Revealed: The CIA-Backed Think Tanks Fueling the Iran Protests

By Alan Macleod – Jan 15, 2026

As waves of deadly demonstrations and counter-demonstrations hit Iran, MintPress examines the CIA-backed think tanks helping to stir the outrage and foment more violence.

One of these groups is Human Rights Activists In Iran, frequently referred to as HRA or HRAI in the media. The group, and its media arm, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) have become the go-to group of experts for Western media, and are the source of many of the most inflammatory claims and shockingly high casualty figures reported in the press. In the past week alone, their assertions have provided much of the basis for stories in CNN, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, ABC News, Sky News, and The New York Post, among others. And in a passionate plea for leftists to support the protests, Owen Jones wrote in The Guardian Tuesday that HRAI are a “respected” group whose death toll proclamations are “probably significant underestimates.”

Yet what none of these reports mention is that Human Rights Activists In Iran is bankrolled by the Central Intelligence Agency, through its cutout organization, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

“Independent” NGOs, Brought to You By the CIA
Established in 2006, Human Rights Activists in Iran is based in Fairfax, Virginia, just a stone’s throw away from CIA headquarters in Langley. It describes itself as a “non-political” association of activists dedicated to advancing freedom and rights in Iran. On its website, it notes that, “because the organization seeks to remain independent, it doesn’t accept financial aid from neither political groups nor governments.” Yet, in the same paragraph, it notes that “HRAI has also been accepting donations from National Endowment for Democracy, a non-profit, non-governmental organization in the United States of America.” The level of NED investment into HRAI has been substantial, to say the least; journalist Michael Tracey found that, in 2024 alone, the NED had apportioned well over $900,000 towards the organization.

The huge death tolls in Iran being splashed all over the media are sourced to an outfit in Fairfax, VA called "Human Rights Activists in Iran" that is overwhelmingly funded by the US government. What is their methodology? Is it credible? Who cares? Just pump the big numbers out pic.twitter.com/9No2e7n1Dw
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) January 12, 2026

Another NGO widely cited in recent media reports on the protests is the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran (ABCHRI). The group has been quoted widely, including by The Washington Post, PBS, and ABC News. Like with the HRAI, these reports also fail to disclose the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center’s proximity to the U.S. national security state.

Although it does not mention it in its funding disclaimer, the center is supported by the NED. Last year, the NED described the center as a “partner” organization, and awarded its director, Roya Boroumand, their 2024 Goler T. Butcher medal for democracy promotion.

“Roya and her organization have worked rigorously and objectively to document human rights violations committed by the regime in Iran,” said Amira Maaty, senior director for NED’s Middle East and North Africa programs. “The work of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center is an indispensable resource for victims to seek justice and hold perpetrators accountable under international law. NED is proud to support Roya and the center in their advocacy for human rights and tireless pursuit of a democratic future for Iran.”

In addition to this, sitting on the center’s board of directors is controversial academic, Francis Fukuyama, a former NED board member and an editor of its “Journal of Democracy” publication.

If anything, the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) has gone further than HRAI or the ABCHRI. Widely cited across Western media (e.g., The New York Times, The Guardian, USA Today), the CHRI has been the source of many of the goriest and most lurid stories coming out of Iran. A Monday article in The Washington Post, for example, leaned on the CHRI’s expertise to report that Iranian hospitals were being overwhelmed and had even run out of blood to treat the victims of government repression. “A massacre is unfolding. The world must act now to prevent further loss of life,” a CHRI spokesperson said. Given President Trump’s recent threats about U.S. military attacks on Iran, the implications of the statement were clear.

And yet, like with the other NGOs profiled, none of the corporate media outlets citing the Center for Human Rights in Iran noted its close connections to the U.S. national security state. The CHRI – an Iranian human rights group based in New York City and Washington, D.C. – was identified by the government of China as directly funded by the NED.

The claim is far from outlandish, given that CHRI board member, Mehrangiz Kar, is a former Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the NED. And in 2002 at a star-studded gala on Capitol Hill, First Lady Laura Bush and future president Joe Biden presented Kar with the NED’s annual Democracy Award.

A History of Regime Change Ops
The National Endowment for Democracy was created in 1983 by the Reagan administration, after a series of scandals had seriously damaged the image and reputation of the CIA. The Church Committee – a 1975 U.S. Senate investigation into CIA activities – found that the agency had masterminded the assassination of several foreign heads of state, was involved in a massive domestic surveillance campaign against progressive groups, had infiltrated and placed agents in hundreds of U.S. media outlets, and was carrying out shocking mind control experiments on unwilling American participants.

Technically a private entity, although receiving virtually all its funding from the federal government and being staffed by ex-spooks, the NED was created as a way to outsource many of the agency’s most controversial activities, especially overseas regime change operations. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA,” Carl Gershman, the NED’s longtime president, said in 1986. NED co-founder Allen Weinstein agreed: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” he told The Washington Post.

