Gordon Carrera

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So David, as we kind of delve into this story of Iran, and we've looked at Iran in the past on our podcast, we did our first two episodes back on 1953 and the kind of coup organised by MI6 and CIA.

But as we look at the situation now, I guess your experience inside the CIA is particularly relevant here, isn't it, in the kind of analytical understanding of what's going on in a crisis like this?

Yeah.

So I guess in this first episode, we'll look at what David's successors, the people we sometimes call the mini McCloskeys, what will they be up to now?

What kind of questions and demands will we be getting from policymakers?

And then in our second episode, we'll look at how some past scenarios...

whether it's in Iran, 1979, or whether it's the fall of communism or the Arab Spring, how they help us understand how intelligence agencies sometimes struggle to predict this kind of political change.

And then for our club members, we'll also have a kind of bonus episode with Arash Azizi, an Iran expert and commentator who's going to share his perspective.

on where things might be headed so do sign up for the declassified club if you want to hear that so david what are the mini mccloskey's being asked what are they looking at right now maybe we should start with setting up just briefly the current state of play

yeah it's interesting isn't it that it was shopkeepers i think a kind of mobile phone shopping areas in some of the big markets who were the first to close because they were they were just saying we can't do business like this with the problems over imports with the problems over the currency and they're the first ones to kind of go out on the streets but it does reflect that kind of deeper problem for the kind of cost of living with the plummeting currency you're hearing people saying it's hard to get cooking oil the price of chicken is kind of going way up so that

That was the kind of immediate cause, wasn't it?

The economic anxiety at the end of December.

There's a few days where it's not clear what they're going to do and whether they're going to try and maybe offer some concessions.

And then you have this absolutely brutal crackdown, which we saw a few days ago.

I mean, the stories are just terrifying and awful.

of, you know, children being shot in the head, of people going around on motorbikes just kind of spraying the protesters with machine guns, people being hunted down in alleyways.