The Rest Is Classified - 132. What's Next For Iran?

Episode Date: March 1, 2026

Israel and the US have launched missiles at Iran and killed Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But what is actually happening on the ground? How did we get here? And what happens next?  Listen as David and Gordon shared the intelligence perspective on the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, live on Sunday 1 March. ------------------- Later today, we will also be sending out a round up with perspectives from across our shows on the situation in Iran. You'll hear from Gordon, Alastair and Rory from The Rest Is Politics, and Katty and Anthony from The Rest Is Politics: US. Becki, our producer, currently in Jordan, will also share her perspective. You can receive these updates by signing up for our newsletter, here: https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign-up ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ ⁠⁠https://nordvpn.com/restisclassified⁠⁠ Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee ------------------- Email: [e-mail] Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified Social Producer: Emma Jackson Producer: Becki Hills + Alice Horrell Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Well, hello everybody and welcome to this. Rest is Classified Live Stream, where me, Gordon Carrera and Dave McClure. Oscar, we're going to look at the dramatic events in Iran over the last day or two. Thanks to everyone who's joining us live, and some of you, I know, will be listening to us later when this goes up on the podcast feed. There's a lot going on, isn't there, David? And we thought it's time we had a look at it. There is, Gordon. There is.

And I think you and I, like probably many of our listeners, have been spending the last day or so trying to sort through what in the world is actually going on, what we can make sense of what. you know, what sort of questions remain unanswerable. And I think with all that noise out there, we wanted to put out a live stream on this to kind of give our, I guess you could say, rest as classified lens on the situation, give our initial take with all the caveats that it's early days, you know, in what looks to be, you know, a much more prolonged U.S. and Israeli assault on Iran and try to help, I guess, maybe frame some of the big questions, or, for how listeners should be thinking about what is going on right now and what might come next. That's right. We've got four big exam questions. We're going to try and answer.

First of all, just thank you to all those are listening. I can see in the comments. We've got people from Melbourne, from Birmingham, from Prague, from New Hampshire, from Greenwich, and even from Clappen and Belfast, Scotland, lots of places. So thank you. And please do send in your questions. But we've got four questions that we thought we'd use to frame this. One is what's actually going on right now. You know, what do we know? What's the latest on the intelligence side? Two, how did we get here?

What led us here? Three, why is this happening? What's the motivation behind these attacks? And four, what's going to happen next? We'll try and kind of whizz through those, but give our take on it. So should we start with the latest what's going on right now? And I guess the top line is Saturday morning, it started, started mid morning. come back to why that's interesting and significant, with strikes, which are, I think, much bigger

than many expected. People thought there might be a kind of initial strike to push Iran back to the negotiating table, but it was something much more significant and directed at the leadership, wasn't it, David? Well, that's right. And I think, you know, we'll talk about how the intelligence, it does seem, drove the timing of the strikes, because what has now, I think, become clear in the 24 hours since this, this point. barrage began is that the sort of the entire thing kicked off because the U.S. and the Israelis had intelligence on both the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei's location at a particular time yesterday, Saturday morning. And also, it seems the Israelis had a bunch of sort of locational

information on, you know, maybe a dozen or more senior Iranian officials who were going to be having a meeting at a location very close to where Ali Hamine was located. And, you know, the timing, we talk about that. It's a bit peculiar because it happened, I think, mid-morning Iran time, like around 930 or 10 a.m. So broad daylight, which is a bit unusual for these kind of strikes. And again, was driven by the fact that this was kind of use-it-or-lose-it information that both the U.S. and the Israelis had.

And there's some great reporting that has come out, I think, from the New York Times, Gordon, that shows or suggests that it was actually CIA information on the Supreme Leader's location that was passed to the Israelis. The Israelis had a bunch of information on other senior Iranian officials, including the head of the IRGC, the defense minister, a host of others. And the Israelis paired all of that together and struck these compounds. mid-boarding yesterday, which set the whole thing off. Yeah, that's right.

So it was a window of opportunity because they had this intelligence. We'll come back to what it might have been, which gave them just enough advance warning of both where the Supreme Leader would be and other senior officials to make it worth pulling everything forward, it sounds like, to carry out this strike. Now, let's just dig down a little bit into what that intelligence might have been, because it does seem to have come from the CIA, according to these reports have been given to the Israelis.

I mean, it is interesting because the Supreme Leader knew he was a target. He'd have been taking precautions. He might not have thought he'd get hit mid-morning. Maybe that was part of his mistake. It's interesting. Donald Trump has actually said in one of his statements, he was unable to avoid our intelligence and highly sophisticated tracking systems. Now, that's a kind of a hint, perhaps, of what we're talking about.

But what do we think it might have been? Because I know when Israel took out some of the scientists last summer in that 12-day war, they had amazingly good intelligence on the location of some of those individuals, which they built up over time. Yeah. You know, this is the question that I think we all want the answer to, and we're very unlikely to get really satisfying, granular information on here in the coming days, because it's very, obviously.

