A lot of discussion is circulating about just how cooperative the Iranians are when it gets down to coming clean on their nuclear program. Earlier this week, it is significant to note that Iran decided to hand over a set of blueprints to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that details how to shape weapons-grade uranium into a form usable in a nuclear warhead. After all, there has been a lot of talk about the Americans and the Iranians getting together for another round of negotiations over Iraq. And these Iraq negotiations are intrinsically linked to the Iranian nuclear program. If Tehran expects to negotiate effectively over Iraq, it makes sense to throw out such confidence-building measures in order to set the mood.

But this is still not enough for the IAEA, much less the European Union and United States. In fact, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei — under heavy pressure from the Europeans and Americans — admitted on Thursday that Iran has only offered selective cooperation in providing access to its program. He said the agency’s knowledge about Iran’s current nuclear program is diminishing since it has not received the type of information that Iran had been providing since early 2006. Not coincidentally, the first part of 2006 was an extremely heated period of assassinations, defections and abductions in the ongoing covert intelligence war involving the United States, Israel and Iran.

So, was this latest concession from Iran to the IAEA simply a failed attempt to sweeten ElBaradei into putting out a report lauding Tehran for its cooperation (and thereby give Iran more bandwidth to skirt sanctions)? Or is Iran seriously trying to pursue talks with the United States over Iraq by putting the nuclear issue on the negotiating table? The two possibilities are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but it is important to see through the blustery rhetoric on all sides to make sense of what these nuclear negotiations are all about.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, according to a Reuter’s source close to him, has instructed his Cabinet to draft proposals on how Israel will cope with a nuclear Iran. The prime minister’s office denies the report. But it makes perfect sense for Israel to be drafting such contingency plans. Nonetheless, Israel does not want to give the impression that it sees a nuclear Iran as inevitable.

Quite to the contrary, the United States and Israel could even be ramping up efforts to sabotage the Iranian nuclear experiment. A report cropped up earlier this week on a “series of explosions” that took place in southern Iran at the Parchin military complex, about 19 miles southeast of Tehran, where Iran is suspected of housing a nuclear weapons research and development facility. Though Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency is reporting in an almost defensive tone that the site where the explosion took place is a “nonmilitary area at a tire and wastes storage place,” Iran’s principal exiled opposition organization, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, is going to great lengths to suggest the incident was a covert attack that the Iranian regime and its media outlets are covering up. Though allegations from this organization can often be dubious, it would not be beyond the pale of certain intelligence organizations to shake up the Iranians in this fashion. The Israeli Mossad has been conducting a covert campaign to take out key Iranian nuclear scientists for some time, and these operations, according to our sources, are continuing.

That said, we do not yet have any evidence to back up this claim. And if the Iranians were actually being sincere about their cooperation on the nuclear issue, the United States and its allies would likely be taking some care to not rock the boat too much. In any case, the Fars report should not be taken for granted; this is one “accident” worth investigating.

When from what I have read, the report at one point specifically says that they cannot say that they are not because of Iran not cooperating completely.