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You know, there's real concern about water desalination plants, electricity grids and also e banking because if any of those are hit, this place will come to a complete standstill.
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The supreme leader of targeted and killed Gulf allies under attack, global energy markets disrupted. The US Israeli war with Iran is spilling out across the region. What are the goals and how does it end? This is SOURCES AND METHODS from npr. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. In case you are new here, welcome. Our name, sources and methods is a term you may know from the intelligence community. It speaks to how we know what we know. And you will hear us walk through that every Thursday as I discuss the week's biggest national security stories with the NPR reporters out and about in the newsroom and around the world. This week, all eyes, of course, are on Iran, where six days of war are turning the Middle east upside down. Joining me this week, Aya Batrawy reporting from her base in Dubai, a city that has been literally in the line of fire this last week. Hey, Ayah.
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Hi.
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And NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman, covering the war from Washington and sitting right across from me. Hello, my friend.
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Good to be back.
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All right. So the story with Iran is moving very fast. I want to note that we are taping at 12 noon Eastern, which means it's what, nine at night where you are? Yeah.
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Correct.
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Okay. I mean, there are a million, probably more questions that I could start with. But let me go with this one. Who is running Iran today? Who's making decisions five days after an Israeli airstrike killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei? Yeah.
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That question is unclear the answer. But what we do know is that there is a three man interim council currently run by the elected Iranian president, as well as two clerics, one a senior chief of the judiciary and another from a senior council of clerics in Iran. But then, you know, if you get into questions over who's running the command and of the irgc, the Revolutionary Guard Corps and some of those other elements of the armed forces. That becomes less clear.
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Yeah. I mean, there are many centers of power in Iran, just the succession. Someone is going to be named by an assembly of experts. These are religious experts, and someone will be named the next supreme leader. A lot of complications there. For starters, bombs are still falling. Kind of hard to name a new leader when the assembly that's going to name that leader may be targeted.
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It's even hard, Mary Louise, to bury the former supreme leader who ruled the country for almost 40 years, a very revered Shia figure among many in Iran who support the regime. And he still hasn't been publicly buried until this moment. It's been, I'm speaking to you now on day six of the war. He still hasn't received a burial because of, I think there's just such huge crowds expected to come out for this, like you said, in the midst of very heavy Israeli and American bombardment over Tehran and other parts of the country. But also, yeah, I mean, being able to decide and pick this next clerical leader of Iran will require this assembly of experts to, if not physically convene, but somehow convene to make that decision. Because we also know that there have been many continued assassinations of top Iranian leadership, both religious and military and security and political. And so, you know, they haven't convened yet and their actual physical headquarters was bombed this week by Israel.
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So as we talk through how events may unfold and things we're watching for in Iran, let's note we do not have a reporter, an NPR journalist on the ground in Iran. We hope to as this story continues to proceed. But we are working around that and trying to track from as many different sources as we can what people are experiencing, what it feels like, what it sounds like there. Right now, I want to play a little bit of There are a substantial number of Iranians who say they support the regime. We've got Irnathis is Iranian state media, which has been posting videos on social media of huge crowds publicly mourning the ayatollah's death. So again, that is not video that NPR has recorded. I have not witnessed that. We don't have a journalist on the ground. But this does track with what I have witnessed on past reporting trips in Iran where you do see large numbers of Iranians coming out saying they support the regime, rallying in the streets. I also want to touch on the obviously horrific story that we're trying to track of the girls elementary school. What we know is that it was hit by an airstrike, like 165 people killed, again, according to Iran state media, many of them children. What do we know at this point about who carried out that attack? Tom?
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We don't know exactly who carried out the attack. The Pentagon said they're looking into it. They're investigating exactly what happened. Our colleague Jeff Brumfield did a story basically saying it could have been an old target that they assumed it was a Revolutionary Guard barracks. That was an old target and now it's a girls school. So maybe somebody made a mistake on the target.
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We don't know yet. Was this a US Strike? Was this an Israeli strike? The Pentagon says we don't attack civilian targets, but somebody did.
