Iran invites IAEA team to help ease nuclear worries

VIENNA, June 25 (Reuters) Iran has invited the International Atomic Energy Agency to send a team to agree how to resolve longstanding IAEA questions about Tehran's contested atomic programme, the UN watchdog said today.

Tehran's conciliatory gesture came as the United States, Britain, Russia, France, Germany and China began discussing a third, harsher batch of UN sanctions against Tehran for refusing to suspend nuclear enrichment-related activities.

Iran's chief negotiator Ali Larijani, who agreed a ''plan of action'' for transparency with IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei in talks on Friday, returned to see ElBaradei on Sunday and issued the invitation, the agency said in a statement.

Olli Heinonen, the IAEA's global head of inspectors, was expected to lead the team after his return from North Korea, where he will begin a five-day visit yesterday to lay groundwork for Pyongyang's promised nuclear disarmament.

Iran says its programme aims only to produce electricity.

But suspicions persist in the West that Tehran wants to build a nuclear bomb since Iran hid sensitive nuclear research from the IAEA until 2003 and has stonewalled investigations since.

Tehran has been penalised with two sets of UN sanctions.

A year ago, Iran pledged to come up with a plan for cooperation with IAEA inquiries but never followed through.

''This (new deal) is the first break in a stalemate that has been going on since then on allowing the IAEA to resolve these remaining mysteries,'' said a Vienna diplomat close to the IAEA.

FULL TRANSPARENCY The Larijani-ElBaradei deal calls for the IAEA and Tehran to agree within two months what steps will be needed to ''let the IAEA get to the bottom of the issues'', the diplomat said.

This would likely entail access for IAEA inspectors to Iranian sites, documents and officials at the centre of indications of past covert activity with military links.

Iran has long conditioned full transparency on the UN Security Council first returning authority over its file to the IAEA. Western powers reject such a concession, saying dropping sanctions options would relieve Iran of pressure to cooperate.

The diplomat said Larijani did not repeat that demand in his meetings with ElBaradei. But, asked whether wider, stiffer sanctions now being contemplated could unravel the IAEA-Iran deal, the diplomat said, ''Surely''.

However, a Western diplomat in Vienna said Iran's effort to address the lack of international trust in its nuclear agenda looked more like a delay tactic than a genuine turnaround.

''I assume Iran feels pressure mounting, that there will be another Security Council resolution and they'd like to head that off, buy more time,'' he told Reuters.

''If Iran were really serious, why do they need to negotiate two months on how to resolve the issues? The IAEA has made clear for some time what Iran needs to do. I don't think unity (among world powers) will fall apart over this Iranian move,'' he said.

But Russia, one of five powers with a Security Council veto, has hinted at disagreement with a US thrust for more sanctions soon by saying it will back them only once the IAEA declared all possibilities to resolve its questions had been exhausted.

Larijani also met at the weekend in Lisbon with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, who has been exploring how to bring about an Iranian nuclear suspension.

Both men called their latest talks constructive. But they yielded no breakthrough on the core dispute -- Iran's refusal to fully suspend an enrichment programme it has rapidly expanded.

REUTERS SR RN2154