It's very, it's very classified, Gordon, how this happened. And I think, you know, it's, it is interesting, though, to kind of, if you look back with a lens on how, you know, what do we know about the way these sorts of operations have been enabled in the past, right? And what has kind of trickled out over the past four or five years that has given us some kind of, I guess, information about how the Israelis, how the Israelis, how the. US have sort of penetrated the upper echelons of Iran's leadership. And it's a pretty fascinating, you know, set of case studies. And we've done some of them on the pod, haven't we? When we talked about, you know, the assassination of the former head of Iran's nuclear program, Mosulhryza Day, you know, we have kind of in some of our Iran episodes talked about

the sort of, I am this incredible heist of nuclear information where the Israelis actually broke into an industrial warehouse in South Tehran and carded information on the new program out of the country. But what I find, it is striking to me that it took, and again, this is not a perfect comparison, but it took eight or so months, I think, Gordon, after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 to bind Saddam Hussein in his spider hole. And Khomeini is killed in, you know, the opening salvo of this conflict, right? So again, it's not a perfect comparison, but it gives you some sense of just how good the U.S. and its partners have gotten at this kind of manhunting tactical. How do you go find someone and kill that? I mean, you think about the Maduro raid, which we did that, you know,

set of Venezuela episode in January. I mean, the intelligence picture required to kind of do this stuff is really, it's really striking. It's really striking. And I mean, one of the things we We've heard from previous hits like this is often it is using technical intelligence as well as human source. So often it is being inside things like the mobile phone networks and understanding who are, for instance, the bodyguards who are associated with a senior official in the Iranian regime. And then what are their phones? How are their phones moving? Where are they moving it? So it's deep penetration often of the telecommunications network and building up the kind of pattern of life intelligence around not just the officials themselves, but people around them, people like bodyguards, to be able to work out where they are and where they might be. But again, it is interesting in this case. They had advance notice because you've got to actually send those, you know, the jets with the missiles.

It takes, I think, nearly a couple of hours from a launch in Israel to actually hit the target in Iran. So it's no good knowing he's there now. You need to know he's going to be there in the morning in time to get a whole war plan together and move it forward. So it's advanced notice as well as kind of ongoing tactical intelligence, which they must have had in this case in order to be able to do it. Yeah. And that would, again, I'm speculating here, but that would suggest to me that it's it is some blend of the sort of humid side of things where there's an actual source who has access to sort of, you know, the calendar, I guess, in a way knowing. when there's going to be a group of people meeting. And then probably the technical intelligence to confirm that they're actually there or moving there. You know, it's a blend of all of those things, most likely.

And, you know, it is interesting. I think one very kind of luminous detail about just how I think the assumption or sort of the working belief that the Israelis have, let me put it this way. I think imagine like the worst possible compromise, and that's probably not far off from what happened from an Iranian standpoint, right? I mean, there's this detail from a few years back where former president, it was former President, Mahmu Abidin Shah, who actually said, you know, we stood up this counterintelligence units actually root out Mossad penetrations around the Iranian government, and then they found out

later that the head of the unit was actually a Mossad asset. So the guy who had been, the guy who had been in charge of rooting Mossad out was actually working for Assad, right? So that is how thoroughly kind of penetrated the Iranian leadership, you know, apparatus has been in recent years. And I think this is probably what is striking to me, I think maybe most of all is that after the 12-day war in June, there presumably would have been a massive counterintelligence. drag net to root out how they found people yeah how they found people because that war began with a similar opening salvo of dozens of senior officials killed and there were rumors at the time that they're actually you know we did have locational information on

the Supreme Leader and it just wasn't wasn't active on yes but but how are these how were these massad sort of assets or penetrations not or American for that matter not rooted out I mean it's it's pretty astounding Yeah, either it's a big counterintelligence failure. Well, it is a big counterintelligence failure, or the US and Israel have adapted as well and found new ways of tracking these people. But clearly they felt they had this window of opportunity with knowing where the Supreme Leader is and now having the desire to go after him, which you're right. They had eyes on him before and decided not to do anything. But then also knew where some other senior officials were at that same moment. And so then decided to launch that attack. And I think it's around about 9.40 a.m. Tehran time, working day on Saturday, that the bombs hit. I think 30 bombs on the compound. That's the report I've seen where the Supreme Leader was thought to be. Because I think there's some reports.

He may have been in an underground bunker, but possibly not a really deep underground bunker. So you're using multiple bombs to reach him. And then they also take out a series of other officials. I mean, there's some talk about 40 senior key military commanders killed, seven senior officials, including the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, the defense minister, I mean, that's a pretty wide net to have cast. And then they launched the wider campaign because they've seen this opportunity at that moment, which is going to hit a series of other targets. And it looks like Israel is hitting the leadership targets and the U.S. is

more focusing on the military targets in terms of what we've heard so far. I think that is another important distinction in this round versus June. I think in June, I think in June, the U.S. and Israeli attacks, you know, I mean, they were coordinated, but the great description I've seen is that in June it was kind of like a baton handoff in a relay race where, you know, the Israelis did something, we did something, right? And it was sort of back and forth, but it wasn't tightly integrated. This time, it's very tightly integrated. The two, the two militaries are effectively operating as one. And the two intelligence apparatuses are effectively operating as one in this theater, which makes it, I think, much more powerful because there can

be a very clear and complementary division of labor where the Israelis are hitting these kind of leadership targets. It seems like a lot of the launchers, which will come to these ballistic missile launchers, the U.S., I think, doing a bit of that, but also hitting broader military infrastructure. Yeah. Let's talk about the launches. Be cared up that way. Yeah. Because the launches, that seems to be one of the other big targets as well as the individuals, they're seeing the missile launches because obviously they want to suppress the ability of Iran to retaliate, but also I think they're trying to take out as much of the missile program as they can. And that seems to be a really big part of this campaign. And the US military even using, I think, they've said Kamikaze drones,

their own version of Iranian Shahid drones, which Iran has used and supplied to Russia to use in Ukraine. I mean, that's kind of interesting, isn't it, as well? We don't call them kamikaze drones, though, Gordon. No, I think the American military that kind of has a negative for them, I'm sure. A negative connotation. That's right. Well, they're called Lucas drones, Gordon, L-U-C-A-S, which are, I think it's low-cost, unmanned combat attack system. It's a kamikaze drone, and you're right, it is straight up reverse, which is, this is sort of deeply ironic.

