David McCloskey

You actually can't.

Because that fear changing size point is, again, it's that shift.

It's that incredible shift of the private view becoming the public view.

And yeah, if the East Germans kill hundreds of people in Leipzig, maybe that private view stays private.

Well, I guess in some ways, I mean, you know, there are a couple examples from the Cold War of the Soviet Union and communist forces

crushing uprisings brutally and quickly.

Hungary in 56 and then in Prague in 68.

And I think in both cases, similar dynamics where everybody was surprised that it happened, but then the extreme brutality of the response ensured that fear didn't switch sides and prevented that revolutionary bandwagon.

Gordon, I guess that brings us to the third lens for looking at how an intelligence agency deals with and analyzes unrest, which is near and dear to my heart, which is the Arab Spring of 2011.

It did, yeah.

And I think there were many points here where this revolutionary bandwagon thing, it really resonates with me because you saw it not only spreading inside countries, but across countries throughout the Arab world.

And it was absolutely surprising.

Nobody had predicted that it would happen kind of to this broader point on...

You don't see these things coming.

By definition, they're unpredictable and you can't really forecast them.

You can look and we had been, you know, as Middle East analysts, like we all had an understanding of the deep problems that most of these governments had and the fact that if you had gone through, as we had actually, we had done a pillars exercise because by this point in the CIA era,

basically every country team was doing something similar and looking at whatever authoritarian regime they were covering and saying, well, what are the pillars of stability here?

And where are they at?

And do we see signposts of any of these things weakening?

So we had done that exercise on Syria, actually, I think maybe six to 12 months prior to the protests breaking out.