What's your familiarity with Iran?

Every CIA officer has a handful of countries that they have to understand on a fundamental level, right?

China is one of those countries. Iran's one of those countries. North Korea is one of those countries. Saudi Arabia is one of those countries. Turkey is one of those countries. Russia is one of those countries. So when it comes to the fundamentals of Iran, I'm there. But what an Iran

specialist understands far exceeds my knowledge. For years, decades, maybe since I was a child

with the hostage crisis forward, it was always my understanding that that was the one country

that was the most significant, other than maybe

Russia and China, but the next country that maybe our relations were poor and the nuclear

risk was high and that they were funding, constantly funding things around the globe against

us. And then we fly over there and we drop a bunker buster bomb on their nuclear enrichment factory.

One of them.

One of them.

Why was there no retaliation to that?

What in the, like, I couldn't believe we did it because it was counter to everything that I ever believed that the way that we wanted to handle that situation, but yet we just did it. And I'm, I'm interested if there's any insight you have around why we did it and whether that, what that is done with our position with that country. Remember how I was telling you espionage is a franchise?

Everybody does it?

Yeah.

One of the key elements of espionage is covert action, meaning you take action that nobody can see.

What we did when we dropped those deep penetrating bombs on the Natanz factory, the weapons,

nuclear enrichment factory, we did not take covert action.

We took overt action.

Right.

When you don't see response from overt action, it's virtually guaranteed that there is covert action as the response.

Okay.

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