Israel and the US planned to bring Ahmadinejad to power in Iran

Days after Israeli strikes killed Iran's supreme leader and other senior officials in the first salvos of the war, US President Donald Trump publicly mused that it would be best for "someone from within" Iran to take over the country.

It turns out that the US and Israel entered the conflict with one specific and very surprising person in mind: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president known for his hardline, anti-Israel and anti-American views.

But the bold plan, developed by the Israelis and for which Ahmadinejad was consulted, quickly went awry, according to US officials briefed on it.

Ahmadinejad was wounded on the first day of the war in an Israeli raid on his home in Tehran, which was designed to free him from house arrest, US officials and an Ahmadinejad aide said. He survived the attack, they said, but later, after narrowly escaping death, became disillusioned with the regime change plan.

He has not been seen in public since then, and his current whereabouts and health condition are unknown.

It is an understatement to say that Ahmadinejad was an unusual choice. Although he increasingly clashed with the regime’s leaders and was under close scrutiny by Iranian authorities, during his presidency from 2005 to 2013, he was known for calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” He was a strong advocate of Iran’s nuclear program, a fierce critic of the United States, and known for violently suppressing internal dissent.

How Ahmadinejad was recruited to participate in this remains unknown.

The existence of the operation, which had not been previously reported, was part of a multi-phase plan that Israel had developed to overthrow Iran’s theocratic government. It shows how Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu entered the war not only by misjudging how quickly they could achieve their goals, but also by taking a somewhat risky gamble on a leadership change plan in Iran that even some of Trump’s associates found implausible. Some U.S. officials were particularly skeptical about the feasibility of restoring Ahmadinejad to power.

“President Trump has been clear from the beginning about the goals of Operation Epic Fury: to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles, dismantle their production facilities, sink their navy, and degrade their proxy forces,” said Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, in response to a request for comment on the regime change plan and Ahmadinejad. “The U.S. military has met or exceeded all of its objectives, and now our negotiators are working to reach an agreement that would permanently end Iran’s nuclear capabilities.”

A spokesman for Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service, declined to comment.

American officials spoke in the early days of the war of plans developed with Israel to identify a pragmatist who could take over the country. Officials insisted that there was intelligence that some people within the Iranian regime would be willing to cooperate with the United States, even if those people could not be described as “moderates.”

Trump has enjoyed the success of the US military operation that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, as well as the willingness of his interim successor to cooperate with the White House - a model that Trump seems to believe can be replicated elsewhere.

In recent years, Ahmadinejad has clashed with regime leaders, accusing them of corruption, and rumors have circulated that questioned his loyalty. He has been disqualified from numerous presidential elections, his associates have been arrested, and Ahmadinejad's movements have been increasingly restricted to his home in the Narmak neighborhood of eastern Tehran.

That American and Israeli officials saw Ahmadinejad as a potential leader of a new government in Iran is further evidence that the war in February was launched in the hope of installing a more pliable leadership in Tehran. Trump and his cabinet members have argued that the war's goals were narrowly focused on destroying Iran's nuclear, missile and military capabilities.

Many questions remain unanswered about how Israel and the US planned to bring Ahmadinejad to power, as well as the circumstances of the airstrike that wounded him. US officials have said the strike - carried out by the Israeli Air Force - was intended to kill guards monitoring Ahmadinejad, as part of a plan to free him from house arrest.

On the first day of the war, Israeli strikes killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader. The strike on Ayatollah Khamenei's compound in central Tehran killed Iranian officials, some of whom the White House described as more willing to negotiate a change of government than their superiors.

The first reports appeared in the Iranian media that Ahmadinejad had been killed in an attack on his home.

The attack did not significantly damage Ahmadinejad's house at the end of the cul-de-sac. But a security house at the entrance to the street was hit. Satellite images show that building was destroyed.

In the days that followed, official news agencies explained that he had survived, but that his "bodyguards" - actually members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who were both guarding him and keeping him under house arrest - had been killed.

An article published in March in The Atlantic, citing anonymous Ahmadinejad associates, stated that the former president had been released from state custody following a raid on his home, which the article described as a "prison break operation."

Following the article, an aide to Ahmadinejad confirmed to The New York Times that Ahmadinejad saw the attack as an attempt to free himself. The aide said that the Americans viewed Ahmadinejad as someone who could lead Iran and who had the ability to manage "the political, social and military situation in Iran."

