119. Inside Iran: Why Trump Didn’t Intervene (Ep 2)

17:29Gordon:Well, welcome back. We are continuing our journey into understanding how intelligence agencies look at these highly dynamic revolutionary situations. Next up is 1989, Gordon, which you should lead this section, Gordon, because I was a young thing.

17:49David:I remember it vividly.

17:50Gordon:You had long hair. It wasn't grey back then.

17:55David:It was quite long, actually, in my rock days. Let's not get in. That's definitely a diversion. As I can see here, you had the French Revolution of 1789, Russian Revolution of 1917. I'm not old enough to get to those ones as examples of where revolutions came, perhaps with surprise. But I think 1989 is one I do remember, when famously the Berlin Wall falls. And I remember it incredibly vividly. I actually kept all the newspapers from that time, because you just felt the headlines were so important. And I think it's also a really good case study for why some revolutions are not seen coming and why some get crushed and some succeed in overthrowing the regimes.

18:36David:So if you look at Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union under communism in that period, and I think Western intelligence could see that communism was decaying, it was failing to keep up economically with the West. There were these increasing problems with legitimacy. Some of the pillars were a bit weaker, the pillars we talked about last time, dissent growing. But no one predicted the sudden collapse across Eastern Europe in 1989 of all those communist regimes and then eventually the collapse of the Soviet Union. I think, worth saying, different in different countries. So for instance, Poland, it was driven through the 80s, particularly by the trade union, solidarity, and civil society.

19:15David:I actually went on slight sidebar. I went to Gdansk last year and I went to the Solidarity Museum in Gdansk. And anyone who's interested in the end of the Cold War, it is absolutely fantastic. it go to Gdansk and go to the museum because it just gives you an understanding of what happened in Poland but I think one of the things I'd say is you know we talked a bit about the bandwagon effect the revolutionary bandwagon and what you saw in Eastern Europe that year was a revolutionary bandwagon across countries so you saw one country rise up and to some extent succeed and then others would follow in its footsteps so I think that is part of it across what happened East Germany though is the one I think worth focusing on because it famously leads to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was the symbolic moment for the collapse of communism.

19:59David:I think it's also interesting because we talked about authoritarian states. Well, famously, the Stasi, the East German Security Service, were incredibly effective in many ways. I mean, per person, they had more informants in the population than any other regime in history. It was incredibly surveilled. And yet it still collapsed and i think that is interesting and a parallel with iran it's people power it's people going out on the streets people protesting and there's a great line from the time where a writer said fear changed sides so the regime started to fear the people rather than the people fearing the regime and that switch isn't it is hugely important because it's the moment where the state loses the will to kind of take action and there's a particular moment i think in leipzig in October, where there are massive demonstrations being planned, people going to come out, the state is prepared to repress it.

20:56David:You know, the tanks are ready, the hospitals are told to stand by. The local officials, though, call up national officials and say, we don't know what to do. There are so many people out there. The people are non-violent. The national official kind of says, oh, I don't know what to do. I'll call you back. Never does. And so they do nothing. and to me that one moment in Leipzig is really interesting because it is the kind of moment where you've got the security forces ready to go but there is a lack of will at the top you know the elite cohesion breaks down within the state over over whether they're willing to repress and take action and some people are questioning you know would the soldiers actually shoot their own people it's quite a fine margin though I think because you know if the official had said shoot might it have all been different?

21:44David:Would the bandwagon have been stopped? I don't know. I think it's very interesting.

21:48Gordon:It's not even the difficulty of predicting these kind of dynamics, but just the impossibility of it. I mean, because Tumur Karan has this political scientist that we've been quoting frequently who's done this great work on kind of revolutions and revolutionary dynamics. I mean, he's got this great line, he was writing about 1989, where he says, pinpointing a specific event that pushed the bandwagon over the hill is akin to identifying the cough responsible for a flu epidemic. You cannot predict these situations. You actually can't. Because that fear-changing sides point, again, it's that shift.

