Heads up here at the top, there is some brief, strong language in this episode.

There are plenty of people who were not surprised when President Trump released a video early Saturday morning,

announcing that the United States and Israel had launched major combat operations in Iran.

But I have to admit, I was not one of them.

Saturday, I got woken up by a text that read simply, Jesus fucking Christ.

That might have been a lot of people's reaction, honestly.

Shane Harris from over the Atlantic,

he's one of those people who was not surprised,

which is why I wanted to get him on the line as soon as I could.

When I went to bed on Friday night,

a lot of us were anticipating that there might be military action, perhaps

the next evening.

So it happened a little bit earlier than we expected.

But I also had colleagues who were awake.

What were the signs you were seeing?

Well, you had this amazingly big military buildup, first of all, in the Gulf.

I mean, the United States had put more forces in the region than we've seen any time since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003.

We knew that talks were happening between the Iranians and the United States in Geneva,

but they appeared to be going off the rails.

And there was this very interesting interview on a Friday afternoon with the Omani Foreign Minister and Margaret Brennan at CBS, in which it kind of felt like he was throwing a Hail Mary pass to me where he was saying, we're so close, we're so close on these negotiations, we just need more time. And then, you know, my colleagues and I were also just getting winks and nods from people that something felt like it was about to happen. You start, as a reporter, you're talking to people kind of in the system and you start to pick up that something may be about to go.

The scale of it was something that we did not, could not have maybe anticipated as easily.

The scale seems large.

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