Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org.

I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll look into a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with uncertain talks in Pakistan to negotiate an exit for a war Trump started

and appears desperate to end before a ceasefire between the US and Israel and Iran expires

on Wednesday, with uncertainty about who is in charge in Iran and a delusional

Trump posting today that, quote, I'm winning a war by a lot in caps, and that, quote,

things are going very well. We will speak with Nader Hashemi, the director of the Al-Aweed Center

for Muslim Christian Understanding

and a professor of Middle East and Islamic politics at the Edmund A. Wall School of Foreign Service

at Georgetown University. A non-resident fellow at Democracy for the Arab World now, he is the

author of The People Reloaded, the Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran's Future,

and Sectarianization, mapping the new politics of the Middle East.

Then we'll examine the CIA's legacy of blowback, particularly in Iran, where, but for the

coup they engineered against a democratically elected government, we would have in Iran today a thriving

secular democratic state in the middle of an unstable region dominated by military thugs and

Islamist religious fanatics. Joining us to discuss a new documentary about the Jewish James Bond,

Peter Sischel, The Last Spy, is Stephen Kinzer,

an award-winning foreign correspondent who served as the New York Times Bureau Chief in Turkey, Germany and Nicaragua,

and as the Boston Globe's Latin American correspondent.

He is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University

and is the author of All the Shars Men, Overthrow and the Brothers, John Foster Dallas, Alan

Dallas and their Secret World War. His latest book is Poisoner-in-Chief, Sydney Goughlieb and

...