22:25Gordon:It's that incredible shift of the private view becoming the public view. And yeah, if the East Germans kill hundreds of people in Leipzig, maybe that private view stays private.

22:40David:At the same time in Dresden, famously, you've got this young KGB officer called Vladimir Putin, who is watching protests as well. And he asked the Soviet military commanders who are there based in East Germany what they're going to do. And their reply is nothing because Moscow is silent. And again, it's this interesting idea that the Soviet Union had signalled it was no longer willing to use force to back the regime in East Germany. So that kind of foreign government role is very much a kind of role here that the kind of supporting state for East Germany had decided they weren't going to act. We talked about this a bit in our kind of declassified club, didn't we, where we had Mark Gagliotti talking about how this had been a formative moment for Putin.

23:23David:Because I think Putin himself, his lesson from this is if you're silent, then protests gather momentum and they can overthrow a regime. So his lesson is go in and go hard to crush the protests, which is something he will then do in neighboring countries and in Russia itself.

23:41Gordon:Well, I guess in some ways, I mean, there are a couple examples from the Cold War of the Soviet Union and communist forces crushing uprisings brutally and quickly. Hungary in 56, and then in Prague in 68. And I think in both cases, similar dynamics where everybody was surprised that it happened, but then the extreme brutality of the response ensured that fear didn't switch sides and prevented that revolutionary bandwagon from happening.

24:20David:There's a very interesting parallel as well from Iran to Hungary in 56, because I think in 56, a lot of the Hungarians thought the West was, and particularly the US, would come to help them. And they felt they'd had that message actually from the West and almost encouragement to rise up. And then it never came, which I think an interesting parallel with Iran recently. But also just finally on 1989, there's a very interesting comparison from what we're talking about happened in Leipzig to China because that same year of course June had seen Tiananmen Square you'd had the protesters student protesters come out in this huge square I mean I've been in it in the center of Beijing fill the square you know for a prolonged period and for a while it's so interesting because the leadership equivocates there are splits within the communist party leadership about how to deal with these reformist movements there's some military units which appear unwilling to act against their own people.

25:19David:But then eventually, the Chinese leadership decides they're going to go and, to use the unpleasant phrase, go big and send in the troops to massacre and kill the students and the protesters. And I think that there was actually talk in East Germany in 1989, in October, November, when the wall's coming down or about to come down, whether they're going to do a Tiananmen. because I think they realise that is the only way of doing it, is to effectively go big. And I think the lesson for some regimes is you either have to go big and go all in and repress, or if you kind of half repress, it doesn't work because you often just kind of spur more protests.

25:58David:And I think Ukraine saw that 2013-2014, the Maidan revolution, where they start to repress, but they're not willing quite to do the kind of Tiananmen-style massacres. And as a result, the government is overthrown in Ukraine and you get a more democratic regime. So I think it's so interesting because, you know, you look between China, East Germany, both 1989, the two communist regimes, you know, the East German and the others collapse. But in China, we still got a communist party ruling the country because of what they did in Tiananmen Square.

26:27Gordon:Gordon, I guess that brings us to the third lens for looking at how an intelligence agency deals with and analyzes unrest, which is near and dear to my heart, which is the Arab Spring of 2011.

26:43David:So yeah, talk us through that, because you were in the CIA at the time as an analyst. So I mean, that felt on the outside, like it caught everyone by surprise. I mean, it started in Tunisia, didn't it? With a kind of street vendor protesting about corruption, kind of interesting parallel about ordinary people protesting about economic oppression, a bit like Iran in the mobile phones in the bazaars, and yet led to this kind of revolutionary bandwagon across the kind of Arab world, didn't it?

27:13Gordon:It did, yeah. And I think there were many points here where this revolutionary bandwagon thing, it really resonates with me because you saw it not only spreading inside countries, but across countries throughout the Arab world. And it was absolutely surprising. Nobody had predicted that it would happen, kind of to this broader point on, you don't see these things coming. By definition, they're unpredictable, and you can't really forecast them. You can look and we had been, you know, as Middle East analysts, like we all had an understanding of the deep problems that most of these governments had.

