00:00I would like to ask you how vulnerable you think the supreme leader and the leadership overall in Iran is looking right now.
00:08Obviously, some key figures are no longer alive. They were killed. They've been killed during the course of the last six days.
00:17Overall, though, would you say that it looks like this system of leadership in Iran is in a very vulnerable state?
00:28I mean, that's the key question, and everyone's debating that.
00:35Does this precipitate some kind of change in regime in Iran? Does this receive some kind of collapse, Syria-type collapse?
00:43Well, the Iranian security services, we're at hold, have not been hollowed out to the same extent that the, say, Syrian army had been before the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December.
00:55So I don't think that we'll see a collapse the way that we saw in Syria, and also there's no organized opposition in the way that the Idlib HTS-led forces were able to move down to Aleppo and then, I think, surprising themselves all the way to Damascus.
01:11So I don't think we'll see that kind of scenario.
01:13But I do think it must be extremely difficult for the Iranian leadership to meet right now to decide what it is that they're going to do.
01:21What should their response be?
01:24With something like 11 senior officers having been assassinated over the past six days, how would you get together to do the command and control and planning?
01:34So I think that there's probably a great weakening of the ability to respond diplomatically and militarily to what's going on because of not knowing who's the spy, not knowing how do the Israelis get the information.
01:49I mean, it looks, doesn't it, Ambassador, I mean, just to pick up on that, I mean, it really looks like Iran has been thoroughly, thoroughly compromised in terms of the intel here.
01:59Yes, I agree, and that must weigh on everyone's mind.
02:04How did the Israelis do this?
02:05I mean, it's an extremely sophisticated and impressive clandestine operation that the Israelis did in combination with the precision airstrikes.
02:15I mean, and the fact that they were able to basically have a drone factory inside Iran is remarkable.
02:22I mean, we can go back to the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haneyeh in a presidential guesthouse of Iran.
02:31And this must make it extremely difficult for decision making in Iran now because you don't know who to trust or what other information the Israelis have.
