Iran says lays ground for more cooperation with IAEA

VIENNA (Reuters) - Iranian nuclear energy chief Ali Akbar Salehi said he had agreed a basis for deeper cooperation with U.N. inspectors during talks Tuesday with the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The IAEA had no comment on the meeting, which coincides with a diplomatic thaw between Iran and world powers signaled by a plan for talks on October 1 prompted by rising concern about Iran's drive for nuclear capability.

Salehi declined to say what the new cooperation entailed but it would not cover the IAEA's probe into intelligence reports suggesting Iran covertly researched nuclear weapon designs. Iran has said the reports were forged and the issue is closed. "We managed to come to an agreement to set a new framework for better and deeper cooperation in the future," Salehi told reporters, summarizing talks with IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei during an annual meeting of the agency's 150 member states.

"Details will be revealed at the proper time. We hope we will be witnessing in the future improved cooperation (with the IAEA). And we think the international environment is also very conducive to this issue ..."

A senior diplomat close to the IAEA told Reuters no new, specific measures had been agreed by Salehi and ElBaradei, but the Iranian had held out the prospect of a better climate for gestures to allay mistrust in Tehran's nuclear activity.

Last month, the Islamic Republic agreed to longstanding IAEA demands for tighter surveillance of its rapidly expanding Natanz uranium enrichment plant and restored some access to a heavy-water reactor of proliferation concern.

OUTSTANDING IAEA DEMANDS

But the IAEA has sought more far-reaching transparency from Iran to defuse mistrust around its nuclear ambitions. ElBaradei raised three key issues with Salehi, the senior diplomat said:

* Iran should permit snap inspections ranging beyond declared nuclear sites to help inspectors verify that no secret work devoted to "weaponizing" nuclear know-how is going on.

* Iran should resume providing advance design information on planned nuclear facilities and regular access for inspectors.

* Iran should furnish proof for its denials of what the IAEA has described as credible intelligence pointing to past military dimensions to the enrichment program.

"The alleged studies (intelligence) is from our point of view a dead issue. This is just like a movie which is very consistent and comprehensive but at the end it is a fiction," Salehi said, speaking in English.

"We are not here to prove the fictional movie is real ..."

Israel, Tehran's arch-enemy, told IAEA delegates that the intelligence material was "accurate and real" and suggested Iran was trying to evade harsher U.N. sanctions if talks failed by touting superficial gestures of cooperation with the IAEA.

Iran dismissed Israel's comments as false. Israel is believed to have the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal.

Salehi is a former Iranian ambassador to the IAEA and seen as a relative moderate who took over Iran's nuclear agency in July during a wave of unrest against a hardline conservative leadership that had resisted talks with the West.

The senior diplomat said Salehi's appointment was surprising but welcomed by those seeking a negotiating track with Iran.

Salehi said Monday Iran's "sovereign right" to nuclear energy was non-negotiable, effectively ruling out Western demands for an enrichment halt, but that Tehran was ready to discuss ways to improve nuclear non-proliferation globally.

Iran has said it is enriching uranium only for electricity, not to perfect a means to fuel atom bombs as the West suspects.

(Additional reporting by Sylvia Westall; Editing by Richard Williams)