27:59Gordon:And the fact that if you had gone through, as we had, actually, we had done a pillars exercise. because by this point in the CIA, basically every country team was doing something similar and looking at whatever authoritarian regime they were covering and saying, well, what are the pillars of stability here and where are they at? And do we see signposts of any of these things weakening? So we had done that exercise on Syria, actually, I think maybe six to 12 months prior to the protests breaking out. And I would say we had an understanding of where those pillars were, but we didn't have an ability to forecast what was coming next, right?

28:45Gordon:Because it was a surprise. And I distinctly remember as the protests are happening in Tunisia and Egypt, And then, you know, the Tunisian president, Ben Ali, famously flees, you know, Tunis, which that sets off another cascade because populations all over the Arab world look and they say, well, we can do this could work. Right. It's that shift of that. It's that private view shifting to become the public one. But what was very fascinating, and it gets to kind of, you know, the anchoring bias that we all have, after Ben Ali fled in, I think he left in late December of 2010. And then in January of 2011, there were massive street protests in Cairo, famously, against Hosni Mubarak's rule.

29:36Gordon:And as we were all watching these, I remember everybody sat down, all these political analysts across the CIA sat down and started writing pieces that basically said, wasn't exactly this blunt, but it was kind of like, here's why that's not going to happen in my country. And I remember one of my good friends was actually writing a piece about the significant hurdles to a protest movement in Cairo when protests broke out. And then he was like, okay, well, I'm going to delete that draft. Rip that one up. You know, I remember being actually in an Arab country in January and February of 2011. And it was a country that was not experiencing unrest yet.

30:25Gordon:And I have distinct memories of sitting at restaurants and cafes and watching these protests in Egypt get bigger and bigger and bigger. And, you know, you just you had the sense that the Egyptian regime was using some violence, but was was definitely waffling in how it was going to respond to the to these protests. And you could see the sort of private views shifting. You could see people looking at these protests and saying, okay, this is now possible. What I thought was impossible two months ago is now possible. And it's that fear changing sides thing starting to happen. And it gets to this idea that what's going on in the minds of millions of people, that's the intelligence problem, and it's why it's impossible.

31:17Gordon:Because all of a sudden, you have this massive sort of shift, everybody's brains shift in a very short period of time. And I think that Syria in particular, during the Arab Spring, has some real parallels and lessons for what we're seeing today in Iran. And there really are some overlapping characteristics that I think make it a potential interesting case study in what we could be seeing today. It is interesting, isn't it?

31:50David:Because the Syrian regime was facing protests, and it looked like it was teetering on the edge, and yet it survived, didn't it? So what do you see as the kind of parallels or the differences between Iran and Syria?

32:09Gordon:I mean, one obvious one is there are widespread protests, right, in both situations that initially center around the economic situation and sort of basic political freedoms, but eventually come to focus on, you know, sort of the removal of the leader and the system or the family in the case of the Assad regime. But in both cases, you have this kind of disorganized grassroots opposition movement that is very fragmented, whose loudest members are overseas and out of the country. These opposition movements tend to be very cannibalistic, right? They eat their own. And they often work at cross purposes.

32:52Gordon:In Syria, that opposition movement also became much more militaristic over time, or just it transitioned from what had been a largely peaceful kind of disorganized protest movement into organized pockets of armed opposition to the regime. And I think hopefully we'll get more information out of Iran as the internet comes back up and we get some more firsthand accounts. But it's hard for me to imagine this many people killed if you didn't have some pockets of true armed resistance to the Iranian regime. And so maybe we're seeing a potential shift in some parts of Iran or in some pockets of this opposition, where you're having people actually picking up weapons and using that to defend themselves, defend protesters, or even just go after the regime.

33:49Gordon:So that's another potential parallel.

33:51David:You're relating that to the fact we have seen these deaths of security forces, you're suggesting. There are armed elements going up against. I mean, there's talk that in certain parts of the country, there's minority groups or others who might have become more violent. So yeah, I take your point. That's a kind of slight unknown, but it's a potential parallel, isn't it?

