Iran Touts ‘Persian Accented’ C-SPAN Caller Accusing U.S. of Lying About Missile Attack

Iranian state television on Thursday broadcast a segment that included a crank phone call to C-SPAN by an apparent Iranian operative who pretended to be the father of a missing U.S. service member.

The purpose of the call was to reinforce Iranian propaganda that a large number of American troops were killed by Iran’s illegal missile attack on two Iraqi bases last week and the U.S. government is covering up the deaths.

Voice of America News (VOA) on Thursday summarized the Iranian television broadcast:

Several Iranian diaspora journalists tweeted a video clip of Thursday’s broadcast by the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) TV channel, whose presenter, Ali Zohourian, introduced a segment about Washington’s purported “cover-up of heavy losses” from Iran’s January 8 strike on the al-Asad base that houses U.S. and Iraqi forces.

No U.S. or Iraqi forces were killed in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) missile attack, which caused some damage to the base. Iran had given advance notice of the strike to Iraqi authorities, enabling the troops at the base to take cover.  

In the IRIB news segment, Zohourian said: “Eight days after the IRGC’s missile slap on the (face of) the United States war machine, a father of a terrorist soldier of America admits in a telephone interview with (C-SPAN’s) Washington Journal (program) that he has no information about his son’s whereabouts since last week, and says his numerous pursuits of U.S. Defense Department officials bore no fruit.”

The call to C-SPAN was more than a little dodgy.

The host of the C-SPAN program, Greta Brawner, treated the call as genuine and expressed sympathy to “Allan,” the caller with a suspiciously thick Persian accent. “Allan, I’m so sorry for you, for what’s happening with your family, not knowing what’s happening to your son,” she said.

C-SPAN representatives later said they have no means of authenticating phone calls or “fact-checking” claims made by callers. The network declined to comment on Iranian state media’s use of the C-SPAN segment. It is not impossible for a person with a heavy Persian accent to have a son or daughter serving in the U.S. military. Even if the phone call came straight from Iran, constant battles with telemarketers and scam artists have demonstrated that incoming phone numbers can be spoofed. On the other hand, critics would have preferred some reflexive skepticism of the unusual caller’s claims. 

As VOA observed, claims of huge American casualties from Iran’s “mighty slap” attack last week are a staple of state media, most of them sourced to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a designated terrorist organization and the home of Gen. Qasem Soleimani, whose elimination by a U.S. airstrike was supposedly avenged by Iran’s missile attack. The same IRIB media outlet uncritically relayed the regime’s false assertions that a Ukrainian passenger jet crashed on the same night due to a mechanical malfunction or crew error, when in fact it was shot down by Iranian missiles.

“IRIB is so strategically important to the central message that the rulers in Tehran want to get out to their people, and the managers who run IRIB’s news department are so close to the establishment and trusted by them, that they don’t even care that what they are saying is ridiculous,” a former employee of the media organization told VOA.

While the U.S. government maintains there were no casualties of Iran’s missile attack, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said on Thursday that eleven service members were flown from Iraq’s Al-Assad airbase to medical centers in Germany and Kuwait to be treated for symptoms of concussion from the explosions. CENTCOM described the treatments as steps taken in an “abundance of caution” and part of the standard procedure for dealing with the aftermath of large explosions.