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What we do know from chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Kaine, the Americans were operating that area where the girls school was hit and
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then beyond the school just to try to bring y' all a taste of daily life and how things are unfolding in Iran. Let me bring in the voice. This is a woman named Shadi and in Tehran who spoke with our colleague Ruth Sherlock. So she's describing taking her mother to a chemotherapy appointment and walking past government buildings, military bases, centers for Iran's Revolutionary Guards, all of them shattered by US And Israeli strikes. And despite all the anxiety, now my seven year old niece waking up in the middle of the night in fear, the paralysis of my and my husband's work and life, the waiting in lines for gas and bread. You know what I'm thinking? If we try to take over even one of these bases of these criminals ourselves as Iranians and take the weapons they kill us with, how many of us would die trying to do this? 2,000, 3,000? And what if we wanted to take them all? Half a million. So again, that is a woman named Shadi speaking from Tehran. To our colleague Ruth Sherlock, who is reporting from the Turkey, Iran border right now, trying to gather voices inside Iran. You will note that she only gave NPR her first name. That is for fear of being arrested by a regime that has not tolerated dissent or free speech. We're gonna take a break. When we come back, Iran's counterattacks are spilling across the region. How will the Gulf states respond? That's ahead on Sources and Methods from npr.
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This message comes from Intuit. TurboTax with TurboTax Expert. Full service match with a dedicated expert who will do your taxes for you from start to finish, getting you every dollar you deserve. It's that easy. Visit turbotax.com to match with an expert today. We're back. We've been talking about Iran, but this conflict quickly has become much bigger than Iran. Iran has attacked a whole list of places. Qatar, the uae where you are, aad,
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Cyprus and Azerbaijan today as well.
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Azerbaijan added to the list as well as Turkey. Military bases are coming under attack. Energy infrastructure coming under attack, people's homes. What is the reaction? Because this is Israel and America's fight, at least so far. But Gulf states like where you're speaking to us from UAE are paying a price.
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They're paying a steep price. The UAE has actually suffered 300% more targeted attacks by Iran than Israel in this war, according to publicly available data from government statements. And I asked an analyst why the UAE in particular, and he said that he believed it was because the UAE first of all has close ties with Israel, but also the uae, it represents the west in many ways because it has an advanced economy. It's home to so many wealthy Europeans and people from around the world and tourists. It's always been considered a really stable part of the world, not just the region that's been removed and sort of insulated from volatility around the world. And so by attacking Dubai's airport, by attacking the Fairmont Hotel on the palm shaped island, you know, people are getting debris in their million dollar backyards. This is unheard of in Dubai. When we started hearing the booms overhead, it literally rattled this city of millions of people because it's unexpected and it's unprecedented. Dubai has never come under missile attack until now.
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Has it changed your daily life in any way? Can you see or hear this?
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Yeah, I mean, schools are canceled, that's for one. I mean, there's been all remote learning and then they've moved up spring break, so all kids are home now. But the government has been really keen to try to get things back to feeling normal. Has sent out messages that we should resume normal activities because they have been very, very successful at intercepting the vast majority of those missiles and drones. That said, people are still deciding to shelter in place. A lot of people have been reaching out to me because they know I'm a journalist, they know I'm across a lot of information to ask me what they should do. A lot of people are thinking about leaving, and I want to bring your attention, Mary Lise, to one particular attack in the midst of all these attacks that have happened, which hit an Amazon data center. And it didn't get a lot of attention, but it actually disrupted life. Like, I can't pay my phone bill. I can't pay my Internet bill. And that really just brings to the heart of, like, how vulnerable. It doesn't take a mass casualty event for life to be disrupted here. You know, there's real concern about water desalination plants, electricity grids, and also E banking, because if any of those are hit, this place will come to a complete standstill.
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I suppose it's worth noting just the basic geography, too, as you're trying to figure out why the UAE is getting targeted. You're right there. Like, you're right across the Gulf. You can look out toward Iran. Yep. I wonder. I mean, part of the thinking of hosting US Bases in the region is that it's supposed to make the region safer, to have a US Footprint, US Troops, US Facilities. Are any conversations starting about, should the Gulf rethink this? Yeah.
