David McCloskey

Exactly.

And that's the critical piece here.

And I just don't see it yet.

So I hope this thing changes and the Iranian people get something better out of the future than they've gotten out of the recent past with this government.

But I think as an analyst, you have to be really careful that you don't transpose your own desires onto the analysis.

The other comment I'll say, just to close out the parallels with Syria, is I was struck as a...

intelligence analyst the tremendous gap between the truth as reported in the press and what we were seeing in the intelligence picture because I will say if you just read what was going on

in Al Jazeera, the way it was being reported journalistically.

And then you looked at the way the regime was talking about the situation internally.

You looked at the satellite imagery of the protests, things like that.

Sometimes those two pictures overlapped.

A lot of times they were very different.

And so the last kind of final caution for my mini McCloskey experience as an analyst is,

There's a lot of stuff right now that we're not seeing on the outside.

And a lot of truth about what happened, good, bad, ugly, tragic, will come out down the road.

But we have nothing approaching.

a comprehensive picture of what's going on right now.

And the people who have a better picture, you know, they're not going to, they're unfortunately not going to come and talk to us on The Rest is Classified, Gordon, because they're in skiffs somewhere.

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And amid all of this unrest, how do intelligence agencies, how is the CIA looking and examining the crisis in Iran?