U.N. agency finds Iran has not complied

? A U.N. watchdog agency’s report to be issued today will declare that, despite a formal request from the Security Council, Iran has not provided international inspectors with any new information about the country’s nuclear program and has accelerated, rather than curbed, uranium-enrichment activities, sources said.

Iran announced two weeks ago that it had used a “cascade” – or array – of 164 centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency are expected to confirm in the report that Iran ran the cascade successfully, but several officials with knowledge of the nuclear program said Thursday that the cascade was no longer operating and that a number of the networked centrifuges had crashed.

It remains unclear whether Iran managed to enrich a small quantity of uranium to a level of 3.5 percent, as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced April 11. That level would suffice for nuclear energy but is far too low for a weapons program, which the Bush administration contends Iran is developing.

The IAEA will include these findings, sources said, in what they characterized as a brief and highly negative report to be delivered today, the end of a 30-day deadline the Security Council set for Iran to stop enriching uranium until inspectors are confident the program is exclusively peaceful.

“It’s pretty clear Iran is not going to meet those requirements,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday. “When that happens, the international community, represented by the Security Council, is going to have a choice.”

The Bush administration is hoping that the report, and Iran’s actions, will make it easier to increase pressure on Iran. The council’s request, along with others by the IAEA’s board of directors, asked Iran to suspend its enrichment program.