UN nuclear chief says Iran to grant ‘less access’ at sites
TEHRAN, Iran — Iran will begin to offer U.N. inspectors “less access” to its nuclear program as part of its pressure campaign on the West, though investigators will still be able to monitor Tehran’s work, the U.N. atomic watchdog’s chief said Sunday.
Rafael Grossi’s comments came after an emergency trip to Iran in which he said the International Atomic Energy Agency reached a “technical understanding” with Tehran to continue to allow monitoring of its nuclear program for up to three months. But his remarks to journalists underlined a narrowing window for the U.S. and others to reach terms with Iran, which is already enriching and stockpiling uranium at levels far beyond those allowed by its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
“The hope of the IAEA has been to stabilize a situation which was very unstable,” Grossi said at the airport after his arrival back in Vienna, where the agency is based.
Grossi, the IAEA’s director general, offered few specifics of the agreement he had reached with Iranian leaders. He said the number of inspectors on the ground would remain the same but that “what changes is the type of activity” the agency was able to carry out, without elaborating further. He stressed monitoring would continue “in a satisfactory manner.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who under President Hassan Rouhani helped reach the atomic accord, said the IAEA would be prevented from accessing footage from their cameras at nuclear sites.
Zarif’s comments marked the highest-level acknowledgment of what Iran planned to do when it stopped following the so-called Additional Protocol, a confidential agreement between Tehran and the IAEA reached as part of the landmark 2015 nuclear deal.
The IAEA has additional protocols with a number of countries it monitors.
Under the protocol with Iran, the IAEA “collects and analyzes hundreds of thousands of images captured daily by its sophisticated surveillance cameras,” the agency said in 2017. The agency also said then that it had placed “2,000 tamperproof seals on nuclear material and equipment.”
There are 18 nuclear facilities and nine other locations in Iran under IAEA safeguards.
In 2018, then-President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. unilaterally out of the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, saying it needed to be renegotiated.
From Washington, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said President Joe Biden remained willing to negotiate with Iran over a return to the nuclear deal, an offer earlier dismissed by Zarif.
“He is prepared to go to the table to talk to the Iranians about how we get strict constraints back on their nuclear program,” Sullivan told CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “That offer still stands, because we believe diplomacy is the best way to do it.”