Iran Agrees to More Nuclear Talks With U.S. and Allies - NYTimes.com

Iran Agrees to More Nuclear Talks With U.S. and Allies - NYTimes.com: "Iran Agrees to More Nuclear Talks With U.S. and Allies
By STEVEN ERLANGER and MARK LANDLER

GENEVA — Critical talks over Iran’s nuclear ambitions ended Thursday evening in Geneva with an agreement to talk again before the month, a senior administration official said. The talks included the highest level bilateral discussions between the United States and Iran in many years.

Held at the isolated Villa Le Saugy, an 18th-century building in the countryside here, Thursday’s meeting brought together Iran, the five members of the United Nations Security Council, Germany and the European Union for what one senior American official called the beginning of an “extraordinarily difficult process.”

Washington had hoped to begin bilateral talks with Iran on a range of issues, among them trade and Tehran’s support for Palestinian, Lebanese and Iraqi insurgent and terrorist groups, including Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.

But after new disclosures of a hidden Iranian enrichment facility dug deep into a guarded mountain near the holy city of Qum, the immediate goal of the negotiations shifted, to the aim that talks would touch on Iran permitting serious nuclear inspections and suspending its nuclear enrichment program.

It “cannot be an open-ended process, or talks just for the sake of talks, especially in light of the revelations about Qum,” said the American official, who briefed reporters Wednesday on condition of anonymity. “We need to see practical steps and measurable results, and we need to see them starting quickly,” he said.

Speaking at the United Nations, the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, described the talks as “constructive,” and said they focused on a wide range of issues that Iran laid out in its five-page proposal for talks, which included talk of global nuclear disarmament but no specifics about the Iranian nuclear program.

“We considered the atmosphere as constructive one and we hope that the other side will have the same political will and determination and constructive approach to participating in this dialogue,” he said. He added that Iran would be ready to enhance the level of the talks up to that of a summit meeting, meaning that heads of state would be involved.

The United States was represented at the Thursday meeting by the under secretary of state for political affairs, William J. Burns, and Iran by its chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili. Mr. Jalili’s direct counterpart is Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, who is the host of the meeting.

During the morning session, Mr. Burns had a one-on-one meeting with Mr. Jalili, said Robert Wood, the deputy State Department spokesman. Mr. Wood said he had no other details on the private meeting.

Other officials said that the morning was largely spent in speeches by both sides, with little give-and-take before breaking for lunch.

Mr. Burns, a career diplomat with a long history in the Middle East, attended a similar meeting with Iran in July 2008 during the Bush administration, though with instructions not to negotiate.

On Wednesday, Mr. Mottaki, the foreign minister visited the country’s unofficial embassy in Washington, the first trip to the capital by an Iranian of that rank in a decade. Mr. Mottaki said Thursday that he had gone to insure that the Iranian diaspora in America were being well looked after.The visit by Mr. Mottaki, who had been at the United Nations, was approved by the White House, and it was seen as an effort to help thaw the atmosphere as the Obama administration puts its policy of engagement with Iran to the test.

The State Department said Mr. Mottaki asked for permission to visit the staff at Iran’s interest section, a diplomatic outpost that Iran maintains in the Pakistani Embassy because it does not have relations with the United States. The last time an Iranian foreign minister was permitted to make such a visit was in the late 1990s, during the Clinton administration.

“It is an unusual coincidence; whether it’s a happy coincidence, we’ll see,” said Philip J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman. “It doesn’t make the serious issues we confront any easier, but if it’s taken as a small gesture and contributes in some way, that will be terrific.”

Many diplomats and analysts believe that the Qum facility is only one of a serious of hidden installations that Iran has constructed alongside its public ones for what is considered to be a military program. Iran insists its program is purely peaceful and insists on its rights to enrich, but has regularly lied to the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency about its facilities.

The United States is likely to offer Iran a repackaged version of something it has offered before: an agreement to hold off on new sanctions if the Iranians agree to freeze their enrichment of uranium, so that serious negotiations can take place. The West remains wary of talking while Iran continues enrichment, fearing a negotiation without end or result.

The proposal did not interest the Iranians before. But officials plan to try again, hoping that a new American administration, the pressure from disclosure of the nuclear enrichment complex and internal divisions from Iran’s chaotic elections and the ensuing crackdown on demonstrators will make it more acceptable, American and European officials said.

“The point is to try to make it impossible for them to say no,” a European diplomat said.

But some American officials believe that the turmoil in Iran will make its government less willing to compromise and appear weak.

France or Russia, officials said, is likely to put another familiar inducement on the table: a plan to supply Iran with nuclear fuel, which it could use to operate its nuclear reactors under international monitoring.

Such an agreement, which would be policed by the atomic agency, would give Iran a guaranteed source of enriched uranium for civilian energy needs but remove the fear that Iran would enrich uranium to the weapons-grade level needed for a nuclear bomb.

For its part, officials and experts said, Iran is likely to turn up with a narrow agenda on its nuclear program, but a host of other issues, including overhauling the United Nations; giving greater voice to non-Western countries; and universal nuclear disarmament. It laid these out in a five-page proposal last month, which was met with derision by Obama administration officials.

Iran is also likely to argue that it was not legally obliged to disclose its second enrichment plant, the one whose existence was made public last week. That contention will hinge on its “safeguards agreement” with the atomic agency, which originally said Iran was not required to disclose the plant until 180 days before it put fuel into it.

The agreement was later modified to require Iran’s disclosure as soon as it decided to build the complex. Iranian officials contend that its Parliament never ratified the modification — an argument that the atomic energy agency’s director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, has rejected.

“They have been on the wrong side of the law,” said Dr. ElBaradei, who is normally circumspect and has said that fears over Iran’s nuclear program are exaggerated.

In Tehran on Wednesday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran would be willing to buy enriched uranium “from whomever will sell it to us” — suggesting a possible willingness to compromise on the issue of enrichment. A senior American official said the international community would consider such a proposal, saying it wanted “tangible steps” in its negotiations with Iran.

Steven Erlanger reported from Geneva and Mark Landler from Washington. Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington and Sharon Otterman from New York."