{"id":67822,"date":"2013-03-16T18:48:04","date_gmt":"2013-03-16T16:48:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/?p=67822"},"modified":"2014-01-08T01:19:45","modified_gmt":"2014-01-07T23:19:45","slug":"us-iran-nuclear-teams-to-istanbul-for-technical-talks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2013\/03\/16\/us-iran-nuclear-teams-to-istanbul-for-technical-talks\/","title":{"rendered":"US, Iran nuclear teams to Istanbul for technical talks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Posted on\u00a0

\"Iran'sNuclear experts from Iran and six world powers head to Istanbul next week to discuss a revised international proposal that Iranian officials\u00a0welcomed\u00a0as a \u201cturning point\u201d at a meeting in Kazakhstan last month.<\/p>\n

The U.S. team to the Istanbul talks, to be held March 18, includes two veteran State Department arms control negotiators, Robert Einhorn and Jim Timbie, as well as Jofi Joseph, an Iran director in the White House WMD shop, US officials told the Back Channel Thursday. Einhorn and Timbie previously attended\u00a0technical talks with Iran\u00a0held in Istanbul last July, along with then White House WMD czar Gary Samore, who\u00a0left\u00a0the administration in January for Harvard.<\/p>\n

Iran\u2019s delegation to the technical talks in Istanbul next week is expected, as last July, to be led by Hamid-Reza Asgari, a\u00a0longtime member\u00a0of Iran\u2019s nuclear negotiating team, who multiple Iranian sources tell Al-Monitor is an Iranian intelligence officer who has been involved in Iran\u2019s international arms control discussions for over a decade. Iran\u2019s team to Istanbul last July also included Ali Ashgar Soltanieh, Iran\u2019s envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).<\/p>\n

(A revealing detail on their dynamic comes from a late 2009\u00a0US cable, released by Wikileaks, and written by then US envoy to the IAEA Glyn Davies. It describes Soltanieh as having moved to shake US Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Poneman\u2019s hand at a 2009 Vienna meeting, \u201cnecessitating Iranian Legal Advisor Asgari to pull him [Soltanieh] away from\u201d the U.S. delegation, Davies wrote.)<\/p>\n

American and Iranian officials had fairly extensive discussions at the last technical meeting in Istanbul last July, a senior US official, speaking not for attribution,\u00a0told journalists\u00a0at P5+1 talks with Iran in Almaty, Kazakhstan last month.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a little heightened hope that Iran will respond in a meaningful way when they meet,\u201d Mark Fitzpatrick, a former State Department arms control official now with the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London, told the Back Channel Thursday. \u201cIf Iran comes back engaging in the details\u2026if they are talking the same language\u2026it would be very much progress.\u201d<\/p>\n

President Obama, speaking on Wednesday ahead of his first presidential trip to Israel next week, said that the United States currently assesses it would be at least a year before Iran could manufacture a nuclear weapon if it decided to do so, and the United States and international partners had been intensifying efforts to reach a diplomatic resolution in that window because it would prove more durable.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now, we think it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon, but obviously we don\u2019t want to cut it too close,\u201d Obama told Israel\u2019s Channel 2 Wednesday, the Associated Press\u00a0reported.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cSo when I\u2019m consulting with [Israeli Prime Minister] Bibi [Netanyahu], my message to him will be the same as before,\u201d Obama continued. \u201cIf we can resolve it diplomatically, that is a more lasting solution. But if not, I continue to keep all options on the table.\u201d<\/p>\n

Arms control experts said calculating such a time line involves a complicated set of likely and unlikely assumptions. \u201cIf Iran decided today to build nuclear weapons, it would require years, not weeks or months, to deploy a credible nuclear arsenal,\u201d Greg Thielmann, a former US intelligence analyst now with the Arms Control Association, told the Back Channel Thursday.<\/p>\n

The Istanbul experts level talks come as Iranian leaders\u00a0have intensified debate\u00a0on the pros and cons of direct talks with the United States in recent days, suggesting Tehran may be mulling whether to take President Obama up on the offer and under what conditions.<\/p>\n

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei\u2019s official website this week posted previously unreleased photos of Iranian and American officials meeting in Iraq in 2007, as well as interviews with Iranian officials involved in the talks, Al-Monitor\u00a0reported\u00a0Thursday. Then US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker told Al-Monitor Friday that he found Tehran\u2019s publication of the photos \u201cinteresting,\u201d and said they were of meetings he attended in Iraq in 2007, when he served as the US envoy to Baghdad.<\/p>\n

Two Iranian presidential candidates close to the Supreme Leader also weighed in on prospects for US-Iran talks in Iranian media interviews this week.<\/p>\n

Ali Akbar Velayati, the Supreme Leader\u2019s longtime\u00a0foreign policy advisor\u00a0and a former Iranian foreign minister, speaking to Iranian journalists Wednesday, \u201csaid that as long as Americans have not changed their behavior and methods of conduct with Iran, the stance of the Islamic Republic of Iran will remain unchanged,\u201d the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA)\u00a0reported\u00a0Thursday.<\/p>\n

But former Iranian nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani\u00a0said\u00a0there were situations when the Supreme Leader would endorse talks with the Americans, as he has on certain occasions in the past.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is not the Supreme Leader\u2019s view that Iran and the United States should not have negotiations and relations until the Day of Judgment,\u201d Rowhani, the Supreme Leader\u2019s representative to the Iranian Supreme National Security Council,\u00a0was cited\u00a0by Iranian media Thursday.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there is a situation where the country\u2019s dignity and interests are..served, he will give permission for dialogue\u2026as\u2026negotiations have been held between the two countries on issues related to Iraq, Afghanistan, and the nuclear (issue),\u201d Rowhani continued.<\/p>\n

(Hamid-Reza Asgari, top right, a senior advisor in Iran\u2019s Atomic Energy Organization, is pictured with Iran\u2019s envoy to the IAEA Ali Ashgar Soltanieh (left, with beard), attending a meeting in Vienna with French, Russian and American diplomats October 21, 2009. REUTERS\/Herwig Prammer.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more:\u00a0http:\/\/backchannel.al-monitor.com\/index.php\/2013\/03\/4760\/iran-p51-nuclear-experts-head-to-istanbul-technical-talks\/#ixzz2Nios3vk4<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Posted on\u00a0March 15, 2013\u00a0by\u00a0Laura Rozen Nuclear experts from Iran and six world powers head to Istanbul next week to discuss a revised international proposal that Iranian officials\u00a0welcomed\u00a0as a \u201cturning point\u201d at a meeting in Kazakhstan last month. The U.S. team to the Istanbul talks, to be held March 18, includes two veteran State Department arms […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":67823,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[4176],"class_list":["post-67822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-iran_","tag-nuclear-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}