TEHRAN – The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has openly admitted to playing a central role in amplifying and exploiting the tragic death of an Iranian woman in 2022, spurring deadly riots that convulsed Iran for several months.

The admission, made by NED President Damon Wilson in an interview with The Free Press on Wednesday, confirms long-standing Iranian assertions that foreign actors orchestrated the violence ensuing Mahsa Amini’s death. The unrest took the lives of about 300 hundred people including over 100 security forces. 

The NED which, says is dedicated to “promoting democracy around the world”, is funded by the U.S. government, despite claiming to be a non-governmental organization. 

What happened to Mahsa Amini? 

The death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September 2022 became a flashpoint for Western media and NGOs who claimed she had been beaten up by police while in custody. Amini passed out at a police station and lost her life a few days later in a hospital. Westerners said her death was due to an injury she had sustained to her head. 

Iranian authorities maintained that Amini suffered from a pre-existing medical condition—a claim corroborated by her father in a judiciary-released video. This video was filmed while Amini’s father was speaking to a judiciary official beside her hospital bed. The official, dispatched to the hospital to investigate, asked her father if he could identify any injuries to his daughter's head, to which he responded, "No, not at all."

A year later, an Iranian-American doctor with a significant social media following disclosed that Amini’s brain scans, leaked while she was hospitalized, showed “no signs of injuries” and only evidence of prior surgery. “I withheld this truth to avoid undermining the movement,” he admitted, exposing the deliberate manipulation of medical evidence to inflame public sentiment.

NED grantees, including media outlets and activist networks, amplified narratives that said Amini had been killed by police globally.

In his interview with the FP, Wilson boasted, “Thanks to NED grantees, the world learned about the horrible death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the brutal Iranian regime.”

NED: a legacy of covert regime change

Founded in 1983 and funded by the U.S. Congress, the NED has long been described as a “traditional intermediary of the CIA,” tasked with executing overtly what the agency once did covertly.

Former NED officials, including Allen Weinstein, have openly acknowledged this continuity: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” she told the Washington Post in 1991.

The NED's former president, Carl Gershman, explained, "It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60s, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created."

New York Times reporter John Broder wrote in 1997 that the organization was created “to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades.”

The NED’s modus operandi involves channeling millions of dollars annually to opposition groups, media platforms, and NGOs in target nations.

Frances Stonor Saunders, a historian of CIA operations, described the NED as the “umbilical cord of gold that leads directly back to Washington,” facilitating information warfare and regime-change campaigns under the veneer of democracy promotion.

In Iran, the NED’s grantees reportedly funded protest coordination, social media campaigns, and anti-government propaganda. These efforts aligned with broader U.S. strategies to isolate Iran economically and politically.

During multiple protests and riots throughout the years, the scale and violence bore hallmarks of foreign intervention.

In 2022, Western and Israeli-linked actors infiltrated the initial protests and eventually moved towards attacking police stations and city infrastructures.

Mainstream media in the West, meanwhile, advertently echoed only opposition claims and ignored Iran’s efforts to address protester concerns, such as pardoning 22,000 detainees in March 2023.

Geopolitical agendas and double standards

The NED’s activities in Iran reflect a broader U.S. strategy to weaken independent states that resist Western hegemony.

Parallels exist in Venezuela, Syria, and China, where the NED funds opposition groups under the pretext of “human rights.”

Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, has repeatedly warned of this “hybrid war”—a blend of sanctions, propaganda, and covert operations aimed at sowing discord.

The so-called human rights groups' one-sided condemnations of Iran, while ignoring U.S.-backed violence worldwide, further expose this hypocrisy.