David McCloskey

The other comment I'll say, just to close out the parallels with Syria, is I was struck as a...

intelligence analyst the tremendous gap between the truth as reported in the press and what we were seeing in the intelligence picture because I will say if you just read what was going on

in Al Jazeera, the way it was being reported journalistically.

And then you looked at the way the regime was talking about the situation internally.

You looked at the satellite imagery of the protests, things like that.

Sometimes those two pictures overlapped.

A lot of times they were very different.

And so the last kind of final caution for my mini McCloskey experience as an analyst is,

There's a lot of stuff right now that we're not seeing on the outside.

And a lot of truth about what happened, good, bad, ugly, tragic, will come out down the road.

But we have nothing approaching.

a comprehensive picture of what's going on right now.

And the people who have a better picture, you know, they're not going to, they're unfortunately not going to come and talk to us on The Rest is Classified, Gordon, because they're in skiffs somewhere.

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And amid all of this unrest, how do intelligence agencies, how is the CIA looking and examining the crisis in Iran?

I don't think it's hyperbolic to say, Gordon, that this is the most significant internal challenge that the Islamic Republic has ever faced and certainly faced since 1970 died.

I mean, the scale and the intensity of these protests, the crackdown, the level of violence, the death toll, it's uncertain, but it's still rising.

And it looks like it's going to be

the most violence that the regime has meted out against its own people ever.

It's truly an unprecedented situation for the Islamic Republic.