34:08Gordon:Right, right. And then, you know, Syria also had widespread kind of socioeconomic problems, mass youth unemployment, housing crisis. There was there'd been mass internal migration from a drought in the east. So you had these kind of big socioeconomic problems, right, that the regime in Syria was incapable of solving. And I think, you know, here in Iran, we have similar parallels where you just the level of sort of mismanagement and corruption has led to a situation where that that socioeconomic contract between the regime and the people has really has really frayed. Also in Syria, you had a regime whose revolutionary institutions had totally decayed and whose legitimacy narrative was really quite weak.

34:58Gordon:The most important, quote unquote, political party in Syria in 2011 was the Ba 'ath Party. And regime officials at the time were, they were kind of surprised and probably shouldn't have been to see just how hollowed out the thing had become. I mean, nobody believed in this kind of Assadist Arab nationalist ideology anymore. It was just totally hollowed out. And I think similarly, you know, with Iran today, as we discussed in the last episode, you know, this kind of legitimacy narrative for the Islamic Republic has really weakened.

35:36David:Yeah. But I mean, there are significant differences, aren't there? I mean, you had the Alawite minority in rule, in power in Syria who kind of facing a kind of Islamist opposition in that case and fearing being wiped out by them. Iran is a kind of a complex country with a lot of minorities, but some of those dynamics are fundamentally different, I think we should point out, shouldn't we? And the Syrian opposition was a mix, but there were parts of it which were quite heavily Islamist, as we know from Ahmad al-Shara, who's now in power, you know, had come through that kind of world and been linked to some of those groups.

36:10David:Whereas the Iranian opposition feels very different, but also quite diverse and dispersed in that sense. Well, and then the elites in Syria, at least initially, fairly cohesive, I would say.

36:24Gordon:And so were the regime's military and security services. And in particular, the units that were responsible for regime protection, the more elite pieces of the military, most of the intelligence agencies, there really weren't significant defections or instances where you had orders disobeyed to fire on protesters. to go after armed opposition. And I think so far, that's what we're seeing in Iran. And I think there's some interesting kind of lessons that, for me, came out of the Syria experience that I think could relate to Iran or at least maybe shed some light on where things are headed or how we could look at the situation.

37:04Because one of them,

37:06Gordon:and this was a constant refrain inside the Obama administration in 2011, was when you looked at the sort of cascade of protests across the Arab world. And then you looked at, oh, Ben Ali fled, Hosni Mubarak eventually steps down, Gaddafi is killed amid this massive uprising against his regime. And the lesson that a lot of Obama's advisors took from all of this was to sort of generally conflate a regime's loss of political legitimacy and the appearance of protest with the imminent demise of the regime. Like, it's just going to happen. And I think there's a tendency, and we're seeing a little bit of this in the commentary around Iran right now, is to sort of conflate a regime's loss of legitimacy with the fact that it's just going to be toast.

38:10David:It's inevitable and it's going to be soon.

38:12Gordon:And I think that tends to ignore the ability of these kind of regimes to adapt, which they do have. And it ignores, I think, the absolute criticality of the loyalty of the security and the kind of coercive apparatus. And if those things hold, it's really hard to unseat these regimes. And if you do unseat them, typically the path there runs through a long civil war. And it takes, as we saw in Syria, almost 15 years. So that's kind of one, I think, significant lesson. I mean, the other one, the kind of parallel, I find this very interesting, is the calls by the internal opposition for external help, particularly military support.

39:04Gordon:And what happened in Syria was that the oppositionists in Damascus, Aleppo, and Holmes, these other places, were looking at what was going on in Libya at the time, where the US had intervened, NATO had intervened, and essentially acted as the Libyan rebels' air force to help unseat Gaddafi. And the Syrian opposition began to call for exactly the same thing in Syria.

