3 key moments that led to the U.S.-Iran war

11:21Michael Eisenstadt:And increasingly what you see is this conflict zone in which everyone has their finger on the trigger. You know, it's a fog of war, you're at sea, and there's constant risk of miscalculation, there's lack of communication.

11:36Karim Sadjadpour:The Islamic News Agency said the U.S. has become involved in a full-fledged war with Iran. The Iranian president, Ali Khamenei, is quoted as saying, we will retaliate. The United States expanded its rules of engagement to allow U.S. vessels at sea to come to the aid of ships from other countries that were not part of the reflagging operation, but are being attacked by the Iranians. So we're being more proactive in the Gulf in terms of our activities. There was a newly arrived ship, the USS Vincennes, coming to the region. There was a new class of ship with a radar system that could see further out with greater resolution than the radar systems that were then used by the ships.

12:22Karim Sadjadpour:Their role generally was to kind of hang back and provide a big picture of the air defense environment for the other ships that were operating in the region.

12:35Michael Eisenstadt:So on July 3rd, 1988...

13:01The Vincennes then steamed to the aid of its helicopter, as well as to join the fight.

13:10Karim Sadjadpour:In doing so, they moved into Iranian territorial waters, which was a violation of U.S. rules of engagement. At the same time, while it's doing this and while it's pursuing the Iranian warships that were involved in the attack against the Pakistani tanker, an Iranian civilian aircraft takes off from the airport in the city of Bandar Abbas, which is an airfield and a port city in the south of Iran, en route to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

13:38Michael Eisenstadt:And what would usually be a 30-minute flight, very easy.

13:41Karim Sadjadpour:And as it turns out, it was flying right over the area in which combat was going on on the surface. And? It takes off. The crew of the Vincennes thought that this civilian jet was actually an Iranian fighter aircraft that was at first gaining altitude but then diving to attack.

14:03Michael Eisenstadt:They mistook it for an Iranian military aircraft, and they were trying to communicate with it, but they were using military frequency to communicate with this Iranian plane, and they weren't getting any response because this Iranian plane was a civilian airliner, which wasn't on a military frequency. So after numerous attempts of trying to communicate with it... They shot two surface-to-air missiles.

14:35which brought down the Iranian airliner, killing 290 civilians aboard.

14:47Kim Zetter:There has been a dramatic and sudden escalation of hostilities in the Persian Gulf involving U.S. forces. There is the possibility that U.S. Navy missiles may have accidentally shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, a civilian airliner carrying nearly 300 people.

15:03Michael Eisenstadt:And so I think the fog of war, coupled with both a miscalculation, itchy trigger fingers, and inability to communicate, resulted in this terrible tragedy.

15:18Kim Zetter:Throughout the morning, there have been very confused reports as to what actually happened.

15:22Michael Eisenstadt:To this day, the Iranian government believes there was no way this was an accident.

15:27Kim Zetter:It was doubtful that the plane that was shot down was an F-14 fighter.

15:32Michael Eisenstadt:because the plane was clearly marked. Its flight pattern was clearly civilian aircraft headed to Dubai. There's probably dozens of such flights every day between Bandar Abbas and Dubai. But what the U.S. side talks about is the broader context. You know, this U.S. warship was actually receiving fire from what they thought were Iranian warships. You know, there was constant attacks taking place during that time. And so the United States acknowledged it as a terrible mistake. President Ronald Reagan offered what is known as ex gratia payments, voluntary payments by the United States government

16:20Karim Sadjadpour:to the families of the victims of Iran Air 655. And this settlement today...

16:27Michael Eisenstadt:For Iran, these things are not mistakes. Even if America claimed it was a mistake, the message that was taken by the Iranian side was that this was an act of open hostility.

16:42Karim Sadjadpour:One of the things you often hear today is that there's always a worry about miscalculation in dealing with the Iranians. That there's always the potential for inadvertent escalation as a result of a tragic mistake. On the other hand, I would point out that one of the lessons of this conflict during the latter phases of the Iran-Iraq war is that actually both sides were pretty good at keeping the level of conflict within a certain kind of relatively narrow band. That neither side wanted the conflict to spiral out of control and become an even larger war. And they largely succeeded in that regard.

17:19Several months later, Iran actually signed the peace treaty to end the Iran-Iraq war.

