U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says Iran has rejected his offer made July 25 to go to Tehran to address the Iranian people.

In a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg Television, Pompeo had said, “I’d like a chance to go [to Tehran], not do propaganda but speak the truth to the Iranian people about what it is their leadership has done and how it has harmed Iran”.

He added that Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is often able to communicate with the American people during trips to New York to visit the United Nations.

But in a tweet on July 29 the Secretary of State said “I recently offered to travel to Tehran and speak directly to the Iranian people. The regime hasn’t accepted my offer”.

In another tweet Pompeo said, “We aren’t afraid of @JZarif coming to America where he enjoys the right to speak freely. Are the facts of the @khamenei_ir regime so bad he cannot let me do the same thing in Tehran? What if his people heard the truth, unfiltered, unabridged?"

In an apparent response to Pompeo’s offer to go to Tehran, the spokesman of president Hassan Rouhani’s government said on July 28, that Iran can send a reporter to the U.S. to interview the Secretary of State. Apparently, Pompeo took that as a rejection of his offer.