It is straight up reverse engineered from the Shahhead. As you said, I mean, it is, it's a, it's a U.S. Shahed drone, essentially. But first time those were used in combat. I think the launcher piece, though, is important because there's some, there's some math here that might have an impact on how long this thing goes, because the kind of, I don't know, it's not a secret, obviously, but, you know, the kind of dirty secret here is that we actually don't have in the theater like a tremendous number of interceptors, like the interceptor munitions, right, for Iranian ballistic missiles. And so these are the missiles that's the problem,

shot up to intercept other missiles being fired by Iran. And those are kind of vital what those are to protect. I mean, it's the air defenses effectively. That's what we're talking about with these interceptor missiles. And we know actually from the, you know, Ukraine theater as well, that these are in short supply, both the missile systems, but also the actual interceptor missiles, which you fire up. And that's important, isn't it? Because the whole worry is about Iranian retaliation. And so if the US is going to run low on interceptors, you're going to have a problem. So you want to take out as many of the Iranian missile launches and missile systems first. So you don't have that kind of strain on the system.

Yeah, that's right. And I think, so that math is kind of input. I think listeners should put a pin in that because that is something to watch. If the Iranians continue to have the capability to deliver, and we'll talk in a minute about the numbers on sort of overall Iranian ballistic missiles and things like that, but if the Iranians are able to keep it up for a while and interceptor capacity, just the sheer numbers, kind of thin out or diminish,

you could be in a situation where more and more of these missiles could get through and that could, you know, whether that's Israel, whether that's U.S. bases, whether that's soft targets in the Gulf. And that could change the dynamics of this really quickly if, you know, if you end up instead of two people dead in Dubai or 10 in Abu Dhabi, I think it was, or 10 in Israel, it's, you know, well, there's 50 people dead in Israel and 30 people get hit when the shopping mall gets, you know, bombed in Dubai. Like that could change the calculation here pretty quickly. Yeah. I mean, the other thing, Gordon, that I do think is interesting.

to mention is, when you look at the targets that the U.S. and the Israelis have hit, I really do think that the opening kind of round of this, it was about fracturing the regime's ability to kind of see and do things, right? I mean, I think it was an attack on command and control. And when we did the the series about the Pager attacks in Lebanon against Hisbalah. You know, a big part of the Israeli theory of victory there, or the theory of the case was like, how do you make it so Hezbollah can't actually operate as an organization? Because you've sapped its morale. You've killed its leadership.

Like, you've made it harder for people to actually, yeah, it feels it's penetrated. It can't do stuff and can't react to what's happening around it. And I think that in this case, when you look at the target, You know, sort of command and control nodes, air defense sites, the intelligence organs. I mean, there had been some reports about the Israelis hitting some of the units, the intelligence units that would actually be used to suppress internal unrest, right? That kind of stuff makes it as well. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, very interesting. I think maybe we'll get back to that because I think that gets to what might be the U.S. strategy and what it's hoping to do in the long term. But I agree that the nature of that, of what they're targeting, it's not as simple as just military. sites. It's Iran's ability to operate and even to deal with domestic protest. But Iran, we should say, has retaliated. It's launched this amazingly broad a set of retaliatory strikes across the Middle East. I mean, with explosions reported, you know, not just in Israel, but UAE, Saudi,

Qathe, Dubai, Bahrain. We've seen those videos, haven't we? Some of them apparently targeting U.S. bases, but also hitting other forms of infrastructure, hitting hotels, urban areas. I think the The question is, how much of this can Iran do? How long can it go on for? What's its capacity? And is it going to use it all up? Yeah. Yeah.

And I think, again, this is obviously these numbers are a very moving target. But yesterday and into this morning, the tallies I've seen put the number at Iran having fired a little over 460 missiles and maybe around 350 drones. The estimates that I've seen, Gordon, have the sort of Iranian inventories prior to this at around 2,000 long-range missiles and 2,000 short-range, right? Again, who exactly knows, but those are rough numbers? And I guess the question here then is, like, you know, if you've got another, you know, a couple thousand in inventory, the sort of math becomes, can the U.S. and the U.S. and the

Israelis destroy that capability or create a condition where you don't use that capability before you're able to kind of continually respond. That's the question there. The question is, are the Iranians, now the Supreme Leader's being killed, now they fear that the US is looking and the US has been quite explicit about regime change. Are they going all in? Are they going to fire everything and throw everything they've got in retaliation? Or do you think there is still, because, you know, we've seen performative responses in the past.

