Gordon Carrera

You do have people who understand the country and have been there on the ground and can probably feed into that.

But the scale is definitely different, I think, from the Americans in terms of the kind of...

analytic firepower they can then suddenly throw at this question.

So I think, yeah, there's a difference there in scale.

Yeah.

Despite some other tensions at the moment, we should come to that at another point around Greenland and things.

I think there is still on something like Iran.

I think you'd expect there to be a lot of intelligence sharing and a kind of analytic sharing as well.

Yes, that is definitely the case.

You know, when it comes to the Middle East, there's still quite a lot of close cooperation.

So, yeah, let's have a look at how you think the CIA will be assessing the kind of strength and likely survival of the Islamic Republic regime in Iran.

Shall we drill down into those?

I think they're really helpful as a way of kind of analysing the situation.

So I guess the first of those was elite cohesion, which means are the group of people running the country still singing from the same song sheet?

You know, how far are they really aligned with the same objectives and the same genre?

Because I find that one a really interesting one because, you know, this regime came into power in 1979.

And while it's a kind of theocracy,

It's also had free elections, we should say, or semi-free elections.

So you've seen kind of periods of reformists and hardliners in power, you know, based on who's done better in those elections.

You've seen a kind of ebb and flow between those two.