Aletho News

The Head Of A CIA Cutout Admits To Meddling In Iran To Fuel Unrest

The Dissident | February 24, 2026

At a recent House Appropriations Committee hearing, Damon Wilson, the current president of the National Endowment for Democracy, the notorious cutout of the CIA’s regime change arm, which has previously helped fund coups around the world, admitted to meddling in Iran and helping to fuel both the women’s life freedom protests in 2022 and the recent protests in Iran.

Wilson boasted that the U.S. government-funded organization helped spread the story of a woman being killed for not wearing a headscarf in Iran that sparked the women’s life freedom protests in 2022, even admitting that the story would not have spread across Iran without the NED.

Wilson admitted, in response to the question, “Are you doing anything in Iran and can you tell us what that is?”, “This has been a huge priority for the endowment. Iran has been- since I arrived at the endowment- our fastest growing program. It’s now one of our largest programs globally that involves both direct partners, Iranian groups as well as our core institutes. If you think about the impact of our work in Iran, the reason the women life freedom movement began with the the simple act of a young woman who didn’t fully cover her her head with a headscarf, that story … could have been lost in a regional as a regional story in Iran, but NED Partners helped cover that story, get it out to the world, and get it back into Iran.”

He also admitted in reference to the most recent protests in Iran, that the organization has helped smuggle Starlink terminals into Iran and spread propaganda that helped spark the pro-regime change protests.

Damon Wilson boasted, “the endowment has been making investments over years that have ensured that there have been secure communications, including Starlinks, other means, file casting that allowed information to go both in and out of the country at a time when the regime tried to hide its brutal crackdown” adding, “Part of what we see manifesting is a response that our partners have helped tell the Iranian people the story that the regime has squandered their own resources on supporting proxies throughout the Middle East to the point where they cannot manage their own water supplies for Tehran. And these stories have not just emerged, they are ones that have been covered, documented, and shared with the Iranian people consistently through our work.”

He added, “we’ve been investing in communication tools over the years that allow for information to be sent into Iran even when internet connectivity is blocked. We specifically began supporting the deployment, the operation of about 200 Starlinks early on.”

Damon Wilson boasted that the NED has spread stories that the Iranian government has “squandered their own resources” and “cannot manage their own water supplies for Tehran”, issues that have, in large part, been caused by U.S. sanctions.

Previously U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has boasted that U.S. sanctions helped spark the protests in Iran saying, “What we can do at treasury, and what we have done, is created a dollar shortage in the country, at a speech at the Economic club in New York in March I outlined the strategy, it came to a swift -and I would say grand- culmination in December when one of the largest banks in Iran went under, there was a run in the bank, the central bank had to print money, the Iranian currency went into freefall, inflation exploded and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.”

While Scott Bessent boasts that U.S. sanctions led to “Iranian people out on the street”, Damon Wilson is boasting that the NED has flooded Iran with anti-government messaging while people are suffering worsening conditions from the U.S. sanctions, in order to further destabilize Iran and further the ultimate goal of regime change.

February 25, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Deception | Iran, NED, United States