Hey, everybody. It's Tim Miller from the bulwark.

Excited to welcome to the channel. Mark Polymeropolis.

I got that right. I nailed it. A co-host of Eyes on Geopolitics Potty. You retired from the CIA in 2019 after 26 years in the intelligence community. He's an expert on counterterrorism and a bunch of other relevant stuff. He's the author of Clarity and Crisis Leadership Lessons from the CIA. Mark, I wanted to do, I kind of just going to do a little around, around the region with what we got

going on in Iran with you to get us up to speed on the latest. Just right off the top here,

there's an Axios report on Thursday where Trump says that he must be involved in picking Iran's next leader. And so, I don't know,

I assume that in the past, I've heard rumors that the CIA has been involved in coups and in picking

leaders before. I don't know if that was during your era, but how does he see that working,

do you think? Well, nobody really knows that.

I mean, you know, this is such a story of, you know, a military operation, which, you know,

decapitation strikes, the fusion of intelligence with, with targeting, with precision weapons.

I mean, the opening days of the war, now followed by this level of uncertainty and what looks to be terrible, you know, not even post-war,

but planning that's going on right now. And now Trump, you know, he said that there was not regime

change. There is regime change. Now it's, I'm going to choose the next leader, but it still might

not be regime change according to some of the other cabinet officials. And look, there is a, there is a long and some would say shorted past of the CIA be involved in coup plannings. But what you don't have is the president announcing that he is the one who's going to choose the next leader. You know, is it conceivable that, you know, if there was such a covert action plan that you would have identified individuals in Iran who could take over, sure. Would that be presented to the president? Yes. Would he have personal approval? I don't know. Usually he would take the recommendation of the national security staff, you know, the way things normally work as this goes through an interagency process. But the idea that he's going to kind of pick and choose is rather preposterous.

And, you know, I think in the back of his mind, he's thinking of the Venezuela operation in

which we now have put a member of the regime, you know, Rodriguez, who, you know, in power,

nothing has changed.

The regime is still there, you know, the same people who abuse the Venezuelan people.

If he thinks he can do that in Iran, choosing a leader, you know, from a regime who abused the Venezuelan people. If he thinks he can do that in Iran,

choosing a leader from a regime that has the blood of 30,000 Iranians on their hands, this is getting crazy. And so we're really in a level of, I honestly think Trump just kind of, well, we know this. He just says things off the top of his head. We all react to it. Could be true, might not be true, but I don't think they know what they're doing right now.

And that's the biggest worry to me.

I mean, he said, speaking of things that he just says, what's the David From line? There are a lot of secrets, but no mysteries with Trump. He's not exactly, it doesn't exactly keep things close to the best. And at the very beginning of this, he said that they had identified two or three potential people in the Delci Rodriguez mold, but they all got killed. Yeah. And, you know,

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