but the Islamic Republic publicly took a tough stance and said it would not be allowed to visit any installations in the country.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast tried to play down the decision, suggesting the IAEA team didn’t really want to visit any sites. “The title of the members of the visiting delegation is not inspector,” he said. “This is an expert delegation. The purpose of the visit is not inspection. The aim is to negotiate about cooperation between Iran and the agency and to set a framework for a continuation of the talks.”
But news reports from IAEA headquarters in Vienna said the team, which also visited Iran two weeks ago, had specifically asked to visit the Parchin military complex south of Tehran where Western intelligence agencies say Iran has conducted research on nuclear warheads. The day before Mehman-Parast spoke, state radio also said the IAEA had asked to see Parchin.
Mehman-Parast said the status of cooperation between Iran and the IAEA was at the “best” level. But reports from Vienna said Iran had stonewalled the delegation on its early February visit. They said the Islamic Republic simply did not address the IAEA’s main concerns.
The IAEA has said repeatedly that it wants access to people, places and paper in Iran. It wants to interview people who it believes have worked on military aspects of Iran’s nuclear program. It wants to visit places, like Parchin, where it suspects military work has been conducted. And it wants more documents from Iran outlining all aspects of Iran’s program.
The current delegation is the same as that in early February. It is led by Herman Nackaerts, the deputy director general of the IAEA and the man in charge of inspections worldwide.
IAEA inspectors visited Parchin in 2005, but were only allowed to see one of the four sites on the sprawling base that they had sought access to.
The Islamic Republic has gone on the offensive against the IAEA in recent months, suggesting that it leaked the names of Iranian nuclear scientists to foreign countries so they could assassinate the scientists.
As recently as last Thursday, Iran’s ambassador to Russia, Mahmud-Reza Sajjadi, said, “The IAEA must prove that terrorists haven’t used it to assassinate nuclear scientists. We don’t know whether the IAEA is engaged in nuclear protocols or is carrying out espionage on our nuclear facilities.”
