What Will Make Them Stop?

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The evidence seemed sufficient to the Administration. Washington charged Iran with violating its NPT commitments and insisted that the agency take Iran's noncompliance to the U.N. Security Council, which could impose punitive sanctions. To Tehran's dismay, the international community sided with the U.S. "The Iranians are behaving in a way that leads people to think they have something to hide," said a British official. The IAEA agreed unanimously in September to give Iran until Oct. 31 to explain itself or face possible U.N. sanctions.

The approaching deadline has added fuel to Iran's internal political struggle. President Khatami's reformers, according to an adviser, feared that defiance would cost the country its hard-won trade with Europe and Japan and any hope of emerging from U.S.-imposed isolation. Iran's hard-liners wanted to keep the centrifuges spinning, quit the NPT and let Iran bully its way to regional supremacy as an A-bomb owner, according to diplomats and Iranian analysts. Both sides suspected that the U.S. was using the nuclear agency to force a showdown. "Americans have been looking for pretexts for 25 years now," Abdullah Ramezanzadeh, Khatami's official spokesman, told TIME. "The neocons in the U.S. don't believe in the needs and demands of other nations, and they don't believe in dialogue. They want to use force."

Iran's embattled President spent three months maneuvering against the hard-liners. According to close associates, he built a broad coalition for a moderate response to IAEA demands among pragmatists in the military and clergy, reformers in parliament and Iranian public opinion. Because the conservatives never publicly claimed that Iran wanted a nuclear bomb and Iran's top cleric once called such weapons un-Islamic, it was not humiliating to climb down. "In the end," Khatami's adviser says, the President convinced the country's real boss, Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, that defying the IAEA would entail formidable risks to Iran's national interests.

What made it all work was the intervention of Britain, France and Germany, which devised a face-saving deal. The three countries wrote to Khatami in late August, offering to recognize Iran's right to peaceful nuclear development and to provide technological "cooperation," meaning trade, if Iran would meet the IAEA demands. That let Khatami show hard-liners that Iran would profit by giving in and prove the country is prepared to play by the world's rules. By the time the three European nations' Foreign Ministers arrived in Tehran at Khatami's invitation last week, Iran was ready to make the announcement. The country would sign the Additional Protocol, which calls for unfettered inspections and a suspension of uranium-enrichment and -reprocessing activities and requires Iran to answer all questions about the "possible failures and deficiencies" of its nuclear program.

While Iran hailed the agreement as a major breakthrough and Europe basked in the success of its politics of engagement, the U.S. reserved judgment. U.S. officials say they knew and approved of the initiative, and Bush grudgingly described the deal as "an effective approach." But privately, U.S. officials, especially the neocons, are charging that the deal was a ploy designed to buy Iran time to procure the Bomb. Washington is skeptical that Iran will follow through on its paper promises and fears that the Europeans may grow soft on Iran and prove more eager to accommodate a dangerous miscreant than to hold it to its word. But without the European intervention, there probably wouldn't have been a deal. Iranians, says Tehran University political-science professor Hadi Semati, would never have given in to American bullying. "If it had been the stick alone," he says, "there would have been no choice but to go the North Korean route."

Many analysts say any agreement to curb Iran's nukes deserves a cheer. But will Tehran live up to its promises? Administration skeptics are worried that the deal merely delays, not derails, an eventual confrontation. At the end of last week, Tehran delivered to the IAEA in Vienna a thick, indexed binder containing its "full" declaration detailing the hows and whys of its suspect behavior. The Iranian ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Akbar Salehi, told TIME the report admitted "mistakes" that resulted not from attempts to build weapons but from ignorance of IAEA requirements and a desire to be "discreet" because of the threat of U.S. sanctions. More troubling, he said, the document does not resolve a key issue: how the centrifuges were contaminated. The ambassador insisted, as Iran has done for weeks, that the parts came from middlemen who got them in several countries, "but we do not know where." The IAEA must now attempt to determine whether this is a dodge.