By Jim Muir, correspondent, Tehran, 1 June 2004

When I set up shop in Tehran at the end of 1999 – the Beeb’s first resident presence since its expulsion 20-odd years earlier – I thought there was a fair chance I would end up getting chucked out (or worse) at some stage or other.

I also had an educated hunch there would be an earthquake on my watch.

Iran is riddled with fault lines and there are tremors practically every day somewhere or other. A major one was overdue.

So one of the first things I did was to buy a sturdy, 4x4 Nissan Patrol into which I thought one day we would throw what we needed, and hare off across the desert to wherever it was.

Bombing down to Bam

Well, I was right about the earthquake. But it happened on Boxing Day last year when I was in Cyprus on a break.

So it was my driver Nader who ended up piling the generator, videophone and other kit into the Patrol and bombing off down to Bam, arriving just in time to meet me off the flight that I’d managed to squeeze on to from Tehran after flying through the night from Larnaca and Dubai.

For the first 24 hours at Bam, the trusty Patrol was home and office for me and my team. Then it became the core of BBC tented city that sprang up around it as reinforcements poured in from all points of the compass, a kind of instant urbanisation that was fascinating to observe.

But I was wrong about getting chucked out. Unless something goes very wrong in the next few weeks, my four and a half years in Iran will have passed off… well, not without incident, but at least we’re still here.

One problem is that it’s hard to know how close to the wind you’re sailing. What goes on behind the official scenes, we simply don’t know.

We’ve broadcast many items I thought would cause trouble – on runaway girls, drug addicts, murdered dissidents, arrested students – without an official squeak of protest.

Ordeal by fruit and tea

The one time I knew I was in trouble was over a piece on BBC World television (widely watched here despite a ban on sat dishes) and online about a fundamentalist militant Sunni group ensconced just inside Iraq on the border with Iran.

I suggested there might just be an Iranian connection, which was widely known and denied by Iranian officials.

This got up the nose of the Revolutionary Guards, who banned me from going into northern Iraq again. I suppose in the old days I would simply have been asked to leave. Instead I was invited to negotiate with some senior RG officials. It was ordeal by fruit, tea and taaarof (elaborate Iranian politesse).

I was let off with a caution.

And so we survived. The closest we’ve come to being closed down was probably for the sins of two visiting BBC teams from London who fell foul of the authorities – one of the hazards of running a BBC bureau in a difficult country.

The February elections closed one political chapter and opened another, so it’s not a bad time to be moving on. But I’m sad to pack up.

I’ve only skimmed the surface of Iran’s richness and diversity. It’s a hard place to work. Competing power centres, nit-picking bureaucracy and tendency towards official paranoia ensure that.

But I’ve met great kindness and great friendship here, and that has made Iran one of the few countries that have really got under my skin.

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