The United States on Thursday announced a nuclear deal with Iran with a dozen "parameters" that will guide the next stage of talks, but the framework that Iran has released has significant discrepancies from the American version.
According to
The New York Times, there are also some key areas of the agreement that remain unclear, such as what type of research Iran is allowed to undertake on advanced centrifuges during the first 10 years of the accord.
"This is just a work in progress, and those differences in fact sheets indicate the challenges ahead," Olli Heinonen, former deputy director general of the International Atomic Agency, told the Times.
The Obama administration insists there are not conflicting accounts of what was agreed at the negotiating table and that the two sides simply released their own summaries of the discussions in the interests of time, though officials acknowledged that they did not inform the Iranians in advance of the "parameters" they planned to announce.
"We talked to them and told them that we would have to say some things," a senior administration official told the Times. "We didn't show them the paper. We didn't show them the whole list."
The official acknowledged that it was "understood that we had different narratives, but we wouldn't contradict each other," the Times reported.
However, Javad Zarif, Iran's foreign minister, dismissed the five-page summary by America as "spin" and he also appeared on state television, saying the Iranians had complained to Secretary of State John Kerry that the American outline of the talks were "in contradiction" to what had been agreed.
But one expert said that the Iranians may be conducting their own spin to conceal the extent of the concessions that were made.
"Iran conceded a considerable amount in this deal, and Zarif and [President Hassan] Rouhani may want to break the news back home slowly," David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, told the Times.
"When negotiations resume, Iran may believe it created additional room to backtrack on its commitments, assuming the U.S. is right about what was agreed in the room."
A review of the statements indicates some key differences, the Times said. The American version says that Iran has agreed to shrink its stockpile of uranium to 300 kilograms, but the Iranian document does not mention it.
The Iranian statement says that nuclear cooperation between Iran and the world powers will grow, including the construction of nuclear power plants, research reactors, and the use of isotopes for medical research, but that possible cooperation is not mentioned in the American statement.
And the American statement says Iran will be prohibited from using its advanced centrifuges for uranium enrichment for at least 10 years after which it will be able to conduct some "limited" research on the centrifuges, but the Iranian statement makes no mentioned of the word "limited."
The largest area of difference revolves around the pace at which economic sanctions on Iran would be removed. The Iranian text says it will be immediate once the agreement is implemented but American officials have said it will be a step-by-step process dependent on how the Iranians comply with the accord, the Times said.
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