David McCloskey

Well, so inside the CIA, it used to be the case that the operations people and the analytic people were sort of in totally separate organs of the bureaucracy, right?

Different silos, different directorates.

Well, what has happened since about 2015, 2016, very Orwellian phrase, the CIA has been modernized, Gordon.

I would argue you don't ever want to be part of an organization that's being modernized as a general rule of thumb.

But what has happened is that the old kind of Iran operations division and what had been in my day called the Office of Near East and South Asian Analysis, Gordon, it went through many name changes since, got fused together.

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.