The landmark nuclear deal with Iran isn't as sudden a breakthrough as it might seem. Before the Geneva talks, a team of American diplomats hand-picked by President Obama held at least five secret meetings with their Iranian counterparts starting in March, the AP finds.

The American delegations were led by Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden's top foreign policy adviser, sources tell Reuters, describing how meetings in the Gulf nation of Oman were hushed up with the use of military planes and service elevators to conceal the presence of American diplomats.

The talks were kept secret until September, when the Obama administration informed Israel, Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia that it had made significant progress. In Israel, however, officials say they knew about the talks long before the US told them. "We did not know from the beginning, but we knew, we had intelligence that these meetings were happening," a senior Israeli minister tells Buzzfeed.

The US secrecy came at the price of annoying some allies. France balked when talks began, the Wall Street Journal reports, when the US showed up with an almost complete framework that one diplomat called an "American Text."

Oman's monarch Sultan Qaboos played a key role in getting the "Great Satan" and an "Axis of Evil" nation to the negotiating table. He offered to help get the two sides together soon after playing a key role in securing the release of three American hikers seized after straying across the Iranian border.