Speaking in May at a conference in Washington, DC, Gregg Roman, executive director of the American right-wing Middle East Forum (MEF), took stock of the work his organisation has been doing over the past year in support of efforts aimed at the eventual overthrow of the current Iranian regime.
"[US military operation Epic Fury] was the doctrine we advocated in practice. For the first time in 10 years, we saw it live. 39 days of fire," he said to a room of 150 donors and pro-war policy makers, which included the Israeli ambassador to the US, Yechial Leiter .
The conference appeared to serve as an opportunity to seek funding for additional MEF initiatives directed at challenging Iran's current government.
Operation Epic Fury was launched on 28 February by the United States and Israel, reportedly at the encouragement of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The war's aim in the immediate hours was to topple the Iranian regime with the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the top leaders of Iran. The plan involved encouraging Iranian elements to rise and seize power in the ensuing chaos, the arming of dissident groups and recruits, especially in Iran's minority communities, and the installation of friendly Iranian leaders to accept US-Israeli terms.
Since 7 October, Israel stepped up its intelligence operations in Iran, peaking with the 12-day war in June 2025. Israel identified and recruited scores of Iranian dissidents to aid in its covert operations in Iran. It remains unclear, however, whether a similar level of Israeli infiltration occurred during Operation Epic Fury or whether Iran's brutal crackdown managed to contain it.
According to US and Israeli sources, the early days of the war involved a botched plan to arm Kurdish Iranian elements in the Northwest to launch attacks on Iranian regime targets.
With the war on Iran winding down in late June following the announcement of a Memorandum of Understanding between the US and Iran, which excluded Israel and by all accounts failed to deliver any strategic gains for Washington and Tel Aviv, The New Arab can now reveal a collaboration between MEF and the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies ( INSS ) to create intelligence on "pressure points" inside the country with the aim of weakening the Iranian regime, ahead of the war.
The project, dubbed the "Iranian Civil Society Vulnerability Assessment", was to gather information from Farsi-language open-source intelligence and social networks and build a "comprehensive heat map that provides actionable information on key pressure points" in ten of Iran's most ethnically diverse provinces. The proposal identified INSS's top Iran expert, Raz Zimmt , as the intended project lead.
The leaked documents do not explain how any resulting research would have been operationalised, nor do they establish that it was subsequently used in military planning or intelligence operations.
But writing about the project in an email, Roman believed that "INSS's analytical expertise combined with MEF's operational focus can produce a truly transformative understanding of the opportunities within Iran".
Information about the proposed project was obtained thanks to documents leaked by the INSS and published by the journalist collective Distributed Denial of Secrets in April 2026.
The documents were leaked by a group operating under the eponym Handala , with suspected links to Iranian intelligence. According to the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz , which established the authenticity of documents in the tranche, the Institute had been targeted by Iranian hackers for years.
The INSS claims to be an independent academic institution affiliated with Tel Aviv University. However, it maintains strong ties with the Israeli security establishment. Many of its fellows were high-ranking members of Israel's intelligence forces, such as the Mossad and the Army Intelligence, before joining the institute.
Its current director, Tamir Hayman , used to run the Israeli army's Intelligence Directorate between 2018 and 2021, and has been advising the Israeli army since the start of its war on Gaza in 2023. Meanwhile, some INSS experts, such as Raz Zimmt, have publicly questioned whether US-Israeli strikes alone on Iran could bring down the regime.
When contacted, MEF's Executive Director Gregg Roman refused to confirm the authenticity of the leaked correspondence and denied any collaboration with INSS.
"You are preparing to attack the American organisation doing the most to help the Iranian people end the regime in Tehran," Roman told TNA in an email. "That is not journalism. That is the regime's public relations, and you have volunteered to do it," Roman wrote in an acrimonious exchange of email s.
The New Arab also contacted Tamir Hayman and Raz Zimmt for comment. No reply was received in time for publication.
Before the publication of this article, Israeli media outlets reported on the forthcoming story and criticised The New Arab , accusing it of "[targeting] the Middle East Forum for its open support of the Iranian people against the regime".
What is the Middle East Forum?
In his speech last month, Roman likened the Middle East Forum to DARPA, the research branch of the US Department of Defence, which developed, among others, the bunker-buster bomb .
"We're not a think tank. We're an applied research organisation for defending political modernity. We are the DARPA of this fight," said Roman during the conference in Washington.
Founded in 1994 by the self-described "counter-jihad activist" Daniel Pipes , the MEF is considered by many observers as one of the leading institutions in the spread of anti-Muslim discourse in North America.
Roman denied having an anti-Muslim agenda and told TNA via email that they only target 'Islamism', a common defence among right-wing and conservative forces.
