David McCloskey

I don't think it's hyperbolic to say, Gordon, that this is the most significant internal challenge that the Islamic Republic has ever faced and certainly faced since 1970 died.

I mean, the scale and the intensity of these protests, the crackdown, the level of violence, the death toll, it's uncertain, but it's still rising.

And it looks like it's going to be

the most violence that the regime has meted out against its own people ever.

It's truly an unprecedented situation for the Islamic Republic.

So those are the big questions we'll be tackling in this two-part series.

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I did have the, I guess, fortune or misfortune, depending on how you look at it, of covering Syria during the kind of early stages of the protest movement, the uprising, and eventually what became a civil war of a bunch of opposition factions against Bashar al-Assad's regime.

And so I was a CIA analyst who was looking at that

uprising, which began in 2011, and obviously morphed into terrible violence that went on for over a decade, and is still going on today.

So I have, I think, a particular perspective on how an intelligence agency is going to react to a fast-moving crisis like this, and what it feels like to sort of

be wrestling with some of these really, really big questions about what's going on in the country that you happen to be following?

Because you think that the Iran, and we'll go much deeper into this, but the Iran analysts are now confronting a series of massive questions about what's coming next and the stability of the regime or lack thereof.

And so how do you make sense of that as an intelligence analyst?