Think tank: Crates, trucks at Iran site ahead of UN visit

However the IAEA, using U.S., Israeli and other intelligence and its own research, suspects that Iran may have have experimented with high-explosive detonators for nuclear arms at that military facility south of Tehran, and other weapons-related work elsewhere. The US Congress is set to vote on whether to accept the nuclear deal on September 17, and some lawmakers have expressed concerns that Iran would not comply with requests that it give a full accounting of possible military aspects of its nuclear program. Washington has described the side deals as “technical agreements”, which are believed to include a deal about Iran’s documentation of the alleged “previous military dimension (PMD)” of its nuclear program.

A senior intelligence official told Bloomberg that Iran’s “sanitization” efforts are known, but that the world powers who signed the deal with Iran are confident that UN inspectors can still detect Iran’s past nuclear work.

IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano will meet Wednesday with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where he will discuss “the IAEA’s role in verifying and monitoring nuclear-related measures” laid out in the nuclear deal, according to a statement from the agency. They’ve signed on to an agreement where they say they’ll never try and make one and we have a mechanism in place where we can prove that.

David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and worldwide Security, obtained a commercially available image of the Parchin site taken by satellites on July 26 that shows renewed activity at the Parchin site.

“You have to worry that this could be an attempt by Iran to defeat the sampling, that it’s Iran’s last-ditch effort to eradicate evidence there”, he said. “The day is coming when they are going to have to let the IAEA into Parchin, so they may be desperate to finish sanitizing the site”, Albright said.

A 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Assessment concluded that Iran halted this kind of work in 2003.

“Iran is going to know that we know”, added Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Royce added, “For a long time, they have been altering sites”.

The commercial imagery shows that Iran has moved heavy construction equipment to the area.

Committee members contacted Amano after being rebuffed on the issue by the Obama administration, which argues that the documents must remain confidential to preserve the global Atomic Energy Agency’s integrity and independence and to avoid setting a precedent for another country to demand copies of similar arrangements with the United States. Iran would seem to have its doubts as well, since it’s still trying to cover its tracks.