The New York Times, Washington, September 26, 2009 – The Obama administration plans to tell Iran this week that it must open a newly revealed nuclear enrichment site to international inspectors “within weeks,” according to senior administration officials. The administration will also tell Tehran that inspectors must have full access to the key personnel who put together the clandestine plant and to the documents surrounding its construction, the officials said Saturday.

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates said that a secret nuclear facility in Iran was “part of a pattern of deception and lies.”

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.
American and European officials say they will also press Iran to open what they suspect are nuclear-related sites to international inspectors, and to turn over notebooks and computers that they think may document efforts to design weapons.
President Obama has repeatedly said that Iran must show significant cooperation by the end of the year, establishing what officials say is effectively a three-month deadline. Interviews with American and European officials, however, suggest differences of opinion about how much time Iran should be given to show full compliance.
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 American intelligence agencies estimate was designed to house 3,000 centrifuges, enough to produce about one bomb’s worth of material a year. But he did not say when, nor did he say whether Iran would meet any of the other American and European demands.
Mr. Salehi, who spoke on Iranian state television, added that Mr. Obama’s dramatic release of the information about the site at a global economic summit meeting was a “plot” meant to “unite the whole world against us.”
Iranian officials have long maintained that their nuclear program is designed to produce energy, not weapons, and they said the facility near Qum is for peaceful purposes. They have not explained why it was located inside a heavily guarded base of the Revolutionary Guards.
From the White House to Europe, senior officials were pushing to exploit the disclosure of the covert facility as a turning point in negotiations to try to get Iran to halt its nuclear program.
“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. Mr. Burns said Mr. Obama “now has much greater leverage to organize an international coalition to confront” the country’s leaders with sanctions should the negotiating effort fail.
David A. Kay, a nuclear specialist who led the fruitless American search for unconventional weapons in Iraq, said the discovery “reopens the whole question of the military’s involvement in the Iranian nuclear program.”
For now, 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. Quick access to the facility is considered crucial because of fears that Iran would move incriminating equipment or documents.
It is still unclear what kind of incentives the United States and its allies might offer Iran if it completely opened, and ultimately dismantled, its nuclear program. On Saturday, Mr. 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.”
Now that the clandestine site has been revealed, however, American and European officials say they see an opportunity to press for broader disclosures. Iran will be told that to avoid sanctions, it must adhere to an I.A.E.A. agreement that would allow inspectors to go virtually anywhere in the country to follow suspicions of nuclear work.
Iran would also have to turn over documents that the agency has sought for more than three years, including some that intelligence agencies obtained that they say 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 I.A.E.A. rules, which Iran agreed to and then renounced, requiring it to announce in advance any plans to build nuclear facilities. Iran says it will adhere only to an older rule, requiring notification when a plant is about to become operational.
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For several years, Iran has deflected I.A.E.A requests to interview key scientists, presumably including those who ran the highly secret Projects 110 and 111. American intelligence officials, after piercing Iran’s computer networks in 2007, said they believe that those projects 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.