Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel walked into the Oval Office on the morning of Feb. 11, determined to keep the American president on the path to war.
For weeks, the United States and Israel had been secretly discussing a military offensive against Iran. But Trump administration officials had recently begun negotiating with the Iranians over the future of their nuclear program, and the Israeli leader wanted to make sure that the new diplomatic effort did not undermine the plans.
Over nearly three hours, the two leaders discussed the prospects of war and even possible dates for an attack, as well as the possibility — however unlikely — that Mr. Trump might be able to reach a deal with Iran.
Days later, the U.S. president made clear publicly that he was skeptical of the diplomatic route, dismissing the history of negotiating with Iran as merely years of “talking and talking and talking.”
Asked by reporters if he wanted regime change in Iran, Mr. Trump said it “seems like that would be the best thing that could happen.”
Two weeks later, the president took the United States to war. He authorized a vast military bombardment in conjunction with Israel that swiftly killed the country’s supreme leader, pummeled Iranian civilian buildings and military nuclear sites, thrust the country into chaos and triggered violence across the region, leading to the deaths so far of four U.S. troops and scores of Iranian civilians. Mr. Trump has said more American casualties are likely as the United States digs in for an assault that could last weeks.
In public, Mr. Trump appeared to take a circuitous path to military action, alternating between saying that he wanted to strike a deal with Iran’s government and that he wanted to topple it. He made little effort to try to convince the American public that a war was necessary now. And the limited case he and his aides made included false claims about the imminence of the threat that Iran posed to the United States.
But behind the scenes, his move toward war grew inexorably, fueled by allies like Mr. Netanyahu who pushed the president to strike a decisive blow against Iran’s theocratic government; and by Mr. Trump’s own confidence after the successful U.S. operation that toppled the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January.
This reconstruction of Mr. Trump’s decision to launch a sustained attack against Iran is based on the accounts of people with direct knowledge of the deliberations, as well as those on all sides of the debate, including diplomats from the region, Israeli and American administration officials, the president’s advisers, congressional lawmakers and defense and intelligence officials. Almost all spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions and operational details.
The U.S. decision to strike Iran was a victory for Mr. Netanyahu, who had been pushing Mr. Trump for months on the need to hit what he argued was a weakened regime. During a meeting at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in December, Mr. Netanyahu had asked for the president’s approval for Israelto hit Iran’s missile sites in the coming months.
Two months later, he got something even better: a full partner in a war to topple the Iranian leadership.
In a statement Monday, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said Mr. Trump made a “courageous decision” to take on a threat that no previous president had been willing to confront.
Few in the president’s inner circle voiced opposition to military action. Even Vice President JD Vance, a longtime skeptic of American military interventions in the Middle East, argued in a White House Situation Room meeting that if the United States was going to hit Iran, it should “go big and go fast,” according to people familiar with his remarks.
In the same meeting, Mr. Trump’s top military adviser, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, told the president that a war could lead to significant American casualties. Days later, Mr. Trump told the public that his military adviser had been far more reassuring. He wrote on Truth Social that General Caine had said that any military action against Iran would be “something easily won.”
Other administration officials were similarly misleading in private sessions with lawmakers. During a Feb. 24 meeting with the so-called Gang of Eight — the leaders of the House and Senate and heads of the intelligence committees — Secretary of State Marco Rubio made no mention that the Trump administration was considering regime change, according to people familiar with his comments.
Three days later, while flying on Air Force One to an event in Corpus Christi, Texas, Mr. Trump gave the order for a sustained attack that would begin with the killing of the supreme leader.
“Operation Epic Fury is approved,” Mr. Trump said. “No aborts. Good luck.”
The White House insisted that its diplomatic talks with Iran were not mere theater. But it became clear over the past month that there was never the space for a deal that could satisfy Mr. Trump, Mr. Netanyahu and Iranian leaders at once — or one that could put off a war more than a few months.
The talks delivered nothing, but for Mr. Trump they served a different purpose: time to complete the largest American military buildup in the Middle East in a generation and carry out, in Mr. Trump’s words, a war or “overwhelming strength and devastating force.”
