Tehran’s Fake Diplomacy and the 10-Day Reload

Code 110

The regime’s foreign minister sat for an interview and gave the game away: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz was written into the war plan before the first shot, under a codename, and the negotiations were staged “for closure.” The same regime has now quietly authored a ten-day ceasefire request while its cities absorb a tenth consecutive night. This issue reads the confession, prices the pause, and follows $7.7 million of foreign money to a building site blocks from the US Capitol.

Good afternoon. The most important document of this war week was not a communique. It was an interview. Iranian journalist Javad Mogooyi’s sit-down with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, mined in a new Forum dispatch by Shay Khatiri, contains the sentence that indicts the entire diplomatic track: “The negotiations were for closure so that nobody, domestically or internationally, would say if you had negotiated there wouldn’t be war. We were certain that there would be war.” The strait closure itself, Araghchi says, was pre-agreed under a codename, Code 110, to be triggered if the supreme leader was targeted. The extortion was not improvised. It was filed.

Hold that confession against this morning’s diplomacy: two sources tell The Jerusalem Post that it was Tehran itself that initiated the ten-day ceasefire proposal now being carried by Qatari, Egyptian, Omani, and Pakistani mediators, while CENTCOM ran a tenth consecutive night of strikes and Kuwait urged power rationing after a fourth straight night of Iranian fire on its power and water plants.

The Wall Street Journal supplied the reason time matters: Israeli intelligence assesses that Iran moved thousands of centrifuges under Pickaxe Mountain last fall, a site no bomb has yet touched. And in Washington, the Forum published the receipts on a different front: $7.7 million in Islamic Development Bank financing behind CAIR’s new headquarters project. Two fronts, one method. Read the files.

Gregg Roman · July 21, 2026

In this afternoon’s brief:

• The confession: Code 110, a scripted closure, and a Supreme Leader nobody sees
• The ten-day request: Tehran authored the pause it pretends to weigh
• The Gulf board: a tenth night, Kuwait rationing, and tankers turning for Suez
• Special Feature: the CAIR Plaza file, $7.7 million in foreign financing
• The Levant: the first pilot-zone handover, and Aoun at the White House

The interview that gave the game away.

The facts first. Iranian journalist Javad Mogooyi has begun releasing a multi-part interview with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, recorded before hostilities resumed, and Shay Khatiri’s new Forum dispatch mines part one for what it is: a confession (MEF / Khatiri). On the negotiations that preceded this war: “The negotiations were for closure so that nobody, domestically or internationally, would say if you had negotiated there wouldn’t be war. We were certain that there would be war. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was behind this tactic too.” On the strait: “Why was the Strait of Hormuz closed from the first day? Because, from the beginning, it had been agreed that, if the supreme leader had been a target, the strait would close.” The codename for that scenario was Code 110.

On the arsenal: Araghchi boasts the regime tripled its missile capability and cut launcher-base reactivation from ten to fifteen hours down to thirty-five to forty minutes.

And on the regime’s soft tissue: its “biggest vulnerability is the penetration of the regime” by spies, and “The regime would collapse if all members of the Supreme National Security Council are hit, which is why they never met at once during the war.” When the interviewer named two Tehran leadership tunnel locations on air, Araghchi’s reply was its own kind of admission: “There are more, of which you do not know.”

Then there is the Supreme Leader nobody sees. In remarks to the Iranian outlet Asriran carried this week, Araghchi said: “I have not seen Mr. Mojtaba so far, and I don’t think anyone else has seen him in the current era, except for a few people” (JPost, JNS). Decisions in the negotiations, he explained, ran through a six-member committee “consisting of people like the president, Ghalibaf, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, and myself, who made decisions for the negotiations on the spot, because it was difficult to communicate with the top.”

The Critical Threats Project reads the remarks as highlighting “the seemingly limited role that Mojtaba has played in regime decision-making,” and notes “numerous reports in recent months that Mojtaba is incapacitated or seriously wounded” (CTP). Israel Hayom reported, on a single source, that Mojtaba is not in Iran at all, with statements in his name drafted by Ahmad Vahidi and senior Guard officers (Israel Hayom); the Washington Times puts it more carefully: no public appearance since February, whereabouts unclear, flight rumors unconfirmed (Washington Times).

Khatiri draws the line under it: the appointment, in Araghchi’s own words, “was a very important message to the world that there would be no change in the regime’s policies and ideals.”