Ahmadinejad could "play a very important role" in Iran in the near future, the aide said, suggesting that the United States saw him similarly to Delcy Rodriguez, who took power in Venezuela after U.S. forces captured Maduro and has worked closely with the Trump administration since then, the source said.

During his presidency, Ahmadinejad was known for his hardline policies and often bizarre fundamentalist statements, such as claiming that there were no gay people in Iran and denying the Holocaust. He spoke at a conference in Tehran entitled "A World Without Zionism."

Western satirists ridiculed such views, and Ahmadinejad became a kind of reluctant pop culture curiosity, even the subject of parodies on "Saturday Night Live."

He also led the country at a time when Iran was accelerating its enrichment of uranium, which it could one day use to make a nuclear bomb, if it decided to turn its program into a military one. A 2007 U.S. intelligence assessment concluded that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear device years earlier but had continued to enrich nuclear fuel that it could use for a nuclear weapon if it changed its mind.

After leaving office, Ahmadinejad gradually became a kind of outspoken critic of the theocratic government, or at least was in conflict with Ayatollah Khamenei.

Three times, in 2017, 2021 and 2024, Ahmadinejad has tried to run for his former post, but each time Iran's Guardian Council, a body composed of civilian and Islamic jurists, blocked his presidential campaign. Ahmadinejad has accused senior Iranian officials of corruption or mismanagement and has become a critic of the authorities in Tehran. Although he has never been an outspoken dissident, the regime has come to view him as a potentially destabilizing factor.

Ahmadinejad's ties to the West are rather unclear.

In a 2019 interview with The New York Times, Ahmadinejad praised President Trump and advocated for a rapprochement between Iran and the United States.

"Trump is a man of action," Ahmadinejad said. "He is a businessman and therefore he is capable of calculating the cost-benefit ratio and making a decision. We are telling him: let's calculate the long-term cost-benefit ratio for our two nations and not be short-sighted."

People close to Ahmadinejad have been accused of having too close ties to the West, and even of spying for Israel. Esfandiyar Rahim Mashaei, Ahmadinejad's former chief of staff, was brought to trial in 2018, and the judge in that case publicly asked about his ties to British and Israeli intelligence services - an accusation reported by state media.

In the past few years, Ahmadinejad has traveled outside of Iran, further fueling speculation.

In 2023, he traveled to Guatemala, and in 2024 and 2025, to Hungary, which was covered in detail by New Line magazine. Both countries have close ties to Israel.

The then Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has a close relationship with Netanyahu. During a trip to Hungary, Ahmadinejad spoke at a university affiliated with Orban.

He returned from Budapest just days before Israel launched its attack on Iran last June. When the war broke out, he kept a low profile in public, making only a few statements on social media. Many Iranian social media users noted his relative silence about the war with a country that Ahmadinejad has long considered Iran's archenemy.

Discussion about Ahmadinejad on Iranian social media intensified after reports of his death, according to analysis by FilterLabs, a sentiment monitoring company. But the discussion has died down in the weeks since, largely down to confusion about his whereabouts.

Israel initially envisioned the war taking place in several phases, starting with airstrikes by the United States and Israel, the assassination of Iranian top leaders and the mobilization of Kurds to fight Iranian forces, according to two Israeli defense officials familiar with the operational planning.

The Israeli plan then envisioned that a combination of Israeli influence campaigns and Kurdish invasions would create political instability in Iran and a sense that the regime was losing control. In the third phase, the regime, under intense political pressure and the burden of damage to key infrastructure, such as the electricity system, would collapse, allowing the establishment of what the Israelis called an “alternative government.”

Aside from the air campaign and the assassination of the supreme leader, little of the plan unfolded as the Israelis had hoped, and from today's perspective, it appears that much of that plan deeply underestimated Iran's resilience and overestimated the ability of the US and Israel to impose their will.

But even after it became clear that Iran's theocratic rule had survived the first months of the war, some Israeli officials continued to express confidence in their vision of imposing regime change in Tehran.

David Barnea, the head of the Mossad, has told aides in several interviews that he still believes the agency's plan, based on decades of intelligence gathering and operational activity in Iran, had a very good chance of succeeding if it had been approved for implementation.