Faced with the imminent release of a report by international nuclear inspectors, Iran acknowledged publicly on Sunday that it secretly purchased components for its nuclear program from a network of international suppliers, but continued to insist that its program was for electricity production, not nuclear weapons.
The statement, by the Foreign Ministry, came after the head of the Supreme National Security Council, Hassan Rohani, met in Vienna with the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei.
European and US diplomats say they believe that ElBaradei summarized the results of a report the IAEA is expected to release this week about Iran's nuclear program, including details that Iran withheld last fall when, under pressure from Europe and the US, it revealed 18 years of nuclear activity.
"The Iranians are admitting to the dimensions of their program bit by bit as they are confronted with individual pieces of evidence," said one senior US official involved in the investigations of the nuclear trading network set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the Pakistani weapon.
"Compare it to what the Libyans are doing. I'm convinced the Libyans are voluntarily showing us everything," the official said, referring to Libya's decision to dismantle all of its nuclear weapons program.
The official added: "The Iranians are still stonewalling."
Reuters reported on Sunday that the spokesman for Iran's Foreign Ministry, Hamid Reza Asefi, said that "we have bought some things from some dealers but we don't know what the source was or what country they came from."
He insisted that every purchase had been reported to the IAEA.
Iran's statements are significant because few US or European officials say they understand how far the country's nuclear program has advanced, or how close the country may be to producing a nuclear weapon. Because Khan's network sold Libya equipment, full warhead designs and the raw uranium gas that must be enriched to produce bomb fuel, US officials say they assume that Iran received the same package of goods.
On Friday, the Malaysian police released a report of its interrogations of B.S.A. Tahir, whom US President George W. Bush has identified as Khan's chief lieutenant. In the report, the police quoted Tahir as saying that Iran paid about US$3 million for parts to manufacture centrifuges, which turn the uranium into highly enriched weapons-grade fuel. The parts arrived in Iran in 1994 or 1995, officials said, about seven years after the first transactions between Iran and Pakistan. That shipment was something of a surprise to US officials, who until recently only had evidence of Pakistani shipments to Iran in the 1980s.
It now appears that the later shipments were part of an effort to sell Iran a more sophisticated type of centrifuge, called a "P-2," which enriches uranium more efficiently than the first models sold to Tehran. The Iranians say they informed the IAEA last fall that they had worked experimentally with the P-2 design, but some agency officials say the information was only passed along after it became clear that Khan was being interrogated.
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