This is definitely more than that because they're hitting those Gulf states. But are they, is it all in or are they holding back? What do you think? I think they've held back a bit. I mean, what is confusing to me, it's not a direct answer to your question, but is like prior to this, were there existing standing directives that had been sent down to the, these units that are actually doing the launching to say when this happens, do this, and it's already sort of pre-programmed? Or is it like, you know, enterprising kernels who are, you know, actually,

you know, have command and control over some of these launches who have decided who the targets will be and how hard they'll go? I mean, it seems to me that I guess my take, right, in hot take right now, you know, 24 hours into this is that the Iranians are holding back because they understand that they could run out of, you know, this capability relatively quickly and want to retain some measure of it for future rounds. But, you know, it's hard to say. What do you, I mean, what do you think, Gordon? No, no, I, from your, our earlier point about the disruption of Iranian command and control, you go, there is no supreme leader. or the rest, you know, we were expecting a new one, but to make some of those decisions,

your chief of staff of, you know, the army's been taken out, you know, the head of the Revolutionary Guard taken out. So you have got that question is, have they got the capacity to make decisions? I mean, we know that they put plans in place in case there were decapitation strikes of the regime, but you're right. Do those plans include not just people, but how to act in different eventualities or are they scrambling to respond? I just think we don't know. So I think, should we move on to our second question, so we don't run out too much time. I think we could deal with this one a bit more briefly, which is the how did we get here? Although, well, it is going to be hard to do that quickly because, you know, Donald Trump started in 1979, Gordon, so we should probably start

there, right? Yeah, I know. I was thinking that when he did his video statements straight after the attack started. He did start in 1979 and with the start of hostilities. And I was like, wow. But I think actually what he was trying to do by saying that was like, this is all part of a long-running sense of Iran being an implacable enemy of the United States. And this is all just the latest thing about. Let's not go back to 1979. I mean, I think you're right. Let's go back a bit more recently. You know, the 12-day war last summer, Iran and Israel. America's Operation Midnight Hammer. And that was at the end of that 12-day war when it sent those B-2 bombers to hit the Iranian nuclear program with targeted strikes. Those amazing pictures from Sapolite imagery

of those holes, very precise holds, tunneled down into the nuclear program. Now, Donald Trump at the time said the nuclear program had been obliterated, completely obliterated, which then I think led people to go, well, why then are there still negotiations going on over a nuclear program? And why are you still worried about a nuclear program? Where do you negotiate it with them over something that's been obliterated? Yeah. Well, the actual intelligence, we should declare the actual intelligence assessments, the findings that have leaked out sense basically said that it was something like significantly degraded or something like that, right?

I mean, so not actually obliterated. But then I guess in January, Gordon, we get popular uprising against the regime, which we talked about in a couple Epps on the pod, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not more people out of the streets. And then what looks to have been an absolutely savage crackdown. in which, you know, I mean, upwards of 30,000 people were killed, although we don't know. We don't know. Tens of thousands, yeah.

And of course, at that time, Donald Trump made that statement basically encouraging people saying help is on its way. But it wasn't because U.S. forces were not in place to do the kind of operation that we've seen in the last day or two, which allowed then the regime to crush those protesters and kill tens of thousands. So that was, if you like, the next phase. And then since then, we've seen these, and I think it's the confusion or the complication between these two different aspects.

You've got the negotiations about the nuclear and the ballistic missile program, which have been going on. And you've got negotiations going on about that. And accompanying that, you've had a military build-up by the United States. And you've had this question about regime change and popular uprising. And it's been very, very unclear. And I think we'll get to that what the US priority was or what the strategy was or what they were trying to head for. Because we've seen these talks and the talks have been going on.

I mean, some of the talks just finished. You know, we're still going on on Thursday. On Thursday. Yeah. Meeting to have talks. But I think what's interesting about the talks is the US and certainly backed by Israel had a very maximalist, you know, set of demands, which is, you know, end the nuclear program, end enrichment, although maybe there might have been some way of allowing some token enrichment,

but also give up your ballistic missile program as well. And you can see for the Iranians, I think they're looking at that and going, that basically means disarming. You know, that means giving up our nuclear program, which is our one bit of leverage, and our ballistic missile program, which is our bit of military deterrence, which they're using now to try and have some impact. And you can see why Iran is thinking, is the US bluffing? But also, even if it's not bluffing, do we want to just give up these things

and open ourselves up to attack, having given them up? So you could see why negotiations were not really going anywhere. Right. And at the same time, you had, which I think is why it was somewhat or it could be somewhat confusing to have sort of watched the U.S., you know, and its Iran policy over the last couple of months, because you had these indirect talks going on. And then at the same time, you had the largest military buildup

that the U.S. has conducted in the region since 2003 prior to invading Iraq that was happening sort of in real time kind of slowly, but very much, you know, publicly. I mean, it was, I think, by late January, the U.S. had moved. The USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group into the Persian Gulf and the South China Sea. And then in mid-February, you had the Gerald Ford, which is the largest carry in the world, it departed the Caribbean because it had been involved in the operation against Nicholas Maduro. I mean, and by the time the strikes occurred yesterday, there was a massive, massive U.S. military force in the region.

And, you know, I guess the question is, I might, which still I'm kind of wrestling with, is, were the negotiations ever serious, you know, or was this, was this just a smokescreen to confuse the Iranians? I don't know. No, it's a good question. I mean, because I think one of the arguments was it was coercive diplomacy, you build up the military to show you're serious in order to get the Iranians to relent and do, basically give up their program and do the deal that they want, that the US particularly wants.

