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By Richard Valdmanis
BAKU (Reuters) - U.N. atomic watchdog chief Rafael Grossi appealed to Iran's leadership on Tuesday to take steps to resolve longstanding issues with his agency a day before he arrives in the Iranian capital for crunch talks over its nuclear programme.
The International Atomic Energy Agency head has for months sought progress with Iran on issues including a push for more monitoring cooperation at nuclear sites and an explanation of uranium traces found at undeclared sites.
But little has come from Grossi's efforts and with the return of President-elect Donald Trump, who is widely expected to restore a maximum-pressure policy on Iran, Grossi's trip on Wednesday should provide indications of how Iran wants to proceed in the coming months.
"I am far from being able to tell the international community ... what is happening. I would be in a very difficult position. So it's like they (Iran) have to help us, to help them to a certain extent," Grossi told Reuters on the sidelines of the COP29 climate summit in Baku.
Iran has stepped up nuclear activity since 2019, after Trump during his first term abandoned a 2015 deal Iran had reached with world powers under which it curbed enrichment and restored tough U.S. sanctions on the Islamic Republic. Iran's work on enrichment has been seen by the West as a disguised effort to develop nuclear weapons capability.
Tehran is now enriching uranium to up to 60% fissile purity, close to the roughly 90% required for a nuclear bomb. It has enough higher-enriched uranium to produce about four nuclear bombs, if refined further, according to an IAEA yardstick.
Iran has long denied any nuclear-bomb ambitions, saying it is enriching uranium for civilian energy uses only.
Grossi's trip comes a week before the IAEA's 35-nation board of governors meet in Vienna with the European parties to the 2015 accord - Britain, Germany and France - considering whether to raise pressure on Iran given its lack of cooperation.
The agency's last report in June said it had lost continuity of knowledge to key parts of the programme due to being unable to perform verification and monitoring activities for more than three and a half years.
"I think the situation continues to degrade itself. Their nuclear program grows, and we are not having the degree of visibility that we need in areas that are sensitive, like centrifuge production and others," Grossi said.
It was "indispensable" to get results on monitoring and the unexplained activities, he said.
Grossi said he had been disappointed that Tehran had not re-engaged more quickly despite receiving positive overtures on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in September, but that the worsening geopolitical situation in the Middle East and tit-for-tat strikes between Israel and Iran may have been behind that.
"To a certain degree, Iran must make an investment at this point in the agency by entrusting us with and allowing us to see more than they would strictly legally have to, because the deficit is huge," he said.
(Additional reporting by Francois Murphy; writing by John Irish; Editing by Rod Nickel)