Part of the CIA’s mission was to create a worldwide network of media outlets and NGOs that would parrot CIA talking points, passing it off as credible news. As former CIA taskforce leader John Stockwell admitted, “I had propagandists all over the world.” Stockwell went on to describe how he helped flood the world with fake news demonizing Cuba:

We pumped dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists [to the media]… We ran [faked] photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country… We didn’t know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists eating babies for breakfast.”

Mike Pompeo, former CIA director, alluded this being active CIA policy. At a 2019 talk at Texas A&M University, he said, “When I was a cadet, what’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses [on] it!”

One of the NED’s greatest successes came in 1996, when it successfully swung elections in Russia, spending vast amounts of money to ensure U.S. puppet ruler Boris Yeltsin would remain in power. Yeltsin, who came to power in a 1993 coup that dissolved parliament, was deeply unpopular, and it appeared that the Russian public were ready to vote for a return to Communism. The NED and other American agencies flooded Russia with money and propaganda, ensuring their man remained in power. The story was cataloged in a famous edition of Time magazine, whose title page was emblazoned with the words, “Yanks To The Rescue: the Secret Story of How American Advisors Helped Yeltsin Win.”

Six years later, the NED provided both the finances and the brains for a briefly successful coup d’état against Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez. The NED spent hundreds of thousands of dollars flying coup leaders (such as Marina Corina Machado) back and forth to Washington, D.C. After the coup was overturned and the plot was exposed, NED funding to Machado and her allies actually increased, and the organization has continued to fund her and her political organizations.

The NED would have more luck in Ukraine, playing a key role in the successful 2014 Maidan Revolution that toppled President Viktor Yanukovych and replaced him with a pro-U.S. successor. The Maidan affair followed a tried-and-tested formula, with large numbers of people coming out to protest, and a hardcore of trained paramilitaries carrying out acts of violence aimed at destabilizing the government and provoking a military response.

Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs (and future NED board member) Victoria Nuland flew to Kiev to signal the U.S. government’s full support of the movement to oust Yanukovych, even handing out cookies to protestors in the city’s main square. A leaked telephone call showed that the new Ukrainian prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, was directly chosen by Nuland. “Yats is the guy,” she can be heard telling U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, citing his experience and friendliness with Washington as key factors. The 2014 Maidan Revolution and its aftermath would lead to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine eight years later.

Just across the border in Belarus, the NED planned similar actions to overthrow President Alexander Lukashenko. At the time of the attempt (2020-2021), the NED was pursuing 40 active projects inside the country.

On a Zoom call infiltrated and covertly recorded by activists, the NED’s senior Europe Program officer, Nina Ognianova, boasted that the groups leading the nationwide demonstrations against Lukashenko were trained by her organization. “We don’t think that this movement that is so impressive and so inspiring came out of nowhere — that it just happened overnight,” she said, noting that the NED had made a “significant contribution” to the protests.

On the same call, NED President Gershman noted that “we support many, many groups, and we have a very, very active program throughout the country, and many of the groups obviously have their partners in exile,” boasting that the Belarusian government was powerless to stop them. “We’re not like Freedom House or NDI [the National Democratic Institute] and the IRI [International Republican Institute]; we don’t have offices. So if we’re not there, they can’t kick us out,” he said, comparing the NED to other U.S. regime change organizations.

The attempted Color Revolution did not succeed, however, as demonstrators were met with large counter-demonstrations, and Lukashenko remains in power to this day. The NED’s actions were a key factor in Lukashenko’s decision to abandon his relationship with the West, and ally Belarus with Russia.

Strangling Sanctions and Color Revolutions: How the West Has Stolen Iran’s Sovereignty for Centuries

Just months after their failure in Belarus, the NED fomented another regime change attempt, this time in Cuba. The agency spent millions of dollars infiltrating and buying off pliant musical artists, especially in the hip hop community, in an attempt to turn local popular culture against its revolution. Led by Cuban rappers, the U.S. attempted to rally the people into the streets, flooding social media with calls from celebrities and politicians alike to topple the government. This did not translate into boots on the ground, however, and the fiasco was written off sarcastically as the U.S.’ “Bay of Tweets.”

So many of the most visible protest movements the world over have been quietly masterminded by the NED. This includes the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests, wherein the agency funnelled millions to the movement’s leaders to keep people in the streets as long as possible. The NED continues to work with Uyghur and Tibetan separatist groups, in the hope of destabilizing China. Other known NED meddling projects include interfering with elections in France, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Poland.

It is precisely for these reasons, therefore, that accepting funding from the NED should be unthinkable for any serious NGO or human rights organization, as so many that do have been front groups for American power and clandestine regime change operations. It is also why the public should be extremely wary about any claims made by organizations on the payroll of a CIA cutout organization, especially those that attempt to hide the fact. Journalists, too, have a duty to scrutinize any statements made by these groups, and inform their readers and viewers about their inherent conflicts of interests.