But there is another view which is, you know, that was never likely to happen. And I think, I mean, in a way, that does actually kind of bring us on to our third question, which is, you know, why is this happening? You know, what is the strategy? You know, what's behind what the US is trying to do? I mean, I think, you know, and I think,

again here, it goes back to that kind of complication, confusion, how much of this is about the narrow issues of nuclear enrichment and ballistic missile programs, which could be dealt with a negotiation, and how far is it really and has it always been, and is it increasingly about regime change and something completely different? I think that's the, you know, that gets the nub of it really, doesn't it? It does. I think, you know, it is interesting to go and actually like listen to Trump's statement that he put out yesterday on on truth social. Because he does, we joked about it at the beginning of this question. But, you know, he does start with this kind of laundry list of Iranian aggression against the U.S., some of which is very real, right?

And historically accurate to the other bits of it are kind of out there, you know, and not not historically accurate. But he does paint, he basically paints this, you know, this combat operation almost as a kind of defensive measure against a regime that has, you know, I mean, he basically, I mean, he basically paints the Islamic Republic as having, you know, he goes back to the embassy crisis court. And I mean, it goes back to sort of the inception of the Islamic Republic was itself, you know, sort of the birth of it was this kind of, you know, it was already attacking America back then,

and it's been attacking America and its friends ever since. And therefore, you know, we are, we are going to. And this is where I think it's interesting, though, because a lot of the analysis of the of his statement yesterday said, okay, Trump's calling for, you know, this is regime change. And it's like, not really. I think if you read what he, if you read the statement, you listen to the statement, it seems to me like he's almost saying, we're going to, we're going to batter these guys for a while. And you, the Iranian people should rise up and, you know, what does he say, kind of claim your government, take power. If you don't do it, you'll miss this sort of once-in-a-generation opportunity that I'm creating for you. But he kind of stopped short of saying the policy is regime

change. I agree. I think that I think that's. That's a really important distinction. He's kind of, we want regime change and we might create the conditions for regime change to take place, but we are not necessarily going to go all in to do that. And it's interesting because you also see there have been other justifications for the attack. I mean, some of which, you know, I'm not convinced stand up. There's been language about imminent threats that the Iranians were about to either develop some kind of missile capacity or strike the US first.

been talk about, you know, Steve Witton Cops had some stuff about, you know, them develop, being able to develop nuclear-enrich material really fast. All of that to me felt very flimsy. It certainly had echoes of Iraq WMD in 2003, where legally and morally you are trying to justify a preemptive attack by saying, you know, the legal basis for it is they are about to attack us, so we need to attack them first. And it felt like there was, you know, there were echoes of famously in Britain, you know, Iraq in that case being able to fire missiles in 45 minutes, you know, which was the source of much controversy in the UK. And so, you know, there was a bit of that talk going on, which was, I think, to build a kind of legal justification, but fundamentally,

it was always pretty, pretty flimsy. And the regime change part of it was also there. But I think your point is right, is that what's really going on, is they saw a weakened Iran at this moment, and there is a window of opportunity to do some serious, to do more damage to Iran, and perhaps to create the conditions for regime change. Yeah, I think that is, that's the point. It's the conditions for regime change.

I mean, it also, just to go back to one point you raised on kind of the Iraq, you know, example, what has absolutely not been done in this case, is a public, the administration making the public case for war, really. I mean, Donald Trump, we had the State of the Union address, you know, last week, Gordon. Like, Iran was sort of barely mentioned. I mean, he did make this claim about Iran, you know, trying to develop the capability, kind of imminently, to hit the U.S. with an intercontinental ballistic missile, which I think, which we should say clearly, the actual intelligence that has at least, you know, the sort of high-level analytic assessments that have come out on that are pretty much in contradiction to what the president said. Like, there's a long, I don't think Iran had even decided to do that and there's a very long development window to build an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Absolutely right. There was, yeah, there was none of the kind of buildup, the kind of long kind of thought, how do we manage public opinion that you saw in the lead up to Iraq? This feels much more fast and opportunistic, doesn't it? It does. It does. And I guess it, you know, the other thing to note, I think, on just Trump's mindset on Iran is that if you look at the way he's dealt with it, going back to his first presidency, it's been zero, it's been all upside for him, really, right? I mean, so he withdrew from the Obama, you know, Iran nuke deal, right? And we pulled out of that, I think, in 2018 or something like that. He assassinated Gossam Soleimani, former head of the Kud's Force, the Revolutionary Guards Coots Force, in 2020.

He bombed, as we talked about, he bombed Iran's nuclear program in Operation Midnight Hammer last summer. I don't think Trump has, there's been no domestic consequence for any of this stuff. And very little retaliation, yeah. No retaliation in Iran. Right, exactly. So you have this kind of, like, there's no doubt. looks at Iran and says, we've messed with these guys consistently and aggressively, and they haven't done anything. And then the other piece to this, which I think is really important for Trump's mindset,

is that Iran's weak right now. You know, I mean, when we did our conversation back in January and this, and you look at kind of the pillars of the Iranian regime, it's not good, right? To be the socioeconomic, you know, contract between the regime and its population is in absolute tatters. its legitimacy narrative is basically gone. There's opposition, obviously, that is still present even after the crackdown. I mean, there have been protests again that popped up in the last week or so. So I think that there's a sense here that he might have the, you know, he might have the regime on the ropes. At least that's how he would be thinking about it.

