Two special editions in two days is not a habit; it is a week that demanded them. Yesterday I told you about the book. Today’s subject found me: this past week, the Islamic Republic invented the deaths of seven American sailors, and the machinery that spread the invention ran better than most Americans realize, some of it running through Washington. The Insider’s pause holds, the Dispatch carries the dailies, and this essay goes to every reader, free and premium alike.
Tehran’s War on American Morale
It is a military operation. Treat it like one.
On August 11, Iran killed seven American sailors. It killed them in print. Mehr News, a wire service of the Islamic Republic, reported a violent clash aboard USS Abraham Lincoln: seven dead, several wounded, an adviser to the CENTCOM commander booed and pelted with water bottles on the deck of America’s flagship in the Arabian Sea. The source was Tasnim, an outlet tied to the Revolutionary Guard, citing one anonymous “informed military source.”
The story ran for two days before US Central Command said a word. By the time CENTCOM called it what it was, false, zero deaths, the one sailor who went overboard on August 3 recovered safely, an English-language newsletter had already dressed the massacre up as analysis, complete with knives. Within two days of the denial, an Iranian embassy was selling “America’s floating prison at sea.” The lie had lapped the truth twice.
No sailors died. That is not the point. The point is that a state at war with the United States manufactured their deaths, on a schedule, for an audience, and most of Washington still discusses it as a media story. It is not a media story. It is a military operation aimed at the one American system Tehran can actually reach: the will of the force, and the families behind it.
Tehran deserves its due here: the targeting is intelligent. The Lincoln’s deployment is genuinely brutal. The carrier left San Diego in November 2025 for a routine cruise and got a war instead. More than 260 days at sea. A record stretch of more than 200 days without a port call. Ten thousand aircraft flights, a million and a half pounds of ordnance expended, an extension with no announced end.
Families raised real complaints, about food that ran thin last spring, about showers, mail, and exhaustion, and some were real enough that CENTCOM’s commander acknowledged problems “raised months ago” and fixed them. American reporters covered it, as they should. Senators demanded answers, as they should.
Nor is the strain an aberration. USS Gerald R. Ford logged 326 days before returning in May, the longest American carrier deployment since Vietnam. The extended cruise is becoming a feature of naval force generation, not a fluke of this war. None of that is disinformation. That is a democracy metabolizing the cost of a long conflict.
What Tehran built on top of it is something else. The method takes the true kernel, tired crew, long deployment, worried families, and inflates it past recognition. “America’s floating prison at sea,” in the words of Iran’s embassy in Kenya, which decorated the phrase with an anonymous spouse’s quote lifted from Western press coverage and a graphic of a sailor behind bars. “Worse than a public toilet! … No wonder troops want to jump overboard!” from PressTV, over a shaky bathroom video that an IRGC-adjacent account recycled a day later, same footage, new caption, as proof that sailors were defying CENTCOM’s denial. A Lego cartoon mocking the crew, captioned “Four Score! No Shore!” And beneath the mockery sit the hard fabrications: the seven dead, the invented mutiny, the claimed spike in suicidal ideation that the Navy says its data does not show.
We have seen this movie. Tehran produced the first reel in the spring. In February and March the same apparatus manufactured a different collapse: the Lincoln struck by four ballistic missiles, the Lincoln burning, the Lincoln sunk, the Lincoln “forced to retreat” under the avenging fire of the Iranian navy. Fact-checkers rated the videos Pants on Fire. The footage turned out to be recycled clips and video-game renders. The New York Times logged more than 110 unique pro-Iran deepfakes in two weeks; the Foundation for Defense of Democracies traced the campaign to regime-linked networks.
The carrier kept flying. So Tehran did what propagandists do when the lie about the battle fails: it started lying about the men. The pivot from “we sank the ship” to “the ship is destroying its own crew” preserves the claim, American defeat, while removing the evidence requirement.
“You cannot photograph a sinking that never happened. A rumor about morale needs no photograph at all.”
