International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general ElBaradei told reporters after a 45-minute meeting with US President George W. Bush that Iran was cooperating fully since it agreed to let inspectors back into the country later this month.

"I think today Iran is cooperating fully. Now they are back on track," ElBaradei told reporters as he left the White House.

"It was regrettable that they suspended their inspections for a couple of weeks," he said.

"We expect them to be fully transparent, to provide all information in the most detailed manner, because we started from a deficit in confidence and we need to build confidence...we need one hundred percent cooperation."

The IAEA has since February 2003 been verifying whether Iran's nuclear program is peaceful, or devoted to secretly developing atomic weapons, as the United States claims.

ElBaradei said he had won assurances from CIA director George Tenet on Tuesday that his agency would get as much US intelligence information as possible.

Tenet had assured him, he said, that the IAEA "will get as much intelligence as we can get from the CIA and other intelligence agencies" in Washington.

"I think we all understand we need intelligence. We need resources. We need technology to do a good job," in verifying Iran's nuclear program, ElBaradei said.

"This is a different ballgame and we need to think outside the box."

Before meeting with Bush on Wednesday, ElBaradei told a US congressional subcommittee that Iran was developing a nuclear fuel cycle as it has been under international sanctions against its nuclear program.

"Have they taken the step from that into weaponisation? We have not seen that but I am not yet excluding that possibility," ElBaradei told the subcommittee on Middle East and Central Asian affairs.

"The jury is still out," on whether Iran possesses such a program, he said.

"Our statements can make the difference between war and peace. That's why we have to be careful what we say."

In a November report to the Vienna-based IAEA, ElBaradei said there was no evidence that Iran had a nuclear weapons program.

But he said last Sunday that the IAEA's discovery in January of designs for sophisticated P2 centrifuges in Iran for making highly enriched uraniumthat could be used to make the bomb was "a setback, a great setback" since Iran claimed in October it had fully disclosed its nuclear activities.

This led to a tough resolution against Iran at an IAEA board of governors meeting in Vienna last week for hiding sensitive nuclear activities.

In his remarks to the congressional subcommittee, ElBaradei said he favored direct talks between Iran and the United States, although the White House was noncommittal, saying its policy on Iran, with which the United States does not have diplomatic relations, remained unchanged.

ElBaradei said he did not think Bush had rejected the idea of direct talks. "I think it's a matter that they will mull over and see if it's something useful.

"I think it would be good to have a dialogue," ElBaradei said.

ElBaradei also said he and Bush had agreed the time had come to "change many of the rules" in order to strengthen the fight against nuclear proliferation.

He said they had "agreed on the need to revisit the whole export control regime."

"We focused particularly on nuclear material, highly enriched uranium and plutonium...to develop a good program to control these materials and hopefully enliminate it and replace it by low level enrichment that does not pose a serious threat," he said.

The IAEA is now overseeing a reactor in Libya from which highly enriched uranium is taken to Russia, which is to return it as low enriched uranium, which can not be used in a bomb.

"My suggestion to the president is that we need a good plan to clean up all this nuclear weapons useable material that is all over the place," ElBaradei said.

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