17:24Michael Eisenstadt:So the shooting down of Flight 655, Iranian Air Flight 655, was a terrible tragedy in which civilians were killed. If you look back, though, at the history, it may have been that the Iran-Iraq War might have lasted longer had that terrible incident not taken place. I think one thing the United States realized by the late 1980s was that the Iranian revolution was not just going to be a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon. You know, that the revolutionary Islam and the Khomeini's ideology that was born out of the 1979 revolution was going to be an enduring concern. and shortly thereafter when the Soviet Union collapsed, I think Iran and the threat of radical Islam eclipsed communism as kind of challenge or threat number one for the United States.

18:26Michael Eisenstadt:And I think similarly, one of Iran's takeaways from the Iran-Iraq War and its interactions with the U.S. military is that the U.S. military's budget is more than 50 times that of Iran's. And so in a head-to-head conventional military matchup, Iran cannot compete with the United States. How it can compete is using essentially asymmetric warfare, whether that's the use of proxies, whether that's the use of mines, in some cases taking hostages, having plausible deniability. Iran needed to figure out low-cost, high-impact ways to challenge the United States. And it's really honed that ability over the last four decades.

19:28Karim Sadjadpour:That was Kareem Sajadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Michael Eisenstadt, director of the Washington Institute's Military and Security Studies Program. Coming up, the story of the Shadow War.

19:55Hello. Hello.

19:58Karim Sadjadpour:Hi. My name is Kelly. Casey. Sherry. And we are calling from Michigan. And we love true life. It makes me a better teacher, a better person. Just better. Thank you for what you do. Bye-bye.

20:16Michael Eisenstadt:This message comes from BetterHelp. International Women's Day is this March. Time to celebrate all women. The leaders, the caregivers, the hype friends, the how-do-you-do-it-all types.

20:27Karim Sadjadpour:Women deserve to be reminded how much they matter. and that therapy offers a space to care for themselves.

20:33Michael Eisenstadt:BetterHelp makes it simple by matching you with a qualified therapist based on your needs and preferences. Visit BetterHelp.com slash NPR for 10 % off.

20:43Karim Sadjadpour:Part 2. Hidden in Plain Sight. I blame myself for what happened. I was a sergeant of the guard. I was ultimately responsible for the security of that BLT that morning.

21:010630 on a Sunday morning, Beirut, Lebanon.

21:06Karim Sadjadpour:Everybody was asleep.

21:08Kim Zetter:We have a bulletin from the Pentagon on the explosion in Beirut at the U.S. Marines barracks. Then I heard the rev of an engine behind me.

21:16Karim Sadjadpour:A truck loaded with explosives broke through a gate into the lobby of a building in Beirut occupied by Marines. I saw the truck come to a stop, dead center of that lobby. Dead silence in the lobby. you could hear a pin drop.

21:35Karim Sadjadpour:And then the next thing I saw was a bright orange flash.

21:42Karim Sadjadpour:The speeding pickup truck crashed through barriers and exploded in the lobby of the headquarters building where Marines were sleeping. The first thing I said was, son of a bitch, he did it. Causing the four-story structure to collapse.

21:57Karim Sadjadpour:Chunks of concrete and spears of broken glass were hurled hundreds of yards, wounding other Marines. Some of those wounded helped pull their colleagues from the rubble. I remember looking on my shoulder, and there was one Marine back here, moaning, help me, help me, God help me, somebody please help me. The Pentagon now estimates that 120, possibly more, have been killed. A list of survivors, dead and wounded, is still being compiled. Forty-five of the more critically wounded have been evacuated. Others remain to be evacuated later. It's been pretty hectic, trying to just sort things out and see what the total effect of this tragedy is going to be.

22:43Michael Eisenstadt:So, in 1983, a truck bombing destroys U.S. military marine barracks in Beirut, which was, I think, the deadliest single-day attack on the U.S. Marines since Iwo Jima. Almost 250 Marines were killed. It was unclear to people who was behind this attack, because it was a truck bombing. And, you know, now we become accustomed to suicide bombings. We read about suicide bombings often in the news. But at that time, that was really a novel attack. It was, I think, widely assumed that Iran was responsible, but Iran shrewdly operated via proxy. They tried not to leave fingerprints. And, you know, the attack was blamed on a group called Islamic Jihad, which is widely thought to be essentially the precursor to Lebanese Hezbollah.

