Chapter 1: What triggered the recent protests in Iran?
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Protests in Iran, a violent crackdown. Is the country on the verge of a revolution?
And amid all of this unrest, how do intelligence agencies, how is the CIA looking and examining the crisis in Iran?
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.
I don't think it's hyperbolic to say, Gordon, that this is the most significant internal challenge that the Islamic Republic has ever faced and certainly faced since 1970 died. I mean, the scale and the intensity of these protests, the crackdown, the level of violence, the death toll, it's uncertain, but it's still rising. And it looks like it's going to be
the most violence that the regime has meted out against its own people ever. It's truly an unprecedented situation for the Islamic Republic.
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.
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Chapter 2: Is Iran on the brink of a revolution?
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Chapter 3: How are intelligence agencies monitoring the Iranian crisis?
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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?
I did have the, I guess, fortune or misfortune, depending on how you look at it, of covering Syria during the kind of early stages of the protest movement, the uprising, and eventually what became a civil war of a bunch of opposition factions against Bashar al-Assad's regime. And so I was a CIA analyst who was looking at that
uprising, which began in 2011, and obviously morphed into terrible violence that went on for over a decade, and is still going on today. So I have, I think, a particular perspective on how an intelligence agency is going to react to a fast-moving crisis like this, and what it feels like to sort of
be wrestling with some of these really, really big questions about what's going on in the country that you happen to be following? Because you think that the Iran, and we'll go much deeper into this, but the Iran analysts are now confronting a series of massive questions about what's coming next and the stability of the regime or lack thereof.
And so how do you make sense of that as an intelligence analyst?
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?
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Chapter 4: What does the violent crackdown on protests signify for the regime?
And of course, as the momentum builds, again, also typical in these situations, the demands start to shift from purely economic to more political. That becomes much more acute because the Iranian regime cracks down and cracks down brutally on the protests.
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. And the truth is, we don't know the death toll. I think no one knows the death toll. I mean, you've seen low estimates in the low thousands. Some estimates, you know, go up to 20,000.
Of course, the reality is, we just don't know.
Compounding the uncertainty is... President Trump has been, I think, a bit of a wild card, it's fair to say. He's certainly raised the stakes of the situation. I think, quite honestly, I think he has given Iranians who went out to protest false hope about what the US's intentions really were.
Because on the 2nd of January, Trump writes on his Truth Social account, if Iran violently kills peaceful protesters... the U.S. will, quote, come to their rescue. Right. Which is a pretty clear statement. Then on the 13th, Trump calls off any meetings with Iranian officials and promises without specifying that help is on the way. And then just this Friday,
Again, on Truth Social, he thanks Iranian leaders for calling off mass executions, hangings, which Trump has been very focused on throughout the crisis. So there's this, I think, massive question kind of hanging over the unrest, which is, at some point, might the U.S. strike Iran militarily and cripple or attempt to cripple its military security apparatus, the institutions that it's using?
to crack down. And that's been hanging over this entire thing. I think it still is, but at this point, it looks a bit like the president was stringing Iranian protesters along.
One of the challenges in understanding what's gone on is that the Iranian authorities have shut down the internet, international phone lines. They've put a blackout on the country. It's very interesting in this way. I mean, at the moment, there's some signs that internet connectivity are being restored a little bit, but pretty much it's still... shut down.
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Chapter 5: What challenges do intelligence analysts face in predicting unrest?
So protest is not uncommon in in the Iranian context, but the scale and intensity of these protests. I mean, even I think sources inside US intelligence agencies have said these are significantly more widespread and violent in terms of the crackdown than any of those other rounds of protest.
So that's the situation as far as we do know at this point. Let's talk a bit now about what might be going on within the CIA, within the analytical arm, the mini McCloskeys, we call them. Who will be working on it and what will they be doing?
Well, so inside the CIA, it used to be the case that the operations people and the analytic people were sort of in totally separate organs of the bureaucracy, right? Different silos, different directorates. Well, what has happened since about 2015, 2016, very Orwellian phrase, the CIA has been modernized, Gordon.
I would argue you don't ever want to be part of an organization that's being modernized as a general rule of thumb. But what has happened is that the old kind of Iran operations division and what had been in my day called the Office of Near East and South Asian Analysis, Gordon, it went through many name changes since, got fused together. And so you have...
I would say probably hundreds of people. I mean, the actual number, I don't know, and it's certainly classified. Hundreds and hundreds of people who are spending all day inside what is now called the Near East Mission Center working on Iran, right? Thinking about nothing other than Iran. Because Iran is a big country, it's a big account, it's important to the U.S.,
you have analysts inside NEMEC, as it's called, that Near East Mission Center, who have very finely sliced portfolios on Iran. So it's not like there's five or 10 people doing this. There's probably a team of 10, 15 people who are doing nothing other than looking at Iran's economy. There's an entire team of people who are looking at Iran's military. There's an entire team of people who look at
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Chapter 6: What are the pillars of regime stability in Iran?
Iran's leadership structure and put together the sort of bios and what they call leadership profiles of all of the major figures inside the Iranian regime. So there's a massive community of people who are spending all of their time writing stuff and briefing inside the intelligence community, inside the sort of national security bureaucracy on Iran.
