Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is reportedly under arrest for allegedly conspiring to help Israel overthrow the Iranian regime.
The New York Times published an explosive investigation Monday, citing four senior Iranian officials, claiming Israel conducted a multi-year covert operation to recruit the Holocaust-denying, Israel-cursing former president as a Mossad intelligence asset.
The long-term goal, according to the report, was to position Ahmadinejad as Iran’s leader once the current regime collapsed. It was part of a broader Israeli regime-change plan that also included arming and training Iranian Kurdish opposition forces to cross from northern Iraq into western Iran and march toward Tehran.
The centerpiece of the operation was a meeting between Ahmadinejad and Mossad chief David Barnea at an academic conference in Hungary. The conference was arranged, according to the Times, by a senior Hungarian government official who asked a Budapest university rector to invite the former Iranian president. Israel also secretly paid money to Ahmadinejad’s spokesman, Javanfekr, and met with Ahmadinejad on multiple other occasions abroad.
Tamir Hayman, a former head of intelligence for the Israeli Defense Forces, confirmed to PBS in May that the operation involved “a sequence of special operations, very, very unique, that was supposed to happen.”
When the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran began on February 28, Israel made its move. An airstrike targeted Ahmadinejad’s bodyguards. A black Peugeot whisked him away from his Tehran home and drove him to an Israeli safe house.
Then Ahmadinejad grew disillusioned. He left the safe house and Israel reportedly lost him.
The former president was not seen in public again until Khamenei’s funeral on July 6 — and the footage of that brief appearance raised more questions than it answered. Dressed in a heavy jacket in 90-degree heat, a surgical mask pulled down to his chin, Ahmadinejad stood with his head down, silent, flanked on all sides by what appeared to be IRGC security guards. Iran’s two other living former presidents — Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Khatami — were not invited and did not attend.
According to four senior Iranian officials cited by the Times, Ahmadinejad is now in the custody of the IRGC’s intelligence wing, under house arrest. His precise current location remains unclear.
Ahmadinejad served as Iran’s president from 2005 to 2013, spent years denying the Holocaust, called repeatedly for Israel’s destruction, and personally accelerated Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Yet Israel chose him as its preferred successor to Khamenei — apparently calculating that a man desperate for power and bitter at the system would be more useful than ideologically pure.
The broader regime-change plan of which Ahmadinejad was a part never fully materialized. The Kurdish forces never crossed the border in force. The new government was never installed. And the IRGC — now with more control over Iran’s leadership than ever following Khamenei’s death — is tightening its grip internally, arresting dozens of suspected Israeli spies across multiple provinces in recent weeks.