23:39Michael Eisenstadt:Hezbollah was created to fight Israel. whose army invaded and occupied the country. The emergence of a group called Hezbollah, the Party of God, was essentially a byproduct of two momentous events. One was the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and the other was the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. And so as a result of these two things, all of a sudden the Shia community in Lebanon had an enormous, very wealthy external patron. It is a secretive, militant movement of the Shia sect of Islam, largely funded and armed by Iran. Iran, after the revolution, defined itself in opposition to the United States and in opposition to Israel.

24:24Michael Eisenstadt:And so you started to see an emergence of Shia radicalism in Lebanon, which Iran was harnessing. And, you know, Lebanon is a country in which America doesn't have enormous strategic assets. It's a very small country on the Mediterranean, but it doesn't have oil resources like Saudi Arabia. So the major reason for America's presence in Lebanon to do peacekeeping and be there as a buffer for our key regional ally, which is Israel. There are no words to properly express our outrage, and I think the outrage of all Americans. After the bombings of the Marine barracks, I think it caused a real debate within the Reagan administration.

25:13Michael Eisenstadt:Some wanted to pin the blame on Iran. Others said there was no clear proof. and I think others also realized that if America were to blame Iran directly then it would warrant action you know you if you're going to blame Iran for a massive attack on the U.S. Marines you can't just sit on your hands afterwards you have to do something about it and so I think for that reason there was actually a reluctance within the Reagan administration to too aggressively blame Iran because America didn't really want to fight that war. And in hindsight, there are historians who actually criticized the Reagan administration because they say by not responding to that massive attack by Iran against the U.S.

26:02Michael Eisenstadt:Marines, it essentially emboldened Iran. Iran realized that actually suicide bombings can be quite effective, truck bombings can be quite effective. And eventually it led to America's pull out from Lebanon. Ambassadors Habib and Draper, who are presently in Beirut, will continue to press in negotiations for the earliest possible total withdrawal of all external forces. Because the Americans, looking at the television set, said, why are our sons and daughters dying in Beirut, Lebanon? What are we there? What are our interests? And so I think this is a tactic which Iran has used quite effectively, essentially testing the resolve of the United States, and in some ways, conducting acts of radicalism and terror, which will bring in the American public, and the American public, you know, calling for further restraint or a pullout from the Middle East.

27:19My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from

27:32Karim Sadjadpour:grave danger. On my orders...

27:35Michael Eisenstadt:When the Iraq War was launched in 2003, one of the Bush administration's underlying goals for the Iraq War was to create Shiite democracy in Baghdad, which could then spread to Tehran and undermine the legitimacy of the Iranian regime. And so for that reason, Iran had every incentive to try to sabotage America's efforts in Iraq if they believed that the Iraq War was intended to eventually overthrow the Iranian government. And so for that reason, from the beginning of the Iraq War, Iran was somewhat cautious the first year or so. But then you started to see Iran ramping up attacks on American troops using proxies, using their Shia militia proxies in Iraq.

28:38Michael Eisenstadt:Iran has essentially tried to franchise the Hezbollah model. I call it the McDonaldization of Hezbollah, taking that Shia militia franchise in Lebanon and using it in other contexts, whether that's to help fight for your ally Bashar Assad in Syria, Iraqi Shia militias to fight against ISIS and project Iranian power in Iraq, and now in Yemen.

29:08Karim Sadjadpour:A second day of airstrikes inside Yemen by Saudi jets, bombing Iranian-backed Houthi Shia militias, which have taken control of the country.

29:19Michael Eisenstadt:And when we're talking about countries in the region which are experiencing either civil wars or power vacuums, Iran is able to fill those voids much more effectively with these Shia proxies on the ground.

29:35Karim Sadjadpour:The top U.S. commander for the Middle East worries about what could be Tehran's bid for superpower status.

29:43Michael Eisenstadt:So I think a major asymmetric advantage that Iran has over both the United States and U.S. allies, like Saudi Arabia, for example, is that almost all Shia radicals in the region, let's say from India to Lebanon, are willing to go out and kill, if not die, for the Islamic Republic of Iran. whereas almost all Sunni radicals in the Middle East are deathly opposed to the United States, and they want to actually overthrow the government of Saudi Arabia. Groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS are Sunni radicals, which are not Saudi Arabia's proxy. They're actually Saudi Arabia's adversary. And so despite the fact that Shia are outnumbered by Sunni by four or five to one in the region, And Iran has a monopoly over Shia radicalism.

30:36Michael Eisenstadt:And increasingly, not only does Iran operate via proxy, but its proxies also have plausible deniability because they're not necessarily doing the fighting themselves. They're using IEDs, they're using drones, they're using mines. So it gives Iran two layers of deniability.