And it doesn't feel like a part of a strategic master plan. I think it is a moment of opportunity, a moment of week. He sees Iran and a tactical moment where you see the supreme leader where he is and you think, I'm going to take advantage of that, you know, and I'm going to do it. I'm going to go for it and see where it takes, takes the US and Israel. So I think, I mean, we're starting to get some interesting questions in. So please do keep sending them in. There's one here from our gentlemen. Do you feel that there's enough of an organized resistance in Iran for regime change? I think we can get to that next because, you know, if we hit our last question, which is what is going to happen next, I mean, there's a few

different areas to look at, aren't there? I mean, I guess one of the point is, you know, going back to what we were saying earlier, what is the U.S. going to do? What's its goal? Well, one of the things it's not done. This isn't like Iraq in 2003 in terms of regime change. There is no ground force for an invasion, is there? That is not. That's actually an important point that we should just clearly state, which is when you look at the U.S. forces that are in the region, I mean, I think before Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, there were 250,000 plus American soldiers who were in the Persian Gulf before Desert Storm. It was even more than that, I believe. This is not the case right now. So there is not going to be a ground invasion of Iran as part of this,

which is kind of, we should just, that's an important point just to mention. Like, that's not coming. But again, there is this slight confusion. Then what are the goals? I think they're multiple goals. I mean, some of them have, you know, damage the nuclear program or damage the missile program. Destroy the Navy. He's mentioned that, which I think is interesting.

And then this issue of hoping to overthrow the regime or create the conditions for overthrowing the regime. But I think one of the questions is, is it's very hard to see how that plays out. isn't it? It's not straightforward. No, no, it's not. You know, I think one thought, and again, I mean, there's a recency bias at play here, but I think there might be a recency bias at play in our president's mind as well, is what about a kind of Venezuela-type operation, or obviously Iran is more complicated and bigger and all of that, but maybe the fundamental premise here, is we hit the Iranians hard for a few days. We kill a lot of their top leaders, including the Supreme Leader.

And then we hope that the regime from within sort of, not that it changes its fundamental nature, like, and becomes a much, you know, a more open sort of democratic thing that's not suppressing or repressing its people, but that it fundamentally deals with the U.S. on some of these, you know, whether it's ballistic missiles, whether it's the nuclear program, what have you. deals with us in a different way. I think that might be the hope here is that there would be someone or some group of people in Iran who then say they take power and decide to sort of bargain with the U.S. from a position of weakness so that Trump gets what he wants.

I think that could be a viable outcome for him and would allow Trump to say. Yeah, no, there's a lot of hope. A lot of hope at play here. I mean, because the other thing to state, I think, just, you know, is when you look back at the historical kind of, you know, the use of air power in an attempt to change a regime, the track record is not great, right? It's just, it doesn't, I actually am not sure there is an example of it. No, I mean, yeah. Recent, recent counter examples would be Yemen, like, I think there were something on the order of $7 billion spent on an air war in Yemen that did not fundamentally change the Houthi regime.

So, you know, you just, you got to think here that it, I think that it's going to be, you're not going to like depose an entire deeply embedded network of financial and political and military elites with air power. Just not going to do it, right? No. The only parallel, but I don't think it works, is you had Libya, where you had the US, UK, France, use air power against Gaddafi. But there you had the conditions already of effectively a civil war and of organized armed groups on the ground. And the US and UK air power supported them and eventually deposed Gaddafi, although you can see the chaos that there's been in the years afterwards. It's not necessarily a model of what you want. And this goes back to the question we had from our gentum.

Do you feel that there's enough of an organized resistance in Iran for regime change? I mean, one of the things we saw in January was, you know, there is not, the resistance is just people. It's just ordinary people turned out on the streets. Often students, young people, you know, some of them were, you know, chanting the name of the former, the son of the former Shah. But there's no sense in which there is an organized, armed resistance, which is capable of taking on the regime. And the regime is very, it's not just one person, the supreme leader, is it? I think that's the point about Iran. It is a pretty deeply embedded power structure, which even if you take out the top leadership,

it's not clear, is it that that is going to be enough for it all to crumble if some people just come out on the streets? You know, I'm just not sure about that. I think it is important that we not confuse the spectacle of power. with the longer term sort of, I guess, energy required to actually reshape political outcomes in Iran, right? Those two things can be connected. But the first day or two of a conflict like this, it kind of, especially if the U.S. and the Israelis are doing it, it's always going to look pretty good, right?

I mean, because of this mastery that we have developed in being able to kind of target individuals to sustain this kind of camp, like to marshal this number of resources in the region and do this to a sovereign state requires real power. But the question, and it's an unanswerable question right now, is like can, like how resilient is this regime really, right? I mean, that is a big question. I think we are trying to fracture the regime's coherence, as I said earlier, with the strikes. Like, I think that is part of the design. But you won't really figure out how tough, flexible a kind of network is until you start to attack it. And we're going to figure that out here in the coming weeks and months. But it's not something.

Actually, it's an unknowable question. Yeah. Unanswerable question right now. Yeah. And you would talk, you know, in terms of how the public in Iran reacts, clearly a lot of people hate the regime. Not everyone, though. Right. But you also had, I mean, it's interesting.

