Gordon Carrera

Protests in Iran, a violent crackdown.

Is the country on the verge of a revolution?

Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified.

I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McCloskey.

And we are going to be looking at Iran this week.

It's another interruption to our regularly scheduled programming.

If you were waiting for that series on Kim Philby, Britain's greatest traitor that we've been promising, it will come soon.

But we just felt that the kind of urgency of events in Iran required us to have a look at it because, I mean, those protests and the crackdown that we've seen have been a real challenge, haven't they, to the Islamic regime, David?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And even though we're recording this on Sunday, the 18th of January, things of course could change in the coming days.

It looks like for the moment, the repression has managed to stop those protests.

But I think one of the questions we want to look at is what does that mean for the long term stability for the regime and particularly how will intelligence agencies be trying to understand that?

And this question about how good, how effective agencies like the CIA, MI6, others are at predicting stability.

revolutions, uprising, understanding when or not they're actually going to be able to topple a regime.

And I think that's where we can really apply our rest is classified lens to this situation and try and understand how people might predict what happens next.

This episode is sponsored by HP.

Most people are not counter-espionage experts, but that won't stop them getting targeted by cyber criminals seeking to extract their secrets.

No more stressing about dodgy emails or unexplained pop-ups.