David McCloskey

So those are the big questions we'll be tackling in this two-part series.

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I did have the, I guess, fortune or misfortune, depending on how you look at it, of covering Syria during the kind of early stages of the protest movement, the uprising, and eventually what became a civil war of a bunch of opposition factions against Bashar al-Assad's regime.

And so I was a CIA analyst who was looking at that

uprising, which began in 2011, and obviously morphed into terrible violence that went on for over a decade, and is still going on today.

So I have, I think, a particular perspective on how an intelligence agency is going to react to a fast-moving crisis like this, and what it feels like to sort of

be wrestling with some of these really, really big questions about what's going on in the country that you happen to be following?

Because you think that the Iran, and we'll go much deeper into this, but the Iran analysts are now confronting a series of massive questions about what's coming next and the stability of the regime or lack thereof.

And so how do you make sense of that as an intelligence analyst?

My analytic progeny all over the intelligence community.

Protests began in late December.

They began in two major markets in downtown Tehran.

And the very, as is quite common, as we'll see in these types of situations, the protests begin not from a desire for, or a stated desire for regime change or revolution, but

but because of economic pressures and stressors, right?