We talk about the mastery of U.S. and Israel firepower. But there's also been these reports, for instance, of a strike on a girl school in Menab, which killed a large number of civilians. Now, I don't know the exact details of that. It was supposedly, you know, proximate to a military base. And whether it was a mistake, whether it's not. Who knows? But you could also imagine that as things develop on the ground, if there are those kind of incidents, you could also see some people within Iran turning against the attack. So I think it's not, I think it's very hard to judge.

And clearly what the US and Israel want is for them not to have to do the hard work of regime change, but for the Iranian people to do it. And they're basically now saying, now you go do it. But that's a big call to hope that the repressive capability of the regime has been degraded. enough for them to not do it. And if you're a protester to not end up, like the tens of thousands of others a few months ago, dead in a morgue. I mean, that's, as you said, it's a, you know, it's very hard to judge how that will play out. Yeah. I mean, the other wild card here is that I think that Trump's motivations for this or his sort of designs are, that's also a moving, a moving target. I mean, even yesterday, right? I mean, after the strike start, Trump said, you know,

I can go log and take over the whole thing or end it in two or three days until the Iranian see you in a few years if you start rebuilding. So I think he's even creating an off-ramp, right? About whether he's going to see it through. Yeah. Right, right. Well, that's the question. See what through? Yeah. Yeah. You know, I mean, is there a strategy? Yeah. What's the goal? Because I think when you look at, again, let's just take Venezuela because it's reset, obviously there wasn't really a like coherent strategy for what came next, right? It was it was about. Delsi Rodriguez, but it was kind of like, ah, well, it's someone else inside the regime will take power and we'll be able to deal with them. That was kind of the extent of it. And you might say, hey, that's enough. But, um, I don't think there's much beyond that here. And I mean, going back to that initial question of whether there will actually be more significant unrest as a result of this, if the goal really is, and I think this is a bit contradictory because I actually don't, I don't, the impulses, Trump's impulses here are contradictory. It's like, on the one hand, you want to be, you want to decapitate, you know, kill Hamini, kill a bunch of the

the top leadership, get someone new that you could kind of deal with. But my sense is that if you get that and you accomplish that in three or four, five, six days, whatever, that runs contradictory to the impulse then to have sort of people rise up against the actual regime itself. I agree. Because you could end up with a situation where you have the exact same repressive app, which, by the way, my hot take early days, so I will identify this as a hot take. as such. My hot take is that is exactly what you get, which is a significantly beaten and degraded Iranian sort of military and security apparatus that is still in control and that is saying some of the right things about what it intends to do vis-a-vis the US, whether that's

ballistic missiles or nuclear program or what have you. And absolutely no change in that kind of regime's ability and willingness to use its military and security forces against its population. I think that's a pretty – that's my hot take of where we're headed here. No, and I think that's pretty good. With a lot of chaos along the way. Yeah. Last few things we should just briefly touch on is about some of the wild cards in this, which is about what could happen more widely in the region, particularly. I mean, Iran has already talked about the Straits of Hormuz, which is, of course, this very important shipping lane through which the world's oil and other supplies goes,

if they shut that down, who knows what could happen there? I mean, it's a little bit unclear from the language what they're going to do with that, and it would also annoy some of the countries which are loosely allied to Iran like China and others who will see the impact on the global economy. That's a wild card, isn't it? It is.

One point on that, though, is it's not just about the sort of, can someone, is someone biding it or are there, you know, have there been at a sort of operations against shipping? It's the risk premiums on the insurance for the ships that would actually transit the straight, right? And those have already started to increase very significantly, unsurprisingly. So I think it's also a question of like what's going on in the Gulf? It's also a question of how are, you know, what does Lloyds of London think about this? and are they attached to higher premiums to ensure those halls, right?

So there's one other point to that. Yeah. And then I guess another wild card is what happens as a result of these other countries we talked about earlier on being hit in the region, you know, the UAE, the Saudis, the Qataris. The fact that they're being hit does that lead them to put pressure on the U.S. to stop this? do they, because they've not been that keyed on this conflict for precisely that reason? What if there is a big hit on a U.S. military base or on a shopping center in Dubai or something like that? That is certainly a wildcard which could change things, couldn't it?

Yeah, I know it absolutely could. And honestly, I think, you know, one of the kind of surprising things, I think, for many observers, has been just how broad Iran's retaliation has been. I mean, I think Gordon, there were reports that the Iranians had actually lobbed ballistic missiles at maybe UK assets on Cyprus. I mean, it was like, is that right? Well, towards in the direction of Cyprus is what I'd see. Yeah. Which could be that they were just in that direction, or it could be they were targeting Cyprus.

But either way, I mean, there's a question here from the Apollo to seems a French naval base in Abu Dhabi was just striking. with Iran also targeting Cyprus, do you two reckon UK and France will get involved with offensive strikes? Now, I mean, my view is the UK is saying we've got air power in the region being used defensively, effectively, to shoot down Iranian missiles and things like that. I don't think they will want to get into offensive strikes on Iran itself. The legality of that, I think, is we haven't got into that and let's not get into it. But I think in the UK, the view is it's not legal. you know, there isn't a kind of justification for it. So, but once you get into self-defense, because, and this gets back to that wildcar point,

if bases do get here, or things do get here, then suddenly that could change the equation, couldn't it? So that is, that's one of the other kind of wildcards in terms of how far Iran does want to push this and what it does with its missiles. And I guess, sorry, a third one is, is how else could Iran retaliate? I mean, could it retaliate in Europe? Could it retaliate in different ways through proxies? Yeah. And I think, you know, Gordon, we were talking about this a little bit yesterday as we were getting our minds around this. It obviously does bear mention, right? That there's the possibility for asymmetric retaliation at some point down the line.

