A senior U.S. official met Iran's top atomic negotiator for face-to-face talks on Thursday _ the first such encounter in years of big-power attempts to persuade Tehran to freeze a program that could create nuclear weapons.
While diplomats and officials disclosed no details of the meeting, they appeared to be concrete proof of President Barack Obama's commitment to engage Iran directly on nuclear and other issues _ a sharp break from previous policy under the Bush administration.
More broadly, the meeting suggested that Obama was putting his concept of U.S. foreign policy into action, with its emphasis on negotiating even with nations that are the most hostile to the United States.
The change in approach may go down well with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who on Wednesday made pointed comments about other nations needing to respect Iran's rights.
Iran-U.S. bilateral talks have been extremely rare since the two nations broke diplomatic relations nearly 30 years ago, following the Iran's Islamic revolution and the ensuing U.S. Embassy hostage crisis. U.S. and Iranian negotiators met in Baghdad two years ago to discuss Iraq. But those were three-way talks, hosted by Iraq.
"On the margins of the meeting, Undersecretary (William) Burns, who is heading our delegation, met with his Iranian counterpart," U.S. State Department deputy spokesman Robert Wood told reporters Thursday. He did not elaborate.
Two Western diplomats separately told The Associated Press that Burns and top Iranian negotiator Saeed Jalili discussed issues during a lunch break at Thursday's seven-nation talks in Geneva. The diplomats demanded anonymity for discussing the confidential information.
Though held at the same venue, the bilateral talks were formally outside of the main meeting in Geneva _ talks where the U.S. and five other world powers hope to persuade Iran to at least consider discussing its nuclear program, and in particular its refusal to freeze its uranium enrichment efforts.
The fact that the Geneva meeting is taking place at all offers some hope, reflecting both sides' desire to talk, despite a spike in tensions over last week's revelations by Iran that it had been secretly building a new uranium enrichment plant and recent tests of its long-range missiles.
While the West fears that Iran's nuclear program aims to make a bomb _ and that the country is developing missiles to carry nuclear warheads _ Iran insists the program is strictly for peaceful use and has refused to negotiate any limits on it.
Iran is bringing a broad range of geopolitical issues to the table, while the six powers _ the permanent U.N. Security Council members plus Germany _ are seeking to soften Iran's resistance to freezing its uranium enrichment program. The process can make both nuclear fuel and fissile warhead material.
Wood said the six would also raise concerns about Iran's recent revelation it is building a second enrichment plant, alongside one that is under supervision by the International Atomic Energy Agency to make sure it makes only fuel and not weapons-grade uranium.
Iran says it has done nothing wrong, saying it reported the facility, near the Shiite holy city of Qom, voluntarily. But the West says Tehran came clean only because it feared that others would reveal the existence of the plant before it did.
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has publicly said Tehran was "on the wrong side of the law" because it should have revealed its plans as soon as the decision was made to build the plant.
"We would like Iran to basically tell us what it knows about previous nuclear activities and current ones, including information it has about the Qom facility, which we're very concerned about," Wood said.
Iran is under three sets of Security Council sanctions for refusing to freeze enrichment. Diplomats at U.N. headquarters in New York said there has been no discussion of a new sanctions resolution _ comments echoed Thursday in Moscow by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner.
"I'm no fanatic about sanctions," Kouchner told Ekho Moskvy radio. He said sanctions can sometimes be useful and suggested they cannot be ruled out but added "in Geneva, we are not talking about sanctions."
Still, U.S. and other Western officials said the Americans, British and French are already exploring how to tighten existing sanctions against Iran and propose new ones, should the talks fail. Those deliberations, they say, include joint new U.S.-European sanctions in case Russia and China _ the other two permanent Security Council members _ again block U.N. sanctions.
Moscow and Beijing, which have economic and strategic ties with Iran, are skeptical of U.N. sanctions and agreed to the sanctions in place only after the West accepted milder penalties than it had originally sought.
While Russia has adopted tougher language since the U.S. administration canceled its missile shield plan for Eastern Europe earlier this month, Beijing continues to insist that persuasion _ not sanctions _ is the way to deal with Tehran.
Wood suggested that _ while Washington was focused on diplomacy for now _ "we're not going to do it forever," noting that the Americans continued to be engaged in a "two-track process" _ talks first and sanctions if negotiations failed.
American officials have held out the hope that Thursday's talks could result in a second meeting.
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Associated Press writers Bradley S. Klapper, Scheherezade Faramarzi and Alexander G. Higgins in Geneva and Pam Hess in Washington contributed to this report.
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