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Join the Declassified Club at the rest is classified.com. What is the secret history of the conflict between Washington and Tehran?

And how did it give us Operation Epic Fury?

Well, welcome to the rest is classified.

I'm David McCloskey.

And I'm Gordon Carrera.

And Gordon, I guess we should say, just because this is a very fluid situation that we are recording this on March the 11th.

The U.S. is at the moment still at war with Iran and has been engaged in a war with Iran for a little over a week now.

Along with Israel, of course, the U.S. began striking Iran on the 28th of February,

killing Iran's supreme leader.

We did a live stream the next day to talk about events as they unfolded.

I did a little kind of mini episode with CNN's Clarissa Ward looking at some of the news that the CIA and Mossad might potentially be arming the Kurds. But I think Gordon, with the war

ongoing, we wanted to kind of step back and examine some of the secret history of how we got here in the first place.

That's right, because history is so important.

The rationale for why this war is taking place has been, it's fair to say, a bit all over the place.

Different motivations have been expressed.

But I think at the heart of them has been this

history of antagonism between particularly the US and Iran. So what is that history? How did we

get here? We thought we'd pull it together across two episodes because really a lot of that

history revolves the things we talk about and have talked about in terms of the secret world and the

world of clandestine operations and spies.

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