Iran: Does this assure you in any way?

New Iran agreement includes secret side deal, Tehran official says

By Paul Richter

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WASHINGTON – Key elements of a new nuclear agreement between Iran and six world powers are contained in an informal, 30-page text not yet publicly acknowledged by Western officials, Iran’s chief negotiator said Monday.
Abbas Araqchi disclosed the existence of the document in a Persian-language interview with the semiofficial Iranian Students News Agency.
The new agreement, announced over the weekend, sets out a timetable for how Iran and the six nations, led by the United States, will implement a deal reached in November that is aimed at restraining Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
When officials from Iran and the world powers announced that they had completed the implementing agreement, they didn’t release the text of the deal, nor did they acknowledge the existence of an informal addendum.
In the interview, Araqchi referred to the side agreement using the English word “nonpaper,” a diplomatic term used for an informal side agreement that doesn’t have to be disclosed publicly.
The nonpaper deals with such important details as the operation of a joint commission to oversee how the deal is implemented and Iran’s right to continue nuclear research and development during the next several months, he said.
Araqchi described the joint commission as an influential body that will have authority to decide disputes. U.S. officials have described it as a discussion forum rather than a venue for arbitrating major disputes.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Monday that the text of the implementing agreement would be released to lawmakers. He said the six parties were weighing how much of the text they could release publicly.
Asked late Monday about the existence of the informal nonpaper, White House officials referred the question to the State Department. A State Department comment wasn’t immediately available.
Ray Takeyh, an Iran specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Iran and the other six countries may have written the nonpaper to record understandings that they didn’t want to release publicly. The governments may plan to release “just a short text, with broad principles and broad strokes,” Takeyh said.
The Nov. 24 deal between Iran and the six powers – the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany -- aims to freeze Iran’s nuclear progress for six months. During that period, the two sides will try to negotiate a longer-term deal aimed at ensuring that Tehran’s nuclear program remains peaceful. The agreement has come under fire in Iran and the United States from critics who contend it is harmful to their side.
In his interview, Araqchi touched on the sensitive issue of how much latitude Iran will have to continue its nuclear research and development.
U.S. officials said Sunday that Iran would be allowed to continue existing research and development projects and with pencil-and-paper design work, but not to advance research with new projects. Araqchi, however, implied that the program would have wide latitude.
“No facility will be closed; enrichment will continue, and qualitative and nuclear research will be expanded,” he said. “All research into a new generation of centrifuges will continue.”
The research and development issue has been an important one for many U.S. lawmakers, who fear that Iran will try to forge ahead with its nuclear program while the negotiations are underway. At an administration briefing for senators Monday, members of both parties raised concerns about the centrifuge research issue, aides said.
President Obama on Monday again hailed the implementing agreement and appealed to Congress not to impose new sanctions on Iran, for fear of driving the country from the bargaining table.
"My preference is for peace and diplomacy, and this is one of the reasons why I've sent the message to Congress that now is not the time for us to impose new sanctions; now is the time for us to allow the diplomats and technical experts to do their work,” Obama said. "What we want to do is give diplomacy a chance and give peace a chance."

IAEA gains more Iran access, but not enough for bomb probe

(Reuters) - The U.N. nuclear watchdog's increased access in Iranto monitor a landmark agreement with world powers still falls short of what it says it needs to investigate suspicions that Tehran may have worked on designing an atomic bomb.

It is also a far cry from the wide-ranging inspection powers the International Atomic Energy Agency had in Iraq in the 1990s to help unearth and dismantle Saddam Hussein's clandestine nuclear program after the first Gulf war.

Nevertheless, the IAEA will see its role in Iran expand significantly under the November 24 interim accord between the country and the six major powers, the implementation of which will start next Monday.

Since the deal is only preliminary, the IAEA and its investigation may gain more prominence in later talks on a final settlement of the decade-old dispute over Iran's nuclear program, but it remains to be seen how far it will go.

"This is just an appetizer, I guess ... a starter," former chief U.N. nuclear inspector Herman Nackaerts said.

The deal struck in Geneva seven weeks ago focuses on capping Iran's output of fissile material, which can be used for atomic arms if refined further, and not on any research it may have undertaken in how to make a bomb out of it.

