Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been placed under house arrest by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps after intelligence officials uncovered what they say were clandestine contacts with Israel, according to The New York Times. Citing American and Iranian sources, the newspaper reported that Israel had spent years running a covert effort to cultivate Ahmadinejad as a potential intelligence asset who could, at a decisive moment, be positioned as Iran’s next leader. The operation allegedly included secret payments to cover housing and travel, along with several meetings between Ahmadinejad and Israeli operatives overseas. The reported relationship is striking given Ahmadinejad’s long record as one of Tehran’s most combative anti-Israel figures: during his presidency, he pushed forward Iran’s nuclear programme, repeatedly called for Israel’s destruction and denied the Holocaust. The covert effort reportedly reached a dramatic point in February this year, in the early phase of the US-Israeli war with Iran, when operatives attempted to move the former president out of danger. The aim, according to the report, was to help trigger the downfall of the current Iranian system and install Ahmadinejad, who had been living under heavy surveillance in Tehran, as its replacement leader. But the plan collapsed. On February 28, an Israeli airstrike hit Ahmadinejad’s compound, targeting the building used by his bodyguards and his armoured vehicle.
After the strike, a black Peugeot arrived at the compound, collected Ahmadinejad and sped away from the scene, four senior Iranian officials told the newspaper. American and Iranian officials said the car was driven by Mossad agents, who took the former president to a hidden safe house inside Iran. Yet Ahmadinejad was reportedly unhappy with the disorderly extraction and appeared to lose confidence in Mossad’s plan to return him to power. He later left the safe house under circumstances that remain murky and did not reappear publicly until last Monday, when he briefly attended the funeral of slain supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His present situation is unclear, but four senior Iranian officials said the IRGC’s intelligence arm had detained him and placed him under house arrest after the regime learned more about the scale of his communications with Israel. Israel has not publicly addressed the alleged mission to elevate Ahmadinejad, which was described as one piece of a wider campaign aimed at overthrowing the government in Tehran.
Another strand of the alleged plan focused on Iranian Kurdish opposition fighters based in northern Iraq. They were to be trained, supplied with weapons and instructed to enter western Iran, seize territory and eventually push toward Tehran. That portion of the operation never materialised. Tamir Hayman, a former Israeli Defence Forces intelligence chief, described the regime-change effort in May on PBS’s “Firing Line” as involving a “sequence of special operations, very, very unique, that was supposed to happen,” adding: “And Ahmadinejad was part of that sequence.” According to the report, one phase unfolded in 2024, when the rector of a Budapest university received an unusual request from a senior Hungarian government official. The official asked Professor Gergely Deli, rector of Ludovika University of Public Service, to stage a climate change conference and invite an unexpected speaker: Ahmadinejad, the deeply controversial former Iranian president. The official later told Deli that the event was intended as cover, allowing Ahmadinejad to meet secretly in Budapest with Israeli intelligence operatives.
Deli feared that hosting Ahmadinejad could damage both his own standing and the university’s reputation, but he ultimately agreed. “You have two enemies, and if these enemies want to talk with each other, then it’s best to do what you can to make them talk,” he told the publication. Ahmadinejad’s 2024 visit to the Budapest university, followed by another trip the next year, was reportedly part of Israel’s long-running attempt to prepare him as a future leader of Iran. He was considered important enough to the effort that David Barnea, then head of Mossad, travelled to Budapest in 2024 to meet him in person, former American officials said. Soon after, those officials said, Mossad contacted the CIA to verify that it had been holding discussions with Ahmadinejad. During his presidency from 2005 to 2013, Ahmadinejad was Iran’s most prominent hardliner. He frequently spoke of destroying Israel, and under his leadership Tehran resumed uranium enrichment, heightening fears that Iran was pursuing a covert nuclear weapons programme. He also ordered harsh crackdowns on nationwide protests challenging his disputed 2009 re-election, while the judiciary under his rule carried out mass executions of dissidents and jailed opponents and rivals.
