US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates said yesterday he doubted a deal to send some of Iran's uranium abroad for enrichment was close, even as Iran's top diplomat claimed progress could be made.
The conflicting comments come against a backdrop of Western powers' growing impatience with Iran over a failure to respond clearly to the proposal, amid suspicions the Islamic republic is trying to build a nuclear bomb.
"I don't have the sense we are close to an agreement," Gates said in Ankara, a day after Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Tehran was "serious" about sending uranium abroad for enrichment and that a deal was near.
"If Iran has decided to accept the proposal of the P5-plus-one, they should do that to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)," he told reporters, referring to the five permanent UN Security Council members and Germany.
But Mottaki, speaking from the Munich Security Conference in Germany, sent out a fresh positive signal yesterday following talks with the head of the UN's nuclear watchdog.
"Today I had a very good meeting with the head of the IAEA, Yukiya Amano," Mottaki said.
"We discussed and exchanged views about a wide range of issues... We also exchanged views about the proposal that is on the table. I tried to explain the views of the Islamic republic of Iran for the director general," he said.
For his part, Amano said after the talks Iran had offered no new proposal, but that "dialogue is continuing and should be accelerated, that is the point".
Iran appeared to reject in October a deal proposed by the IAEA for Iran to export low-enriched uranium (LEU) to France and Russia to be further purified into fuel for a research reactor in Tehran.
Enrichment outside of Iran is a central plank of a UN-brokered deal Western powers are pushing for out of fears that unsupervised enrichment could feed a covert nuclear weapons programme. Enriched uranium produces fuel for a nuclear reactor but the process can also be used to make the fissile core of an atomic bomb.
Tehran insists its nuclear programme is strictly for civilian purposes.
Mottaki earlier told the conference that "with regard to discussions with the different parties, I personally believe that we have created conducive ground for such an exchange in the not very distant future".
"Under the present conditions that we have reached, I think we are approaching a final agreement that can be accepted by all parties."
He added that Iran "has shown it is serious about doing this, and we have shown it at the highest level," referring to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's assertion last week that Tehran would have "no problem" with the proposal.
However, US and EU officials suspect the Iranian overture could be a delaying tactic to avert a fourth round of UN Security Council sanctions against the regime.
Before Mottaki's meeting, EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton, also at the Munich conference, said Iran needed to respond directly to the UN atomic agency to "build badly needed confidence".