File Code 110 where it belongs: as the answer to every future op-ed pleading for one more round of talks. The regime’s chief diplomat says the last negotiation was theater staged “for closure,” that the strait closure was scripted in advance, and that the state he serves is run by a committee for a Supreme Leader nobody can locate. The Iran Freedom Project’s claim has never been about the regime’s weakness of arms; it is about the regime’s weakness of legitimacy, and a government that hides its own head of state from its own foreign minister is making our argument for us. The Reciprocity Standard addendum: when a regime tells you its diplomacy is choreography, believe it the first time.

Tehran authored the pause it pretends to weigh.

The ceasefire story turned inside out this morning. On Monday, a senior Iranian official told Reuters that mediators had passed Iran a proposal for a ten-day ceasefire to revive the June interim deal. By this morning, The Jerusalem Post reported the origination: “It was Tehran that initiated the proposal now being advanced by mediators for a 10-day ceasefire,” per two sources familiar with the negotiations, carried by senior Qatari, Egyptian, Omani, and Pakistani officials (JPost).

Axios’s Barak Ravid keeps the mediators out front and names them: Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, envoy Ali Al-Thawadi, Pakistani Field Marshal Asim Munir, Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty, and Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi, with a package that would halt the fighting, reopen both Hormuz traffic lanes, and salvage the June 17 memorandum, including a floated Malacca-style “reasonable service fees” formula for the strait (Axios).

The American answer so far: exploring the proposal, but demanding a longer ceasefire and at least partial freedom-of-navigation understandings first, with some administration officials calling the Iranian offer “absurd” and “illogical” (JPost). A senior US official to Axios: “The president is focused on making Iran pay for its violations of the MOU... These devastating blows will continue until the president deems otherwise.” The President ordered the Pentagon to make Iran pay “many times over” for every American death. Secretary Rubio, overnight: the US remains “open to a diplomatic solution” (Ynet). Tehran’s spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei, for his part, performed the shrug: “The proposals conveyed through the mediators have been received by us, but at this stage I prefer not to discuss their details” (Axios).

The scholarship has already graded this play. Banafsheh Keynoush, writing in Middle East Policy after last year’s twelve-day war, described the standing doctrine: Iranian elites maintain “a fluid scheme that lacks easily enforceable nonproliferation parameters, using negotiations and the threat of conflict to buy time and build up the nuclear program,” and “despite setbacks from the June war, Tehran is continuing this strategy” (Scholar Gateway: Keynoush 2025, Middle East Policy).

Bowen and Moran found the same pattern across a decade of files: for Iran, diplomacy “has long been used as a means of dissipating pressure and buying time,” and the record suggests “Iran never intended to reach an agreement before achieving some degree of mastery of all elements of the fuel cycle” (Scholar Gateway: Bowen & Moran 2015, International Affairs). The Forum’s own Michael Rubin wrote the one-line version two decades ago, in a formulation the literature still cites: Iran’s game of deception in nuclear talks buys time while leaving the West “frustrated and facing a dwindling set of palatable options” (Scholar Gateway: Tures 2009, Asian Politics & Policy, citing Rubin).

And the Journal supplied the exhibit. Israeli intelligence assesses, per the Wall Street Journal, that Iran moved thousands of centrifuges into the Pickaxe Mountain complex south of Natanz last fall, after the twelve-day war: buried more than 300 feet under granite, deeper than Fordow, never struck in 2025 and never struck in this war, with fifteen months of truck and construction activity and no IAEA access; officials worry it could host a small enrichment program to produce fissile material (WSJ via ToI). The President’s stated intention, from last week: “Pickaxe is a possible target for a nice big fat shot right near the front door... We’ll probably give Pickaxe a shot relatively soon” (ToI).

Put the three documents side by side: a foreign minister who says the last negotiation was staged, a proposal for ten days authored by the side losing pieces nightly, and a mountain full of centrifuges that has never been hit. That is not a peace track; it is a reload track with better stationery. The Insider’s readers know the controlled experiment, because we ran it in June: the last pause bought the Guard half its missile stockpile back, and Araghchi now brags the launchers reset in forty minutes. The Hormuz Mandate answer is unchanged: the strait’s freedom is a precondition, not a concession to be purchased in “service fees.” And the Reciprocity Standard answer to a ten-day request from the regime that scripted Code 110 is the only one it will understand: pressure priced by the night, not the news cycle.