Changes Following Presidency
In the years after leaving office, however, Ahmadinejad appeared to reinvent himself. He trimmed his once-unkempt beard, seemed to have received Botox, began studying English and softened his public positions, including toning down his anti-Israel rhetoric. From his office in Tehran, he held hour-long morning meetings with ordinary citizens seeking help with grievances. At times, he wrote letters to government ministries urging them to consider petitioners for loans. His relationship with the Iranian establishment remained tense: senior figures sidelined him and limited his movements, though they still allowed him to sit with other top officials on a high-level council that advises the supreme leader. Some in Tehran viewed his transformation as a calculated political pivot, an attempt to separate himself from the ruling elite and win back support among working-class Iranians. “Ahmadinejad would not do this for money. He has money; he has a wide economic network. He would do it for power. He wants to be at the helm of power,” Abdolreza Davari, a former close associate and senior adviser to Ahmadinejad, told The New York Times. The two men fell out years ago. According to an associate from Ahmadinejad’s inner circle, the former president discussed with a small group of trusted aides his hopes of becoming Iran’s future leader with help from foreign powers.
Ahmadinejad had reportedly grown disenchanted with the Islamic Republic after being barred from running for president three times, eventually concluding that he could not regain power unless the existing system changed. One associate said Ahmadinejad worried that, if war and regime change came, the United States and Israel might choose an exiled opposition figure unfamiliar with Iran to lead the country, a move he believed would fuel instability. He presented himself to those around him as a potential reformer in the mould of former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, and said that if he took power, Tehran would recognise Israel and normalise relations under President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords, the associate claimed. During the same period, Mossad officers were closely tracking Ahmadinejad’s widening rift with the Iranian leadership, according to two Israeli defence officials. They were especially interested in his growing resentment toward Ayatollah Khamenei and other senior figures who had blocked him from seeking the presidency again. Over time, however, Ahmadinejad’s conduct began to draw the attention of the IRGC intelligence branch, which is tasked with protecting the Islamic system from foreign interference.
Those concerns intensified, according to two members of the Guards and an intelligence official familiar with the case, after Ahmadinejad began publishing letters in 2017 addressed to Trump and later to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The US president had praised both men. Iranian intelligence agencies only began probing Ahmadinejad’s alleged links to Israel after this year’s Israeli strike temporarily freed him from Guard surveillance. It remains unclear when Israeli operatives first sought to recruit him, but Iranian officials said there was at least some contact during a 2023 trip Ahmadinejad made to Guatemala for an environmental conference. The invitation came from Guatemala’s government, which maintains closer diplomatic ties with Israel than many other Latin American countries. Ahmadinejad nearly missed the trip after security forces stopped him at Tehran airport, refused to issue him a boarding pass and prevented him from leaving the country. He responded by staging a sit-in lasting several hours, turning the confrontation into a public-relations moment as he posed for photos with ordinary travellers, airport staff and airline workers, then posted updates on social media. Eventually, Iranian officials allowed him to fly out and attend the conference. “Some people told me not to travel to Guatemala; I told them my brother the minister of environment invited me,” Ahmadinejad said in one video from the trip. “This is a very important country in Latin America.”
In 2024, Ahmadinejad travelled to Hungary for the Ludovika University conference, where he met Barnea, who had led Mossad for five years until last month. Hungary, then governed by hard-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban, had some of the closest ties with Israel of any European country. Orban and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited each other’s countries during their time in office. In April 2025, Netanyahu delivered his own address at Ludovika University, which presented him with a public service award. Just days before Israel began its war with Iran in June that year, Ahmadinejad returned to Budapest on what was allegedly another cover trip to meet Israeli intelligence operatives. His Iranian bodyguards from the Guards’ Ansar unit later claimed that, on at least two occasions during the June 2025 visit, Ahmadinejad slipped away from his security detail and vanished for lengthy meetings. In their report on the trip, the bodyguards said they confronted him about the unexplained absences, but he insisted he had merely been meeting university professors.
Ahmadinejad Reemerges
At the conference, the former president delivered a lecture in English, shocking attendees by abandoning the signature Quranic verse he used to recite at the beginning of every public address. He referenced ‘shared humanity’ and a ‘changing world order,’ according to videos from the speech posted on his social media page. He presented Deli, the university rector, with a copy of the Book of Kings, written by the ancient Iranian poet Ferdowsi, while Deli gave Ahmadinejad an emblem of the university. In an interview last month, Deli admitted that, in extending an invitation to Ahmadinejad, he had played the role of a ‘strohmann’ – a German word meaning ‘frontman’ or ‘puppet’. The former president has not been seen in public since last February until last week, when on Monday he made a brief appearance as part of Khamenei’s grand funeral procession. Wearing a surgical mask and a heavy jacket in the sweltering heat, Ahmadinejad stood with his head down, silent, flanked on both sides by security guards.
