The United Nations nuclear agency, the IAEA, issued a letter to the US Congress, in which it protested against a report it had released on August 23rd, stating that it displayed a series of "erroneous" pieces of information regarding the research the agency had performed on Iran's nuclear activities, the BBC reports.

Signed by a senior director at the International Atomic Energy Agency, Vilmos Cserveny, the leaked letter, which also accused the report of being "misleading", highlighted a series of objections and expressed resentment, taking "strong exception to the incorrect and misleading assertion" towards claims made for the replacement of a senior IAEA safeguards inspector, Chris Charlier for "allegedly raising concerns about Iranian deception" over its nuclear schedule.

The letter, sent to Peter Hoekstra, the president of the House of Representatives' select Committee on Intelligence, labels as "outrageous and dishonest" a suggestion in the report, according to which Charlier had actually been removed from his position because he did not join "an unstated IAEA policy barring IAEA officials from telling the whole truth" about Iran and its nuclear ambitions.

In addition to this, Cserveny labeled the report as faulty in stating that Iran had actually enriched uranium to such a level as to build nuclear weapons, when the IAEA had only discovered that the Islamic republic encircled small quantities to lower levels than it was specified in the document.

The entire purpose of the letter, as Cserveny highlighted, was to set "the record straight on the facts" connected to the IAEA's research activities and findings about Iran. As a spokeswoman for the agency, Melissa Fleming, stated: "This is a matter of the integrity of the IAEA and its inspectors".

However, there has been no reply yet from the Washington administration over the accusations this letter brings. The only matter that has been commented upon was the letter's classified status: according to Rush Holt, a member of the House intelligence committee, the letter was not supposed to be released to the press. In an interview with the BBC, Holt underlined that: "This report was not ready for prime time and it was not prepared in a way that we can rely on. It relied heavily on unclassified testimony".