A tenth night, a kingdom cutting power, and tankers turning for Suez.

The campaign did not pause for the diplomacy. CENTCOM announced Monday evening it was conducting a tenth consecutive night of precision strikes, “designed to further degrade Iranian military capabilities used to attack commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz” (Stars and Stripes, PBS); Iranian media reported explosions at Bandar Abbas, Sirik, Qeshm, and Shiraz, with blasts also heard near Isfahan (the provincial governor said no attack occurred there) and Konarak and Chabahar added toward dawn (JPost). One caution the wires got right: the blasts around Bushehr were the nuclear plant’s air defenses firing, not impacts, per the province’s governor via IRNA (JPost).

Iran’s answers traced the now-familiar map. Kuwait’s electricity and water ministry said plants were struck Monday night for a fourth consecutive day, with fires extinguished, generating units taken offline, and peak-summer power rationing urged (Washington Times, ToI); Iran also claimed missile fire at a US base in Kuwait today, and a tanker reported taking a projectile in the strait (ToI liveblog).

The Guard’s claims department worked overtime: Amazon’s “central data infrastructure” in Bahrain “targeted and destroyed by several cruise missiles,” plus a US radar and an F-15 destroyed in Jordan, all in service of what the IRGC called clearing “the region of radars and defense systems” to “complete the black night of the American enemy’s radar” (JPost, IRGC statement via Tasnim). No confirmation exists from Amazon, Manama, Amman, or Washington; trade press notes the Guard has claimed strikes on the same AWS site before, going back to March (Data Center Dynamics).

The WHO’s running count for the Gulf states is the honest one: five civilians injured by falling shrapnel in Qatar to date, one injury in Kuwait’s plant strikes, and, per Iranian health authorities, 50 killed and more than 500 injured inside Iran this month (UN News).

The war’s perimeter widened in paper and in water. The State Department updated its Worldwide Caution on Monday: Americans in the Middle East “should be prepared for possible flight cancellations, periodic airspace closures, and potential travel disruptions,” those outside it “should reconsider travel to and through the region,” and “Iran and groups supportive of Iran may target other U.S. interests overseas or at locations associated with the United States and Americans throughout the world” (State Department); the war has now halved the number of airlines operating at Dubai’s airports (The National).

France summoned Iran’s charge d’affaires today, two days after French embassy staff in Tehran were detained and one physically assaulted by security services; Paris “expects the Iranian authorities to shed light on this incident, punish the perpetrators, and ensure the security of its premises and personnel” (ToI/Reuters, JPost). Senior Iranian military advisor Yahya Rahim Safavi drew Tehran’s escalation map for the neighbors: “We explicitly stated that Turkey or Azerbaijan are not our targets. However, there must be no attacks launched against us from their territory; otherwise, we will target them,” adding that Ankara has assured Tehran that Incirlik will not be used; Iran’s spokesman issued the same warning to Bulgaria over US tanker aircraft at Bezmer (JPost/Reuters).

And the Houthi blockade of Saudi Arabia began to bite on day two. Riyadh’s foreign ministry condemned the declaration and a coalition spokesman dismissed the “disinformation,” but the market voted with its rudders: the VLCC Xin Long Yang, loaded with two million barrels of Saudi crude at Yanbu, and the smaller tanker Rodos, carrying roughly 700,000 more, both U-turned toward the Suez Canal after Houthi warnings that vessels serving Saudi ports could be targeted “in any location” (Reuters via gCaptain, The National). Saudi loadings are down 36 percent (The National); Brent held near $90 Tuesday after briefly breaking it over the weekend (Fortune, Axios); and the UN’s spokesman warned “we’re already seeing the impact of the near closure of the Strait of Hormuz” while calling immediate de-escalation “essential” (UN News).

Score the day the way the Accords Logic file scores everything: the coalition of the shot-at grew again, and so did its bill. Iran’s fourth consecutive night on Kuwait’s water is not military targeting; it is the deliberate rationing of a neighbor’s summer, and the Gulf capitals underwriting the regime’s diplomatic lifelines should read their own outage maps before the next Doha communique. The Houthi turn against Riyadh completes the lesson the Hormuz Mandate has taught since April: a chokepoint doctrine licensed to one proxy is licensed to all of them, and the answer to “an eye for an eye” at Bab el-Mandeb is the same coalition interdiction that is strangling the parent siege at Hormuz. No separate peace, and no separate blockades.

