The United States on Monday denied a British press report of back-channel talks between Washington and Iran on Tehran's controversial nuclear program.

In London, The Independent newspaper reported Monday that a group of former US diplomats and foreign policy experts had been holding talks for the past five years with Iranian academics and policy advisers, in hopes of reaching a breakthrough on the diplomatic impasse.

But a White House official on Monday, speaking anonymously, said "clear channels" exist for communication with Iran, and that the approach described in the Independent article "isn't one of them."

The daily quoted former US undersecretary of state Thomas Pickering as saying that the United States had pursued five years of talks with Iran, despite decades of tense relations publicly, and amid continuing strife over the Islamic Republic's failure to heed international ultimatums that it suspend uranium enrichment.

The US State Department was equally emphatic that the talks described in the article were "not a government activity," but instead "a set of private discussions."

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