James Bond couldn’t have done it better. Which is why an unconfirmed 007-style story about Iran arresting an American woman with a microphone hidden in her teeth is grabbing headlines.

The report first emerged this week in the state-owned newspaper, Iran, which does not have a history of publishing truth-telling facts when it comes to alleged enemy spies.

Then on Thursday Iran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency, which is tied to the Revolutionary Guard, weighed in with its own unsubstantiated report: “Iranian authorities announced” the detention one week ago of 55-year-old Hal Talayan, it claimed. The story was titled: “Iran arrests US spy.”

“Security forces discovered ‘espionage devices’ such as a microphone implanted in her teeth,” the report claimed of the arrest, which Fars stated took place while the “US woman” tried to enter Iran from Armenia without a visa.

“The detained spy asked the Iranian authorities not to return her to Armenia in fear of her life,” stated Fars.

But then later on Thursday, a state-run television channel offered a contradictory report, which seemed to dismiss the arrested-spy theory altogether.

“The American woman was not able to enter Iran,” the Arabic-language Al-Alam channel reported, according to Agence France-Presse. “She approached the border guards, but as she did not have a visa, she was not authorized to enter Iran. She was sent back to Armenia.”

The confusing stories appeared to weaken the likelihood of another American arrested in Iran and accused of spying. But top Iranian officials have frequently accused the US and some European “enemies” of waging “psychological war” against the Islamic Republic, and are known to have used their own tools of propaganda in reply.

Read the entire story at csmonitor.com