David McCloskey

There's a database that we used.

It was called Trident when I was inside and it pulled everything in, right?

So if you had different kind of searches set up that would pull in all of the signals intelligence, all of the human, all of the state reporting, links to the imagery reports, the satellite, the overhead stuff.

And then the press in a situation like this, oftentimes journalists, the wire reports that are on the ground or have connections to people who are inside are very, very valuable.

And what I would say just sort of anecdotally from my time working on Syria and in particular in those first few weeks of the unrest in March of 2011, if you left your desk for a briefing and you went downtown, let's say you went down to the NSC, you know, at the White House.

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?