David McCloskey

And then just this Friday,

Again, on Truth Social, he thanks Iranian leaders for calling off mass executions, hangings, which Trump has been very focused on throughout the crisis.

So there's this, I think, massive question kind of hanging over the unrest, which is, at some point, might the U.S.

strike Iran militarily and cripple or attempt to cripple its military security apparatus, the institutions that it's using?

to crack down.

And that's been hanging over this entire thing.

I think it still is, but at this point, it looks a bit like the president was stringing Iranian protesters along.

There was a round in...

2022, following the death of a young Iranian woman named Masa Amiri in state custody, just an absolutely tragic and brutal situation.

There was another set of protests in 2019, following a massive spike in fuel prices.

That round had spread to over 20 cities, led to maybe 2,000 people being killed, hundreds of banks destroyed.

There were also protests in 2009 over the results of Iran's presidential election.

So protest is not uncommon in

in the Iranian context, but the scale and intensity of these protests.

I mean, even I think sources inside US intelligence agencies have said these are significantly more widespread and violent in terms of the crackdown than any of those other rounds of protest.

Well, so inside the CIA, it used to be the case that the operations people and the analytic people were sort of in totally separate organs of the bureaucracy, right?

Different silos, different directorates.

Well, what has happened since about 2015, 2016, very Orwellian phrase, the CIA has been modernized, Gordon.

I would argue you don't ever want to be part of an organization that's being modernized as a general rule of thumb.

But what has happened is that the old kind of Iran operations division and what had been in my day called the Office of Near East and South Asian Analysis, Gordon, it went through many name changes since, got fused together.