Iran gained access to confidential International Atomic Energy Agency reports and for two decades used them to mislead the organization and conceal suspected work on nuclear weapons, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
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According to Middle East intelligence officials and documents reviewed by the paper, Iran circulated the reports among senior officials involved in its nuclear program between 2004 and 2006, which they used to prepare cover stories and falsify records.
"Iran could design answers that admit to what the IAEA already knows, give away information that it will likely discover on its own, and at the same time better hide what the IAEA does not yet know that Iran wants to keep that way," David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security and a former weapons inspector told the Wall Street Journal.
The matter "represents a serious breach of IAEA internal security," he said.
The documents, which featured handwritten notes in Persian, were among the files seized by Israeli intelligence in January 2018 from a Tehran archive, the paper said.
Meanwhile, talks between the IAEA and Iran aimed at ending a long standoff on explaining the origin of uranium particles found at apparently old but undeclared sites are at "a very difficult juncture," the chief of the nuclear watchdog, Rafael Grossi, said on Wednesday.
Grossi and Iranian officials agreed in March on a three-month plan to get to the bottom of the issue, which has been a source of tension between the Islamist republic and Western powers even in broader negotiations aimed at bringing Tehran and Washington back into full compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal.
Those talks are now stalled but Grossi has said it is hard to imagine any deal put into action while the IAEA still had not received satisfactory answers on this issue.
"I suppose I should abstain from having a final conclusion at this point since we haven't finished the process yet but let me say that we are at a very difficult juncture at the moment," Grossi told a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
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Grossi is due to report to the IAEA's 35-nation Board of Governors on how talks on the open issues have progressed by the time the Board starts a quarterly meeting on June 6.
"I hope that the time ... between now and the issuance of my report will [be] put to good use to come [up] at least with a start of a credible answer to these things."
While Grossi's effort to obtain answers from Iran is not part of the wider talks to revive the 2015 deal, a lack of progress could lead to fresh confrontation between Iran and the West at the Board that would only complicate the indirect talks between Iran and the United States that have stalled since March.
