Gordon Carrera

Protests in Iran and a violent crackdown.

But can the regime survive?

And I'm Gordon Carrera, and welcome to this second episode where we're looking at Iran through the lens of how intelligence agencies might understand it.

David, of course, a former CIA analyst looking at the Middle East.

And we've been trying in the first episode to understand

what the pillars are for regime stability, how you might assess whether a country like Iran was stable or was on the brink of change.

We ended really with an exploration of some of the challenges that intelligence analysts might face in doing that.

Now, in this episode, I think we're going to look at some of the historical examples, some of the context for that, of when intelligence agencies have tried to understand

whether a revolution, whether an uprising might be about to take place and whether it might lead to a change of regime and then apply that to the Iran of today.

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So David, let's go back, I guess, to Iran itself, because the revolution which brought this regime to power in 1979 is very interesting in itself as a case of a popular uprising and intelligence agencies pretty much failing to predict it, I think.

Well, you're going to try and defend the CIA.

It was more than a minute.