Exclusive: Ex-IAEA Official Says US And Iran To Sign Deal Soon
Tehran and Washington have agreed to restore the 2015 nuclear deal and will announce terms in two to three weeks, a former IAEA official told Iran International.
Tehran and Washington have agreed to restore the 2015 nuclear deal and will announce terms in two to three weeks, a former IAEA official told Iran International.
Speaking Tuesday, the once senior official at the International Atomic Energy Agency, who is close to the United States government, said President Joe Biden had resolved to take the step in advance of November’s mid-term US Congressional elections.
The official said Washington had informed Israel of the decision, and that four Arab states – Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – had been told during Biden’s July Middle East tour that the US would help them develop nuclear technology. While the Israeli leadership has consistently opposed the 2015 agreement, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), Prime Minister Yair Lapid and opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu are vying over the Iranian ‘threat’ as the November 1 parliamentary election approaches.
The former IAEA official gave no indication as to how Iran and the US had resolved the differences over JCPOA restoration that have characterized 16 months of talks, both with five other world powers in Vienna, and bilaterally with European Union mediation.
Leaked information both in Iran and in Israeli media about a proposed European Union plan indicate a broad agreement on many issues, but lingering questions of Iranian demands over “guarantees”, “verification” and a lingering IAEA probe about Iran’s pre-2003 undeclared nuclear activities.
An IAEA report leaked Monday revealed Iran’s latest breach of the JCPOA with the installation at the Natanz nuclear site of additional IR-6 centrifuges, advanced models for enriching uranium barred under the JCPOA.
There have also been consistent reports of differences over enquiries by the IAEA into unexplained uranium traces found at several sites linked to work done by Iran before 2003 but not declared as nuclear-related. While the US and European JCPOA signatories have insisted the IAEA enquiry should go on regardless of what happens with the JCPOA, President Ebrahim Raisi insisted Monday that the JCPOA could be restored only once the IAEA dropped the probe, which Tehran insists results from allegations made for ‘political’ reasons in 2018 by Israel.
Finessing the wording
Earlier Tuesday, Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, criticized “excessive” demands made by the IAEA, while Fereydoun Abbasi, a member of the parliament’s energy committee, said Iran should enrich uranium not just to 60 percent – the highest level reached – but to 90 percent “both for scientific research and for making nuclear fuel for submarines.”
Tehran has made no public response to the latest US input in the nuclear talks, submitted August 24 through the European Union. But there have been reports of efforts to finesse a wording that would postpone the IAEA probe while the JCPOA gradually comes back into play, and IAEA director-general Rafael Mariano Grossi suggested August 23 the uranium traces might be better investigated with the 2015 deal back in place.
There have also been indications of ‘principlist’ politicians in Tehran claiming the US had made significant concessions in the talks process. Real or not, such ‘concessions’ would help suggest Raisi’s government, which took office August 2021 with talks underway, had secured a more favorable outcome than would have been possible under the centrist President Hassan Rouhani, a staunch advocate of the JCPOA.
In comments reported by the ISNA news agency, Behrouz Kamalvandi said Iran’s degree of cooperation with the IAEA, the United Nations agency, had been constrained by parliamentary legislation passed December 2020 to the ‘safeguards’ level required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
IAEA monitoring would be extended to that required by the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, including implementing the ‘Additional Protocol,’ the spokesman said, once United States sanctions were eased and the 2015 agreement restored.
Kamalvandi’s remarks comes as Iran weighs up the latest US input, submitted August 24 through the European Union, in 16-month talks aimed at restoring the 2015 agreement, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).
One of the challenges in the talks is reportedly a gap between, on one hand, Iran’s expectation that with JCPOA restoration the agency would shelve its enquiries into uranium traces found by inspectors in sites used before 2003 and, on the other hand, the US insistence that Iran must satisfy the IAEA under its NPT commitments regardless of the JCPOA.
Dropping the enquiry?
There have been reports of efforts to finesse a wording that would postpone the matter while the JCPOA gradually comes back into play, and IAEA director-general Rafael Mariano Grossi suggested August 23 the uranium traces might be better investigated with the 2015 deal restored. But Iranian politicians, up to President Ebrahim Raisi, have lately argued forcefully, citing an alleged 2015 precedent, that the agency drop the enquiries before the JCPOA is restored.
