Obama to demand immediate inspections of new Iran nuke site

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration plans to tell Tehran this week that Iran must open a newly revealed nuclear enrichment site to international inspectors "within weeks," according to senior administration officials. The administration will also seek full access to the key personnel who put together the clandestine plant.

The demands, following the revelation Friday of the secret facility at a military base near the holy city of Qum, set the stage for the next chapter of a diplomatic drama that has toughened the West's posture and heightened tensions with Iran. The first direct negotiations between the United States and Iran in 30 years are scheduled to open in Geneva on Thursday.

U.S. and European officials say that they will also press Iran to open suspected nuclear sites to inspectors and turn over notebooks and computers involved in suspected weapons design over the next few months.

President Barack Obama has said repeatedly that Iran must show significant cooperation by the end of the year, establishing what officials say is effectively a three-month deadline for action.

However, in interviews with U.S. and European officials, there appear to be differences of opinion about how much time Iran should be given to show full compliance and how they will measure Tehran's cooperation.

On Saturday, Iran's nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, said the International Atomic Energy Agency would be invited to visit the site near Qum that U.S. intelligence agencies estimate was designed to house 3,000 centrifuges, enough to produce about one bomb's worth of material a year. Iranian officials have said the site is for peaceful purposes. They have not explained why it was located inside a heavily guarded Iranian Revolutionary Guard base.

From the White House to Europe, senior officials were pushing to exploit the disclosure of the covert facility as a turning point.

"This is the most important development in the three and a half years since the U.S. has offered negotiations with Iran," said R. Nicholas Burns, a Harvard professor who served as the Bush administration's chief strategist on Iran. He said Obama "now has much greater leverage to organize an international coalition to confront" the country's leaders with sanctions should the negotiating effort fail.

The most urgent issue, current and former officials agree, is gaining immediate access to the hidden tunnel complex that Iran now acknowledges is a uranium enrichment plant still under construction.

"This reopens the whole question of the military's involvement in the Iranian nuclear program," said David Kay, a nuclear specialist who led the fruitless U.S. search for unconventional weapons in Iraq. The clandestine plant, he added, also raises questions of whether Iran was preparing to sprint for an atom bomb.

It is still unclear what kind of incentives the United States and its allies may offer Iran if it completely opens, and ultimately dismantles, its nuclear program. On Saturday, Obama in his weekly radio address said he remained committed to building a relationship with Tehran. "My offer of a serious, meaningful dialogue to resolve this issue remains open," he said. "But Iran must now cooperate fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and take action to demonstrate its peaceful intentions."

But since the clandestine site was revealed, U.S. and European officials say they see an opportunity to press for broader disclosures. The country will be told that, to avoid sanctions, it must adhere to an IAEA agreement called the "additional protocol" that would allow inspectors to go virtually anywhere in the country to track down suspicions of nuclear work.

Iran will have to turn over documents that the agency has sought for more than three years, including some that appear to suggest work was done on the design of warheads and technologies for detonating a nuclear core. The negotiators would also insist, officials say, that Iran abide by IAEA rules, which Iran agreed to and then renounced, requiring it to announce in advance any plans to build nuclear facilities. Iran says it will only adhere to an older rule, requiring notification only when the plant is about to become operational.

For several years, the Iran has deflected IAEA requests to interview key scientists, presumably including those who ran the highly secret Projects 110 and 111, which U.S. intelligence officials, after piercing Iran's computer networks in 2007, say they believe are at the center of nuclear design work. Iran has denied that the projects exist and has denounced as fabrications the documents the United States has shared with the agency, and with other nations, that were taken from a scientist's laptop that was smuggled out of the country.

There are other elements of the Iranian program that may also draw greater scrutiny, though it is unclear whether they are part of the new Western demands. A controversial U.S. intelligence report in 2007 that said Iran seemed to have halted final work on a bomb also asserted that there were more than a dozen suspect sites about which officials knew little.

Administration officials acknowledge it is unlikely that Iran will accede to all of those demands. But they say this is their best chance to move the seven-year-long standoff over Iran's nuclear program sharply in their favor.

In interviews and public comments, the administration's tone has clearly changed in recent days, becoming tougher and more confrontational.

In an interview to be broadcast Sunday on ABC, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the hidden facility was "part of a pattern of deception and lies on the part of the Iranians from the very beginning with respect to their nuclear program."

But he deflected a question that has been circulating inside the government: whether the Qum facility is one of a kind, or just one of several hidden facilities that were intended to give Iran a covert means of enriching uranium, far from the inspectors who regularly visit a far larger enrichment facility, also once kept secret, at Natanz.

"My personal opinion is that the Iranians have the intention of having nuclear weapons," Gates concluded, though he said it was still an open question "whether they have made a formal decision" to manufacture weapons.

One of Obama's other national security advisers said in an interview, "Until this week, the Iranians always seemed to have the momentum. We had to reverse that. Now they have to answer the question: If they've kept secret an enrichment center under a mountain, what else have they forgotten to tell the inspectors?"

(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.) In recent years, Tehran has slowly and systematically cut back on the access of atomic sleuths. Early in 2006, for instance, it unilaterally began redirecting the international inspectors from dozens of sites, programs and personnel all over the Islamic republic to a single point: Natanz, where Iran is enriching uranium.

Pierre Goldschmidt, a former IAEA official who is now a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the revelation of the secret enrichment plant drove home the urgent need for enhanced legal authority for tough inspections. "It's proof that, without additional verification authority, the agency cannot find undeclared nuclear activities," he said.

Beneath the dry language of reports issued every three months by the international agency lies the story of an intense cat-and-mouse game in which inspectors seek documents or interviews with key scientists like Mohsen Fakrizadeh. He sits atop a maze of laboratories believed to have once been used -- the Israelis and some Europeans say they still are -- for the design of nuclear arms.

So the IAEA's agenda of inspection is already huge, as is its record of failing to get the Iranians to address the most serious clues and charges, inconsistencies and suspicions.

The departing chief of the agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, recently argued that the case for urgent action against Iran was "hyped," even as he acknowledged that the country has refused, for two years, to answer his inspectors' questions about evidence suggesting that the country has worked on weapons design.

In May 2008, the atomic agency in Vienna issued an uncharacteristically blunt demand for more information from Tehran and, even more uncharacteristically, disclosed the existence of 18 secretly obtained documents suggesting Iran's high interest in atom bombs.

The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran included a classified chapter on covert sites, and evidence of the existence of blueprints and designs that could turn nuclear fuel into deadly warheads.

But the wording of the public portion of same intelligence actually froze the effort to force Iran to reveal more. Its conclusion that some of the weapons design work halted in 2003, perhaps because the Iranians feared the kind of disclosure they suffered last week, was a surprise that ended talk of sanctions.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the report an exoneration.

In fact, the NIE listed more than a dozen suspect locations, though officials would not say whether they included the one that was revealed Friday.