WarSclerotic

Iran’s official IRNA news service reported that the country has given samples to the UN nuclear agency from its Parchin military site, where it once allegedly worked on triggers for nuclear weapons. The environmental samples were taken without international inspectors present, according to the spokesman for Iran’s atomic agency.

The question of how samples were to be drawn from the site, which is suspected of past covert military activity, has been hotly debated. The Associated Press reported that a draft agreement between the IAEA and Iran stipulates that Tehran can take its own samples for examination as part of the nuclear deal. Western diplomats have maintained that samples will be drawn with IAEA representatives observing.

“Iranian experts took samples from specific locations in Parchin facilities this week without IAEA’s inspectors being present,” Behruz Kamalvandi was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA, according to Reuters.

“They followed regulations and standards and the samples were given to IAEA’s experts,” the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) spokesman added.

The head of the UN nuclear agency paid what Iran’s official news agency described as a ceremonial visit Sunday to Parchin.

Neither Iranian reports of Yukiya Amano’s visit to the Parchin site nor its confirmation by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency gave substantial details.

But they appeared to jibe with the terms of a draft agreement between Iran and the IAEA, which Amano heads. Seen by The Associated Press, that confidential draft speaks of a visit by Amano not as a participant in any IAEA probe but as a “courtesy” granted by Iran.

The draft also postulates that Amano would come only after the suspected site at Parchin was probed for evidence of weapons work. His visit Sunday thus could indicate that the inspection had already occurred over the past few days.

Such a probe would normally be done by IAEA personnel. But the draft says that at Parchin, Iranian experts, monitored by video and photo cameras, will collect their own environmental samples. They will then give them to IAEA officials for laboratory analysis.

The Parchin compromise comes less than a month before an October 15 deadline for the IAEA to gather information on allegations that Iran tried to build atomic weapons and after more than a decade of essentially stalemated agency attempts to follow up the allegations.

A final UN assessment is due in December, and that will feed into the larger July 14 nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers, helping to determine whether sanctions on Tehran will be lifted.

White House and US State Department officials have confirmed the existence of the draft agreement between Iran and the IAEA. They said they are satisfied that the arrangements for Parchin will allow the IAEA to do its job but have refused demands from US Congress and others to make it public, saying they are governed by confidentiality rules agreed to by Iran and the agency.

The IAEA also has refused to detail the arrangement, saying only that it meets its stringent inspection requirements.

The draft didn’t say whether IAEA personnel would be present anywhere on the base during the inspections. In a tweet last week, chief Iranian IAEA delegate Reza Najafi said Parchin “is a military site and Iran will not let any inspector go there.”

Iran denies any work on — or interest in — nuclear weapons. It says IAEA suspicions are based on false intelligence from the US, Israel and other adversaries.