Mossad's Puppet Plan — Israel's Secret Campaign to Install Ahmadinejad and the Coup That Never Came

On July 13, 2026, The New York Times published a story with the potential to rewrite a chapter of Middle Eastern intelligence history: Israel's Mossad, over several years, attempted to convert former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into an intelligence asset — not as an ordinary informant, but as a future proxy leader to be installed in power. The plan ultimately failed. Ahmadinejad is now under house arrest by the intelligence arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

This is not a spy novel plot, but a real three-year-plus operation corroborated by multiple sources — current and former U.S. officials, Iranian officials, and Israeli defense officials.

An Impossible Invitation

In early 2024, Professor Gergely Deli, rector of Budapest's Ludovika University of Public Service, received a request from a senior Hungarian government official — to invite Ahmadinejad for a visit under the pretext of a climate-change conference. The true purpose shocked Deli: the conference was a cover for Israeli intelligence personnel to meet secretly with the former Iranian president. After weighing the risks, Deli agreed to cooperate, for a reason worth recording in intelligence textbooks: "You have two enemies. If these two enemies want to talk to each other, it's better to help them talk."

Hungary under right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had the closest relationship with Israel of any European country. In April 2025, Benjamin Netanyahu himself had spoken at the same university and received a Public Service Award. Choosing Budapest as the meeting ground offered both political feasibility and operational convenience.

After the initial contact in 2024, Mossad Director David Barnea flew personally to Budapest to meet Ahmadinejad. The signal was unequivocal: this was not a routine approach by a mid-level handler, but a strategic recruitment effort led by the head of the intelligence agency. Mossad subsequently notified the CIA — a "notification," not a "request for approval."

A Former President's Transformation: From Erasing Israel to Learning English

Ahmadinejad's personal transformation is perhaps the most puzzling element of the entire affair — and the essential precondition for understanding why Mossad believed the plan was viable.

During his 2005–2013 tenure, he was Iran's most prominent hardliner — threatening to "wipe Israel off the map," restarting uranium enrichment, and violently suppressing the 2009 protest movement. But after leaving office, subtle changes emerged: he stopped wearing his signature oversized khaki coat and shifted to tailored suits; he trimmed his once-unruly beard and began learning English; he publicly criticized the security forces' iron-fist tactics and the corruption of the ruling class. At his office in Tehran, he held daily open meetings to hear ordinary citizens' grievances, and he regularly toured the country to meet with supporters.

Interpretations of these changes divided Iranian observers. Some saw a populist's political makeover aimed at regaining power; others saw signs of genuine reflection. Israel's intelligence community read the data selectively — interpreting the widening rift between Ahmadinejad and the current establishment as deep enough to exploit — leading to an extraordinarily audacious operational direction.

According to sources close to his inner circle, Ahmadinejad confided to his most trusted associates that he wanted to become Iran's future leader with the help of foreign powers. After being barred from running for president three times, he had grown disillusioned with the Islamic Republic system, concluding that he could never attain power under the existing order. He saw himself playing a role similar to Russia's Boris Yeltsin — a reformer who, if he came to power, would recognize Israel and normalize relations as part of Trump's Abraham Accords.

Overseas Meetings and the IRGC's Suspicion

In 2023, preliminary contacts were already underway when Ahmadinejad traveled to Guatemala for an environmental conference. At the Tehran airport, security forces refused to issue him a boarding pass, but after hours of sit-in protest, he was allowed to travel — a signal in itself: his movements were closely monitored, yet he still had the capacity to break through surveillance.

In June 2025, just days before Israel launched its war on Iran, he traveled again to Budapest. The Ansar unit of the IRGC assigned to guard him later reported that Ahmadinejad had slipped away from his security detail at least twice, disappearing for extended periods. When confronted, he claimed he was meeting with university professors.

During the same university conference, the former president delivered a speech in English. Those present were struck by the fact that he did not open with the customary recitation of Quranic verses that had marked every speech of his presidency. Dressed in a dark blue suit, he spoke of "shared humanity" and a "constantly changing world order."