39:30David:Yeah. Yeah. And it's very interesting, the Libyan example, because I remember it well, that Gaddafi was in power. He'd faced these protests and then he was sending his security forces to Benghazi and the assumption and from the language of the Gaddafi regime was there was going to be a massacre there. They were just going to massacre the protesters and civilians. And so at that point, the US, UK, France intervened with air power and basically, you know, kind of bomb some of Gaddafi's troops and start off a process which does lead to the fall of Gaddafi. But interestingly enough, they don't want to put the boots on the ground.

40:04David:They just want to do this air power side of things and then effectively let a civil war play out. And then that civil war becomes bloody and violent and goes on for years. So I think one of the challenges in Iranians is that in Washington and I think in some other places, they're looking at that and going, that is not necessarily a successful model or outcome to go do some military strikes on, say, Iran, which some people have called for on some of the security forces, because you don't know where quite that will lead. And it could lead to destabilisation and chaos, as happened in Libya, rather than some kind of happy outcome of a democratic regime change in Iran.

40:41David:I think that is one of the things in people's minds and one of the reasons why I think we saw the caution from the Trump administration to actually necessarily pull the trigger. I think there are some other reasons as well. Arab states were saying to them, you know, who knows where this could lead or what you could do. I think the ability to affect change as a foreign power is often quite limited and can be overstated in these cases. Ultimately, I think there is some really interesting kind of political science evidence that the most successful regime changes, uprisings, revolutions are the ones where they are organic and from the people rather than with outside help or support, which just kind of adds a different dynamic, delegitimizes it sometimes because people can go, you're just being supported by a foreign power.

41:23David:You think about Iraq, you think about Libya in these cases. And I think that is one of the kind of challenges people face is that it's hard to see what the role of outside powers would actually be, even though some want it.

41:33Gordon:There was some interesting academic research that some members of our team did back in 2011. And one of the most significant variables in determining the length of a civil war is the extent of foreign involvement. And you'd be unsurprised to hear that the more foreign involvement there is, the longer the civil war goes on, right? And so I think in this case at Iran, I would wager a guess that more foreign involvement is going to sort of tip us in that direction, right? Of a kind of civil conflict between the regime and the opposition. I'm not making a statement on whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

42:16Gordon:I'm just saying that that's probably the direction it tips us in. The other dynamic that I think is an interesting parallel is that political change is kind of usually a long-term game in these situations. In Syria, the first year of unrest was marked by waves of protest, but then, you know, and they would sort of wax and wane too. I mean, that's another piece of this. We're recording this on the 18th of January. And we're in this period where it kind of looks like the regime has suppressed the unrest. And yet in Syria, there were these moments where protests dwindled and died down and then they came back.

43:00Gordon:Or what came back a couple of weeks later might have been a pocket of armed opposition to the regime that they were then unable to suppress. And so there's this kind of waxing and waning of the opposition. And a lot of the really important developments in the Syrian crisis were also happening out of the public eye, as you had opposition, even very local opposition, kind of coalescing against the regime, but obviously doing that quietly, not as a massive protest. So these things take time. I mean, Syria lasted 13 years. And even in 1979 in the Iran parallel, it was over a year of escalating unrest and protests before the Shah fled.

43:48Gordon:So these things are marathons. They're not sprints.

43:52David:So I guess, David, as we come to an end, we've talked about how difficult it is to predict what's going to happen. So I think trying to predict what would happen would be slightly foolish for us at this point. But I guess we can talk about what some of the scenarios might be and what we might look at. It's interesting, I spoke to someone, a Brit who knows Iran really well, and his view was this is a regime in its death throes, which is flailing around desperately at this point, which has lost its legitimacy. But I think we both agreed, you do not know how long those death throes may last. That doesn't give you a timeframe.

44:25David:But I think his view was very much that it would be very hard for it to regain any legitimacy. It's lost its legitimacy. We talked earlier about China. One of the things China was able to do was, yes, it did this brutal repression. But then in the years afterwards, it was able to strike a new socioeconomic contract with its people and go, we will give you economic growth. You might not get political freedom, but that's the trade-off, economic growth for a lack of political freedom. And it kind of worked for the Communist Party in solidifying their control in China. Now, you cannot see that happening in Iran.