Axis Sally needed a transmitter. Tokyo Rose needed a studio. Tehran needs neither, because we built its distribution system for it and called it a social network. The Islamic Republic’s morale operation runs on a layered architecture that any student of Soviet active measures would recognize, updated for the algorithm.
State wires, Mehr, Tasnim, IRNA, originate the fabrication under gray sourcing. PressTV translates it into meme-grade English. Diplomatic accounts in Nairobi and Freetown, of all places, serve as billboards; last April it was Iran’s embassy in Sierra Leone sneering that there were “no goodies on the table for Israel’s foot soldiers… They sure get to die for them, though!”
Then comes the laundering layer, and this is the part Americans need to understand, because it happens here. The seven-dead fabrication reached American readers through a Substack calling itself “Middle East Report,” a name that free-rides on a long-established journal, and it sourced its “Lincoln Massacre” story entirely, and I mean entirely, to Tasnim, PressTV, and IRNA.
The widest-reaching artifact of the August cycle did not come from a state wire at all. It came from a Washington think-tank executive. Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, published a photograph he said was “sent to me from the field”: graffiti written in the dust of an aircraft, “Operation Epstein Fury,” “ALL THIS FOR THE HOLY LAND,” plus an anonymous serviceman declaring the operation “has no morale behind it.” It drew 13.7 million views in under a day. Within hours, aviation-literate readers identified the aircraft as an apparent land-based KC-135 tanker, a plane that cannot operate from a carrier, photographed over what looks like concrete. He did not claim the image came from the Lincoln. It did not matter. The post fed the exact lane Tehran was working, at the exact hour, and as of this writing the provenance questions sit unanswered while aggregation accounts strip his hedging and repost the image as fact.
Wars on morale produce a particular voice: the fluent one, the credentialed one, the one that reaches the home audience in its own accent. Americans named the genre in the 1940s, Axis Sally, Tokyo Rose, and the names outlived the courtrooms because they described a function, not a verdict; America later pardoned Iva Toguri, and kept the name. This war’s version does not need a transmitter in Berlin. It has a podium three blocks from the White House, and the shorthand writes itself: Tehran Trita.
The file runs longer than one photograph. Parsi was born in Ahvaz and raised in Sweden from age four, in a family that fled the regime; his father was jailed by the Shah and then by Khomeini, a history he tells himself. He took his doctorate at Johns Hopkins under Francis Fukuyama, and in 1997 founded a group called Iranians for International Cooperation, whose stated goal, in internal documents the Forum’s writers have published, was to “pressure U.S. lawmakers to pose a more Iran-friendly position.” In 2002 he founded the National Iranian American Council and ran it for seventeen years. In 2019 he co-founded the Quincy Institute on seed money from George Soros and Charles Koch, and moved one door down from advocacy into scholarship’s clothing.
The court record is where the file gets specific. In 2008 Parsi and NIAC sued an Iranian-American researcher, Hassan Daioleslam, for writing that they lobbied for the regime. The suit ended in 2012 with summary judgment against Parsi on every claim. Discovery pried NIAC’s files open along the way, and what fell out included Parsi’s role arranging meetings between Javad Zarif, then Iran’s UN ambassador, and members of Congress, and an internal NIAC email conceding “I believe we fall under this definition of ‘lobbyist.’” The court found by a preponderance of the evidence that Parsi’s side intentionally altered a produced document, the old IIC charter, in which the word “lobby” had become “advocacy” seven years after the group went defunct. The judge sanctioned Parsi and NIAC $183,480.09 for a “disturbing pattern of delay and intransigence,” a penalty upheld on appeal, in a defense the Forum’s Legal Project helped fund. And the district court wrote a sentence that has followed Parsi since: his work was “not inconsistent with the idea that he was first and foremost an advocate for the regime.”