31:03Karim Sadjadpour:Coming up, how one computer virus started a cyber arms race.

31:27Karim Sadjadpour:This is Giselle from Portland, Oregon, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. I only recently discovered the show, but it has quickly become my favorite podcast. in these difficult political times. I'm just so grateful for the show and the context that it gives to really complex contemporary issues. It's a good reminder that nothing exists in a vacuum. So thanks. This message comes from BetterHelp. This International Women's Day, let's celebrate the leaders, the caregivers, the hype friends. With all they handle, women need to care for themselves and therapy is a great way to do that. Visit betterhelp.com slash NPR.

32:11Part three, a digital weapon.

32:14Karim Sadjadpour:An Iranian facility has been targeted for cyber attack. The second time it's happened in less than a year. Worst cyber attack in history. The race between Iranian officials trying to build their nuclear program and outside forces trying to stop it is getting more intense. This new era of warfare has already begun.

32:32Kim Zetter:We have to go all the way back to around 1996, mid-90s, is when the U.S. started to contemplate the development of offensive cyber capabilities. And right around that time, Iran obtained a batch of illicit uranium hexafluoride gas from China. And so that's sort of what we can sort of trace the beginnings of the Iranian illicit nuclear program. They, of course, had been watching Iraq prior to that and seeing that Iraq was looking at nuclear capabilities. And, of course, Iran and Iraq were longtime enemies. And so Iran's view was if Iraq is looking at obtaining nuclear weapons capability, then we should also be engaging in that as well.

33:28Kim Zetter:So around 2000, Iran broke ground on the facility at Netanz. U.S. intelligence wasn't, you know, 100 percent positive about what that facility was going to be, but they were watching it. So, February 2003, the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the agency that oversees or monitors nuclear programs around the world, IAE inspectors make their first visit to Natanz. And now we return to Iran, where today UN inspectors visited a site... And they discovered that Iran is actually much farther along in the program than anyone suspected. They already had a pilot plant set up at Natanz.

34:12Kim Zetter:They had some centrifuges there that they were beginning to assemble. They had said that they hadn't enriched any batch of uranium hexafluoride gas yet, but that turned out to be incorrect. This first process of enriching that first batch was really the beginning step of having enough uranium hexafluoride gas to build a bomb. This is the initial step of getting them to that bomb. And there was a lot of panic at that point to halt the program until IAEA inspectors could obtain more information. So there was a lot of pressure put on Iran to stop everything. The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, in talks with Iranian officials in Tehran.

34:56Kim Zetter:And the breakthrough. Iran surprisingly actually agreed. throughout 2003, 2004, and then something changed in 2005.

35:11Kim Zetter:Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president of Iran. And shortly after that, Iran announced that it was done with the cessation agreement and it was no longer going to remain at this stasis position. and it was going to go forward with enriching its first batch of uranium hexafluoride gas. And so you can imagine the panic in Israel when that happens.

35:42Kim Zetter:Jump forward about six months, on January, February 2006 now, Iran announces that they have enriched their first batch of uranium hexafluoride gas in that pilot plant and the Tans. And then they announced that they had perfected the enrichment process, and they were going to begin installing the first centrifuges in the actual enrichment plants. Israel, of course, was focused on trying to bomb the facility. They'd come to the U.S. for permission from President Bush to launch a strike against the Natanz facility. And the U.S. denied that permission and instead had this alternative plan that they wanted to do.

36:31Kim Zetter:So between February 2006 and February 2007, the U.S. is developing and testing Stuxnet.

36:42Kim Zetter:Stuxnet was what we call a worm. Part of it was a virus, part of it was a worm. A worm is malware that will travel from machine to machine without any human interaction. So the initial release, of course, is done by a human. But once a worm finds a vulnerable system, it will infect that system, and then it will search automatically for any other system connected to that system on an internal network or over the internet and travel to that system and infect that as well. So you've got this Natanz facility that has critical computers that are air-grabbed from the internet, and also the facility itself is physically protected.

37:23Kim Zetter:They had three outer perimeter security walls, anti-aircraft guns, earthen berms entirely hide the facility from

37:32Karim Sadjadpour:view.

