AS Iran attempts to thaw relations with the West, News Corp Australia was taken on an exclusive tour through the sprawling CIA bunker made famous by the film Argo.
By his own admission, Mohammad Reza Shoqi doesn’t know much about Australia other than it has a half decent soccer squad and forests of eucalyptus trees.
But as he strides into Room 201 of a now derelict building in central Tehran the propaganda officer from Iran’s fearsome Baji Militia has one other fact about Australia he is keen to impart.
“Your country was abused, betrayed by the American spies as well,” he says as he excitedly points to a shelf in the small room cluttered with curling sheets of passport-sized photographs, dusty ledgers and 1970s-stock furniture and specialist equipment.
Room 201 dubbed locally as the “spy den” on the second floor of what was once the US Embassy is largely as it was on November 4, 1979 when it was abandoned after becoming the scene of one of the most infamous hostage taking incidents in history.
In rare access, News Corp Australia was taken on an exclusive tour through the building and specifically the CIA wing of the sprawling compound to make a point. Iran wants people to know they are not just the bad guys and in the murky world of foreign espionage, the division of friend and foe is blurred.
But good or bad, the once pariah state is re-emerging as a global power as it joins the Allies in the fight on terror in Iraq and with the aid of their former nemesis the United States and Britain, is redefining its foreign policy strategy in the Middle East and not just on the vexed question of nuclear power.
After next month, Australia could be at the forefront of that redefining of relations with the West with a historic visit from Foreign Minister Julie Bishop armed with a detailed agenda aimed at bringing Iran back from three decades of Western isolation, exploring its expansion ambitions and recapturing the days when the Persian nation was Australia’s largest export market in the Middle East.
But perhaps Iran’s moderate President Hassan Rouhani will first have to convince his own sceptical people their enemy’s enemy now makes them a friend and it’s time to look to the future.
Room 201 leads to what was a passport making room in the CIA wing of the embassy that before it was ransacked by protesting students in 1979, was used to produce US passports.
But according to Shoqi, from the evidence of stacks of blank passports of other countries including Australia, Canada, Algeria and Gulf States, the embassy also produced fake travel documents for US spies to travel freely under different guises from neutral countries.
It’s curious at best, the whole of the embassy floor perhaps an anomaly accessible as it is only via a massive steel bombproof vault door with combination lock which Shoqi has now memorised and a doormat that reads “down with the USA”, clearly a recent addition that he likes to brush his feet on.
But entering the preserved section of the building is largely like taking a step back in time with all the furniture and branded National Security Agency spy equipment there, encoded cable machines, banks of typewriters, pieced together top secret reports, shredders, a soundproof Perspex booth once used for confidential meetings and other paraphernalia of what clearly was a busy space.
How busy was most recently portrayed in the movie Argo on the day the embassy was overrun by the students, with the approval of the Ayatollah Khomeini, with 52 embassy staff later taken hostage for 444 days.
Ironically, the embassy is now the headquarters for the Basij Militia and also serves as an anti-American monument of propaganda where leaders meet to discuss the latest US conspiracies.
Inside, some its walls are covered with murals and pictures not just of the chaos that followed the 1979 siege and storming but more contemporary events such as America’s 1988 accidental shooting down of an Iranian commercial airliner killing all 290 on-board, the 9/11 terrorist attack, eavesdropping allegations of the past two years and the most recent addition, the murder of three young American Muslims in North Carolina last month, a portrait of the trio with the word “martyrs” and a script claiming they were murdered for their religion.
In reality, their death tragically stemmed from a domestic dispute over car parking but try telling that to some in Iran.
“This is why we will never trust the West, the lies they tell even now … and Argo, yes we have seen the film and it is lies, and its Oscar was prearranged, how else do you explain the award was given by Michelle Obama in a message to our nation from the president,” he said.
“But Australia is good, good country a friend yes of us.”
Some consolation for Ms Bishop ahead of her visit to Tehran next month, the first by an Australian high ranking minister for more than a decade and only the second such visit to the one time US-declared Axis of Evil State from any Western nation.
Read more from Charles Miranda in Tehran in papers and online tomorrow.
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