US national security officials disclosed to The New York Times on Tuesday that a joint operation by Israel and the United States aimed to install former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the leader of a new government in Tehran.
The secret plan, which was designed to trigger regime change following the elimination of Iran’s top theocratic leadership, collapsed on the opening day of the war, the report said.
According to American officials, an Israeli Air Force strike targeted Ahmadinejad’s heavily guarded eastern Tehran residence. The tactical objective was to neutralize the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps guards holding him under house arrest, effectively executing a high-stakes jailbreak.
While the strike successfully decimated the security outpost at the entrance of the street, Ahmadinejad was injured in the blast. He was originally reported to have been killed but survived the close call, and associates quoted in The Times reported that the near-miss left him completely disillusioned with the regime-change plot. The former leader has not been seen in public since the incident, and his current condition and physical location remain entirely unknown.
The choice of Ahmadinejad as a potential partner for Western alignment has baffled intelligence analysts. During his tenure as president from 2005 to 2013, he was a notorious fundamentalist who aggressively accelerated Iran’s uranium enrichment program, violently suppressed domestic protests, and infamously and repeatedly called to wipe Israel off the map and also denied the Holocaust.
Before leaving office in 2013, Ahmadinejad said that denying the Holocaust was his “proudest moment” as President.
In 2019, the former President insisted that he is not an antisemite and is merely opposed to the “Zionist government”.
Nevertheless, the operation underscores the immense risks taken by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump, who launched the military campaign with the ambition of establishing a more pliable government in Iran.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly defended the overall success of the broader military intervention, refraining from commenting directly on the covert political strategy.
“From the outset, President Trump was clear about his goals for Operation Epic Fury: destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles, dismantle their production facilities, sink their navy, and weaken their proxy,” Kelly told The New York Times. “The United States military met or exceeded all of its objectives, and now, our negotiators are working to make a deal that would end Iran’s nuclear capabilities for good.”
The Mossad declined to comment on the matter.
In the years leading up to the war, Ahmadinejad had increasingly clashed with then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He was barred from running in multiple presidential elections and confined to his home in the Narmak district after publicly accusing senior regime officials of systemic corruption.
His quiet shift toward the West was punctuated by a 2019 interview with The New York Times, where he directly praised the American president.
“Mr. Trump is a man of action,” Ahmadinejad said at the time. “He is a businessman and therefore he is capable of calculating cost-benefits and making a decision. We say to him, let’s calculate the long-term cost-benefit of our two nations and not be shortsighted.”
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