The Price of Access

In my first three years as a staff writer for a news service in California and a small newspaper in Massachusetts, I was on the scene of just about every story I covered. It’s what made me fall in love with reporting. Once, in those early days, I heard two national reporters at the Los Angeles Times commiserating about a new editor. He’d ordered them to report using the phone in all but the most exceptional cases. Sacrilegious, I thought. Even then.

But Los Angeles is not Tehran, or Damascus, or Hanoi, or any of a number of other capitals where governments keep tight reins on foreign correspondents–not to mention their own journalists. The press freedoms enjoyed in American and European societies yield a high level of reliability in the coverage of news in the Western world. Not so when it comes to partially closed societies such as Iran, where foreign correspondents can face a series of obstacles that prevent unfettered newsgathering.

The first hurdle for foreign journalists seeking to cover authoritarian regimes is often the necessity of getting official accreditation from the government. In Iran this can involve long and difficult negotiations with government officials. Those who make it through the accreditation process are then subject to constant monitoring by the government. This is done by requiring visiting reporters to employ minders from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Interviews must be arranged through the minder, who usually sits next to the reporter during these sessions and acts as a translator.

Foreign correspondents often fail to tell their viewers and readers about the omnipresent minders, though some eventually reveal details after they leave their reporting posts. Azadeh Moaveni, an Iranian-American who reported for Time magazine from Iran for several years, later admitted to being constantly “trailed by a hook-nosed security agent, bullied to inform on my sources, and threatened with prosecution for ‘endangering national security.’ ” In her book, Honeymoon in Tehran, she describes Mr. X, her secret government minder, as “perhaps the most important person in my Iranian life.”³

There’s another layer of control too. Minders have shadow minders, a long-standing practice in Iranian statecraft, where somebody is watching the person watching you–just to make sure that your personal minder does the government’s bidding.

For the few foreign journalists with access to the country, the pressures don’t end with getting accreditation and having to hire a minder who’s on a government payroll. There is always the danger of losing the hard-won government credentials, and to avoid that, it’s necessary to self-censor your journalism. This is true for all foreign correspondents, but particularly for Iranians or those with Iranian spouses who are filing from inside the country for foreign news outlets. They work under even greater duress because their families are virtual hostages.

The latest example involved Washington Post Tehran correspondent Jason Rezaian, who has dual U.S.-Iranian citizenship, and his journalist wife Yeganeh Salehi, an Iranian citizen. They, along with a dual-nationality photographer, were arrested in July of 2014. The photographer, who was not identified publicly at the family’s request, was released a month later, while Rezaian and Salehi remained incarcerated but uncharged. The Post described the detentions as evidence of yet another high-level internal political struggle– though in reality they follow a long-standing pattern of dealing with foreign correspondents.

When Nazila Fathi, a local correspondent for the New York Times, fled Iran in 2009, she explained how the Iranian establishment was more restrictive with respect to foreign reporting than the domestic press. Certain topics, such as executions, she said, were so sensitive that she was prohibited from writing about them, even though some of their accounts were published in Iranian newspapers. Fathi also learned that Iran’s intelligence services draw no line between work and private life. In her case, the government’s monitoring extended beyond listening to her calls and reading her emails. As she recounts in a forthcoming memoir, the woman who looked after her toddlers in her home was a government spy.

The experience of Guardian correspondent Dan De Luce is illustrative of the cost of bucking the system in countries like Iran. De Luce arrived in Tehran in January of 2003. Like Fathi and Moaveni, he was working there when conditions were actually pretty good. Mohammad Khatami, a reformist, was president. It was a time of relative openness for the press. And yet, even under Khatami it was difficult for a foreign correspondent to cover the country.

“Difficult in a subtle way,” De Luce explained to me back then. On the surface there appeared to be a certain openness, but in effect “foreign journalists are on a tight leash by the visa regime,” he said. “It’s very difficult for a reporter to get into the country, and once in, there is the sensitive matter of getting one’s visa renewed every three months. That is a check that discourages journalists from pursuing certain stories.”

The government also discourages controversial stories by intimidating the translators and fixers, said De Luce. They’re very closely watched, their telephones are tapped, and they are interrogated by the government on a regular basis. “I knew that whatever I did was going to be an open book.”

Translators have a way of not pursuing a correspondent’s story without coming out and saying “no” directly, he explained. Sometimes, even when translators are willing to cross the line, the correspondent may not be willing to take that risk on behalf of the fixer or translator.

Language is another barrier to good reporting. Foreign journalists in Iran or other restrictive countries often do not speak the local language, “so they miss a lot,” said De Luce. “They speak to each other, to other foreigners, and diplomats.” And yet native language skills can also be a hazard. The government is particularly paranoid about Iranian expats, who can pass through the country easily with their Iranian passports and fluent language abilities.

“A lot of what is going on there never sees the light of day,” De Luce said. “What goes on is as mysterious as the goings-on in the Kremlin during the Soviet era.” Add to that the paranoia of the Iranian government, which tends to view foreigners as spies or fomenters of revolution, he offered. And when it comes to its own citizens, the government believes it can operate with impunity. De Luce cited the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, who was bludgeoned to death in the summer of 2003 while in police custody. That would have never happened to him or another foreigner, he said.

What did happen to De Luce is more typical of the fate of the foreign correspondent who overstepped limits in the former Soviet Union or China. Following the 2003 earthquake in Bam, a city in the Iranian province of Kerman, most correspondents waited in Tehran for earthquake news from formal channels. De Luce and his wife, who wrote for an Irish newspaper, signed up to go to the earthquake region as volunteer rescue workers. Once there, they documented the frustrations and devastation of the earthquake survivors– until the government expelled them. Their crime was being too aggressive in getting the story.

Not one foreign journalist based in Tehran was willing to protest his expulsion, said De Luce; all were too concerned with maintaining their own access. He understands, though. Is it such a success to be “really gung ho” and get kicked out and not report anything at all, he asks, or, “Isn’t it better to have someone there?” De Luce’s response: There is no right answer.