than either the Cuba agreement or the Iran talks. But even the day before, White House officials said they were unsure whether the Chinese were ready to go public. Obama’s aides were plainly impressed by their opacity.

Mark Landler, New York Times

© 2014 The New York Times Company