Iran offers journalists tour of former US embassy grounds

Iran recently invited some reporters to visit the former US embassy grounds in Tehran, ostensibly to promote tours of former front line sites in the Iran-Iraq war. But the tours’ timing may suggest it’s part of an Iranian response to the recent Hollywood film “Argo,” which several Iranian officials have complained unfairly depicted Iran’s 1979 seizure of hostages from the US embassy, which led to the over thirty year breach in US-Iranian relations.

“The other day I was invited in the former US embassy in Tehran, Iran,” Thomas Erdbrink, the New York Times’ Iran correspondent, wrote on Twitter Monday, in the first of several posts showing his photos of the visit.  The occasion was a press conference by an Iran Baseej commander on tours to former sites in the Iran-Iraq war, Edbrink said.

China’s Xinhua news agency on Monday also published several photos of the former US embassy, which it said were taken by an Iranian journalist for the agency on March 10th:

“An Iranian Journalist visits inside the former U.S. embassy in downtown Tehran, Iran, March 10, 2013,” Xinhua said in a caption:

“Pictures and equipment of Americans are seen inside the former U.S. embassy in downtown Tehran, Iran, March 10, 2013,” the caption to the photograph, below, published by Xinhua said.

The New York Times’ Erdbrink posted his photo, below, of a Baseej commander giving “a press conference on tours to the former [Iran/Iraq] war  in the former US Ambassador’s office,” he wrote:

“The Baseej that now control the grounds of the [former] US embassy… have built pavilions for picnics,” Erdbrink noted. A select few of the visitors were invited to walk over the American and Israeli flags painted on the grounds at the site, Erdbrink wrote, posting his photograph:

A diplomat with Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately explain the reason for the tour of the former grounds at this time. Nor did the State Department immediately respond to a query from the Back Channel about the tour.

But Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper opined the Baseej tours showing the US embassy almost frozen in the time of the hostage crisis, seemed to be an Iranian response to “Argo.”