It's the Middle East, where nothing and nobody is as it seems.
One day Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was President of Iran; the next, he became a top Israeli asset, in line to become the transitional president if Operation Roaring Lion and Epic Fury succeeded.
Israel may not have space lasers or control the weather, but they sure are good at spy craft.
A NYTimes Exclusive:
— Ronen Bergman (@ronenbergman) July 13, 2026
Inside Israel’s Secret Operation to Cultivate Ahmadinejad
The yearslong effort to groom the former Iranian president as an intelligence asset culminated in a dramatic effort to take him to an Israeli safe house in the early days of the war. But the plan fell…
A NYTimes Exclusive:
Inside Israel’s Secret Operation to Cultivate Ahmadinejad
The yearslong effort to groom the former Iranian president as an intelligence asset culminated in a dramatic effort to take him to an Israeli safe house in the early days of the war. But the plan fell apart.
Ahmadinejad was Iran's president from 2005 to 2013, and at the time was known as a strong proponent of Iran's nuclear weapons program, which adds more than a bit of irony to this story. But then again, this is the Middle East...
Israel has been cultivating Ahmadinejad for years, culminating in secret meetings and even payments from Mossad. A face-to-face meeting with Mossad took place at a climate change conference at a university in Hungary specifically held to enable the meeting, demonstrating that even climate summits are scams put on with ulterior motives.
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s 2024 visit to the university and a second one the following year were part of a yearslong Israeli effort to groom him as an intelligence asset who, when the time came, could be installed as Iran’s new leader, according to both American and Iranian officials familiar with the operation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive intelligence.
Recruiting Mr. Ahmadinejad was of such priority for Israel that the country’s then-spy chief David Barnea even traveled to the Hungarian capital in 2024 to meet with Mr. Ahmadinejad personally, according to former American officials. Soon afterward, they said, Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, notified the C.I.A. that it had been in contact with Mr. Ahmadinejad.
Israel’s decision to build a regime-change plan around Mr. Ahmadinejad is an extraordinary twist in the saga of the country’s relations with the former president, who was known for accelerating Iran’s nuclear program, calling regularly for the destruction of Israel and denying the Holocaust.
In recent years, according to American officials, Israel secretly paid money to Mr. Ahmadinejad for housing and travel, and Israeli operatives met him abroad on several occasions, including during his trips to Budapest.
There were rumors earlier in the war that Israel had plans to install Ahmadinejad after the hoped-for fall of the Iranian regime, but the New York Times' story is the first to give a fairly detailed account for all this went down. It is so deeply reported that one has to assume that top officials involved in the scheme cooperated with the Times to lay the scheme out, making one wonder why, exactly, the Mossad or Israeli government leaked so many sources and methods.
On Feb. 28, an Israeli airstrike hit Mr. Ahmadinejad’s compound, targeting the building of his bodyguards and his armored vehicle. After the strike, according to four senior Iranian officials, a black Peugeot car arrived, picked up Mr. Ahmadinejad and whisked him away at high speed from the chaotic scene.
American and Iranian officials with knowledge of the operation said the car had been driven by Mossad operatives, who took Mr. Ahmadinejad to a secret safe house in Iran.
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But the former Iranian leader was upset about the frantic rescue operation, and he appeared to be disillusioned about the Israeli plan to return him to power, according to people with knowledge of what occurred.
He eventually left the safe house under circumstances that are still unclear. Mr. Ahmadinejad was not seen in public again until last Monday, when he made a brief appearance at the funeral procession for the slain supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
His current status remains uncertain. But four senior Iranian officials said that Mr. Ahmadinejad was in the custody of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ intelligence wing, under house arrest now that Iran has learned about much of his interactions with Israel.
Israeli officials have not commented publicly about the plan to install Mr. Ahmadinejad as Iran’s leader, which was part of a broader attempt to topple the government in Tehran. Another element involved arming and training Iranian Kurdish opposition forces based in northern Iraq to cross into western Iran, hold territory there and eventually move toward the capital Tehran, an effort that never manifested.
The regime-change plan involved a “sequence of special operations, very, very unique, that was supposed to happen,” Tamir Hayman, a former head of intelligence for the Israeli Defense Forces, told the PBS talk show “Firing Line” in May, after The New York Times first revealed details of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s role in the plan. “And Ahmadinejad was part of that sequence.”
Mossad keeping at arms' length from the story in public is pretty unconvincing, given how high-level some of the sources in the story are and the level of detail, including descriptions of events that took place in Iran. It could just be that they consider continued secrecy to be useless now that Ahmadinejad is in custody, or it could be that Israel is sowing doubt among Iranian leadership and that Israel had not penetrated Iranian leadership as deeply as has been implied.
This is the Mossad. Either is plausible, although we know that the CIA is remarkably closed-mouthed even after operations have been blown.
Ahmadinejad was famously a hardliner while president, but his relationship with the Iranian leadership grew complicated once he was disqualified from running for president again. The Times describes him as power-hungry with aspirations to become something like a secular Supreme Leader, and he had been cultivating a populist image to build an independent power base in Iran.
Mr. Ahmadinejad became disillusioned with the Islamic republic system after he was disqualified to run for president three times, the associate said, and concluded that he could not ascend to power as long as the current system remained in place.
He was concerned that, in the event of a war and regime change, Americans and Israelis would choose some opposition figure outside Iran who did not know the country and Iran would be destabilized, the associate said. He described himself to those around him as someone who could play the role of a reformer, like the former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, and said that if he came to power, Iran would recognize Israel and normalize relations as part of President Trump’s Abraham Accords, the associate said.
Israeli intelligence agencies were closely following the brewing rift between Mr. Ahmadinejad and the Iranian regime during this period, according to two Israeli defense officials familiar with intelligence assessments at that time. Of particular interest, the officials said, was Mr. Ahmadinejad’s growing resentment of Ayatollah Khamenei and other senior figures who had disqualified Mr. Ahmadinejad from running for president again.
I don't know about you, but I find the level of detail about Ahmadinejad's motivations suspicious. It reads like a Bob Woodward book, discussing the inner thoughts and feelings of individuals that no author should have access to.
Perhaps the descriptions are accurate, but it strikes me as just as likely that the story is highly crafted. Ahmadinejad was seen at Khamenei's funeral. It's conceivable that Iranian leadership would bring him to the funeral despite knowing he was an Israeli spy, but does it seem likely to you?
Until last week, Mr. Ahmadinejad had not been seen in public since late February, when he was whisked away from his Tehran home in the black Peugeot.
Last Monday, he made a brief, surprise appearance as part of Ayatollah Khamenei’s funeral procession. Videos of the procession showed Mr. Ahmadinejad, wearing a heavy jacket in the 90-degree heat, with a surgical mask pulled down to his chin. Iran’s two other living former presidents, Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Khatami, were not invited and did not appear in any of the funeral ceremonies.
Mr. Ahmadinejad stood with his head down, not speaking, flanked on all sides by what appeared to be security guards.
Perhaps my suspicion that the highly detailed story worthy of a spy novel is not all that it seems is a symptom of paranoid delusions, but at least to me this smells of an information operation whose motives I can't quite put together. How did the Times get so much detail? Why were the people involved so ready to share details? Is it really plausible that IDF intelligence officials, even retired ones, would willingly detail operations and describe a source's mental state so freely?
I suppose it is possible.
But then again, this is the Middle East, where little is as it seems.
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