Israel’s reported plan to enlist Ahmadinejad in Iran regime change

In the opening days of the war on Iran, Israel tried to move Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to an Israeli safe house, ending a yearslong effort to cultivate the former Iranian president as an intelligence asset. The plan sat inside a broader U.S.-Israeli regime-change concept built around strikes on senior Iranian figures and a search for a replacement from within the system.

Ahmadinejad served as Iran's president from 2005 to 2013. U.S. and Israeli officials explored installing him as a post-Khamenei leader, despite his record of anti-Israel and anti-American rhetoric and his later break with Iran's clerical establishment.

His isolation inside Iran made him a strange choice. Ahmadinejad was barred from presidential runs in 2017, 2021 and 2024. He lived under house arrest or de facto confinement in Tehran, guarded by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers. The restrictions tightened after a trip to northern Iran and helped sharpen his anti-establishment image.

An Israeli strike hit near Ahmadinejad's residence in Tehran's Narmak district on the first day of the war, not to kill him but to break the guard detail around him and free him for a political role. The strike injured him or left him alienated, and the plan fell apart before it could be advanced.

The wider effort was not limited to Ahmadinejad. It combined airstrikes, covert action and expectations that an internal uprising or a Kurdish-driven collapse could crack the Iranian state from within.