The Obama administration spent the last two years telling lawmakers and reporters that any deal with Iran would require the Iranians to provide International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors robust access to the Parchin military base, where the Iranians conducted hydrodynamic experiments relevant to the detonation of nuclear warheads. The IAEA needs the access to determine how far the Iranians got as a prerequisite to establishing a verification regime. Here’s Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman in 2013: the Joint Plan of Action requires Iran to “address past and present practices… including Parchin”; Sherman in 2014: “as part of any comprehensive agreement… we expect, indeed, Parchin to be resolved”; State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf in 2015: “we would find it… very difficult to imagine a JCPA that did not require such [inspector] access at Parchin”; etc.

Last month Republican senator Jim Risch suggested in an open Senate Foreign Relations committee hearing that the West had collapsed on the requirement and that instead the Iranians had worked out a secret side deal with Iran under which the Iranians would be trusted to collect their own samples for the IAEA. Kerry refused to confirm the arrangement citing classification issues, but the Associated Press’s Vienna reporter locked it down anyway.