Terrorist attacks, effectively, terrorist attacks. Yeah. Tax on U.S. embassies, Israeli embassies, things like that in Europe. Right. Right. This gets mentioned, I think, every time one of these conflicts pops up. maybe these attacks have been, maybe they're being suppressed, maybe they're being stopped. Maybe the Iranians are intending to do them and they're just not able to carry them out. But I don't know. This one seems to me a bit of, I mean, yes, it's possible, but it doesn't, it didn't happen after Midnight Hammer or the 12-day war last year, did it? As far as I know. I mean, so if the Iranians are attempting to do this kind of stuff, it's taking them longer than perhaps.

Perhaps I would think it should. Yeah, I mean, MI5 have said they've fallen 20 Iranian plots against, you know, individuals in the UK, which tends to be often Iranian dissidents of the UK. Right. Of harassment, kidnapping, you know, assassination. So there's been activity, but not that kind of large-scale attack that we're talking about. Whether they have the capability or not, it's hard to know. But it's, that is, again, if they really do feel on the Iranian side,

this is regime change that the US is going for, we need to do everything we can to deter them and stop them, then maybe you press that button. So it goes back a little bit to this bigger question, which is, you know, is the US really going to go all out for regime change? Or are they trying to put enough pressure and then maybe do a deal with a kind of new type of regime? In which case, if you have uranium, you don't want to be unleashing all your proxies everywhere, you know, in Europe or to do things which could be escalated. degree, could draw Europe into it in a different way. So there is still that question about how far both sides are calibrating or whether they're all in. And I guess I should have said, I mean,

after Trump killed Gassim Soleimani back in 2020, there was credible intelligence that the Iranians were attempting to kill senior U.S. officials, right? And there were significant security precautions taken by many of the officials involved in that decision afterwards. So I shouldn't have been. I think I was maybe a little quick to downplay that. It is definitely something that the Iranians could do down the line if they felt it was wise. But I mean, I guess Gordon, maybe it's worth ending on the ultimate hot take question, which was not part of our four exam questions, which was, do you think, I'll pose it to you, do you think that this was a good idea?

I think the risks to this are enormous. I think the risks are, although we said that before with things like taking out Soleimani and your point, and Midnight Hammer, and a lot of the consequences didn't happen. This does feel different. I think there are risks for the Iranian people, and I think there's risks for the Gulf, which are on a different magnitude to what we've seen before. And I can't quite see the strategy to bring about a benefit given those risks. That's not much of a hot take, but it's all I've got.

That's a cold take, Gordon. It's a cold take. And I will say, I do think, well, I'll answer the question here. I was just going to say in general that there are some really, really big questions that are obviously there at this point unanswerable. And I would just beseech our listeners that anyone coming to you with simple answers on what's Donald Trump thinking, is there going to be unrest? how resilient is the regime?

How long, you know, sort of how long can the Iranians kind of, you know, sustain this back and forth? What will happen in oil markets? I mean, all these kind of really big questions. Like, anyone with really simple answers to those is conning you. And they don't, like, just you should not pay attention if anyone has really simple, kind of, you know, certain answers to those questions at this point. I think my hot take is I think the return on investment here is likely.

to be low. I think that we will not, based on the forces that we have positioned in the region, I don't think that this is intended as a regime change operation. I think this is intended as an operation to substantially reduce the regime's internal coherence, roll the dice on spurring protests. And I think it's probably a pretty low, low chance of that happening, but I'd love to be, you know, proven otherwise. And get a different type of regime out of the existing soup of the one that we have now that will do a deal with us or be seen to do a deal with us on some of the bigger ticket items that I think Trump actually cares about, which is the new program and maybe ballistic missiles. And I think that that, so I think this is a lot of input for maybe not a ton of output. Yeah. And is much more performative than anything else.

That's my hot take at this point. And I think that is a good place to leave it. Thank you very much for all your questions. We hope we've answered quite a few of them in the discussion, but thank you very much for sending them in. Later today, we should say we'll be sending out a newslet of roundup with perspectives from across all the different Goalhanger shows. about Iran. I think I'll do some comments. Alistair Campbell, Worry Stewart, from the rest of politics. Caddique and Anthony Scaramucci as well, from the rest is politics, US. Becky, our producer, our intrepid producer is there on the

line. She's currently in Jordan. Frontline producer. She's our front line producer. Yeah. We're sitting at home. She's the one out in the field. Well done, Becky. We're, stay safe, but we're very proud of you. But we'll be sharing all our perspectives, and you can receive those updates by signing up for the newsletter via the link in YouTube and in the podcast description. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for your comments. We may do more of these, might we, David, depending on what happens.

Yeah, I think we will almost certainly be doing more of these. And yes, Echo Gordon's thanks to everyone for joining this. As we always say at the end of our episodes, we would strongly encourage you to go and join the Declassified Club. Also, at the Rest is Classified.com, if you have enjoyed this. But at any case, we hope it's been helpful, and we will undoubtedly see you next time. See you next time. Do you want to know what really happens inside MI5?

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