The Bush administration has agreed to turn over to international inspectors intelligence data it has collected that it says proves Iran worked on developing a nuclear weapon until a little more than four years ago, according to US and foreign diplomats.
The decision reverses the US' longstanding refusal to share the data, citing the need to protect intelligence sources.
The administration acted as the International Atomic Energy Agency is scheduled to issue a report as early as next week on Iran's past nuclear activities. Administration officials hope that the nuclear inspectors can now confront Iran with what the US believes is the strongest evidence that the Iranians had a nuclear program.
The Bush administration's refusal to turn over the data has been a source of friction with Mohammed ElBaradei, the director general of the agency, who has argued that Iran must be given a fair chance to examine some of the case that Washington has developed.
But it remains unclear how much of the data ElBaradei will be allowed to disclose to the Iranians. In particular, it is not clear if the information includes diagrams and designs that were secretly taken out of Iran on a laptop computer in 2004 and turned over to the Central Intelligence Agency.
Under the terms of a "work plan" concluded last summer, Iran was to have met a series of deadlines set by the agency to resolve any unanswered questions about its nuclear activities.
ElBaradei is eager to resolve all of the outstanding questions before he issues his next report to the agency's 35-member board, which could be as early as the end of next week.
The Bush administration's decision came two months after the publication of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that concluded, with what it terms "high confidence," that Iran was designing a weapon through 2003. But the assessment indicated that Iranian officials ordered the work halted later that year, perhaps because they feared it would ultimately be discovered.
The publication of the new estimate in early December undercut efforts to toughen sanctions that were initially imposed because Iran refused to follow a Security Council demand that it stop enriching uranium.
On Sunday, in an interview with Fox News, Bush made it clear that he disagreed with the idea that the intelligence estimate lowered the threat from Iran.
"Iran is a threat, and that's what the NIE said, if you read it carefully," he said. "It showed they had a weapons -- secret military weapons program, but that doesn't mean they can't have another secret weapons military program."
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