Israel’s Regime-Change Plan for Iran

A few months ago, a team of my colleagues learned about a seemingly crazy plan. The man who had been groomed by Israel and the United States to take over as the leader in Iran after the war was one of the most hard-line, anti-American, anti-Israel presidents of Iran in recent memory: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Remember Ahmadinejad? The one who, when he was president from 2005-13, regularly called for the end of Israel? The Holocaust denier? Yes, that Ahmadinejad.

The plan failed. But those same colleagues are back this week with another investigation that gives us more details about the plan and sheds light on just how the U.S. and Israel came to see it as plausible. Today I write about the remarkable inside story of Israel’s yearslong operation to cultivate Ahmadinejad.

Israel’s unlikely man in Tehran

The details of the plan to install Ahmadinejad as Iran’s next leader are like something out of a spy novel. A rendezvous at a Budapest university, during which the former Iranian president had to shake off his own security detail. An Israeli airstrike to free him from house arrest, followed by a frantic drive in a Mossad car to a secret safe house. (And some possible Botox use.)

The surprising nature of Israel’s decision to build a regime-change plan around this man is hard to overstate. He was once hostile in the extreme to the countries proposing to install him as Iran’s new leader. He also oversaw the acceleration of Iran’s nuclear program, as well as the state’s bloody crackdown on the Green Movement, which arose to protest his disputed re-election over a candidate viewed as a reformer.

This was the man who would lead and stabilize a divided country in the aftermath of war?

The premise would never actually be tested. Ahmadinejad himself ultimately grew disillusioned about the Israeli attempt to return him to power, and at some point he left the safe house, under circumstances that are still unclear.

But as my colleagues’ reporting shows, there was some logic behind this plan. In addition to the remarkable details of how Israel sought to recruit the former president, they also learned more about why Israel sought to recruit him. What they found was that over the course of the past decade or so, Ahmadinejad’s relationship to the Iranian state had changed, in ways that might make him a potential asset to Israel, a country he’d once proclaimed a mortal enemy.

From hard-liner to pragmatist?

The thing Israeli and American officials were looking for in a future Iranian leader was pragmatism — someone willing to do business with Israel and the U.S. And Ahmadinejad had already shown he was willing to compromise on his hard-line ideology in the service of a return to power.

He was ambitious, and his ambition had been thwarted.

After leaving office, Ahmadinejad began clashing with the regime. He was repeatedly disqualified from running for president and eventually concluded he could not ascend to power as long as the current system remained in place.

Amid all this, his public persona began to shift. He toned down his anti-Israel rhetoric. Suddenly he was giving interviews and posting about Iranian pop music on social media. He started criticizing the Iranian security forces for their brutality and accused the ruling class of corruption.

He also changed his appearance: Tailored suits replaced the hallmark beige windbreaker. He learned English and groomed his beard. He held lengthy public meetings with aggrieved voters and, on occasion, helped them navigate the government bureaucracy.

In Iran, many greeted this transformation with cynicism, my colleagues found — an attempt to burnish his populist credentials and distance himself from ruling officials.

But Israel and the U.S. were taking notice. Ahmadinejad’s resentment toward Ayatollah Khamenei and other senior Iranian figures seemed to be growing. He professed his admiration for President Trump, to whom he sent letters and referred to as “a man of action.”

If he were ever to return to the presidency, Ahmadinejad told those around him, Iran would recognize Israel and normalize relations as part of the Abraham Accords.

A miscalculation

Israel set in motion the plan to topple the current regime and install Ahmadinejad during the first days of the war. But, as my colleagues put it, “little of the plan played out as the Israelis had hoped.”

The U.S. and Israel misjudged the Iranian regime’s resilience. It has not collapsed in the face of a war that has killed many of its top leaders. They also misjudged the commitment of Ahmadinejad, who ultimately abandoned the plan, for reasons we don’t yet fully understand.

My colleague Julian Barnes, one of the authors of the investigation, pointed out just how deeply Israel managed to penetrate Iran. “Recruiting a former president into Israel’s regime-change plan is by any account an amazing intelligence success,” he said. “And yet the whole plan collapsed just as it was being executed.”

According to my colleagues, Iranian intelligence eventually began piecing together the story of Ahmadinejad’s contact with Israel. Until last week, the former president hadn’t been seen in public since late February.

Then, last Monday, he made a brief, surprise appearance as part of Ayatollah Khamenei’s funeral procession. But he seemed to be heavily guarded.

“Videos of the procession,” my colleagues reported, “showed Mr. Ahmadinejad, wearing a heavy jacket in the 90-degree heat, with a surgical mask pulled down to his chin.

“Mr. Ahmadinejad stood with his head down, not speaking, flanked on all sides by what appeared to be security guards.”

Read the story here.

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