Early war goal was to install hard line former president as Iran’s leader

Washington: Days after Israeli strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader and other top officials in the opening salvos of the war, President Donald Trump mused publicly that it would be best if “someone from within” Iran took over the country.

It turns out that the United States and Israel went into the conflict with a particular and very surprising someone in mind: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president known for his hard-line, anti-Israel and anti-American views.

But the audacious plan, developed by the Israelis and which Ahmadinejad had been consulted about, quickly went awry, according to the US officials who were briefed on it.

Ahmadinejad was injured on the war’s first day by an Israeli strike at his home in Tehran that had been designed to free him from house arrest, the US officials and an associate of Ahmadinejad’s said. He survived the strike, they said, but after the near miss he became disillusioned with the regime change plan.

He has not been seen publicly since then and his current whereabouts and condition are unknown.

To say that Ahmadinejad was an unusual choice would be a vast understatement. While he had increasingly clashed with the regime’s leaders and had been placed under close watch by Iranian authorities, he was known during his term as president, from 2005 to 2013, for his calls to “wipe Israel off the map.” He was a strong supporter of Iran’s nuclear program, a fierce critic of the United States and known for violently cracking down on internal dissent.

How Ahmadinejad was recruited to take part remains unknown.

The existence of the effort, which has not been previously reported, was part of a multistage plan developed by Israel to topple Iran’s theocratic government. It underscores how Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel went into the war not only misjudging how quickly they could achieve their objectives but also gambling to some degree on a risky plan for leadership change in Iran that even some of Trump’s aides found implausible. Some US officials were skeptical in particular about the viability of putting Ahmadinejad back into power.

“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,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said in response to a request for comment about the regime change plan and Ahmadinejad. “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.”

A spokesperson for Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency, declined to comment.

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

Trump was enjoying the success of the raid by US forces to capture Venezuela’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, and the willingness of his interim replacement to work with the White House — a model that Trump appeared to think could be replicated elsewhere.

In recent years, Ahmadinejad has clashed with regime leaders, accusing them of corruption, and rumors have swirled about his loyalties. He was disqualified from numerous presidential elections, his aides were arrested and Ahmadinejad’s movements were increasingly restricted to his home in the Narmak section of eastern Tehran.

That US 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 with the hopes of installing more pliable leadership in Tehran. Trump and members of his Cabinet have said that the goals of the war were narrowly focused on destroying Iran’s nuclear, missile and military capabilities.

There are many unanswered questions about how Israel and the United States planned to put Ahmadinejad in power, and the circumstances surrounding the airstrike that injured him. US officials said the strike — carried out by the Israeli air force — was meant to kill the guards watching over Ahmadinejad as part of a plan to release him from house arrest.

On the first day of the war, Israeli strikes killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. The strike at Khamenei’s compound in central Tehran also blew up a meeting of Iranian officials, killing some officials whom the White House had identified as more willing to negotiate over a change in government than their bosses.

There were also initial reports at the time in the Iranian media that Ahmadinejad had been killed in the strike on his home.

The strike did not significantly damage Ahmadinejad’s house at the end of a dead-end street. But the security outpost at the entrance to the street was struck. Satellite imagery shows that building was destroyed.

In the days that followed, official news agencies clarified that he had survived but that his “bodyguards” — in actuality Revolutionary Guard members who were both guarding him and holding him under house arrest — were killed.

An article in The Atlantic in March, citing anonymous associates of Ahmadinejad’s, said the former president had been freed from government confinement after the strike at his house, which the article described as “in effect a jailbreak operation.”

After that article, an associate of Ahmadinejad‘s confirmed to The New York Times that Ahmadinejad saw the strike as an attempt to free him. The associate said the Americans viewed Ahmadinejad as someone who could lead Iran, and had the capability to manage “Iran’s political, social and military situation.”

Ahmadinejad would have been able “play a very important role” in Iran in the near future, the associate said, suggesting that the United States saw him as similar to Delcy Rodriguez, who took power in Venezuela after US forces seized Maduro and has since worked closely with the Trump administration, the person said.

During his presidency, Ahmadinejad was known both for his hard-line policies and his often outlandish fundamentalist pronouncements, such as his declaration that there was not a single gay person in Iran and his denial of the Holocaust. He spoke at a conference in Tehran called “A World Without Zionism.”

Western satirists lampooned these views, and Ahmadinejad became something of an unwitting pop culture curiosity, even the subject of “Saturday Night Live” parodies.

He also presided over the country at a time when Iran was accelerating the enrichment of uranium it could one day use for making a nuclear bomb should it choose to weaponize its program. A US intelligence assessment in 2007 concluded that Iran had, years earlier, frozen its work on building a nuclear device but was continuing the enrichment of nuclear fuel it could use for a nuclear weapon if it changed its mind.

After Ahmadinejad left office he gradually became something of an open critic of the theocratic government, or at least at odds with Khamenei.

Three times — 2017, 2021, and 2024 — Ahmadinejad tried to run for his previous job, but each time Iran’s Guardian Council, a group of civilian and Islamic jurists, blocked his presidential campaign. Ahmadinejad has accused senior Iranian officials of corruption or bad governance and become a critic of the government in Tehran. While he never was an overt dissident, the regime began to treat him as a potentially destabilizing element.

Ahmadinejad’s ties to the West are far murkier.

In a 2019 interview with the Times, Ahmadinejad praised Trump and argued for a rapprochement between Iran and the United States.

“Mr. Trump is a man of action,” Ahmadinejad said. “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.”

People close to Ahmadinejad have been accused of having too close ties to the West, or even spying for Israel. Esfandiar Rahim Mashai, Ahmadinejad’s former chief of staff, was put on trial in 2018 and the judge in the case publicly asked about his links to British and Israeli spy agencies, an accusation publicized by state media.

In the past few years Ahmadinejad has made trips out of Iran that further fueled speculation.

In 2023, he traveled to Guatemala and in 2024 and 2025 he went to Hungary, trips detailed by New Lines magazine. Both countries have close ties to Israel.

The Hungarian prime minister at the time, Viktor Orban, has a close relationship with Netanyahu. During the trips to Hungary, Ahmadinejad spoke at a university connected to Orban.

He returned from Budapest just days before Israel began attacking Iran last June. When that war broke out, he kept a low public profile and posted only few statements on social media. His relative silence about a war with a country that Ahmadinejad had long viewed as Iran’s main enemy was noted by many on Iranian social media.

Discussion of Ahmadinejad on Iranian social media picked up after reports of his death, according to an analysis by FilterLabs, a company that tracks public sentiment. But the discussion declined in the weeks following, mainly amounting to confusion about his whereabouts.

At the outset, Israel envisioned the war unfolding in several phases, starting with air assaults by the United States and Israel plus the killing of Iran’s supreme leaders and the mobilization of Kurds to fight Iranian forces, according to two Israeli defense officials familiar with the operational planning.

Then, the Israeli plan foresaw a combination of influence campaigns carried out by Israel and the Kurdish invasion creating political instability in Iran and a sense that the regime was losing control. In a third stage, the regime, under intense political pressure and the weight of damage to key infrastructure like electricity, would collapse, allowing for what the Israelis referred to as an “alternative government” to be established.

Other than the air campaign and the killing of the supreme leader, little of the plan played out as the Israelis had hoped, and much of it appears in retrospect to have profoundly misjudged Iran’s resilience and the capacity of the United States and Israel to exert their will.

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

David Barnea, Mossad’s chief, told associates in several discussions that he still thought that the agency’s plan, based on decades of intelligence collection and operational activity in Iran, had a very good chance of succeeding had it received approval to move forward.