$7.7 million, four governments, and a building blocks from the Capitol.

The Forum’s Islamist Watch project published the investigation Monday evening, and the numbers are not in dispute because the lender printed them. The Islamic Development Bank, whose top shareholders include the governments of Iran, Qatar, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, approved a $30 million project in 2013 and has disbursed $7.7 million, per its own 2023 Awqaf report, toward “CAIR Plaza” at 201 K Street NE in Washington: 49 apartments plus retail, listed at $18.5 million, routed through the Washington Trust Foundation, a 501(c) that supports the CAIR Foundation (MEF / Westrop, MEF press release).

All of this sits beside CAIR’s standing claim that it “does not receive funding from foreign organizations or governments.” The land is held through a Delaware LLC on which CAIR founder Nihad Awad served as an official; the Foundation’s assets at the address jumped from $2 million in 2021 to over $17 million three years later. Sam Westrop, who wrote the investigation: “The paper trail is not hidden. The bank publishes it. ISDB reports name the CAIR-linked beneficiary and count the dollars disbursed. CAIR’s tax filings show the assets. The only place this money does not appear is in CAIR’s public claims about its funding.”

The wider footprint is the story’s second act: $13.1 million from the same bank to 44 American K-12 schools, a $90 million New York dormitory tower for the Erdogan-family-linked Turken Foundation, and $7 million pledged to the Islamic Center of Irving.

The Forum’s executive director put the ask on the record: “For years CAIR told Americans it takes no foreign money. The Islamic Development Bank’s own reports prove otherwise. A bank part-owned by the leading state sponsor of terrorism is building a permanent revenue stream for an Islamist group blocks from the United States Capitol. Congress should open an investigation, and the Treasury Department and the IRS must close the disclosure loophole that allowed this to happen in the dark” (MEF press release).

The specific fix is unglamorous and therefore achievable: require Form 990 disclosure of foreign loans and sharia financing instruments, the istisna structures through which this money moved, so the next CAIR Plaza is visible before the certificate of occupancy. World Israel News carried the investigation this morning (WIN).

This is the Daylight Doctrine in its purest form: no leak, no innuendo, just the lender’s own annual reports read against the borrower’s own tax filings and the borrower’s own denial. While the kinetic front burns through the Gulf, the cognitive front is being financed on a thirty-year amortization schedule in Washington, by the same capitals now hosting the ceasefire mediation. Remember the overlap when the “honest broker” language returns: a state can either underwrite America’s Islamist infrastructure or midwife America’s diplomacy, and Doha is currently billing for both. The receipts survive scrutiny. Theirs never do.

The first handover, a president at the White House, and the files behind both.

Grade this morning by the standard we set yesterday: a handover is real when it happens on the ground. It happened. Lebanese troops entered Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh this morning following the withdrawal of Israeli forces, the first town transferred under the pilot-zone framework, and spent the afternoon detonating leftover ordnance (The National).

The wrinkle arrived with the milestone: the LAF says its units “came under fire from Israeli soldiers” as they deployed, without injuries, warning that “this aggression will obstruct the implementation of deployment steps,” while Israel insists it will not withdraw further until the Hezbollah threat to its northern communities is removed.

The seventh Rome round has not convened; the diplomacy moved to Washington instead, where President Joseph Aoun, the first Lebanese president at the White House since 2009, brought the President a written proposal for decommissioning Hezbollah’s arsenal alongside a full Israeli withdrawal, hailed the framework’s “ultimate objective of ending the state of hostility between Lebanon and Israel,” and told Trump: “Together, we’ll be able to achieve this objective” (WaPo, ToI liveblog). The President’s reply was vintage: “I would speak to Hezbollah. Yeah, I speak to everybody.” Hezbollah’s answer came from MP Hassan Ezzeddine, who accused Aoun of “creating a deep division within the country” (The National).

The weekend’s ground truth still frames it all: the device that killed Sgt. 1st Class Ahmad Sami Khalil near Mansouri on Saturday was “most likely” Hezbollah’s, per an IDF review (INN), and the soldier it killed came from Froun, one of the three pilot-zone villages his army took over this week. On Saturday the pattern repeated in miniature: Commando Brigade troops spotted a Hezbollah drone near Tebnit, and the Air Force killed the cell operating it, “a violation of the ceasefire understandings” in the IDF’s words (INN).

