Investigations

Andrew Callaghan was barred from leaving his Tehran hotel alone

He entered on a government press pass while the United States and Israel were at war with Iran.

In Tehran, Andrew Callaghan worked on an Iranian press pass that Tehran had extended through a Vice TV co-sign while the United States and Israel fought Iran. From his arrival at the commercial VIP terminal, a local producer told him higher-ups were tracking his movements.

Callaghan said he was dropped at a guarded government-approved hotel where staff would not let him walk outside without a hired fixer. He felt followed in the lobby and hallways as bombed buildings sat beside highways where traffic still flowed.

Iran ranks among the worst countries for press freedom. Reporters Without Borders places it near the bottom of its global index, and Callaghan said the trip felt curated from the start.

Government contacts steered him into scheduled interviews. A leader of a pro-regime Gen Z think tank in his mid-30s blamed December and January economic protests on inflation and sanctions, then said Reza Pahlavi and outside agitators turned peaceful bazaar demonstrations into riots. He put official protest deaths at about 3,000 names on a government list, far below President Donald Trump's public claim of 30,000.

The same interview defended hangings after alleged beheadings of two police officers in downtown Tehran. Callaghan said international observers and United Nations bodies disputed those beheadings and described coerced confessions at show trials. A UN fact-finding mission documented torture, unfair trials, and death sentences tied to forced confessions during earlier nationwide protests.

Escorts also brought Callaghan to a pro-regime rap collective that displayed a missile-launcher prop and a banner for Chicago rapper Lil Durk, who faced a federal murder-for-hire trial in Los Angeles. Members claimed Durk was a political prisoner; none of Durk's U.S. peers publicly made that argument.

In the Grand Bazaar, merchants still sold counterfeit sneakers for less than a dollar despite wartime tension and sanctions. A remote interview with the creator of the Lego Resistance Front, an AI animation account aimed at Western audiences, ended with an admission that the Iranian government buys the videos as a customer. The creator claimed the shop remained independent.

Callaghan then met a young woman in west Tehran outside a collapsed apartment block where eight families had lived. She said a morning strike sent a shock wave through the structure and buried her grandmother in bed. Authorities had labeled the site a government target, she said, but her family had no ties to the military or the state. She estimated that roughly 500 people in Tehran had died in similar strikes.

Before a large pro-regime rally, Callaghan attended a mosque service where a cleric led Death to America chants that attendees said meant opposition to imperialism, not to individual Americans. Strangers offered tea, sweets, and translated poems on the walk toward the demonstration.

The woman said her grandmother had cooked ghormeh sabzi for the family and that she did not want revenge for the strike. She pointed to writing on a wall marking her grandmother as the mother of a soldier killed in the Iran-Iraq war, and now a martyr herself.

Source video: War in Iran (Part 2)