Neither NIAC nor Parsi has ever registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. In 2020, three senators asked the Justice Department to review whether they should. NIAC called the accusations “slanderous,” said it takes no money from any government, and noted that it routinely condemns the regime’s human-rights abuses; no investigation was ever announced. The network has a European wing as well: a second Parsi, Rouzbeh, left the Swedish Institute of International Affairs after an internal review of his undisclosed role in the “Iran Experts Initiative,” a network that leaked foreign-ministry emails showed was guided from Tehran. He denies collaborating with the regime.
Precision is the whole ballgame here, so let me be precise. I am not saying these Americans take orders from Tehran. I have no evidence of that, and neither does anyone else. The court never ruled Parsi an agent of Iran; it ruled that the researcher who called him one could not be proven malicious, and it priced the way Parsi litigated at $183,480.09. Those are different findings, and the difference matters. Amplification is something propagandists do to a target ecosystem, with or without its consent. A senator quoted inside Iranian propaganda is evidence about the propaganda, not about the senator.
Criticizing this war is every American’s right; I have my own criticisms of how Washington has fought it. But there is a difference between opposing a war and supplying, at scale, unverifiable artifacts and enemy-convenient framing that a hostile state is actively weaponizing against American families, and then declining to answer basic questions about where the material came from. The first is dissent, and it needs no one’s permission. The second is negligence with a reach of millions, in wartime, on the exact terrain where a hostile state is operating. And the negligent have names, platforms, and institutional affiliations that confer the credibility Tehran cannot buy for itself. An American University professor sat for an interview with Al Mayadeen, a Hezbollah-aligned channel, to tell its audience the Lincoln was becoming “unlivable” and a “desperate” American president might go nuclear. The channel got exactly what it booked him for.
Tehran spends this much on morale warfare because it is buying five things at once. It signals effectiveness to its own battered public: we are breaking the Americans. It rides a real collapse in American support for the war; by July only 12 percent of Americans told Marquette pollsters the campaign had achieved its goals, down from 21 in April. It drives the Israel wedge, framing every hardship as a price paid “for the Holy Land,” a message engineered for the far left and the isolationist right simultaneously.
It seeds the recruitment well, telling every military mother that the Navy is a floating prison, sabotage aimed at next year’s enlistment lines. And it plays to the Global South, where embassy accounts in English tell Nairobi and Johannesburg that the American century is ending in moldy showers. What Tehran never had to do is invent the raw material. American reporting, family testimony, and political conflict supplied it. Tehran selected, inflated, fabricated on top, and re-exported.
Here is the uncomfortable part for our side: Washington keeps handing Tehran its best material. In April, when families circulated photographs of thin rations, the Navy’s response was that the reports were “false.” Some of the problems turned out to be real. In August, the secretary of war dismissed the conditions reporting as “completely misrepresented” while the president declared the sailors had been deployed “not nearly long enough.”
Every blanket denial that later cracks becomes a permission slip to believe the next fabrication. Tehran’s denial-inversion machine runs on exactly this fuel: CENTCOM says “false,” and within days the machine presents any new grievance video as the brave rebuttal of a cover-up. You do not beat that machine with adjectives. You beat it with data.
So publish the data. The Pentagon should release, on a standing basis, the granular numbers it currently doles out under duress: mental-health caseloads by hull, retention by ship, resupply logs, port-call schedules against historical baselines. The Lincoln’s reenlistment rate, 84.4 percent by CENTCOM’s own accounting, among the highest of any carrier in the fleet, is the single most devastating rebuttal to the “floating prison” narrative in existence. The command disclosed it only after the fabrication cycle peaked. Transparency is not a public-relations nicety. Against an adversary whose entire theory of victory is the space between official adjectives and visible facts, transparency is force protection.
Second, make the platforms do what their own rules promise. Iran’s embassy accounts are state media by any honest definition; they should carry state-affiliation labels and the reach penalties that follow. PressTV, an arm of a state broadcaster the Treasury sanctioned years ago, romps through American feeds unlabeled. The deepfake archive from the spring sits in plain view of synthetic-media policies that go unenforced. Congress should ask X and Meta, in writing and in public, why.