Meanwhile the resupply war produced its second interdiction in a week: after the al-Tanf tanker-truck haul (at least 100 drones, fiber-optic spools, anti-tank missiles, and likely Paveh-family cruise missiles per Alma Center imagery analysis), Syrian customs at Jdeidat Yabous seized 226 grenade-launcher rounds hidden in a private vehicle bound for Lebanon (FDD’s Long War Journal, INN). Damascus is arresting, not collapsing; the benchmark holds.

Two more files round out the board. In Gaza, an AP satellite investigation found Israel has built more than 23 kilometers of earthen barrier along the Yellow Line in recent months, and the IDF confirmed to the AP it has constructed a physical barrier in the area of the Yellow Line as part of a security zone, declining to give the route or final extent, while stressing the project aims to prevent infiltration, protect troops and border communities, and does not constitute a new border (ToI/AP).

And in the West Bank file, a new Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs report by Lt. Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch argues the Palestinian Authority now fields roughly 70,000 armed personnel against Oslo’s 30,000 cap, “an armed force ten times larger than the total number of terrorists who invaded from Gaza” on October 7, in his words “simply awaiting orders to attack” (JCFA, JPost). Honesty requires the counterweight: this is one analyst’s capability assessment, not an intelligence warning, and recent weeks have also seen the PA moving against Islamic Jihad cells near Jenin. Capability and intent are different files; we keep both open.

The Caesar Act coda belongs here too, because Monday’s JTA retrospective closed a loop this newsletter has tracked: the sanctions were repealed in December’s NDAA after a campaign in which Syrian Jewish leaders, Rabbi Yosef Hamra and his son Henry, lobbied Congress alongside the Syrian Emergency Task Force, over Jerusalem’s objections; Rep. Joe Wilson’s office credits the rabbi’s “everybody deserves another chance” with moving votes (JTA). Sarit Zehavi’s critique in that piece is the one to keep: “They lifted it without any conditions. That’s the main problem.” The live file now is the SST de-listing, effective around August 22, with certification requirements every 180 days.

Zawtar is the Carthage Doctrine’s first data point in the affirmative column: a village actually changed hands, and the LAF is clearing ordnance instead of cutting ribbons. Hold the applause anyway. The same week produced a Hezbollah device that killed a soldier from a pilot-zone village, a drone cell at Tebnit, and two arms shipments moving toward the border; disarmament is still the grade, and the exam has barely begun. On Aoun: a written decommissioning proposal is more than Beirut has put on paper in two decades, and the Post-Aid Alliance rule applies: reward the paper when it becomes proof. And carry Zehavi’s Caesar verdict forward like a placard, because it is the single sentence that indicts a decade of Western sanctions practice: lifted without conditions is lifted without leverage. August 22 is a deadline for conditions, not a date on a calendar.

“Code 110”: the codename Araghchi says Tehran assigned, before the first shot of this war, to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz if the supreme leader was targeted. The blackmail of a fifth of the world’s oil was not a reaction; it was a plan with a filing number. A regime that scripts its extortion in advance is now asking the world for ten days to write the next act. (Source: MEF / Khatiri.)

• Shay Khatiri, New Araghchi Interview Reveals Iranian Delusions and Vulnerabilities (July 20)
• Sam Westrop, Revealed: CAIR’s $7.7 Million of Foreign Financing (Islamist Watch investigation, July 20)
• News from the Middle East Forum, MEF Investigation Reveals $7.7 Million in Foreign Government-Backed Financing Behind ‘CAIR Plaza’ (July 20)
• Jose Lev Alvarez, Washington Should Turn Saudi Arabia’s Outreach to Guatemala into a Weapon Against China (July 21): Riyadh’s Central America opening as an American asset against Beijing’s $5 billion trade beachhead

Forum in the news: World Israel News carried the CAIR Plaza investigation this morning (WIN). And thank you to everyone who joined yesterday’s briefing with Alma Center president Sarit Zehavi on Hezbollah’s tunnel network; the recording will be posted at meforum.org.

Two favors this afternoon. Forward this issue to one person who still believes the ten-day ceasefire is an olive branch rather than a stopwatch, and if you want the Forum reading the regime’s confessions, the lenders’ reports, and the funding files every day, support the work directly. The Forum runs on readers, not the theater it exposes.

That is the board for Tuesday. Reply and tell me: should Washington take the ten days? I read every answer.

Middle East Insider · From Gregg Roman, Executive Director, Middle East Forum

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