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The idea of having, let's say the El Al Dade air base host 10,000 plus US troops in Qatar, for example, or the US Navy's 5th Fleet in Bahrain, was it was supposed to, yes, provide protection and be a counterweight or a counterbalance to those threats from Iran or potentially other countries and actors in the region. But what we've seen is a lot of radars being hit. We've seen already six service members killed in Kuwait where there are US Troops. So we're seeing these attacks on these countries because. Because they host US Troops and because they host US Forces that are actively now at war with Iran and have made very clear from the assassination of Khamenei that this is about regime change. This is not about diplomacy or trying to bring Iran back to the negotiating table when you take out its supreme leader.
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Could I just quickly add, we're not getting a lot of information about these strikes on US Facilities in Bahrain and Qatar. We're getting information from commercial satellite photos, not from the Pentagon, not from the State Department. And I think that's a real concern. They're giving a lot of detail about what targets are hitting in Iran, but not what is being hit in Bahrain, Qatar and also the Emirates.
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Well, and we know that a lot of the incoming Iranian missiles are being intercepted. Can the US And US Allies keep that up forever?
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They cannot, despite what the President said and what officials have said. I'm told by talking to U.S. officials that there's a real concern in the coming weeks, maybe even sooner, you may have to dip into inventories in the Pacific Command to get more of these interceptor missiles. It's a huge, huge concern. And they think that maybe the Iranians are holding back on shooting some of their missiles because they know that the US Is running low on interceptors. The other thing, Mary Louise, is this another major concern right now? Are the shahed drones that hit that facility in Kuwait that Ayo was just talking about, killing six US service members and I'm told wounding as many as 18 more. So they expect that death toll, unfortunately, to rise. They're very hard to detect. They're small, they're fast. They can evade radar. So that's a continued threat that people are really worried about. And get this, Ukraine is now reaching out to the US and say, you know, we can help you with those because we've been fighting them for the past four years. The Iranians have a huge plant deep in Russia, so keep an eye on that. Ukrainians have interceptor drones that they may provide to the US for this fight.
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Fascinating. We were just checking on this podcast last week about how much Ukraine has learned about how to fight drone warfare. They're the best in the world. The Pentagon is sitting up, taking notice. One more facet to talk through ea, and it's the economic one. We know that global oil markets are being hugely disrupted. Gas markets. A lot of the world's oil and gas comes from the Middle East. Transits through the Middle east through the Strait of Hormuz. What is the latest?
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You're right. And not only is the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed because shipping companies don't want to take the risk of sending their ships, their crew members, and all their cargo through that. We're also seeing, you know, already Qatar's gas production has been halted now for most of the week because of attacks from those drones. And this is even ricocheting all the way to Iraq because Iraq had to suspend oil production on its biggest oil fee because it doesn't have ships to put the oil on because those ships are struck in the Strait of Hormuz. But what I want to tell you also is don't forget these Arab Gulf countries, they have invested billions of dollars in Trump's family. Whether that's cryptocurrency, whether that is Trump real estate projects, or whether that is in Jared Kushner's private equity fund, there have been billions of dollars. And interestingly, today, a very senior Emirati real estate developer, Khalif al Haftur, he wrote a direct message to President Trump on X. And you can read that message to say that that reflects, you could say, the mood in Dubai right now at a senior level in which he said a direct question. Who gave you the authority to drag our region into a war with Iran, and on what basis did you make this dangerous escalation? He says, did you consider how this would create suffering in the countries of the region? So what I want to tell you is that there's a real feeling here that the region is stuck between Prime Minister Netanyahu and his far right government in Israel and the Iranian clerical regime across the Persian Gulf waters.
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And can I just add, Mary Louise, this war has already had an impact at home with gas prices. I just drove by my local gas station in Alexandria, Virginia, the Delray Service center. In the past several days, the price of gas has gone up 10 cents just in the past few days.
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We're gonna take a short break after that. The many war objectives, these sometimes contradictory war objectives announced by the Trump administration, its sources and methods from npr.
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I'm Brian Reed, host of Question Everything.
