U.S. and Iranian negotiators moved closer Monday to reaching a two-phase nuclear deal that would hinge on a provision allowing Tehran to ramp up its uranium enrichment gradually after a 10-year period of restrictions and inspection from outside powers.
Officials in both nations said obstacles remain to an agreement before a March 31 deadline in negotiations, but Secretary of State John F. Kerry pointed to “progress” after three days of nuclear talks broke up in Geneva with plans to resume again at the start of next week.
The potential deal is likely to face fierce resistance from Congress, where a growing number of Republicans and Democrats say they believe Tehran is misleading Washington and the other world powers participating in the talks — even as a leading Iranian dissident group was poised to level fresh accusations of what it says is Tehran’s covert drive to acquire a nuclear bomb.
The National Coalition of Resistance of Iran, which has in the past revealed evidence on Iran’s nuclear programs from its sources inside the country, circulated a news release Monday claiming that it has “critical and reliable intelligence on the existence of an active and secret parallel nuclear program” in Iran.
The group said details would be revealed during a news conference Tuesday in Washington. While the group has a controversial history — the State Department for years listed it as a terrorist organization under a different name — the coalition is seen to have deep sources inside Iran’s nuclear community.
Its members are credited with having revealed two developing nuclear sites in Iran during the early 2000s: the Natanz uranium enrichment facility and the Arak heavy-water plutonium facility. The disclosures have been at the center of international scrutiny and distrust of Tehran since then.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has clashed with the Obama administration over Iranian policy, is expected to level harsh criticism of the nuclear negotiations during his address to Congress on March 3.
Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon warned that such a deal would represent “a great danger” to the Western world and said it “will allow Iran to become a nuclear threshold state.”
Other reports Monday said the warnings leveled by Mr. Netanyahu about Iran were not fully from his own intelligence analysts. Citing leaked internal documents, The Guardian newspaper and the Al Jazeera network said Mr. Netanyahu may have ignored his own spy agency’s intelligence assessments when he played up Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear bomb during a major speech at the United Nations in 2012.
Mr. Netanyahu’s warning that Iran was about a year away from having a bomb at the time was contradicted weeks later by a top-secret report from Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, which concluded that Tehran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons.”
Despite the optimism of the negotiators in Geneva, meanwhile, the White House said it was uncertain about the prospects for a successful deal with Iran.
“Our odds of reaching an agreement with Iran are 50/50 at best,” spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters Monday. “I think that continues to be a fair assessment of where things stand.”
Iranian officials have long argued that their nuclear program is for purely peaceful and civilian purposes. But the U.S. and its allies say Tehran has secretly tried to build a bomb in violation of orders from the U.N. Security Council, and Western powers for years have leveled economic sanctions against the Islamic republic and pursued a global embargo on Iranian oil.
During negotiations over the past year, Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium and restrict its enrichment activities to a level of 5 percent. In exchange, the U.S. has allowed Tehran access to millions of dollars in seized oil assets.
Should a full-fledged deal be reached, it would mean the eventual lifting of all sanctions and signal the easing of some 35 years of enmity between Washington and Tehran.
The Associated Press reported Monday that U.S. negotiators initially sought to keep the restrictions on Iran’s uranium enrichment activities in place for up to 20 years, but that Iran pushed for less than a decade — with the prospective deal appearing to be somewhere in the middle.
The AP cited officials representing countries among the six world powers negotiating with Iran — the U.S., Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia — who spoke privately about the state of the talks.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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