David McCloskey

That's a really important piece to this puzzle.

You don't have it.

And then, I mean, the other criticism that I think it's valid, but I also find it to be kind of amusing is

is that it's an intelligence failure, Iran's 79, because the CIA did not anticipate the course of events.

That makes me smile because we talked about this a bit and teed it up in the first episode.

Is that even possible in revolutionary situations?

Is it even possible to anticipate

the course of events.

And I think maybe there, Gordon, before we get to our next lens for evaluating Iran, which will be 1989 and the kind of revolutions across Central and Eastern Europe, maybe we take a break.

When we come back, we'll see how looking into the past can help us understand what might happen next in Iran.

Well, welcome back.

We are continuing our journey into understanding how intelligence agencies look at these kind of highly dynamic revolutionary situations.

And next up is 1989, Gordon, which you should lead this section, Gordon, because I was a young thing.

You had long hair.

It wasn't grey back then.

It's not even the difficulty of predicting

these kind of dynamics, but just the impossibility of it.

I mean, because Timur Karan has this political scientist that we've been quoting frequently who's done this great work on kind of revolutions and revolutionary dynamics.

I mean, he's got this great line he was writing about 1989 where he says, pinpointing the specific event that pushed the bandwagon over the hill is akin to identifying the cough responsible for a flu epidemic.

You cannot predict these situations.