WASHINGTON – Iran’s Foreign Ministry pledged to suspend uranium enrichment the day before a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency after President Bush told reporters over the weekend that he believed they were accelerating the process before the meeting in Vienna.

Speaking to reporters in Tehran, the Reuters news agency quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Asefi as saying, “We will start suspension of uranium enrichment activities from tomorrow on, as we promised.” In August Iranian officials announced that they had broken an earlier promise to suspend enrichment while IAEA inspectors were evaluating the program Iran has insisted is solely intended for peaceful purposes.

This week, British, French, and German foreign ministers announced that they had reached a deal with the Iranians on the nuclear program that would commit the Islamic republic to allow U.N. inspectors to continue their work in the country in exchange for future technical help for their nuclear energy program, including assistance in building another light-water nuclear reactor.

In London over the weekend, Iran’s minister in charge of industry and mining, Eshaq Jahangiri, told reporters that the nuclear deal would increase Iranian-European trade. European oil companies have financed the lion’s share of development in Iran’s oil and natural gas sector, from exploration to refinement. American companies are prohibited from engaging in such work due to sanctions imposed by President Clinton.

So far, the State Department has said it is willing to allow the Europeans to continue their negotiations, effectively eliminating the possibility that Iran’s violations of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty will be brought before the U.N. Security Council. Since the fall of 2003, the three European countries have sought an agreement with Iran to assure the world that new enrichment facilities discovered in 2002 were not intended to make nuclear weapons.

Mr. Bush on Saturday said the Iranian enrichment activities were intended for bomb making, effectively raising pressure on Tehran before today’s IAEA meeting in Vienna. The president’s outgoing secretary of state reinforced that message. “We have reasons to believe that when we see what they have been doing to hide aspects of their nuclear program that you see what they had been doing over the years with missiles and potential delivery systems, it is a cause of concern,” Mr. Powell said on Saturday at a press conference in Santiago, Chile.

Mr. Powell today will begin meetings in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for an international conference with Iraq and its neighbors to discuss among other issues the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq from countries like Iran and Syria. Mr. Powell said yesterday that he would not be holding separate talks with his Iranian counterpart, Kamal Kharazi. Iranian newspapers have reported that Mr. Kharazi has also ruled out such talks.

Mr. Powell yesterday clarified remarks he made last week with regard to Iran’s developments of long-range missiles intended for the delivery of nuclear weapons. “Iran has been working on long-range missiles. Long-range missiles tend to be inaccurate, therefore they are not designed to carry conventional warheads,” he said en route to Tel Aviv. “This is not, in my judgment, terribly complicated. And the additional information that I have seen, keeps me in a position of concluding that what I think they have been doing all along, they have been doing.”