Inside the Secret US-Israeli Plan to Install Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

If you had told foreign policy analysts a decade ago that the United States and Israel would one day launch a covert military operation to install Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the leader of Iran, they probably would have laughed you out of the room.

Yet, as the dust settles on the opening salvos of the recent US-Israeli war against Iran, intelligence leaks and insider reports reveal a geopolitical strategy that sounds more like a Hollywood spy thriller than real life. According to briefed U.S. officials, the initial days of the conflict featured a highly classified, multi-stage regime change effort aimed at putting the notorious former Iranian president back into power.

Let’s unpack how two bitter adversaries of the hardline politician decided he was their best bet for a new Iran, how the audacious "jailbreak" operation went wrong, and what this reveals about modern Western intervention strategies.

The "Jailbreak" at Square 72

To understand the sheer audacity of this plan, we have to look at the opening hours of the war this past February. While global headlines were dominated by the Israeli airstrikes that successfully eliminated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top Iranian officials, a quieter, highly targeted mission was unfolding in the working-class Narmak district of eastern Tehran.

The target? The home of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But this wasn't an assassination attempt. American officials have confirmed that the strike, executed by the Israeli Air Force, was actually a rescue mission.

In recent years, Ahmadinejad’s movements had been severely restricted. He was effectively living under house arrest, guarded—and contained—by members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The Israeli strike was surgically designed to obliterate the security outpost at the entrance of his dead-end street, killing his IRGC captors and freeing him to step into a sudden power vacuum.

Satellite imagery confirms the total destruction of the guard building, leaving Ahmadinejad's actual residence largely untouched. However, the chaotic reality of war rarely aligns with pristine operational planning. Ahmadinejad was injured in the blast. While he survived, associates report that the near-miss deeply rattled him, leaving him profoundly disillusioned with the US-Israeli regime change blueprint. He has since vanished from the public eye.

Why Ahmadinejad? The Enemy of My Enemy

The decision to back Ahmadinejad is a fascinating study in realpolitik. To say he was an unusual choice is a massive understatement.

During his presidency from 2005 to 2013, Ahmadinejad was the ultimate boogeyman for the West. He violently crushed internal dissent, famously declared that Israel should be "wiped off the map," and aggressively accelerated Iran’s nuclear program. He was a fixture of Western satire and a fundamentalist who publicly denied the Holocaust.

So, why would President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gamble on him? The answer lies in a combination of shifting internal Iranian politics and a controversial strategic template.

• The Pragmatic Pivot: After leaving office, Ahmadinejad transformed into a vocal critic of the theocratic regime. He publicly accused senior leaders of corruption and directly clashed with Ayatollah Khamenei.
• The Election Lockouts: Iran’s Guardian Council—the unelected body that vets political candidates—blocked his attempts to run for president in 2017, 2021, and 2024. The regime clearly viewed him as a destabilizing, rogue element.
• The Venezuela Model: President Trump was reportedly inspired by the recent U.S. raid that captured Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, which allowed a U.S.-friendly interim leader, Delcy Rodriguez, to take power. The White House believed this "decapitation and replacement" model could be copy-pasted onto Tehran.
• A "Man of Action": In a revealing 2019 interview, Ahmadinejad actually praised Trump, calling him a "businessman" capable of calculating long-term cost-benefits, and urged a rapprochement between Washington and Tehran.

U.S. intelligence believed that to control a post-Khamenei Iran, they couldn't just install a Western-educated moderate who lacked street credibility. They needed a recognized populist who already had a fractured relationship with the theocratic government but possessed the ruthless capability to manage Iran’s complex political and military apparatus.

The Hungarian Connection and Shadow Diplomacy

Perhaps the most intriguing piece of this puzzle is how the alliance was formed. While Ahmadinejad’s exact recruitment remains shrouded in mystery, his recent travel history leaves a trail of breadcrumbs that intelligence analysts are currently scrambling to piece together.

In the years leading up to the war, Ahmadinejad made highly unusual trips abroad, heavily documented by international observers:

1. Guatemala (2023): A nation with historically close diplomatic and intelligence ties to Israel.
2. Hungary (2024 & 2025): He visited Budapest and spoke at a university connected to Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

The Hungarian connection is particularly glaring. Orban shares a famously tight relationship with Netanyahu. Ahmadinejad returned from his final Budapest trip just days before the initial Israeli strikes in June. When the broader conflict officially ignited, the formerly outspoken Ahmadinejad went completely dark on social media—a silence regarding Iran's greatest enemy that spoke volumes to Iranian citizens.

Furthermore, his inner circle had already been flagged by Iranian counterintelligence. His former chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashai, was tried in 2018 amid state-sponsored accusations of ties to British and Israeli spy agencies.

The Flawed Masterplan: Hubris and Resilience

The operation to install Ahmadinejad was just one piece of a highly ambitious—and ultimately flawed—masterplan engineered primarily by Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency.

According to Israeli defense officials, the strategy was built on three distinct phases:

• Phase One: Decapitation. Joint U.S. and Israeli air assaults targeting critical military infrastructure, alongside the targeted killing of Iran's supreme leadership. (This phase was largely executed).
• Phase Two: Instability. Mobilizing Kurdish factions to fight Iranian forces on the ground, paired with massive Israeli psychological and influence campaigns to make the Iranian public feel the regime was losing control.
• Phase Three: Collapse and Replacement. The sheer weight of political pressure and destroyed infrastructure (like the electrical grid) would cause the government to fold, paving the way for the Ahmadinejad-led "alternative government."

In retrospect, this plan profoundly underestimated the resilience of the Iranian state. While the U.S. military successfully degraded Iran’s ballistic missile production and naval capabilities—dubbed Operation Epic Fury—the total collapse of the theocratic regime never materialized. The sudden power vacuum simply led to the rise of new hardliners, rather than a welcoming committee for a U.S.-backed Ahmadinejad.

What This Means for the Future

As White House negotiators currently work to broker a deal to permanently end Iran's nuclear capabilities, the failed Ahmadinejad experiment leaves us with several critical takeaways:

• Intelligence Echo Chambers: The belief that a former hardliner could be seamlessly installed via a "jailbreak" airstrike highlights a recurring flaw in Western intelligence: projecting desired outcomes onto incredibly complex, hostile environments.
• The Limits of the "Venezuela Model": What works in South America does not easily translate to the Middle East. Iran's deeply entrenched Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its decentralized proxy networks make total regime collapse incredibly difficult to engineer from the outside.
• Mossad's Unwavering Confidence: Despite the chaotic outcome, Mossad chief David Barnea reportedly still believes the agency’s decades-in-the-making plan had a high probability of success. This suggests that Israel may not abandon covert regime change strategies in the future.

The attempt to crown Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the new leader of Iran will likely go down in history alongside Operation Ajax—the 1953 CIA-backed coup in Iran—as a stark reminder of the unpredictable, and often dangerous, nature of geopolitical engineering. It proves that in the high-stakes game of international warfare, the enemy of your enemy is rarely your friend; they are usually just another wild card in an already volatile deck.