Behind the Scenes: How the US and Iran Reached Their Landmark Deal | The Nation
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For months before the Lausanne framework was adopted, Western diplomats had been linking the lifting of sanctions with the resolution of the issue the United States and its negotiating partners had called “possible military dimensions,” or PMD—the demand that #Iran account for two sets of intelligence documents purporting to demonstrate Iranian nuclear-weapons-related research and development. But one set of documents had originated in #Israel, and the other had been submitted by the Mujahedin-e Khalq (#MEK), the cult-like Iranian terror group that had been known to act as a client for Israel. The authenticity of both sets of documents was extremely doubtful, as indicated by a number of anomalies in the papers, especially the fact that the most important documents purported to show Iranian efforts to integrate a nuclear weapon into a missile that Iran had already abandoned.
Iran had not only rejected the linkage between its response to those documents and the lifting of sanctions; it also refused to accept the phrase “possible military dimensions,” which the IAEA had coined in 2008. Instead, the final document refers to “clarification of past and present outstanding issues.”
The US and European negotiators had treated resolution of this issue as a potential bargaining chip that could be used on other issues, according to the Iranian official I met on June 29. “They would say if you reduce this, reduce that, we will get a resolution of the PMD,” the official told me. But he said Iran had never agreed to any linkage requiring that it must wait for an official IAEA assessment on PMD before getting sanctions lifted. The Lausanne framework included language that Iran would carry out “an agreed set of measures” on the PMD issue, but those measures remained to be negotiated.