Tehran (AFP)
Honed by the moderates but praised by the ultraconservatives, the Iranian spy series "Gando", which mixes fact and fiction, is back on state television after several months of hiatus without explanation.
The broadcast of the second season resumed in July, just over a month after ultra-conservative Ebrahim Raïssi won the presidential election.
At the rate of five weekly episodes of 45 minutes for a little over seven weeks, the series, to the glory of the Guardians of the Revolution, the Iranian ideological army, multiplies the attacks and the innuendos against the government of the moderate Hassan Rohani, predecessor by M. Raïssi.
The former president was the architect of a policy of openness that allowed in 2015 the conclusion of the international agreement on Iranian nuclear power, but he saw this diplomatic success torpedoed from 2018 by the former US President Donald Trump and, at home, the ultraconservatives.
In March, a heated controversy erupted from the sixth episode of "Gando", where it was about a spy within the Iranian nuclear negotiation team, and the broadcast of the soap opera was interrupted, without cause, after the thirteenth.
The "gando" is a species of Iranian crocodile.
By metaphor, the title of the series designates the hero, Mohammad, agent of the Guardians' counter-espionage, ambushed like this saurian watching for prey.
The series shows him spinning with his colleagues any foreign spy, especially if he is from British MI6, as soon as he arrives on Iranian territory.
It also portrays the previous government, and in particular the diplomatic corps, as so many mediocre, pusillanimous, or corrupt characters.
- Two convictions -
At the end of August, the Judicial Authority announced the conviction of two people, one for "corruption", the other for "espionage", after verification of certain "revelations" of the series.
"Other files [were] under review," she said.
A photo provided on August 6, 2019 by the Iranian presidency shows then-President Hassan Rouhani (D) and his foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during a meeting with officials at the Foreign Ministry in Tehran HO Iranian Presidency / AFP / Archives
"Gando" has been seen by several commentators in Iran as part of a maneuver to destabilize the Rohani government.
After the series' interruption in the spring, some Iranian media had mentioned the existence of a letter from the government to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to denounce the damage caused by the series to the action of the executive.
Several ultra-conservative personalities accused the Rouhani government of being behind the shutdown of the series, which the government denied.
Ridiculed from the first season, broadcast in 2019, Mohammad Javad Zarif, Minister of Foreign Affairs to Mr. Rohani, had qualified in the spring "Gando" as "a lie from beginning to end" having seriously harmed him personally.
The ultraconservative newspaper Kayhan applauded him in August for the "enlightening revelations" of "Gando", in particular on the relations of "high officials" with foreign chancelleries, "in particular the British embassy".
If the United States and Israel appear as the two great enemies of the Islamic Republic, they, unlike London, do not have an embassy in Tehran.
The second season opens with a scene in a desert location insinuating that French agents have delivered Rouhollah Zam, an Iranian opponent in exile to Tehran, whose arrest the Guardians had announced in 2019. Zam, who lived in France for several years, was hanged in December 2020.
- British spy -
The scenario continues on the hunt for the villain of the series, Charlotte, a British spy acting in Tehran under diplomatic cover.
As in American series of the genre, the Guardians' counterintelligence masters direct their operations from a large room equipped with state-of-the-art screens.
For the Fars agency, known to be close to the ultraconservatives, Charlotte plays Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian-British researcher convicted of spying for Israel's benefit and released in 2020 after two years of detention as part of a prisoner exchange with three Iranians linked to a planned bombing in Bangkok.
A photo provided by the Iranian presidency on September 22, 2019 shows members of the Revolutionary Guards, the regime's elite army, during a parade in Tehran - Iranian Presidency / AFP / Archives
The series does not hesitate to break a taboo.
In an Islamic Republic where the veil is compulsory for all women in public and where censorship requires actresses to be veiled in all circumstances, even for scenes where, in reality, they would not be, Charlotte, played by an actress of the Armenian Christian minority, Béaïna Mahmoudi, appears bareheaded in several interior scenes.
As season 2 draws to a close, there is already talk of a third part, around the nuclear negotiations.
"Anyway, I really like season 2 of Gando ..." the new British ambassador, Simon Shercliff, wrote on August 28 in a cryptic message, in Persian, on his Twitter account.
"If he appreciates it, we suggest that the BBC broadcast it", reacted Sunday Abdollali Ali-Asgari, the president of Iranian public broadcasting.
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