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By Frances Harrison
BBC Tehran correspondent
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Frances Harrison: "Quite a lot of the time we are simply not invited to press conferences."
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There are jokes now about how the British embassy in Tehran should start a rock garden. Sack loads of stones have been collected after being thrown over the wall by angry demonstrators.
And there's now a concerted media campaign to get the embassy's residential and school complex back into Iranian ownership.
"Occupied Qolhaq under the British jackboot" is how the papers refer to this leafy sanctuary in polluted Tehran. When the municipality produced the deeds proving British ownership, the papers accused the British of having their own agent in the local council.
Nightly television dramas depict the wickedness of British colonialists throughout history, the president visits the home town of brave freedom fighters who confronted the British occupiers of Persia and, in the news, footage of British troops appearing to abuse the rights of Iraqi civilians is repeatedly shown.
'Mundane evil'
Traditionally, there's a widespread assumption that there's always a British hand behind everything negative in Iran, and the British are more devious and dangerous than even the "Great Satan" - the United States. American journalists are welcomed - given interviews with the president and asked for their autographs by schoolgirls - but we are a more mundane evil.
I have never worked in a country so obsessed with pigeon-holing me on the basis of my country of birth. The minister of culture recently had a news conference, and he spent several hours talking, repeatedly referring to the "enemy". It's not so comfortable when you're perceived as that enemy - "the propaganda machinery of the world domineering powers".
Apparently, we wage daily psychological warfare against the Iranian nation. Let me tell you how.
Bomb attacks
The BBC office is in a small residential apartment block in north Tehran, underneath the flat I live in. There's no sign and it's all very low-key. We don't give out the address to anyone we don't know.
There have been two bombs outside the British Airways and BP offices which share a tower block, and a bomb scare in the same place. Recently, there was a bomb hoax and threats made against another British company here - advising Iranians not to work for them.
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I don't see how we could be more restricted and still be here
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After the new government came to power, we had real trouble finding any landlord who would accept us. They all feared the stone-throwing mobs and the intelligence agencies. Now that there have been so many attacks on European embassies amid the cartoon controversy, I wouldn't be surprised if they put the rents up even higher.
We have a staff cameraman who spent a large chunk of his life in Austria. Another member of our local staff works half for the central newsgathering operation and half for BBC Monitoring, translating newspaper editorials in the early morning.
Our producer/fixer is the one who writes endless letters to the government to get permission for everything. It's worse for filming - we need a letter to go anywhere outside Tehran and need to apply at least 72 hours in advance.
We need letters of permission for the Grand Bazaar, the cemetery, shopping centres, main streets and squares of Tehran, mosques, schools, universities, hospitals and museums. And a hard copy of the letter has to be collected by the driver.
The British Embassy in Tehran has been the scene of frequent demonstrations
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Quite a lot of the time we are simply not invited to press conferences - some are only for local media or even state media. Often they decide to exclude us or forget to include us - we never know which it is.
There's currently much talk in the Iranian media about trying to restrict the foreign media operating here. There's anger that Iranian state media journalists in New York have to work within travel restrictions.
Personally, I don't see how we could be more restricted and still be here. Our telephones may well be bugged - something that producers in London should remember when talking to us. We cannot do anything without the intelligence agencies knowing what it is - nor can journalists on tourist visas either. And many of the people we want to interview are scared.
Anxiety
As international pressure on Iran increases, it will become more and more difficult for Iranians who work for foreign companies. Job security is one basic worry. One of my colleagues explained to me that if our office is closed down, then no government office will ever employ him. Meanwhile, the likelihood is that foreign companies who need English speakers will also be leaving.
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One of the perils is to dodge the state-run TV camera crews who hunt us down - tape rolling - to ask us what we think of the anniversary of the revolution or whatever event is upcoming
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Our employees are tainted. The relatives of one told him the food in his house was not halal because it was bought with money that came from foreigners. People are thinking of sending money abroad, worrying about whether they could get a job outside Iran if they had to. There is real anxiety about the future.
We operate in a grey area. The BBC is not a registered company in Iran, and we've never been allowed to exist as a legal entity here. We need written permission to take satellite phones and videophones out on the streets - and often we don't get it.
Mobile phones are appalling - the network is oversubscribed. Heavy traffic means it takes at least an hour to get anywhere, if not several hours if it's rush hour. We don't have a radio studio because the engineer has only just got his visa - after months of waiting - to come and install it.
We have "high speed" internet - 128k - which we use for sending pictures. But all audio is filed on sat phones because, although Iran has ISDN lines, they have blocked international data transmission. The internet is filtered to the point that we cannot now read the BBC Persian online site in our office, or even do a Google search for anything including, for example, "women".
When we are out in the field, one of the perils is to dodge the state-run TV camera crews who hunt us down - tape rolling - to ask us what we think of the anniversary of the revolution or whatever event is upcoming. When we say we are not allowed to give interviews without permission from London, they prepare a montage of the foreign media refusing to talk to them and add a voice-over saying how pathetic we are.
Lately, I have taken to telling them if they want an interview they should fax a list of questions to our office - preferably in English. If they did, I might give them the sort of excuses we receive here regularly:
- Your fax has got lost
- Our fax machine is broken
- The room it's in has been locked and the man with the key has gone
- The fax is on the desk of the person who decides
- The reply is still being typed.
