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Join the declassified club at the rest is classified.com. Protest 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 Filby, 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?

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,

...