At the same time, the State Department said the draft, which was agreed to late Thursday after intense discussions with the so-called "EU Three" -- Britain, France and Germany -- as well as Canada and Australia, would keep pressure on Iran to come clean about its programs or face the potential of the agency referring the matter to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.

"We think that the text that we've worked at very diligently with our partners is a good text," deputy spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters. "It shows the spirit of compromise and it keeps the pressure on Iran and sets up the November board meeting for important decisions."

The draft, to be debated by the IAEA's governing board at a special session at its Vienna headquarters on Saturday, does not, as Washington initially wanted, set an October 31 deadline for Iran to fully suspend uranium enrichment and report on its other activities to the IAEA and for Iran to be automatically referred to the Security Council if it failed to do so.

However, it does set a November 25 deadline for a full review of Iran's nuclear program and calls on Tehran to "immediately" suspend all uranium enrichment activities, with this also being reviewed in November. It does not specify any IAEA action to be taken should Iran fail to comply.

Despite the compromise, diplomats in Vienna say some non-aligned IAEA members appear to think the resolution is still too strong and want to avoid making uranium enrichment, which is allowed under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) something for which Iran can be punished.

Enriched uranium can be used to make fuel for civilian reactors but also the explosive core for nuclear weapons.

Iran suspended uranium enrichment in October 2003 as a confidence-building measure but has continued to support activities such as building the centrifuges that refine the uranium despite pledges to the EU Three to halt that work.

Iran insists its program is for civilian energy purposes but the United States maintains that Tehran is using it to hide nuclear weapons development and Ereli said Washington had not yet seen anything to disprove its accusations.

"Frankly, we have not seen anything that would lead us to believe that Iran has met its commitments to the IAEA with respect to its centrifuge program or its enrichment process and that's the crux of the issue," he said.

"They say they were going to do something, they don't do it. They come up with temporary pledges to do it, and then they even break those," Ereli said.

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