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We've got a story about a journalist
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Let's turn now to the question. It really undergirds everything we are talking about and it is one that is surprisingly hard to answer. Coming up on a week into this war, why is the US at war with Iran? Tom, we have been told that this war was about supporting human rights, supporting Iranians, protesting their leaders.
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America is backing you with overwhelming, overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny.
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And to un it's also, we've been told, about stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
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Iran will never possess a nuclear bomb, not on our watch, not ever.
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And also about destroying Iran's navy and about destroying Iran's ballistic missiles, their program and ambitions for those missiles.
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I don't understand what the confusion is. Let me explain it to you and I'll do it once again. I as clearly as possible. Perhaps you'll report it that way. The United States is conducting an operation to eliminate the threat of Iran's short range ballistic missiles and the threat posed by their navy, particularly to naval assets.
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And about destroying Iran's proxy allies, Hezbollah, Hamas, destroying those groups.
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We're going to ensure that the region's terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world.
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And also about preventing Iran from striking first.
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D
We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher, those killed.
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C
I mean, there have been all sorts of reasons for this war that the president has put out. But at what point do you basically say, I think we're good? Is it when there's a new leader that comes in that Trump says he wants to have a hand in appointing? We really don't get that at all. And also, you know, President Trump has not gone on tv. He's taken some questions from The Oval Office. If you remember back during the Iraq wars with George H.W. bush, George W. Bush, they actually went on TV and explained why they're going to war. Why are your sons and daughters in harm's way? We've had none of that at this point from the administration.
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And it's not an abstract question. It's going to be very hard to evaluate when the mission is accomplished if we're not totally clear on what the mission is.
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C
Absolutely.
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Eya, is there daylight between the U.S. s goals and Israel's goals in this campaign?
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Israel's goals are clear. It's chaos and mayhem. Bring down the regime. They've said that time and again, and they're very open about it. What comes after that, though, is. Is very unclear, and there has been no picture drawn about what that would look like and if that's even possible. And in the midst of all of this, while the US Is trying to figure out its goalposts, you have to consider, again, this is having a global impact. It's having a huge impact on the economies here, on the safety of American citizens and Westerners and locals and citizens across the region. It is also having a huge impact on, as far as Gaza, where people there are still suffering. There was supposed to be a board of peace. There was supposed to be an international stabilization force. So there are so many consequences to this that may predetermine whether the US Actually achieves its goals, including the price at the pump, but also for how long are these Gulf Arab states going to continue as well, to stay out of this war directly and not respond militarily? Because as of yet, they continue to say this is not their war. They do not want to be dragged in. But, you know, they're under a lot of pressure to defend their air, you know, space. So that's a real big question, too, is like, do you achieve your goals before this war just, you know, literally ignites the entire region?
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One more thing on how we as journalists are trying to report on this war. Tom, you've covered more wars than you may care to remember. The Pentagon has historically felt, I think, an elevated, perhaps unique obligation to brief Americans on what they're doing and why. Because they. They are the part of the US Government that is putting America's sons and daughters potentially in harm's way. What have the briefings been like so far into this war?
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They've been quite thin, frankly. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is more a cheerleader than offering detailed information.
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He's also, he has taken questions, though.
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He has taken questions. But again, first of all, he has little experience. He has less experience than anybody in that job ever.
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What about from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs? He's taken questions.
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C
He has taken questions. He's been pretty good with tactical information about how many bombs have been dropped, how many targets, more than 2,000 targets and so forth. But as far as getting back to the policy, it's like, where is this thing going? We're just not getting information on that. And as General Kaine said, listen, I carry out policy. I don't make policy. Policy comes from the White House, comes from the State Department. And again, the president and Secretary Marco Rubio, they've been silent about where's this going? Or as Petraeus said, tell me how this ends.
