About a week after its latest report on Iran's nuclear program, the International Atomic Energy Agency issued a series of satellite images suggesting that Iran has been covering up nuclear activity at its facility in Parchin. According to the U.N. nuclear watchdog and to Western spy agencies, the Iranians had conducted tests having to do with nuclear weapons development at the site. Tehran dismissed the allegations. The satellite images, presented at a closed-door briefing of International Atomic Energy Agency member states, indicated determined efforts in recent months to remove any incriminating evidence at the Parchin site, Western diplomats said. In the most recent image, dating from mid-August, a building where the IAEA believes Iran carried out explosives tests possibly a decade ago had been shrouded in what appeared to be pink tarpaulin, they said. "It was pretty compelling," a senior Western diplomat said about the briefing by IAEA Deputy Director-General Herman Nackaerts and Assistant Director-General Rafael Grossi. "The last image was very clear. You could see the pink." The purpose of covering the building could be to conceal further clean-up work from overhead satellites, according to a U.S. think-tank, the Institute for Science and International Security. The IAEA said in a confidential report last week that "extensive activities" undertaken at Parchin since February including the demolition of some buildings and removal of earth would significantly hamper its investigation there, if and when it was allowed access to the facility southeast of Tehran. Iran, which denies Western accusations that it is seeking to develop the capability to make nuclear bombs, says Parchin is a conventional military site. Iran's envoy to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, suggested the activities "claimed to be made in the vicinity of these so-called locations which are identified" by the IAEA had nothing to do with the U.N. agency's investigation. "Merely having a photo from up there, a satellite imagery ... this is not the way the agency should do its professional job," he told reporters after the IAEA's briefing. "Everybody should be careful not to damage [the] credibility of the agency," Soltanieh added. Iran says it must first reach a broader agreement with the IAEA on how the Vienna-based U.N. agency should conduct its investigation into alleged nuclear bomb research in the Islamic state before it can possibly be allowed access to Parchin. Last week's IAEA report said that a series of high-level meetings with Iran over the past eight months on such a framework accord had yielded "no concrete results." The IAEA report also said Iran had doubled the number of centrifuges at an underground uranium enrichment facility in the last few months, in defiance of international demands that it suspend the work. Refined uranium can be used to fuel nuclear power plants, which is Iran's stated aim, or provide the explosive core for a nuclear warhead if processed further, which the West and Israel suspect is Tehran's ultimate aim. An Iranian military commander said Wednesday that Iran makes no distinction between U.S. and Israeli interests and will retaliate against both countries if attacked. The comments came days after the White House denied an Israeli news report that suggesting that the U.S. was secretly negotiating with Tehran to keep out of a future Israel-Iran war. The report emerged just as U.S. President Barack Obama was fending off accusations from his presidential election rival that he was too soft on Tehran. "The Zionist regime separated from America has no meaning, and we must not recognize Israel as separate from America," Ali Fadavi, naval commander in Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was quoted as saying by the Fars news agency. "On this basis, today only the Americans have taken a threatening stance toward the Islamic republic," Fadavi said. "If the Americans commit the smallest folly they will not leave the region safely." In response to continued Iranian threats against Israel, President Shimon Peres said on Wednesday that "not since Hitler has there been a leader such as [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad who calls for genocide and the destruction of the State of Israel. These statements go strongly against the U.N. charter." Peres made the remarks during a working meeting with visiting Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Terzi at the President's Residence in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, U.S. officials say Iran has resumed delivering military equipment to Syria via Iraq's airspace in an attempt to save Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime, The New York Times reported on Tuesday. Washington pressured Iraq to shut down the air corridor through which Iran had delivered equipment to Syria earlier this year, and the flights were suspended in March. But Iran reinstated the deliveries after a bombing attack in Damascus killed several high-ranking Syrian officials in July, and have continued ever since, The New York Times reported.