Targeting Iran
Apart from funding the three U.S.-based human rights NGOs profiled here, the NED is spearheading a myriad of operations targeting the Islamic Republic. According to its 2025 grant listings, there are currently 18 active NED projects for Iran, although the agency does not divulge any of the groups they are working with.

It also refuses to divulge any hard details about these projects, beyond rather bland descriptions that include:

Empowering” a network of “frontline and exiled activists” inside Iran;

“Promoting independent journalism,” and “Establishing media platforms to influence the public;”

“Monitoring and promoting human rights;”

“Fostering internet freedom;”

“Training student leaders inside Iran;”

“Advancing policy analysis, debate, and collective actions on democracy,” and;

“Foster[ing] collaboration between Iranian civil society and political activists on a democratic vision and raise awareness on civic rights within the legal community, the organization will facilitate debate on transition models from authoritarianism to democracy.”

Reading between the lines, the NED is attempting to build up a widespread network of media outlets, NGOs, activists, intellectuals, student leaders and politicians who will all sing from the same hymn sheet, that of “transitioning” from “authoritarianism” (i.e., the current system of government” to “democracy,” (i.e., a U.S.-picked government). In other words: regime change.

Iran, of course, has been in American crosshairs ever since the removal of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi during the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79. Pahlavi himself had been kept in place by the CIA, who engineered a coup against the democratically-elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh (1952-53). Mossadegh, a secular liberal reformer, had angered Washington by nationalizing the country’s oil industry, carrying out land reform, and refusing to crush the communist Tudeh Party.

The CIA (the NED’s parent organization), infiltrated Iranian media, paying them to run hysterical anti-Mossadegh content, carried out terror attacks inside Iran, bribed officials to turn against the president, cultivated ties with reactionary elements within the military, and paid protestors to flood the streets at anti-Mossadegh rallies.

The shah reigned for 26 bloody years between 1953 and 1979, until he was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution.

The U.S. supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, who almost immediately invaded Iran, leading to a bitter, eight-year long conflict that killed at least half a million people. Washington supplied Hussein with a wide range of weapons, including components for chemical weapons used on Iranians, as well as other weapons of mass destruction.

Since 1979, Iran has also been under restrictive American economic sanctions, measures that have severely hindered the country’s development. During his first term, Trump withdrew from the Iran Nuclear Deal and turned up the economic pressure. The result was a collapse in the value of the Iranian rial, mass unemployment, soaring rents and a doubling of the price of food. Ordinary people lost both their savings and their long-term security.

Throughout this, Trump has constantly threatened Iran with attack, finally following through in June, bombing a host of infrastructure projects inside the country.

A Legitimate Protest?
The current demonstrations began on December 28 as a protest against rising prices. Yet they quickly ballooned into something much bigger, with thousands calling for an overthrow of the government, and even the reinstatement of the monarchy under the son of the shah, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi.

They were quickly supported and signal boosted by the U.S. and Israeli national security states. “The Iranian regime is in trouble,” Pompeo announced. “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them…” he added. Israeli media are openly reporting that “foreign elements” (i.e., Israeli) are “arming the protesters in Iran with live weapons, and this is the reason for the hundreds of dead among the regime’s people.”

The Iranian regime is in trouble. Bringing in mercenaries is its last best hope.
Riots in dozens of cities and the Basij under siege — Mashed, Tehran, Zahedan. Next stop: Baluchistan.
47 years of this regime; POTUS 47. Coincidence?
Happy New Year to every Iranian in the…
— Mike Pompeo (@mikepompeo) January 2, 2026

The Israeli intelligence services confirmed Pompeo’s not-so-cryptic assertion. “Go out together into the streets. The time has come,” the spying agency’s official social media accounts instructed Iranians: “We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.”

Trump echoed those words. “TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price,” he roared, adding that American “help is on the way.”

Any debate about what Trump meant by “American help” was ended on Monday, when he stated that “If Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue… We are locked and loaded and ready to go.” He also attempted to place an all-out economic blockade, announcing that any country trading with Tehran would face an additional 25% tariff.

All of this, added to the increasing violence of the protests, makes it much harder for Iranians to express themselves politically. What started as a demonstration about the cost of living has spiralled into a huge, openly insurrectionist movement, backed and fomented by the U.S. and Israel. Iranians, of course, have every right to protest, but a wealth of factors have raised the very real possibility that much of the anti-government movement is an inorganic, U.S.-orchestrated attempt at regime change. While Iranians can argue about how they wish to express themselves and what sort of government they want, what is undebatable is that so many of the think tanks and NGOs called upon to provide supposed expert evidence and commentary about these protests are tools of the National Endowment for Democracy.

(MintPress News)