David McCloskey

Well, and I mean, critically, nobody knew the shot was sick.

Right.

I mean, that in that same INR report, and this was the CIA judgment as well.

They said that the shot was in fine health when, in fact, he had lymphatic cancer, which would eventually kill him in 1980.

I mean, and he's a U.S.

ally.

So having missed that is that's pretty bad.

Although a common refrain in the intelligence failure argument is that nobody really knew anything about the opposition or the Persian street, which is obviously just one street.

If you just walk down it, you'll get a sense of the sense of a country of what now is 90 million people.

I think what is interesting is when you look at the State Department reporting,

that was coming out of the embassy in Tehran in 1977 and 1978, there actually is a pretty nuanced view of the Shia opposition to the Shah.

And there's a fascinating cable from, again, the embassy in Tehran written in 1978 that identifies Khomeini as the leader of the revolution and has really insightful commentary on the extent to which

Islam had become deeply embedded in the lives of a significant portion of the Iranian population and how Khomeini was tapping into that.

So you have bits and pieces of really insightful information that are making it into the kind of U.S.

intelligence community.

There's a draft national intelligence estimate that was written in September of 1978

that paints a really gloomy picture of the Shah's chances for survival, allows for the possibility that the Pahlavi dynasty might not last without making significant concessions to the opposition.

And again, points out that Khomeini is the most influential leader of the Shia clergy and wants to establish a theocracy.

But what I find fascinating, and this critique was leveled by a review done

by the political scientist Robert Jervis after it became clear that the intelligence community had missed something was that what seems to have been missing or a piece of the puzzle that was missing in the CIA's analysis of Iran was there wasn't like a pillars framework that was getting examined on a regular basis.