David McCloskey

is secretly ill, right?

He has cancer.

And he's isolated, increasingly isolated.

He's sick.

And he flees Iran in January of 1979.

Khomeini returns from exile.

And the government essentially collapses shortly thereafter.

The military kind of sits on the sidelines.

And there is, in the

I guess, competition between the various revolutionary factions and opposition factions, which culminates in the establishment of the Islamic Republic after a national referendum.

How did I do?

That was more than a minute.

It felt like we had to give some context here for how this happened.

It didn't age well.

It didn't age well.

Well, allow me a moment to smear another intelligence agency in the United States, because at least I want to direct your ire elsewhere, Gordon, because I don't want you to go after the CIA.

So this was another report from the State Department's intelligence arm called INR, which wrote in 1977, Iran is likely to remain stable under the Shah's leadership over the next several years.

The prospects are good that Iran will have relatively clear sailing until at least the mid-1980s.

So it's not it wasn't just the CIA.

No, that's true.