37:32Kim Zetter:Around the facility, they had fences, they had guards, armed guards, all of that. So the only way that you could get Stuxnet into where you needed to go was to have someone walk it in, deliver it, either wittingly or unwittingly. And we know that the first version of Stuxnet could only be spread via USB sticks. It's quite possible that the first version of Stuxnet, because it didn't have a lot of spreading capabilities in it, was spread by an inside mole. They probably had close access inside the Tans. So 2007, they unleashed that first version of Stuxnet. It was a partnership between the U.S.

38:15Kim Zetter:and Israel. Their aim wasn't to, it wasn't catastrophic damage. They didn't want to destroy all of the centrifuges. They wanted to simply stop Iran from obtaining enough enriched uranium gas to have a bomb. Iran had a limited supply of uranium hexafluoride gas that it had purchased from China, and they had a limited supply of materials that they could use to manufacture new centrifuges. And so the goal with Stuxnet was to destroy some of the gas and some of the centrifuges in order to buy time for diplomacy and sanctions to catch up.

38:54Kim Zetter:when Stuxnet first gets on to that S7-417 PLC it doesn't cause its sabotage right away it sits there for a period of time recording the normal operation of those centrifuges and storing that information and it just keeps storing and storing for days and when the sabotage kicks in it takes that information about the normal operations that it stored and it now feeds that back to the monitoring stations. So while the valves are closed and the pressure is increasing inside the centrifuges, the engineers at the monitoring stations are seeing that everything is normal. All the valves are open, pressure is normal, heat is normal, nothing is wrong.

39:36Kim Zetter:And so they wouldn't have seen the sabotages happening. What they would have seen, however, is they would have seen that they were losing gas, they would have seen eventually the end result is that the centrifuges start breaking down but they wouldn't have known if the problem was the machinery itself. Maybe the centrifuges were faulty, the equipment was faulty. That would have been their first focus. And Stuxnet did one other thing. In addition to feeding that false information to the monitoring stations, Stuxnet froze the safety mechanism on the system. So these automated safety mechanisms were designed to detect if the pressure inside the centrifuges increases, if the heat increases, if they start spinning out of control.

40:23Kim Zetter:And if it sees that a system is getting out of a safe condition, it's supposed to automatically shut down those centrifuges to prevent them from being destroyed or ruined. But Stuxnet stopped the safety mechanism from working. So Iran was confused. They didn't know what was happening.

40:51Karim Sadjadpour:Thank you. Tapper.

40:58Karim Sadjadpour:We have been through a lot together.

41:01Kim Zetter:This is a covert operation, and a covert operation has to be authorized by the sitting president. And the sitting president was leaving. We had an election in 2008, and we see in the code that Stuxnet is designed to halt during this temporary phase of when we are losing the sitting president. And in January 2009, Obama is coming into office, and he meets with President Bush. And during this period, Bush explains to him this covert operation, which we now know is called Olympic Games. And he explains what's happening and what it's designed to do and tells him that it hasn't achieved its full purpose yet and encourages Obama to reauthorize the Olympic Games program.

41:47Kim Zetter:And Obama does. And we already see in January, the attackers are getting prepared to unleash the second version of their assault. And throughout 2009, it's causing its sabotage. And we actually see signs of the sabotage externally, but we don't know what it is. The International Atomic Energy Agency is sending inspectors to the Natanz facility on average about twice a month. And they're sending back reports to their headquarters in Vienna. And those reports are saying that Iran is having problems with its centrifuges. Those inspectors start noticing not just that Iran is having problems, but they're actually removing centrifuges now.

42:27Kim Zetter:So it's not just that they've stopped spinning centrifuges and they've taken gas out of centrifuges. They're actually removing centrifuges from the Cascades. And they're sending this back in the report. And that's the first sign that Iran has given up. They don't know what's going on. They're checking the equipment. They're checking everything. And yet Stuxnet continues to operate. And it continues to engage in sabotage. And it's not until June 2010. Stuxnet is unleashed in another round in March and April 2010. And the March version is what got it caught. The March version had multiple spreading mechanisms attached to it, including that worm.

43:07Kim Zetter:and it spread wildly out of control.

43:15Kim Zetter:It started spreading to machines that weren't the targeted machines, spreading to any Windows machine that it can find, initially just in Iran. And it started causing problems on machines in Iran outside of Natanz. Someone in Iran who had systems that were kept crashing and rebooting and crashing and rebooting, and they couldn't figure out what was going on. So they contacted the maker of their antivirus software, a company in Belarus called VirusBlockAda. And VirusBlockAda obtained remote access to some of those systems in Iran that were having problems. And they discovered some suspicious code that they believed was causing the machines to reboot, crash and reboot.