Western diplomats and nuclear experts say the IAEA also needs to carry out its long-stalled inquiry into alleged tests and other activity by Iran that could be used for nuclear arms development, partly to make sure that any such work has ceased.

The IAEA is pursuing separate talks with Iran in an attempt to restart its probe, but progress may depend on the broader diplomacy between Tehran and the powers.

Nackaerts, who retired as IAEA deputy director general last year, said the Geneva agreement was a good first step.

But, he told Reuters, "more has to come to be able to resolve all the outstanding issues, that is quite clear."

To check that Iran meets its side of the six-month accord to curb sensitive nuclear activity in return for some sanctions easing, IAEA experts will go daily to Iran's uranium enrichment sites at Natanz and Fordow, up from about once a week now.

They will also inspect plants where Iran is manufacturing the specialized equipment, centrifuges, used to enrich uranium, as well as uranium mines and mills.

LIP SERVICE?

However, the agreement between Iran and the United States, France, Germany, Britain,China and Russia - meant to buy time for talks on a final settlement of the decade-old nuclear dispute - only vaguely refers to the IAEA's investigation.

It does not, for example, say anything about the U.N. agency's repeated requests to visit the Parchin military base.

The IAEA suspects that Iran has carried out explosives tests relevant for nuclear bomb development at the facility southeast of Tehran, possibly a decade ago. Iran denies this and has so far refused to open it up for the inspectors.

The watchdog also wants to see other locations, interview officials and study relevant documents for its inquiry into what it calls the "possible military dimensions" to Iran's nuclear program, known under the acronym PMD.

A Western diplomat who closely tracks Iran developments but is not from one of the six powers - known as P5+1 as they group the five permanent U.N. Security Council members plus Germany -said the Geneva agreement "almost totally neglects" this issue.

"Do we take the P5+1's relative silence on PMD as sign that it will only get lip service now and that the past is the past?" the envoy said.

"Or is it simply a sign that we need to calm the situation now in the present, thereby build some confidence, and then they will help ensure PMD and other past issues are fully addressed before this file is declared resolved?"

The Vienna-based IAEA has been investigating accusations for several years that Iran may have coordinated efforts to process uranium, test explosives and revamp a missile cone in a way suitable for a nuclear warhead.

Iran says such claims are baseless and forged.

NO "ANYTIME, ANYWHERE" IN IRAN

As with the big power diplomacy, the parallel IAEA-Iran talks started yielding results only after the election of relative moderate Hassan Rouhani as Iran's president last June.

Under an agreement reached two months ago as the powers were reaching their own deal, the agency has already visited a heavy water production plant in Iran and is expected to soon go to a uranium mine.

However, those first steps do not go to the heart of the IAEA's investigation, and Western diplomats will closely watch an Iran-IAEA meeting in Tehran on January 21 to see whether the two sides can agree more substantive measures.

The Geneva deal says the powers and Iran will set up a joint commission that will work with the IAEA "to facilitate resolution of past and present issues of concern" - seen as code for the IAEA's investigation into suspected bomb research.

However, some experts suggest that the powers may be more concerned with obtaining an agreement to limit future Iranian nuclear enrichment than with helping the IAEA get to the bottom of research and tests Iran may have carried out in the past.

Mark Hibbs, of the Carnegie Endowment think-tank, said it was possible that they, in the interest of quickly concluding a final deal, "might strongly urge the IAEA to accept what it would consider less than satisfactory demonstration by Iran" in response to suspicions about its past activity.

Jofi Joseph, until October a director for non-proliferation on the White House National Security Council staff, said the powers may be tempted to set past PMD issues aside and focus on limits to Iran's future nuclear bomb breakout capability.

"There may be an implicit preference by the P5+1 to sweep the weaponisation issue under the rug," he wrote in a commentary last week for Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

"It is always difficult to prove a negative and, even if Iran significantly expanded access to IAEA inspectors ... doubts likely would persist that Iran was still hiding something."

In Iraq after the 1991 war, the IAEA acted under the authority of a U.N. Security Council resolution giving inspectors carte blanche "anytime, anywhere" authority, former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said.

"From an inspector's perspective, this sounded idyllic," he wrote in his 2011 book the Age of Deception. "But it worked only because Iraq was a freshly defeated country ... No other country would have accepted such conditions."