U.S. Spurns New Indirect Offers for Talks With Iran

Iranian intermediaries have approached the Reagan Administration in recent weeks offering to arrange direct talks between the United States and Iran, but the State Department is still waiting for an official message from Tehran, U.S. and Iranian sources said Wednesday.

The most recent approach came two weeks ago, the sources said, when an unofficial envoy provided the name of an Iranian official he said is ready to enter into talks with the United States.

The sabotage of Pan Am Flight 103 appears to have heightened concern among moderates in Tehran that Iran’s gradual movement toward better relations with the West should continue, U.S. officials said. They noted that the Iranian government immediately disavowed responsibility for the disaster.

State Department officials said they are ready to open talks with Iran but only on the basis of an official approach from the Tehran government.

“We’re certainly willing to have an official meeting and, if the government of Iran is ready, they know how to contact us,” a senior official said. “We’d be happy to receive such a message directly from the government of Iran. . . . But we are hesitant to pursue the many approaches we get from intermediaries.

“We have the sense that the Iranians are not yet ready for direct talks,” he added.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz has said that the Administration is willing to talk with Iranian officials, but only if the meetings are publicly acknowledged by both sides. That condition is a result of the Iran-Contra scandal, which erupted in 1986 with the discovery that White House officials secretly had authorized the sale of weapons to Iran in the hope of winning the release of U.S. hostages in Beirut.

Iranians Fear Backlash

But Iranian officials are apparently unwilling to risk a political backlash in Tehran by opening talks with the United States. Some have said that they would welcome warmer relations with Washington, but Iran’s leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, has remained implacably anti-American.

In the latest unofficial approach to the Administration, an Iranian-American scholar living in the United States said that he gave State Department officials the name of a senior Iranian official who had been designated to meet with U.S. diplomats. An American source said the nominee was Mohammed Mir-Zamani, a senior Foreign Ministry official.

“The Administration has not said that he is acceptable, but they have not said he is unacceptable either,” the intermediary said.

He said the overture for talks came from officials close to Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Speaker of Iran’s Parliament. “The faction of Rafsanjani is waiting for the United States to say, ‘OK, we can hear this man out,’ ” he said.

A senior U.S. official said that the Administration does not intend to respond to the approach because it is not clear whether the intermediary spoke for the entire Iranian government, for a faction or only for some self-appointed negotiators.

The United States and Iran have had no diplomatic relations since 1979, when Iranian militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. However, the two governments have communicated officially with each other through the diplomats of other countries, including Japan and West Germany.