Alan Eyre previously headed the Iran office at the US Consulate in Dubai. Radio Farda says he is a fluent Farsi speaker who peppers his Farsi with Iranian proverbs and expressions.
In the past week, Eyre has been interviewed in Persian by Radio Farda, VOA’s Persian television and the Persian Service of the BBC. But he hasn’t yet made it onto Iran’s state broadcasting.
When asked by a Radio Farda reporter why the State Department decided to have a Farsi spokesperson, Eyre played down the decision, saying, “The State Department has a number of spokespersons in different languages including Hindi, Arabic, and other languages.”
When Condoleezza Rice became secretary of state in 2005, she was startled to find the US Foreign Service had no fluent Farsi speakers left except for a couple of very senior men near retirement. She immediately started a program to encourage Foreign Service officers to learn Persian.
In congressional testimony last week, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Philo Dibble said the State Department had decided to communicate policy messages via interviews by spokespersons fluent in Persian.
“Those interviews clearly must include Iranian state-owned media,” Dibble said. “For years, private sector studies have shown that the majority of Iranians—upwards of 80 percent—get their news from government-owned media.
“We are offering those media appearances by US official spokespersons on live Iranian TV and radio in Farsi. We hope that by engaging with all aspects of Persian-language media—private, Western, Iranian state-owned and, of course, Radio Farda and VOA Persian—we will expand what Iranians hear about US foreign policy and enable them to hear messages directly from US sources.”
A State Department spokesman added—in English: “Just as the US media allow access to Iranian government officials seeking to explain Iranian government positions to US audiences, we would expect the Iranian media to grant US officials the same access with the same professionalism.”
State television in Iran is, however, notorious for refusing to give airtime to opposition leaders and critics of the Iranian establishment.