Iran's hit spy thriller is first shot in election culture war

The second season starts with a dramatic recreation of the arrest of dissident Iranian journalist Ruhollah Zam, who was lured to northern Iraq in an IRGC sting operation before being kidnapped and transported across the border to Iran, where he was eventually executed. “They’ve taken a lot of actual things happening inside the country and they’ve woven in this series of stories that depict them in a good light and show why it was good for them to make these controversial actions,” said Holly Dagres, an Iran specialist at the Atlantic Council. But it was scenes in which a minister unwittingly hires MI6 spies who then undermine Iran’s nuclear talks with world powers that drew condemnation from Iranian civilian officials, who say it incorrectly portrayed them as overwhelmed by Western intelligence agencies. The moderate leader most threatened by the show, apparently, was Iran’s foreign minister, the Western-educated Mohammad Javad Zarif, who is widely tipped as a potential presidential candidate. And while he denied this appearance was ahead of a presidential bid, analysts like Ms Dagres asked why else would the Iranian leader stay up two hours past his stated 10pm bedtime chatting about Iran’s 25-year strategic accord with China, if not to advance his political aspirations?