Meanwhile, IRGC intelligence's suspicion of Ahmadinejad had been mounting steadily since 2017, when he began publicly writing open letters to Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

February 28: A Daring Rescue and Rapid Collapse

In late February of this year, during the first days of the US–Israeli war on Iran, the plan reached its climax. Israel bombed Ahmadinejad's residence — not targeting him personally, but the building housing his bodyguards and his armored vehicles, creating a window of chaos for a rescue operation.

After the airstrike, a black Peugeot sedan arrived on the scene, driven by Mossad operatives, who whisked Ahmadinejad away from the chaos at high speed to a secret safe house inside Iran. The objective: launch a plan to overthrow the current regime and install Ahmadinejad in power.

But the former president was unhappy with the hasty rescue — he appeared disillusioned with Israel's plan to push him back onto the throne of power. He eventually left the safe house while the situation was still murky, and only made a brief public appearance the previous Monday during the funeral procession of the assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Former Israeli Defense Forces intelligence chief Tamir Hayman later described the regime-change plan as involving "a series of very, very unique special operations that were supposed to be carried out. And Ahmadinejad was one link in this chain of operations." Another initiative — arming and training Iranian Kurdish opposition fighters in northern Iraq to cross into western Iran — never materialized.

The Logic of the Plan: Risk Assessment at Three Levels

From an intelligence analysis perspective, the plan conducted risk assessments at three separate levels — and the conclusions were not uniformly supportive of success.

At the individual level, the assessment was probably accurate. Ahmadinejad's rift with the system was real. Being barred from running for president three times, for a man who had once held the highest executive office, was a political humiliation difficult to absorb. His self-image as a "Yeltsin figure" and his expressed willingness to seek foreign assistance to gain power — these indicators pointed to a person deeply dissatisfied with the current system, meeting the basic psychological conditions for intelligence recruitment.

At the operational level, the assessment was likely an underestimate. Arranging multi-country secret meetings under the IRGC intelligence's watchful eye, covering travel and accommodation costs, and eventually executing an armed rescue — each step carried extreme operational difficulty. While the earlier meetings succeeded, the eventual rescue failure suggests operational risk control fell short. Ahmadinejad's own dissatisfaction with the rescue outcome also implies he may have had a more realistic assessment of the plan's feasibility than Mossad did.

At the strategic level, the assessment contained a fundamental flaw. Even if the rescue had succeeded, whether Ahmadinejad could have stabilized his control over Iran as a proxy was a question never seriously answered. How could a populist whose signature slogan was "wipe Israel off the map," a politician who won re-election by riding waves of anti-American sentiment, gain internal legitimacy in Iran after being installed by Israel? If his external backing were exposed (as indeed it had already been discovered by Iranian intelligence), any "reformer" narrative would collapse instantly. The most fatal blind spot at the strategic level is that Iran is not Iraq or Afghanistan — it possesses a highly organized state apparatus and the dual power structure of the IRGC. An externally backed proxy can only function with an internal power base — and Ahmadinejad, having lost power, had lost that base too.

Aftermath: Two Parallel Timelines

After February 28, two timelines extended in parallel. Ahmadinejad is now being held by IRGC intelligence under house arrest. During his brief appearance at the funeral last Monday, he wore a heavy coat with his mask pulled down to his chin, standing silently in 90-degree heat, surrounded by bodyguards. Israel has never publicly acknowledged the plan; Mossad officials did not respond to the Times' requests for comment.

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of this story is not the audacity of the plan itself, but the intelligence mindset it reveals: when an intelligence agency possesses sufficient "confidence in feasibility," it tends to treat strategic impossibility as an operational obstacle to be overcome step by step. From the Budapest academic conference to the director's personal visit, from the Guatemala contact to the armed rescue — each step was operationally executable, each step brought the "proxy takeover" strategic goal one step closer, and yet not a single step made that strategic goal any more realistic.

And Ahmadinejad's own trajectory — from cooperation to withdrawal — provides a fitting narrative closure. Even a former president, barred three times from running, chose to step away when the jump from "talking" to "being rescued by armed force onto a negotiating table" became real. For him, it may have been the clearest decision of his life.