But according to researchers at Georgetown University, the MEF " spreads misinformation, creates 'watchlists' targeting academics, and advocates hawkish foreign policy" in favour of an Islamophobic agenda.
While claiming to " promote American interests in the Middle East", the Forum has predominantly advanced agendas affiliated with the Netanyahu government. Through its Hebrew-speaking Israel Victory Project , it has called for a rejection of peace negotiations until Palestinians and their supporters "recognise the defeat of their struggle against Israel".
"Yes. Through the Israel Victory Project, we argue that wars end when one side accepts defeat, not when the losing side is handed another round of talks. We believe the same wherever the enemy is rejectionist. Decades spent asking the victim to keep bargaining with people sworn to destroy it have produced more war, not less. The path to a real peace runs through victory, and we will not apologise for saying so," wrote Roman in response to The New Arab .
In the UK, the Middle East Forum has been reported to have financed the legal defence of far-right activist Tommy Robinson with at least $60,000 back in 2018. The Forum also funded , organised, and staffed multiple far-right rallies in London in support of Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon. It ultimately cut all ties with the far-right figure in 2020 after it claimed funds intended for him were misappropriated.
What do we know about the project?
The leaked documents do not specify how the intelligence prepared by INSS would be made "actionable".
But such intelligence would include sensitive information such as the level of presence of military, paramilitary, and law enforcement forces in ten of Iran's provinces, as well as the number of political prisoners, executions, and other human rights violations there.
Prominent labour organisations, student and women's organisations would also be tracked, according to the documents. The project was estimated to cost $330,000 per year and would engage four researchers at the Israel-based INSS.
The leaked documents do not show whether the project was actually launched. In September 2025, INSS recruited a Farsi-speaking reservist from the Israeli army's Unit 8200 - in charge of signal intelligence - to be part of the project.
But leaked emails suggest funding had not yet been secured as of December 2025. At the end of that month, protests in Iran over rising living costs led to repression from the regime at a level of lethal violence never seen before.
Since then, the MEF has advocated for investing US taxpayer money in Iranian civil society with the goal of overthrowing the ruling regime.
In January, about a month before the first US strike on Iran, MEF's Gregg Roman wrote that the US government should funnel money to organisations in the country through Cold War-era programmes such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Then, in March, less than a week after the assassination of Khamenei, Roman called for some $300 to $500 million for the NED - to be spent as stipends for pro-democracy activists and in support of ethnic minority groups inside Iran.
"Funding democrats and persecuted minorities against a regime that hangs them is not a scandal. It is the most American thing we do," wrote Roman in an email to The New Arab . "Yes, I put a figure on it, because half-measures get people killed," he added.
Israeli influence inside the Iranian opposition?
Any such large investment could potentially help finance the Middle East Forum's own work and its hawkish agenda.
According to its website , the Forum has deployed some 470 Starlink satellite terminals inside the country to circumvent the regime's internet blackout. It also supports the Iran Freedom Congress , an umbrella group for the Iranian diaspora opposed to the current Iranian regime.
Marty Youssefiani , one of the Congress's founding members, also works at the Middle East Forum. In the lead-up to its convening, Youssefiani spoke extensively to right-wing Israeli media about how the removal of Iran's Islamic Republic could transform the region's relationship with Israel.
"A free Iran can transform the Middle East: peace, stability, trade, commerce, and fraternal relations with all neighbours, especially Israel," he stated in an X post after his intervention on pro-Netanyahu Israeli Channel 14 in March.
Roman, the Middle East Forum's executive director, challenged this framing of Youssefiani's advocacy.
"Youssefiani sat for The National , the Emirati paper out of Abu Dhabi. He is quoted in The Guardian , in The Atlantic , and at length in Foreign Policy ," he said. "Calling that body of work 'right-wing Israeli media' is not a description. It is an effort to dress a mainstream, heavily covered movement up as an Israeli operation run in the dark."
In front of the Middle East Forum's funders, however, Gregg Roman has continued to articulate a vision of a global struggle for what he calls "Western values" against the "Islamist threat" and its "imams in Hamburg, professors at Columbia and ambassadors in Doha".
Speaking in that conference room in May, Roman vowed to continue "the patient work that the moment requires, finding the enemy, documenting the enemy, constraining the enemy, defeating the enemy", including from his "kitchen table in Hod Hasharon [in Israel]".
Anas Ambri is a freelance investigative journalist. Follow him on Bluesky: @anasambri.bsky.social
Yossi Bartal is a freelance journalist based in Berlin. His latest project, #Israelfiles, on Israel’s Lawfare against Human Rights, supported by the European Investigative Collaboration (EIC) Network, was published in numerous publications across Europe. Follow him on Bluesky: @yossibartal.bsky.social