I have just run across a front page item in the "Japan Times" (Thursday, 2/23/06) headlined "US may have squandered opportunity to negotiate with Iran."
The piece is bylined "Gregory Beals, Newsday." It begins "In May 2003, shortly after the US military destroyed the army of Saddam Hussein, a fax arrived at the State Department with an Iranian offer to open talks to include a discussion of weapons of mass destruction." The fax is reported to have come from Sadegh Kharazi, Iranian ambassador to France, nephew of Kamal Kharazi and been forwaded to the US State Department by the Swiss ambassador to Tehran. The source is Flynt Leverett, "former senior director for Middle East affairs at the NSC," who says that he read the fax and that it offered to negotiate on "sanctions, security guarantees, normalization of relations," possible Iranian membership in the WTO. Leverett says that the Iranians "acknowledged that WMD and support for terrorism were serious causes of concern for us, and they were willing to negotiate." Apparently the Bush administration did not reply to the probe, but did complain to the Swiss ambassador Tim Guldimann that he had "overstepped his role as an intermediary by passing it (the fax) on in the first place." The piece also reports on other back channel Iranian offers of negotiations.
I haven't seen this in major US media or on Kos, so I thought it would be worth diarying.
Unfortunately, it is not in the Japan Times online edition, only print.