Third, review the designations. Treasury and State should examine whether Mehr, Tasnim, and Al Mayadeen’s current sanctions posture matches their documented wartime conduct. That is not punishment for speech; instruments of a hostile state’s military-information campaign should be treated as what they are. And the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force should publish an unclassified assessment of Iranian operations targeting American military families. The families are a targeted population. They deserve to be told so by their own government, not left to discover it in their Facebook groups.
Fourth, impose professional costs on the laundering layer, lawfully, publicly, with the proof attached. Editors who ran the seven-dead story owe their readers corrections, and those who refuse should be listed by name in a public scorecard of outlets that laundered a state fabrication and shrugged. Commentators who post “field” artifacts to thirteen million people should answer basic provenance questions or wear the refusal permanently. Universities whose faculty perform for Hezbollah-aligned cameras should be asked, on the record, whether they have a view. None of this is censorship. It is the ordinary machinery of professional accountability, applied to people who have grown comfortable assuming it would never reach them. This is the Daylight Doctrine applied to wartime: force the foreign hand, and the hands that launder for it, into the light, and let Americans judge what they see.
Finally, civil society has to do what government cannot. Official Washington will always be a suspect messenger on its own behalf; the proof has to come from outside. That means independent trackers that archive every state-media fabrication before deletion, and Tehran does delete. It means forensic analyses of viral artifacts, published whatever they conclude. It means prebunking the next narrative before it lands, and it will land: the Navy has ordered USS George Washington to relieve the Lincoln, and Iranian outlets have already begun framing the relief as retreat. Above all, it means a message to military families that takes their grievances seriously precisely because it refuses to let Tehran own them. Raising real problems through real channels is patriotic. Letting a hostile state wear your worry as a costume is the enemy’s whole plan.
The sailors of the Abraham Lincoln spent nine months absorbing everything the Islamic Republic could throw at them: missiles, drones, and finally this, the slander of their own breaking. They held. The 84.4 percent held. The question is whether the institutions behind them, the Pentagon, the platforms, the press, the professoriate, can manage even a fraction of that discipline. Tehran is sailing under false colors, flying our families’ grief as its battle flag. Strike those colors. Do it with data, with labels, with corrections, with names. Morale is a warfighting domain now. The enemy already knows it. The only question is when we start acting like we do.
The Long View runs every Sunday for premium members. This week it has run free twice, because I am on vacation and the week refused to cooperate. Premium membership is $12 a month or $100 a year, and it now includes first access to excerpts from Alone in the Ranks, the book I told you about yesterday. Every MEF donor reads free; if your invitation has not arrived, write [email protected].
Go PremiumThe Lincoln’s reenlistment rate, in percent, by CENTCOM’s own accounting: among the highest of any carrier in the fleet, disclosed only after the fabrication cycle peaked. The most devastating rebuttal to the “floating prison” narrative in existence, and the case for publishing the data before the lie, not after.
The daily Insider stays on pause and returns before the September briefings. The MEF Dispatch, our summary of new articles and analysis from meforum.org, arrives three times a week in the meantime. One click:
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Today’s essay is the New York syllabus.
Boston · Tuesday, September 1 · Bankrupt the Revolution: The Money War Against Tehran
Philadelphia · Thursday, September 3 · Finish the Job: What Victory over Iran Requires
New York · Wednesday, September 9 · The Tentacles of the Outlaws: Iran’s Reach into American Life
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Clear this week. When it should not be, write [email protected]; corrections run here, in print.
The Forum has been publishing the file on Tehran’s American amplifiers for twenty years, and it helped fund the legal defense that pried NIAC’s records open. That work runs on readers, not governments. If today’s essay told you something the wire services did not, this is where the next file gets funded. And forward this one; the essay is free precisely so that it travels.
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