David McCloskey

Yes.

And you came back two, three hours later.

If you wanted to read everything that had come in, you would have to spend like the rest of your day just getting caught up on the reading because there was just so much stuff there.

that would come in.

And in a situation like this, where the questions that policymakers are asking, because, you know, everything ladders up inside the CIA and inside the U.S.

intelligence community to the production of the president's daily brief, the PDB.

And so the big questions, right, that the analysts are being asked are usually in a fast moving situation like this going to go into a PDB article at some point.

You could be asked anything from

what's going on with this or that military or security unit, you know, all the way up to how stable is the Islamic Republic.

You sort of have to get caught up on that reading all the time.

And so what ends up happening is you're just, you're overloaded, right?

You're absolutely overloaded as an analyst in this situation.

And, you know, the big questions that you're being asked, how long can this government hold on?

That's going to be the big one.

Two, what are the scenarios for how this plays out?

Because a smart policymaker wants to understand or have a sense of, well, are there three or four different versions of the world that come out of this and how might I prepare for each of them, right?

And then I think the third one, which is more of a policy question, sort of gets into this, I don't know, this sort of gray area where how does a CIA analyst respond to a question like this is, what can we do to shape these scenarios?

How might we affect the outcome?

of what's going on in Iran.

And these were the exact questions that we got on Syria.