James Clapper: “Iranian officials--probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei--have changed their calculus and are now willing to…”

The frequency with which they are occurring, tells me that they're kind of in - they realize they're kind of in a jam.

I've gotten very concerned about it. There are Chinese, Russians and others so we traditionally thought about it as people coming from Central America, South and Central America. Well, it's much broader than that. So this is a serious…

I think the reason they were taken off the list was to provide an inducement or motivation for them to agree to some sort of ceasefire.

Ties with Tehran offer some regional governments a means of staking an independent position on Iran, thereby mitigating its isolation while also attempting to extract Iranian financial aid and investment for economic and social projects.