TEHRAN -- Iran said Monday it hoped a visit by the chief of the UN’s atomic agency would be “constructive”, just days ahead of the resumption of talks seeking to remove sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was to arrive in Tehran later Monday.
He was expected to meet Foreign Minister Hussein Amir-Abdollahian and Atomic Energy Organization chief Muhammad Eslami, who is also one of Iran’s vice presidents.
“We hope that Rafael Grossi’s visit will be as constructive as the previous ones,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh told reporters.
“We have always advised the IAEA to stay on the path of technical cooperation, and to not let certain countries pursue their political orientations on behalf of the IAEA.”
On Friday, the IAEA said Tehran had again increased its stockpile of enriched uranium.
Grossi’s visit comes as Iran readies for talks with world powers in Vienna on November 29 on saving Tehran’s 2015 deal with other countries by having the U.S. sanctions removed on the Islamic Republic.
“We will leave for Vienna with a full team and a serious will to lift the sanctions,” Khatibzadeh said. “The other parties should also try to come to Vienna to reach a practical and comprehensive agreement.”
The landmark deal was torpedoed in 2018 by then U.S. president Donald Trump’s unilateral decision to withdraw Washington from it and impose a draconian sanctions regime.
The remaining parties to the deal -- Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia -- will join the talks while the United States will watch the negotiations from the sidelines because it has no right to attend them.
Grossi was last in Tehran on September 12, where he clinched a deal on access to monitoring equipment at Iran’s nuclear facilities.
On Saturday, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin threatened that Washington was capable of deploying “overwhelming force”, and that all options would be open if diplomacy failed.
Asked whether Iran feared a U.S. military intervention if negotiations fail, Khatibzadeh pointed to the U.S. military pullout in Afghanistan in August.
“We have seen all their options in a country like Afghanistan and they have seen the outcome of those options; do not believe what they say,” he said.
Robert Malley, the U.S. envoy for Iran, also resorted to an alarmist policy, claiming on Friday that Tehran was approaching the point of no return and that “time is short” for reviving a nuclear deal.
But Khatibzadeh said the U.S. is trying to “sell a false narrative to the international community in order to create a psychological atmosphere in the run-up to the Vienna talks”, adding that it “will not help them at all”.
The spokesman urged the IAEA not to allow certain countries to abuse it for the sake of achieving their own political objectives.
“We have always advised the agency to remain on the path of technical cooperation, and not to allow some countries to advance their political agendas and political objectives using the name of the agency,” he said.
Khatibzadeh underlined that the aim of the talks is “the removal of unilateral extraterritorial and illegal sanctions against Iran”.
He said Iran is serious in this endeavor and urged the other parties to attend the negotiations with the same level of commitment.
For the negotiations to succeed, Washington needs to provide guarantees that it would not abandon the nuclear deal again, Khatibzadeh said.
“It is natural that both we and the G4+1 need genuine guarantees, and it is better for the American officials who would come to Vienna to know that they need to give these guarantees,” he said.