CNN correspondent shares his takeaways from his recent visit to Iran : NPR

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

One of the few international journalists to cover Iran during the war was Fred Pleitgen, CNN’s senior international correspondent. He has just left Iran and is now joining us from Berlin, where communications are a little better. Good morning.

FRED PLEITGEN: Hello.

INSKEEP: Just…

PLEITGEN: Thank you for inviting me.

INSKEEP: Yeah. Glad you’re with us. Just tell me the story. How did you get in?

PLEITGEN: Yeah. So we had visas approved by the Iranian government, and since obviously nothing is flying to Iran at the moment, at least not a civilian plane, we took the land route. It was me and my camera operator and producer, Claudia Otto, who did an absolutely incredible job, you know, taking care of the logistics of getting us there. And I obviously film everything, and I’m very indebted to him forever…

INSKEEP: Yeah.

PLEITGEN: …For having experienced this with me. But we took the land route. We flew to Yerevan, Armenia and had to drive about nine hours to the border with Iran. When we arrived at the border, the border guards told us that the border was closed. We weren’t going to go in. So we had to negotiate our entry. They finally let us pass. And then I would say we still had to drive about 12 hours to Tehran from the border, where we already saw some of the damage from the airstrikes. We actually saw airstrikes immediately afterwards. So we really had the impression of being on the ground, in a country at war.

INSKEEP: Yeah. Truly dramatic images. I saw quite a few during your reporting. I just want to mention, here is my experience in Iran in the past. You must move carefully. You are clearly being monitored in different ways, but you can move around. You can talk to people, and people are surprisingly frank about their opinions. It was the experience of the past. And this time?

PLEITGEN: Yeah. Well, first of all, people are not as outspoken in their opinions, especially if they are against the government. There were, you know, very few people who openly said that. However, people were very outspoken if they were in favor of the government. And we were able to talk to a lot of people, but it was more restrictive than in the past. Basically what we did was when we wanted to go somewhere and film something, we would talk to the Ministry of Culture and say, look, we’d like to go there and there. Also, is that okay with you guys? And then we went there. We were the ones who had the initiative. They would suggest things from time to time, but it was really up to us – up to us whether we went or not. So we managed to do everything we wanted to do. But of course, right now, given the current security situation, if you go to a place where there’s just been an airstrike and security forces cordon off that area, that can become a problem. So we definitely had to coordinate things more than in the past.

REGISTRATION: OK. But in the end, you were able to report what you found. You didn’t have any restrictions on that, did you?

PLEITGEN: No. We reported absolutely what we found. We went to the places we wanted to go. For example, an oil storage facility was hit, and we…

INSKEEP: Yeah.

PLEITGEN: …To negotiate with them whether or not we could go there, because it’s obviously critical infrastructure. The security forces are also there. But in the end, they also gave in and let us go in there and film that.

INSKEEP: One thing about a war zone, of course, is that the story comes to you. And I remember the day you were in Tehran and the Israelis hit this oil storage facility, and the sky was black over Tehran, and it seemed to be raining oil. What was it like being in a city where it rained oil?

PLEITGEN: I’ll tell you, it was probably one of the craziest experiences I had there because we – in the night, we already saw that there were huge airstrikes going on. And one of the things about the situation in Tehran right now is that you never really feel safe anywhere because you’re constantly hearing airstrikes and the munitions that are being dropped there are so heavy that you know that if a building that you’re in, even if it’s a residential building, it will probably be completely razed to the ground. That’s the way it is – it’s a constant thing. And then we saw these plumes of smoke over these oil installations south of Tehran, west of Tehran in particular.

And the next morning I woke up and saw that the whole sky was black and it was raining. So I went out to the roof deck we had and saw that there was soot or what appeared to be oil mixed with the rainwater running down. And one thing I felt was that my lungs felt really heavy after being there that day. So I don’t know if that was, you know, what was in the air there. I had a headache, so I felt like, you know, the air was pretty contaminated after that.

INSKEEP: I imagine your laundry must have been something, and millions of people’s laundry…

PLEITGEN: Yes.

INSKEEP: …It must have been something after that. You talked about not feeling safe anywhere, and I wonder about a particular aspect of that. You went to speak with a senior Iranian official at least once. You go to government offices and you know very well that government offices are targeted by Israelis in the United States. How was it?

PLEITGEN: Yes. It’s interesting that you mentioned that because that’s definitely one of the times where I felt that, you know, you wanted to finish the interview as quickly as possible. You want to be there. It is obvious that you have to be present. The official I spoke to is the supreme leader’s foreign policy advisor. So this is certainly a very important person who is currently shaping how Iranians respond to the bombing by the United States and Israel. So he’s a really important guy to talk to. But yeah, I mean, it was a little uncomfortable staying in that building for an extended period of time, especially after seeing that so many other government buildings had already been demolished.

INSKEEP: And that’s one of the most important reasons to go to a country that’s on the other side of a war. You want to know how Iranian decision-makers are thinking about the situation. American officials need to know this. So what have you learned about how Iranian officials view this war?

PLEITGEN: So I think, from my perspective, from what I’ve seen, what you have in Iran right now is actually a consolidation of power around harder lines. The Iranian president tried to defuse the situation by apologizing to neighboring countries for firing into their territory. But obviously, President Trump rejected that idea almost immediately. And it is since then that we have really seen the hardliners consolidate. I think with the new supreme leader that you have in place now, he is very much in tune with the security apparatus, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

And if you see the people who are most often messaging publicly right now, they are also the hardliners. They are the President of the Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, and the Speaker of Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. These are true hardliners who say the Iranians are going to continue this war. It therefore seems to me that for the moment, the decision has been made in Tehran to consolidate its power base. The army feels that it is now on firmer footing than at the beginning, when these first attacks took place.

INSTITUTE: Wow.

PLEITGEN: They believe they can still put pressure on the region. They believe they can still fire missiles, and they will continue to do so. They say negotiations are not possible. And obviously one of the things that they view as their main tool in their toolbox is the Strait of Hormuz and keeping it closed to maritime traffic unless the Iranians allow it. This is where they feel they can put pressure on the international community to try to end the war. But again, the Iranians are now saying they are willing to continue this policy.

INSKEEP: There’s only a few seconds left, but President Trump at one point talked about encouraging the Iranians to rise up. Vali Nasr, an analyst who appeared on the show, said that in fact, people are now more attached to their government because of the attacks. In a few seconds, did you have the feeling of an uprising?

PLEITGEN: I didn’t see any of that. It’s obviously very difficult for us to actually penetrate society, but it certainly seemed to me, also seeing the number of security forces on the ground, that the government is definitely trying to project that they have total control.

INSKEEP: Fred Pleitgen is a senior international correspondent for CNN and he just left Iran. Thank you very much for your report.

PLEITGEN: Thank you.

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