Be transparent, proactive, Iran told

The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog said in comments aired yesterday that Iran had shopped for nuclear components on the international black market and called on Tehran to be more "proactive" and "transparent".

In an interview on the BBC television programme Hardtalk, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohammed El Baradei also said that Iran's nuclear programme had been going on far longer than the agency had realised.

Although he was not certain of the countries that made the equipment Iran had acquired on the black market, El Baradei said he had a "pretty good idea" which ones they were.

"It could be one country, it could be more than one country," El Baradei said. "They (Iran) told us they have got a lot of that stuff from the black market. It is through intermediaries. It is not directly from the country."

Media reports have named Pakistan, a nuclear weapons state that has refused to sign the nuclear 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), as one of countries whose nuclear technology Iran is believed to be using.

Although he stopped short of accusing Tehran of lying to the UN agency, El Baradei said Iran had failed to give the IAEA a complete picture of its nuclear programme, which Washington says is merely a front for a secret atomic weapons programme.

"They have not really been fully transparent in telling us in advance what was going on," El Baradei said in the interview, recorded on Thursday and aired on Friday.

Asked if he believed Iran was running a secret weapons programme, El Baradei said: "It might be, it might not be."

"I need to really get the Iranians to tell me the full, complete story," he said. "And I would like Iran to be more proactive, more transparent."

He said that it would have been much easier to verify Iran's insistence its nuclear programme is peaceful if it had given the IAEA a complete picture of its atomic plans from the beginning.

"It would have been easier for us to complete our job if we knew what was going on as early as the mid 1980s," El Baradei said. "Now we have to go... 20 years back."

He repeated his call for Iran to quickly sign a protocol giving the IAEA the right to carry out intrusive, short notice inspections across the country. "The international community's getting very concerned, very impatient," El Baradei said about the situation in Iran.

He also agreed that countries such as Iran, pre-war Iraq and North Korea - what U.S. President George W. Bush has branded the "axis of evil" - have had a history of misleading the world about their nuclear programmes.

"They have been giving the international community the runaround," he said.

The IAEA Board of Governors meets next month to discuss the agency's recent inspections in Iran. The United States is pushing the board to declare Tehran in violation of its NPT nuclear safeguards obligations and report it to the UN Security Council, which can impose economic sanctions.

Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said on Thursday the Islamic Republic was ready to start talks on allowing snap UN inspections of its nuclear sites.

"We have written to the director-general (of the International Atomic Energy Agency) saying we are ready to start negotiations on the Additional Protocol," Kharrazi told CNN.