43:58Kim Zetter:And so they found this code and they started taking it apart. they immediately discovered that it was malware and that it was designed to spread to any Windows machine. So they contacted Microsoft because it was using a vulnerability in the Windows software. They contacted Microsoft to have that vulnerability patched. And then they had other files that were dropped onto the machine when it was infected, but those files were encrypted and they couldn't decrypt them. And they didn't have a lot of experience taking malware apart. So they made those files available to the rest of the security community.

44:35Kim Zetter:And that's when a company called Symantec stepped in and started reverse engineering that code. They were able to decrypt it, and they knew that it was designed for sabotage. Until then, everyone had assumed that this was spyware, that this was conducting espionage.

44:55Karim Sadjadpour:Experts say Stuxnet is an exceptionally sophisticated

45:03Kim Zetter:So if you can imagine, from November 2007 all the way to November 2010, Stuxnet continued to operate unimpeded. Mahmoud Akhundinejad blamed the Israelis and the U.S., but Iran didn't do what we expected them to do. They didn't go to the United Nations and complain, and they didn't retaliate, which they would have been in position to do legally. International law sort of limits what a nation can do when it's under digital attack like that. It says that you can take action to halt an attack that's current, but that any sort of retaliation that you do has to be proportional to the attack itself. And so Iran was pretty limited, and also going to the United Nations, Iran is not very powerful in the United Nations.

45:56Kim Zetter:So it knew that it wasn't going to get the support or backing that it needed to punish the U.S. or Israel.

46:02Karim Sadjadpour:They've never seen anything like it. A massive onslaught of cyber attacks on America's biggest banks. Slowing down their websites, even forcing some to shut down temporarily, costing them money.

46:13Kim Zetter:StocksNet was proof of concept for any nation to see that digital capabilities like this are a viable alternative. And so what that has done is it's opened up this new kind of warfare where it's lowered the bar of the actors who can engage in it.

46:29Karim Sadjadpour:Senator Joe Lieberman, then chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said, I think this was done by Iran. It's likely retaliation for previous cyber attacks on Iran and for other things.

46:40Kim Zetter:When you drop a conventional weapon, your victim can't pick up those pieces of the weapon and reconstitute it and send it back at you. The difference with a digital weapon is when you're launching a digital weapon, it's fully contained. And all the code is there. And so you're sending the blueprint for the weapon to your victim. And all the victim has to do is reverse engineer that weapon in the way that Symantec reverse engineered it. And study it and design it in a way that they can send it back to you. And so what we did was we threw stones from a glass house. In the U.S., we've always had this advantage of geography.

47:20Kim Zetter:We have this distance from our adversaries. But digital warfare erases that distance. Now the front line is on businesses and critical infrastructure here. It's brought the war home.

47:44Karim Sadjadpour:That was Kim Zetter. She's a writer for Wired magazine and author of the book Countdown to Zero Day, Stuxnet and the launch of the world's first digital weapon. If you want to learn more about the U.S. and Iran, check out our episode Four Days in August, which is about the CIA-backed coup that first brought the Shah to power in 1953. And next week on ThruLine, we're turning our attention to Cuba, its revolution, and where the U.S. could intervene next. I don't know if the regime is going to fall, but what I'm really sure is that in 2026, something is going to happen with the regime.

48:29Karim Sadjadpour:That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablui. I'm Randa Adelfattah, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This show was produced by me. And me. And. Jamie York. Jordana Hochman. Lawrence Wu. Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Okay, smizing and somber. Nigeri Eaton. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes. Anya Mizani. Naveed Marvi. Sho Fujiwara. Thanks also to Aida Porasad. And Anya Grunman. and to Ntozita, Sarah Wyman, and Amber Cheat. If you like something you heard or you have an idea, please write us at throughline at npr.org. Thanks for listening.

49:22Karim Sadjadpour:This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks, Mint Mobile might be right for you with plans starting from$15 a month. Shop plans today at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for a three-month 5GB plan required. New customer offer for first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra.

49:46Kim Zetter:See Mint Mobile for details.

49:48Karim Sadjadpour:Who should win the Oscar for the best original song this year? On the latest all songs considered from InPure Music, we rank the nominees. I think Diane Warren should have won two Academy Awards. The problem is very often the lyrics are not much more insightful than you would find on the nearest throw pillow. Hear the NPR Music Podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts.