CNN's Frederik Pleitgen Getty Images Even ardent journalists don’t go through what Frederik Pleitgen just endured.
The German-born CNN journalist spent nearly 24 hours traveling overland from Armenia to Tehran —where he was promptly confronted by rampant bombing that threatened him, his producer and translator wherever they went.
But the great risk to Pleitgen also came with great payoff for everyone else: For the critical first week of the U.S. and Israel war in Iran Pleitgen was the only known major journalist representing a U.S broadcasting outlet, having received the Iranian regime’s lone Western-journalist visa. He would use that week to tell crucial stories while dodging air strikes, often avoiding death by a matter of minutes.
Related Stories
Movies German Distributor DCM Acquires Swiss Ascot Elite
Music SiriusXM Celebrates Long-Awaited New BTS Release With Pop-Up Channel (Exclusive)
Pleitgen is home in Berlin now, and he described his harrowing but crucial experience by phone. The conversation was edited for brevity and clarity.
So start with the obvious: how do you even get into Iran right now?
The moment that the combat operations started, I contacted the Iranian culture ministry and the foreign ministry and put in an official visa request. I told them, “I think it would be very important to let us in, to let us report from the ground for a little while.” At some point they were just like, “Okay, we’ll let you in.” And then they issued a visa for eight days, and I picked it up at the embassy in Berlin, and then we flew to Yerevan in Armenia. It was a nine-hour drive to the Iran border in a snowstorm. And then we got to the border and they told us, we’re not getting in. They said the border is closed for foreigners and you need to go back to Armenia.
So much for that visa.
It didn’t seem to matter much to them. So we start negotiating with the border guards, and then we talk to the boss of the Border Station, all through a translator. And we talk and talk, and show them the paperwork again. And finally at some point they let us through. Then it was another 12-hour drive to Tehran. And we’re seeing the aftermath of so many airstrikes and the plumes of smoke from fresh air strikes. As we got closer to Tehran, we heard that there was heavy bombardment going on in the west of Tehran. So we don’t even get there the first night.
And just to be clear, you had no protection. You’re not embedded with anyone, because there’s no one to be embedded with.
No. It’s just me, my translator and my producer Claudia Otto, who’s our photojournalist and producer who also films me while I’m reporting because it’s hard to do all of that under duress. So we’re at this hotel and the next morning we woke up at 5 am and there were jets overhead. We could hear them bombing someplace. We pretty much heard it the whole time we were there.
Do the logistics help you distract from the danger you’re in? Almost like, OK, this is just bureaucracy. This is not bombings. I can deal with this.
I definitely felt that way. It’s one of those things of “at least I have something else to focus on.” But also just the feeling — the vindication and the responsibility — of like, wow, I’m one of the few people, one of the few Western journalists, who can be here and do this. It was a strange feeling but also a really helpful one.
How different did Iran feel compared to other hot spots you’ve been in?
So I’ve been to a lot of war zones. In Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya. But this was very different. We were going into a place that was being bombarded heavily, that was using big munitions in a densely urban area where they would take down that building and maybe even the one next to it. So a lot of your time when you get somewhere it’s “Is there cover I can seek?” “Is this place that I want to film around the block from something that’s a potential target?” Because unlike a lot of war zones in Tehran there are no real shelters. There’s no air raid sirens,. So things can kick off at any moment and surprise you. Wherever we went, there was really never a time that it stayed quiet for more than maybe an hour or so.
How do you avoid those … surprises?
It’s quite difficult. It’s just, “is there some high-value target maybe close to your vicinity.” Just looking around and not going somewhere if you think there was, like a police station or a military facility. But there’s really no way to know.
How does that affect your reporting? So much of reporting is about hunkering down, getting the flavor of a place, walking around. And now you have a ticking clock.
Yeah, I mean I’d be lying if I said it didn’t. There was this one instance we went to a site that had been struck the day before, and we were filming there. We got through the security cordon, we talked to some people, and they let us film in a badly damaged building that was across from the area that had been hit. And we were filming in there. And then I was already feeling, “you know, that we had been there for about as long as I felt was good.”
Uh oh.
Yeah so the people on the ground who were doing the security for that site said that we could film on the other side of the road. So we went around the block, and that’s when all of a sudden, anti aircraft fire went off, and then we had to tail-end out of there so fast. And there was an explosion behind us as we went. That was one of those things where it obviously deeply affected what we were doing. There was another place that we went to where we talked to people in a dairy shop and the owner said there had been a strike 300 meters down the road and the there was a baery where the baker was killed. It was a lot of things like that.
So basically it’s just hovering all the time.
What usually happens to me, and what happened this time with me as well, is that the early stages, when you’re there, when I’m walking around or going around, I always feel really weak and vulnerable, and because you’re constantly thinking, something could blow up next to me or hit the vehicle that it really affects the way you move and you’re not fully focused on on the questions that you want to ask. And it usually takes a day or a day and a half to get used to the situation where then you sort of block that out and you’re able to work at your full strength. As strange as that may sound, you really feel like your legs are stronger under you.
Did you at least have a safe place to stay at night?
Not really. An area close to our hotel got hit one night and you could tell the hotel staff was getting quite nervous, and some of the hits made the walls of the building shake. And then at that point you think: “could it get closer to us?” Another night they hit a bunch of oil installations near Tehran, and we had a big plume of black smoke everywhere, rising up through the city.
Let’s talk about what you saw. I know it’s not the easiest thing to find folks in general, while everyone is kind of afraid to be on the streets, and then, of course, they might be afraid to speak out against the regime, and there’s a lot of self censorship going on. But as best you can say, what is the mood — or maybe what’s the spectrum of feelings that you encountered from everyday folks in Tehran?
I won’t even pretend that I’ve even dug below the surface of a city of 11 or 12 million people. And there are people who are against the government who will be very reluctant to speak to us. There’s a lot of people that that we knew were against the government, and now that the bombing has really become bad, are just downright afraid that something could happen to them. And I think a lot of them are also shocked at the size of the explosions that they’re seeing and at the level of destruction that’s going on in parts of their town. So a lot of it is just fear. Many people are just trying to get by, like when we went to that neighborhood with the dairy farmer or we would talk to some of the customers. They were in a difficult economic situation beforehand, and now it’s even worse. I would say about 20 to 30 percent of the people have left the city. So it’s a lot emptier than it used to be. But it’s very complex. There are obviously a lot of people who are opposed to the regime and want it to fall. And then there’s a base of support the government has, and the government has been able to energize them.
One thing that came up as you were there is how for all your ability to ostensibly move freely you were there at the leisure of the Iranian government. There’s of course critics of CNN who say that affected your objectivity — the New York Post ran that story, among other criticisms. What do you say to those who argue that impacted your independence?
My first moment of watching CNN was in 1991 during the Gulf War, and CNN was the only network on the ground. And the reason they were on the ground is because they had built, I wouldn’t say, relations with the Iraqi government, but they had been there, they had shown that they were interested and we’re going to let you get your side of the story out as well. And I think, quite frankly, that when there is a war going on, when there’s combat operations going on, that you need to also be on the other side, even if you know there are restrictions, even if it’s difficult. I really don’t understand why you wouldn’t think that, or why anybody would think that that is something that is out of line or that you shouldn’t do, or that you’re broadcasting for the enemy or something. It’s about telling the story of the people who are on the ground feeling what it’s like to be under the bombardment, but it’s also to get a better sense of the way they think. You know, whether you like that way or not, your propensity for miscalculation is a lot smaller when you also listen to the other side, even if you think that they’re saying things for propaganda purposes, but at least it shows you what their vibe is and how they’re feeling and what their mojo is. And I think that that’s something that’s very important for audiences to understand. It’s very important for leaders to understand.
How do we get out of this? How does this resolve?
You know, unless there’s a collapse on the Iran side, which I don’t know if that would ever happen, they seem to be able to withstand this. The system can renew itself for a long time. No matter who you decapitate there, there’s always going to be the next guy. The system is big, it’s multi-layered. I also think that they believe that they found their footing after the initial big decapitating strike that took out the Supreme Leader and some of the top generals and some of the political leaders as well. And some of them were hard-liners but there are still hardliners left, and even a lot of the moderates from the beginning that wanted to negotiate are aligning with the hard-liners.
Right now the person at the head of the controls of the way the military campaign and the way the state security system is run is the head of the supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani. [Larijani was killed in an Israeli airstrike shortly after this conversation, and Pleitgen followed up in part to say this: Ali Larijani was someone who was certainly considered to be more of a conservative. He was very close to the deceased Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and at the same time also very important for diplomacy, especially in the Middle Eastern region. In the run up to the war – when the diplomatic efforts were still going on – he was traveling around the region including Oman and Qatar and received a lot of the briefings on how the negotiations process was going. He was certainly someone who diplomatically was very important for the Islamic Republic, but also for other countries to talk to.That is now gone. At the same time it seems as though the hardliners continuously are winning the day as far as the internal politics are concerned.]
The other thing that many people may not understand is that the Revolutionary Guard and its organizations own a large part of the economy there so they control a lot of the Iranian state. And there’s a lot of different organizations. There’s a lot of different groups. Different companies that all have a stake in [the regime] continuing. So it’s a very difficult thing to penetrate, to evoke change. I’m guessing that at some point there could be a settlement, maybe, or a negotiated solution, because right now there’s so many countries in the world that are reeling from rising oil prices. But I don’t know when, where or how. Obviously the longer it goes, the more leverage the Iranians have, and then maybe the more the settlement favors them.
Before we go I do have to ask about the media front. There’s been a lot of talk, I’m sure in the CNN newsroom too, about what it means to be a war correspondent. Just how different it is, how rare it is, how so many people get their news from TikTok influencers who are just commenting far from a war zone. What does it feel like to still report as sadly so many people who get followers really aren’t there and aren’t aware of what’s happening on the ground?
Yeah. I mean, obviously there’s a lot of concern about the future and this transformation and “are we going to be able to keep doing what we do?” But I have to say that this has been one of those occasions that have really shown why we’re still important, why the big news organizations are still important. Because as you say so much of social media is just commenting on things, and of course they play important roles, but it just can’t compare to people in Lebanon or Iran or anywhere else who can tell you what’s going on. So I think it’s really important to preserve what we do. And I’m glad that, you know, apparently our ratings were really good since this started, so audiences seem to recognize that too. There’s no replacement for having eyes and ears on the ground and the front lines. So all I can say is I hope there’s a model that can preserve that. I know people talk about consolidation [like CNN’s impending acquisition by CBS’ parent company] but I spent five years of my life living in communism. I lived in East Berlin as a child. And I do think that one of the things that’s great about America is that the media is all privately owned. And that’s what journalism needs to be. Because the biggest dangers to free speech and to freedom of the press come from the state. So I just hope the American way of doing journalism as it has been for so many years is something that gets preserved.
Finally, do you see yourself returning to Iran? Is this a Hurt Locker situation?
It takes months to apply for a visa. And right now, I think they have the policy of letting one media in at a time. And so someone else, from CNN or another outlet, is going to be in soon. I was gonna try and go back at some point, if I can. And I’m still working the story right now. I’m still getting in touch with people. I can’t go cold turkey.
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Subscribe Sign Up
