David McCloskey

And so you have...

I would say probably hundreds of people.

I mean, the actual number, I don't know, and it's certainly classified.

Hundreds and hundreds of people who are spending all day inside what is now called the Near East Mission Center working on Iran, right?

Thinking about nothing other than Iran.

Because Iran is a big country, it's a big account, it's important to the U.S.,

you have analysts inside NEMEC, as it's called, that Near East Mission Center, who have very finely sliced portfolios on Iran.

So it's not like there's five or 10 people doing this.

There's probably a team of 10, 15 people who are doing nothing other than looking at Iran's economy.

There's an entire team of people who are looking at Iran's military.

There's an entire team of people who look at

Iran's leadership structure and put together the sort of bios and what they call leadership profiles of all of the major figures inside the Iranian regime.

So there's a massive community of people who are spending all of their time writing stuff and briefing inside the intelligence community, inside the sort of national security bureaucracy on Iran.

I think you'd have to say that from a collection standpoint, Gordon, every source that the CIA has globally

That's Iranian or has connections to Iran in any way is being tasked with providing insight on what's going on.

There's a database that we used.

It was called Trident when I was inside and it pulled everything in, right?

So if you had different kind of searches set up that would pull in all of the signals intelligence, all of the human, all of the state reporting, links to the imagery reports, the satellite, the overhead stuff.

And then the press in a situation like this, oftentimes journalists, the wire reports that are on the ground or have connections to people who are inside are very, very valuable.

And what I would say just sort of anecdotally from my time working on Syria and in particular in those first few weeks of the unrest in March of 2011, if you left your desk for a briefing and you went downtown, let's say you went down to the NSC, you know, at the White House.