New details on the Iran nuclear talks in Istanbul this weekend, which were largely touted as “positive,” now show the meeting had, in fact, deteriorated.  European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili kicked off the first international nuclear talks in over a year with a three-hour dinner at the Iranian consulate in Istanbul Friday night. The mood at the informal dinner — meant to build rapport between the two chief negotiators ahead of the formal talks getting underway the next day — was described by aides as “good and friendly.” Conversation deliberately steered away from specific discussion of the Iran nuclear issue. A European diplomat apprised of the conversation told me Monday that they discussed political-party funding in the US among other topics, including the Arab spring.

Whatever rapport was established at the Friday dinner may have helped save the conference from what some feared was the brink of necollapse Saturday night.

By the conclusion of the meeting Saturday night, when Jalili and Ashton held another meeting, the atmosphere of the high-stakes talks re-launch had grown strained and tense — unbeknownst to most of the 500 journalists sitting in the Istanbul congress venue’s basement press center.

In the 90-minute meeting held in the office of the Turkish foreign minister, who vacated it, Jalili “relentlessly” pressed Ashton for a delay in European Union oil sanctions set to go into effect by July 1, another western diplomat told me Tuesday.

“During the Ashton bilateral, it was Jalili of old,” the diplomat said on condition of anonymity Tuesday. “He asked 100 times” for a delay in the oil sanctions.

Ashton — who later privately characterized her Iranian counterpart during the encounter as a “relentless” character in pressing the demand — demurred, saying that was not realistic, and not in her mandate, aides said. She was able to steer the meeting back to a successful conclusion, based mostly on what was agreed to in the two-and-a-half hour morning plenary meeting involving all seven delegations.

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