To the most strident opponents of President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, the suspicious behaviour at a military base about 12 miles southeast of Tehran has become a rallying call to defeat the accord, especially as it now appears that Iranian officials may be allowed to take their own environmental samples at the site and turn them over to inspectors.
It did not take long for the speaker of the House, John A Boehner, to question whether "anyone at the White House has seen the final documents" establishing rules for inspections.
Though the International Atomic Energy Agency says it will monitor the collection, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ed Royce, declared that, "International inspections should be done by international inspectors. Period."
But as in most debates about the Iran deal, the sound bites - on both sides - do not entirely align with reality, or the complexity of the agreement. And the reality about the Parchin military site is that for all its potency as a political issue as Congress prepares to vote on the accord, it is probably not a place where anyone can learn very much about what progress Iran made toward building an atomic weapon.
From all the evidence that has been made public - and much about the inspection architecture remains classified - Parchin likely was a significant site for nuclear weapons research and experimentation a decade ago. It is suspected of carrying out experiments on high explosives - the kind required to detonate a nuclear weapon.
The suspicions about what once happened at Parchin are so old that International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors asked to enter the base in 2004 and actually got inside - once - in November 2005.
They found nothing. But soon after, they concluded they were probably in the wrong buildings, and the Iranians turned down subsequent requests for access.
In the years since, the Parchin site has been bulldozed and rebuilt to the point that evidence of past work likely has vanished.
But it has taken on a new, political importance in recent weeks, as a symbol of whether the IAEA, a United Nations institution, is interested in conducting a real inspection or just checking the box to show that it asked questions, took samples and has taken the issue off the books.
The administration's inability to describe what it knows about the inspection regime planned for Parchin - which is detailed in a confidential agreement between the agency and Tehran - has created the impression, at least among opponents of the deal, that the White House is hiding exactly how the agreement would be monitored.
That led to a sharp exchange last month between Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator Jim Risch, Republican of Idaho, over Kerry's refusal to describe the inspection methodology in public. Kerry said the administration does not have a copy of the agreement, but was aware of its details.
"Even the NFL wouldn't go along with this," Risch said, his voice dripping with sarcasm - perhaps an allusion to letting professional athletes prepare their own samples to prove they are not taking performance-enhancing drugs. After that, the administration provided more classified briefings and even had the director general of the IAEA, Yukiya Amano, visit Capitol Hill to answer questions.
According to people familiar with that briefing, Amano, a former Japanese diplomat, suggested his agency would be monitoring the Iranians as they collected samples. It was not clear what form international oversight would take, but administration officials, including Mr. Kerry, insist that American technical experts are satisfied.
The issue flared anew when The Associated Press reported it had seen a document that described how Iran would collect the samples at Parchin. It published the text of that document, which was described as an early draft of the agreement, although a former IAEA official, Tariq Rauf, published an annotated version of the document that called into question the authenticity of the AP text.
©2015 The New York Times News Service