As President Joe Biden faces criticisms in the US over his administration’s efforts to revive the JCPOA, from which President Donald Trump withdrew the US in 2018, JCPOA opponents and critics in Tehran have been arguing for a more assertive approach.
Fereydoun Abbasi, a member of the parliament’s energy committee, said Tuesday Iranian negotiators should insist not just on closing “safeguards issues” but on “completely closing” Iran’s case at the agency – possibly referring to the withdrawal of a resolution passed by the 35-nation IAEA board in June censuring Iran over failing to satisfy the agency over the pre-2003 work.
Submarine fuel and political expediency
Abbasi also said Iran should enrich uranium not just to 60 percent – the highest level reached at present – but to 90 percent “both for scientific research and for making nuclear fuel for submarines.” Iran began in 2019 enriching beyond the 3.67 percent cap set by the JCPOA, the year after the US left the 2015 deal and imposed ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions. While there are limited civil uses of 90-per-cent-enriched uranium including research and medical isotopes, Iran has no nuclear submarines and 90 percent is widely considered ‘weapons grade.’
While Raisi has not been generally vocal over the nuclear issue and said during his successful 2021 election campaign he would back JCPOA restoration if in the “peoples’ interests,” many of his supporters have been strong opponents of the 2015 agreement. Given previous president Hassan Rouhani’s close association with the JCPOA, signed during his first term in office, it is politically expedient for some Raisi supporters to argue that a ‘tougher’ approach, including ramping up the nuclear program, has yielded concessions from world powers, particularly the US, that would not have happened with Rouhani still in office.
Calling the EU’s text of August 8, currently being discussed between the United States and Iran a “bad agreement,” Lapid claimed it had departed from what US President Joe Biden July had told Israel to anticipate.
The Israeli government, presumably after seeing the EU text, was then perturbed. “We told the Americans: ‘This is not what President Biden wanted.’ This is not what he talks about during his visit to the country,” Lapid said.
The Israeli prime minister claimed only last week that Israel had pushed the US into a harder negotiating position over reviving the 2015 agreement, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), which successive Israeli governments have opposed.
But Lapid, four months away from an Israeli election, suggested Sunday that Israel had been unable to “introduce amendments to the agreement” because of a speech made to Congress in March 2015 by former prime minister and political rival Benjamin Netanyahu. While Netanyahu had compared the US and Israel as “promised lands,” US officials slammed as a cheap election ploy his claim that theJCPOA, which came into play July 2015, would ‘guarantee’ Iran a nuclear weapon.
Lapid said the aim of the coalition government that replaced Netanyahu’s administration in 2021, with Lapid as prime minister since July 2022, had been to “fight against the agreement with all our might, but without harming our strategic relations with the US, and without harming their attention to our arguments."
Arguments in Israel may intensify as talks to revive the JCPOA have reached what Joseph Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, called the “the crucial moment” in an interview published Sunday with Kronen Zeitung, the leading Austrian newspaper. “I’m optimistic, it’s the last millimeters,” Borrell said. “This [restoring the 2015 agreement] makes the world a little safer.”
Nasser Kanaani, spokesman for the Iranian foreign minister, told the official news agency IRNA Sunday that the latest US input, relayed by the EU August 24, was being reviewed technically and that Tehran would reply “as soon as the summary is formed and the details are checked.” Nour News tweeted this would take until “at least” the end of the week, presumably meaning Friday September 2.
Official news agency dismisses ‘false’ report
Kanaani called for all to respect the confidentiality of talks, which were on a “positive and forward trend” despite a “few remaining issues” that were “sensitive, important and decisive.” IRNA separately quoted an “informed source” criticizing the newspaper Jomhuriyeh Eslami for Sunday’s article claiming Tehran had in the talks demanded that Washington compel “western” companies to trade with Iran.
The newspaper’s story was “totally false,” the source told IRNA, suggesting that Iranian media relaying “wrong claims” from foreign media designed to “put pressure on Iran” were in effect becoming a “base for the enemy.”
Qatar has also continued mediation efforts. Mohammed bin Abdulaziz bin Saleh Al-Khulaifi, an assistant foreign minister, met Saturday with Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani. The Qatari foreign ministry said he had stressed “the importance of advancing further in order to revive the nuclear agreement which is in the interest of the security and stability of the region.” Following discussions with Bagheri Kani, Khulaifi spoke by phone with Enrique Mora, the EU official who has coordinated the nuclear talks.