US and Iran held secret meetings before nuclear deal

A historic agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme was made possible by months of unprecedented secret meetings between US and Iranian officials, it emerged last night.

The meetings ran parallel to official negotiations involving five other world powers, and helped pave the way for the interim deal signed in Geneva in the early hours of yesterday morning, in which Iran accepted strict constraints on its nuclear programme for the first time in a decade in exchange for partial relief from sanctions.

The Obama administration asked journalists not to publish details they had uncovered of the secret diplomacy until the Geneva talks were over for fear of derailing them. The Associated Press and a Washington-based news website, Al-Monitor, finally did so yesterday.

The nuclear agreement, which arguably marks the most significant foreign policy achievement of Barack Obama’s presidency, was struck at 4.30am at a Geneva hotel on day five of the third round of intensive talks. It amounts to the most significant agreement between Washington and Tehran since the 1979 Iranian revolution.

The deal releases $4 billion in Iranian oil sales revenue from frozen accounts, and suspends restrictions on the country's trade in gold, petrochemicals, car and plane parts.

Nuclear activities
In return, Iran undertakes to restrict its nuclear activities.

Over the next six months Iran has agreed to:

Stop enriching uranium above 5 per cent , and dilute its stock of 20 per cent-enriched uranium, removing a major proliferation concern.

Not to increase its stockpile of low-enriched uranium.

Freeze its enrichment capacity by not installing any more centrifuges, leaving over half of its existing 16,000 centrifuges inoperable.

Not to fuel or to commission the heavy-water reactor it is building in Arak or build a reprocessing plant that could produce plutonium.

Accept more intrusive nuclear inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

A safer place
The United States defended the deal, maintaining that the accord would make Israel and the Middle East a safer place.

Rejecting comparisons to North Korea and Israel’s criticism that the deal was a “historic mistake”, US secretary of state John Kerry said Iran’s agreement to curtail some of its nuclear activities in exchange for $7 billion in sanctions relief was a first step to making sure Tehran could not build nuclear weapons.

Selling the merits of the agreement Mr Kerry said on three American news channels yesterday that the deal would halt nuclear activities that bring Iran closer to developing a nuclear weapon and put the country’s nuclear facilities under an unprecedented level of international inspections.

“From this day, for the next six months, Israel is in fact safer than it was,” he said on CNN.

“We’re now going to expand the time by which they can break out, rather than narrow it.”

“While today’s announcement is just a first step, it achieves a great deal,” President Obama said. “For the first time in nearly a decade, we have halted the progress of the Iranian nuclear programme, and key parts of the programme will be rolled back.”

Iran welcomed back its negotiators as heroes at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport. – (additional reporting Guardian service, Reuters)