UN Atomic Chief to Visit Tehran in Probe
 
By George Jahn 
January 7, 2008 
The Associated Press 
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/07/AR2008010700934.html

VIENNA, Austria -- The head of the U.N. atomic agency will visit Tehran this week to try to add momentum to his agency's investigation of Iran's past nuclear activities and learn more about present programs, the agency said Monday. 

The trip by Mohamed ElBaradei comes at a time of growing impatience from the U.S. and its allies about the pace of the International Atomic Energy Agency's probe into Iran's past nuclear programs. It also coincides with President Bush's first major trip to the Middle East. 

IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said ElBaradei will visit Friday and Saturday with a view of resolving all remaining outstanding issues and enabling the agency to provide assurance about Iran's past and present activities. 

She said ElBaradei would meet with a number of high officials but provided no other details in an e-mailed statement. 

ElBaradei has said he wants to wrap up the investigation by December. But diplomats accredited to the agency, who demanded anonymity because their information was confidential, told The Associated Press recently that the agency had run into unspecified obstacles, and that Iranian officials were now talking about March as the new deadline _ something they said the United States and its allies would be unlikely to accept. 

While meeting the leaders of Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other regional nations Jan. 9-16, Bush is expected to try and bolster the troubled peace process between Israel and the Palestinians but is also likely to seek backing for U.S. concerns about Iran. 

Iran is under two sets of U.N. Security Council sanctions for its refusal to freeze uranium enrichment, a potential pathway to nuclear arms, and Washington is pushing for additional U.N. penalties. But a recent U.S. intelligence assessment that it probably shut down a clandestine weapons program three years ago have led to increased resistance to such a move from permanent Security Council members Russia and China, which have strategic and trade ties with Tehran. 

The IAEA has been investigating Iran's nuclear programs since revelations in 2003 that the country had conducted nearly two decades of secret atomic activities, including developing enrichment and working on experiments that could be linked to a weapons program. The U.S. intelligence assessment concludes that Iran stopped direct work on creating nuclear arms that year. 

Under a plan agreed to earlier this year with the IAEA, Iran committed itself to answering all lingering questions about its past nuclear activities. That, by implication, included programs that could have weapons applications. But it refuses to suspend enrichment, insisting it has the right to the activity for what it says are purely peaceful purposes - generating electricity. 

Low enriched uranium is a source of nuclear fuel. But at high levels, it becomes the fissile material of bombs and warheads. 

The agency has been careful about the progress of its probe up to now. In an August report, ElBaradei said the agency felt that information provided by Iran on past small-scale plutonium experiments had resolved agency concerns about the issue. It has also confirmed that Tehran has given agency experts a copy of documents showing how to form uranium metal into the spherical shape of warheads. 

But it specified that Iran still needed to satisfy the agency's curiosity about issues that are potentially more important in determining whether the country has or had a military program _ the history and present state of its enrichment technology and the origins of traces of highly enriched uranium at a facility linked to the military.