Iran Still Not Opening Up to the IAEA

Alissa J. Rubin, The LA Times:

Iran offered limited information in response to requests from the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency for greater transparency and access to sensitive sites associated with the country's nuclear program, according to a report released Friday.

Meanwhile, a top U.S. official indicated Friday that the Bush administration would find acceptable a compromise under which Iran would process uranium and then send it to Russia for enrichment into nuclear fuel for civilian use.

The new report by Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, comes before a meeting Thursday of the agency's 35-member board of governors.

"Full transparency is indispensable and overdue," wrote ElBaradei, echoing previous comments by the IAEA. The agency has been frustrated in its effort to obtain documentation, answers to questions and access to scientists and sensitive sites.

The IAEA board has been on the brink of referring Iran to the United Nations Security Council, which could impose sanctions. But Russia and China, both members of the Security Council, are reluctant to move against Iran, thus preventing the U.S. and the European Union from pushing for a referral.

Despite this latest report, which a senior U.S. State Department official said showed Iran's cooperation with the IAEA to be "grudging, forced and incomplete," it appeared unlikely that the board would refer Iran to the Security Council at next week's meeting. The IAEA is still analyzing data and documents it obtained in the last two months from Iran.

Iran broke off two years of negotiations with Britain, France and Germany in August when it announced it was restarting a plant at Esfahan where it processes raw uranium yellowcake into a gas that can be further concentrated for civilian or military use.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad supports aggressive development of Iran's nuclear capability and has made bellicose comments toward Israel.

The nation's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, told state-run television that Iran had started converting a second batch of uranium. "This job is done, and the plant is continuing its activity," Larijani said in an interview broadcast Friday. He added that Iran had informed the U.N.'s nuclear monitoring agency of the development.

Although it was denounced by the U.S. and other countries, the move was hardly surprising considering Iran had restarted the Esfahan plant in August.

Tehran is also negotiating with Moscow over a deal in which Iran would continue to process uranium but would export the gas to Russia to be processed into fuel for civilian uses in Iran, Western diplomats said.

After a meeting in Pusan, South Korea, between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, U.S. national security advisor Stephen Hadley said the two leaders had discussed the proposal. He termed it "a good avenue to explore."

Asked by reporters whether the proposal is acceptable to Bush, Hadley said, "If we didn't think it was acceptable, we probably wouldn't encourage it to be explored."

Hadley also said that Britain, France and Germany, which have taken the lead in negotiations with Iran, support the proposal, as does Russia.

Previously, officials from the U.S. and the European Union refused to publicly endorse such an arrangement, because it would mean retreating from their position that Iran has to give up all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle. Tehran, for its part, has signaled its dissatisfaction with the offer but has not rejected it outright.

"Iran appears to be confident they have done enough to get them through the next board meeting without a referral to the Security Council," said Gary Samore, a former National Security Council official in charge of nonproliferation issues, who is now at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Iran is also taking its case to the American public. In a full-page advertisement in Friday's New York Times, the government detailed its reasoning for pursuing nuclear technology. It asserted that efforts to develop nuclear weapons would be self-defeating, and that claims that Iran was trying to develop nuclear weapons were based on false assumptions.

"The predominant view among Iranian decision-makers is that development, acquisition or possession of nuclear weapons would only undermine Iranian security," it said.

According to Friday's report, Iran has not yet given inspectors access to research centers associated with Lavizan Shiyan, a military site that was razed in 2004 before inspectors could examine it. A senior source close to the IAEA said the agency would like to test equipment that was used at Lavizan Shiyan or at research centers associated with it.

Iran did allow inspectors to return to Parchin, another military site. Environmental samples from there are now being tested.

Some material in the report suggested that despite Iran's denials, it had considered building a nuclear weapon. Documents that Iran obtained from Pakistani nuclear black marketer Abdul Qadeer Khan in the 1970s or early 1980s included one that appeared to describe how to build a casing for fissile material, said a Western diplomat in Vienna.

The document showed how to cast "enriched, natural and depleted uranium metal into hemispherical forms," said a confidential IAEA report. READ MORE

A State Department official cited the document as one more piece of evidence that Iran's true intention was to build a nuclear bomb. But IAEA officials refused to comment on the implications of the finding. The source close to the IAEA said that with only a few pages it was considerably less complete than a guide for building a bomb, which would likely run hundreds of pages.

Times staff writer Peter Wallsten in Pusan contributed to this report.