44:59David:You can't see it being able to kind of re-legitimize itself or create a new social economic contract because it's got sanctions. It's got all these other pressures on the economy. So I think for that reason, this idea it's in its death throes does feel right, but that doesn't really tell you how long it's going to last or how it's going to play out.

45:17Gordon:I like how we've spent two episodes talking about how unpredictable these things are. Now we're going to offer some predictions.

45:24David:Which are going to be proved wrong by the time this episode comes out.

45:28Gordon:Immediately proven wrong. You know, I don't know. I'm kind of reliving some of my Syria experience here, obviously, as we've been talking about this. Because it was a very... It's a hard conversation to have in some respects because there are a lot of people who rightly... I mean, as I do, you look at the regime, the Iranian regime, and you say, ugh, this thing is a brutal system that is predatory, that is extremely, like, who wants to live under a system like this? It's not offering the China example of, you know, you don't have any political rights, but, you know, you've got bread on the table and we're managing this system economically fairly well.

46:17Gordon:They don't do that. And so this is a despicable regime. And you You want it to fall, you know, and you want something better for the Iranian people. My most recent book is on Iran. Like, I spent a lot of time speaking with Iranians for this and trying to understand the country. And you want something better for 90 million people who have not gotten a good shake from the Islamic Republic. And also, this is a regime that has decided to murder potentially tens of thousands of its own people in a short period of time to remain in power. It's despicable. And you want it gone. And I felt the same way about Assad in Syria.

47:02Gordon:And yet, I think analytically, you can fall into a trap of wanting something. And so you say that it's going to happen, right? And we got a lot of flack, even inside the intelligence community for kind of inside the national security establishment for kind of writing in 2011 that, well, hey, it's not inevitable that this regime, the outside regime collapses. just because they're brutal, just because they've mismanaged the country horribly, just because there's no legitimacy narrative left any longer. They still have considerable resources at their disposal and a willingness to use them. And I see a lot of parallels with the situation in Iran today where there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of wish casting about the demise of this regime.

47:58Gordon:And I don't see the cracks yet in the coercive apparatus. That's what I'm watching. Are we starting to see any of these cracks?

48:09David:Amongst the security forces, yeah. Do they start to decay?

48:12Gordon:Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that's the critical piece here. And I just don't see it yet. I hope this thing changes and the Iranian people get something better out of the future than they've gotten out of the recent past with this government. But I think as an analyst, you have to be really careful that you don't transpose your own desires onto the analysis. The other comment I'll say, just to close out the parallels with Syria, is I was struck as an intelligence analyst, the tremendous gap between the truth as reported in the press and what we were seeing in the intelligence picture. Because I will say, if you just read what was going on in Al Jazeera, the way it was being reported journalistically, and then you looked at the way the regime was talking about the situation internally, you looked at the satellite imagery of the protests, things like that sometimes those two pictures overlapped a lot of times they were very different and so yeah the the last kind of final caution for my you know for the my mini mccloskey experience as an analyst is there's a lot of stuff right now that we're not seeing on the outside and a lot of truth about what happened good bad ugly tragic will come out down the road but We have nothing approaching a comprehensive picture of what's going on right now.

49:53Gordon:And the people who have a better picture, they're unfortunately not going to come and talk to us on The Rest is Classified, Gordon, because they're in skiffs somewhere. Yeah.

50:05David:And I think ending on a note of humility is the right one about the ability to forecast these things, because a lot of people have tried, and as we've talked about with previous revolutions and uprisings, have tried to predict those. And it is, I think, for reasons we've really explored, hard. And there are reasons why it's hard. And there are reasons why it's hard to see cracks in a regime or in the elite or how the security forces are going to act. And it can come down to very interesting individual decisions. So there, David, I think let's leave this exploration of Iran and predicting revolutions.

50:39David:Just a reminder, if you're a member of the Declassified Club, you're going to be able to hear an interview with Arash Azizi talking about some of these issues. Do join at therestisclassified.com. But we hope you've enjoyed it and we will see you next time. We'll see you next time.