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All right, let me start to wind down the show. And I do want to take a second to thank all of you who've been writing us. You've been sending us feedback. You send us questions. Keep it coming. Our email is sourcesandmethodspr.org, sources and methods, all one word. You'll find it in our episode notes. Let me read just a couple of notes that we have received in our mailbag. More than a few of you, including Jay, Laurie and Bruce, you have written to say thanks for our recent episode about Ponies. That is the new spy drama on Peacock. It is a lot of fun. If you missed it, that episode where we speak to one of the stars on the showrunner of Ponies, it is now in our archives. NPR supporters will find it there. Our most recent five episodes are always available. Speaking of older episodes, thanks to all of you who keep writing in to share your spy novel recommendations in response to the episode we did where we gave a little reading list of guys, gosh, a few months ago now, Brendan wrote to recommend Pariah. I have not read that. Looking forward to it. Pariah by Dan Fesperman. Listener David wrote to share a great quote about spy novels that he came across. And it reads, when I read Fleming, Ian Fleming, I want to be a secret agent, but when I read Le Carre, I want to be an accountant. There you go. That brings us to our final segment, which is, as loyal listeners will know, is normally OSINT open source intelligence. This week we're going even more basic, basic intelligence because it seems a lot of you are readers. So I wanted to do a quick reading list. We're all trying to better understand Iran, the country, its politics, its people. So I thought it might be helpful to share a book rec or 2. Ea what do you got.
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I prefer, when possible, to read from authors who are from the region and who've lived this through and who have spent a lot of time here. And so I recommend Kim Ratas. She wrote a book called Black Wave a few years ago, and it really talks about the history of the Middle east and Iran and Saudi Arabia, and it begins with the 1979 revolution. And I think she's very balanced and engaging journalist and writer and one of the sharpest analysts and thinkers out there right now. So I recommend her book, Black Wave.
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Excellent, Tom.
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C
All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer. It was written a couple of decades ago, but I think it's very instructive for today. It talks about the overthrow of the Mohammad Mossadegh government back in 1953 by the CIA. One of the lead guys there was a guy named Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and Murray Louise, you look back on this now. And then, of course, the Shah came in. They installed him as a leader, repressive regime for 25 years. And I keep thinking, as we see what's going on now, what would Iran look like had Mosaddegh stayed in power? Right. It was a wealthy nation, a peaceful nation, Western oriented. What would it look like had he stayed in and maybe had a successor? The Middle east would have been completely different. But we'll just never know what would have happened had he stayed in.
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A
Yeah. So I will throw in two memoirs, both by journalists. One is a prison memoir by Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post journalist who was arrested, arrested on charges of being an American spy in Iran. For the record, Jason was and is not an American spy, but he wrote a book about his time in prison titled My 544th Days in an Iranian Prison. It's interesting because a lot of the action of this book, he's not able to go out and interview people. He's not out and about in the streets. He's in a prison cell. So you might think it would be pretty limited. It offers some really interesting insight on Iran's way more on the inside of a Tehran courtroom than he might have ever cared to know. And he also manages to make what was surely a very bleak experience occasionally laugh out loud. Funny. So I would recommend it for that one more, which is titled Persian Mirrors. It was published in 2000. It was updated in 2005, but I think it holds up. It's by Elaine Sciolino, who reported for Newsweek and the New York Times for many years, visited Iran many times over the years. She was actually on board the plane that brought Khomeini to Tehran in 1979. And then she was there and reported on the revolution in 79. And there's a line that kind of sums it all up from the book where she writes, whenever I think I understand Iran, it throws me a curve. Okay, so a reading list there. I look forward to all of the recs that I hope you all will send us. We'll try to link to the books we just mentioned in our episode notes. We've been talking with NPR international correspondent Aya Batrawy in Dubai and Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman here in D.C. thanks to you both.
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C
You're welcome.
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B
Thank you. It was great to be on with both of you.
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A
And a reminder as we wrap up, the news is unpredictable. We do our best to get new episodes out around the same time each Thursday afternoon. The best way to make sure you get new episodes of the show as soon as we can get them ready for you is follow the show whatever platform you use to listen most places. The way to do that is you look for the little follow button. It's at the top of our show page for now. Thanks for listening. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. We are back next week with another episode of Sources and Methods from npr. This message comes from the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur foundation, recognizing extraordinarily creative individuals whose ideas, solutions and discoveries expand people's expectations of what's possible. Macfound.org.