I think you'd have to say that from a collection standpoint, Gordon, every source that the CIA has globally That's Iranian or has connections to Iran in any way is being tasked with providing insight on what's going on.
then you're going to have um you've got the other agencies in the us you've got kind of signals intercept communications intercept nsa you're going to have foreign partners aren't you who are going to be feeding stuff in neighboring countries i guess middle east partners the brits you know unlike the americans do have an embassy in tehran but it's been evacuated it's been moved out in the last couple of weeks when things looked bad but the brits do have some understanding of what's going on on the ground but when i spoke to someone about it in the last few days they were saying a lot of what people will be doing will be because of the shutdown
of internet connectivity is talking to people who are coming out over the borders, you know, at some of those border crossing points. And those border crossing points will be the kind of hubs where people are saying, what's going on? You know, what are you hearing? What's happening?
Because that might be one of the only ways of actually kind of getting the information in and out with that shutdown. But I guess it's about pulling all that together if you're inside the CIA's analytic division to try and kind of come to a truest possible understanding of what's actually going on on the ground.
There's a database that we used. It was called Trident when I was inside and it pulled everything in, right? So if you had different kind of searches set up that would pull in all of the signals intelligence, all of the human, all of the state reporting, links to the imagery reports, the satellite, the overhead stuff.
And then the press in a situation like this, oftentimes journalists, the wire reports that are on the ground or have connections to people who are inside are very, very valuable.
And what I would say just sort of anecdotally from my time working on Syria and in particular in those first few weeks of the unrest in March of 2011, if you left your desk for a briefing and you went downtown, let's say you went down to the NSC, you know, at the White House.
The NSC, that's the National Security Council where policymakers meet.
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Chapter 7: How do socio-economic factors affect the Iranian regime's stability?
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.
The way that we did this at the agency was to look at a regime like Iran's or Syria's, which I was working on, through a lens of pillars of stability. The things that support it, that give it power and authority, and that keep it in power. And there's different ways you can... describe these things, but there's essentially six. There's elite cohesion.
There's loyal and effective military and security services. A fragmented, divided, weak, whatever you want to call it, opposition. There's a socioeconomic contract of some sort with the people. There's a legit, I guess we'd call it a legitimacy narrative. There's something that gives the regime the ability to claim that it's the rightful sort of power structure or governing system of a country.
And then the last one is kind of the foreign environment, foreign backers, How hostile or non-hostile is the environment around you regionally and internationally? Does it support your state or is it working against it? And those are the things that the analysts are looking at right now to understand, are these things weakening or are they working for the regime?
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.
And I mean, I visited Iran a bit in the early 2000s at a time when the reformists had the upper hand, where there was more kind of openness. I mean, I could get a visa, which said something at the time. You've seen this kind of ebb and flow between the two sides.
But it feels like something has changed, I think, in the last few weeks because it's felt like it's suddenly kind of spinning out of control. You've had a reformist, actually a more reformist president at the moment who's in power, but who's ended up instituting an absolutely brutally repressive crackdown. So there's maybe cohesion, but also a kind of instability there, do you think?
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Chapter 8: Can a regime survive despite losing legitimacy?
Yeah. And you have to think about, okay, you've got a certain number of units that you probably know if you're the Supreme Leader or the people around him, without a shadow of a doubt, will do the things that you need them to do, right? Yeah. Where do you allocate those units? And how do you make sure that you don't put units...
like low-level riot police or besiege who might flee in the face of protesters or armed resistance or not shoot. You end up with, even at the bottom, these kind of cracks in your security apparatus that if word gets out, can dramatically change the way that the protesters themselves view the sort of resolve of the regime.
Yeah, so just to maybe finish off that point about security forces, I guess what we're saying here is they were relatively effective in suppressing the demonstrations and the protests, but there might be some signs of cracks in terms of where people were deployed, and I think that's Perhaps we'd agree something to watch. So the next one was opposition. You know, how coherent is the opposition?
This is an interesting one, isn't it? Because on the one hand, I think what struck me about the protests was they started with the bizarres as we talk, the merchants, the businessmen. This wasn't just kind of liberal students and reformers. It was across the country. It wasn't just Tehran.
It was a wide grouping of people and that was quite challenging, but there wasn't a single organised opposition voice in the way that might make it more likely to be able to overthrow a regime. It wasn't quite coherent in that way, was it?
No. The way you could probably categorize the Iranian opposition at this point is that there's probably a broadly shared consensus on kind of the reasons for outrage, right? Everything from, as we discussed, the economic situation all the way up to... I guess, completely authoritarian politics, right? That sort of define the state.
And frankly, sense of like, you have a government that's deciding matters of personal intimacy, how people dress, how they wear their hair, things that many in this opposition find, you know, as I do, deeply, deeply offensive. But what we don't see is is a level of kind of coordination and cohesion among the opposition, right?
If you sort of look at the elite cohesion of the regime, and then you look at the opposition, it's kind of night and day.
You've got the son of the former Shah, Reza Pahlavi, as being a kind of figurehead, but I'm slightly unconvinced that he really has the width and the depth of support, other than as maybe a transitional figure, to really... coalesce people around a single point which could challenge the regime.
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