In an interview with The New York Times on Sunday, the president said he simply became convinced that Iran would never give him what he wanted.
“Toward the end of the negotiation, I realized that these guys weren’t going to get there,” he said. “I said, ‘Let’s just do it.’”
A Rapid Buildup
In the middle of January, when Mr. Trump first threatened to strike Iran in support of the anti-government protests roiling the country, the Pentagon was in no position to wage a lengthy war in the Middle East.
There were no aircraft carriers in the region. Squadrons of fighter jets were sitting in Europe and in the United States. And the bases scattered across the Middle East that are home to roughly 40,000 American troops were low on air defenses to protect them from an expected Iranian retaliation.
Israel was also not ready for the military campaign that Mr. Netanyahu had discussed with Mr. Trump during the Mar-a-Lago meeting in December. It needed more time to bolster its supply of missile interceptors and to deploy air defense batteries across Israel.
On Jan. 14, Mr. Netanyahu called Mr. Trump and asked him to delay any military strike until later in the month, when Israel’s defense preparations were complete. Mr. Trump agreed to wait.
The two leaders would speak several times in the weeks that followed. Mr. Netanyahu also conferred with Mr. Vance, Mr. Rubio and Steve Witkoff, the lead White House negotiator with Iran. Top Israeli military and intelligence officials flew to Washington, and Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, communicated regularly with Adm. Brad Cooper of U.S. Central Command.
By late January, the protests in Iran had been brutally quashed, but the war planning hummed along. The U.S. military presented Mr. Trump with an expanded range of options, including sending in American forces to carry out raids on sites inside Iran.
Two aircraft carriers and a dozen supporting ships sailed toward the Middle East, and the Pentagon sent fighter jets, bombers, refueling tankers and air defense batteries.
By the middle of February, the Pentagon had put into a place a force that could sustain a military campaign of several weeks.
By then, Mr. Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, were having indirect nuclear talks with the Iranians, under orders from Mr. Trump.
But there were signs that the administration was wary.
“We have to understand that Iran ultimately is governed and its decisions are governed by Shia clerics — radical Shia clerics, OK?” Mr. Rubio told reporters in Budapest on Feb. 16. “These people make policy decisions on the basis of pure theology. That’s how they make their decisions. So, it’s hard to do a deal with Iran.”
The message was apparent: Even though the talks were about dismantling Iran’s nuclear program, the goal could be removing Iran’s leadership.
A telling moment came when Mr. Witkoff spoke to Fox News in an interview on Feb. 21 and described Mr. Trump’s reaction to the Iranian reluctance to agree to “zero enrichment” — that is, to dismantle its ability to produce nuclear fuel.
“He’s curious as to why they haven’t — I don’t want to use the word ‘capitulated,’ but why they haven’t capitulated,” Mr. Witkoff said.
He added: “Why, under this sort of pressure, with the amount of sea power and naval power that we have over there, why haven’t they come to us and said, ‘We profess we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do’?”
“And yet it’s sort of hard to get them to that place,” he said.
It was clear to the president’s advisers that he was strongly considering some kind of military offensive. The question was the scale of the campaign and exactly what it was trying to achieve.
Assessing the Options
On Feb. 18, on an unseasonably warm day in Washington, Mr. Vance; Mr. Rubio; John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director; and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, gathered with Mr. Trump in the Situation Room to discuss military planning.
During the meeting, General Caine discussed an array of options, among them that U.S. forces could carry out a limited strike as a way to push Iran in the negotiations, or a larger campaign with the goal of toppling the government. The latter option in particular, he said, carried high risk of American casualties, could destabilize the region and significantly deplete stocks of American munitions.
General Caine underscored that all of the options under consideration would be much more difficult than the successful capture of Mr. Maduro of Venezuela, an operation that the president viewed as a sign of potential U.S. success in Iran.
Joe Holstead, a spokesman for General Caine, declined to comment, saying that “options and considerations” provided to the president and defense secretary are confidential.
For his part, Mr. Vance argued that a limited strike was a mistake. If the United States was going to hit Iran, he told the group, it should “go big and go fast.”
A spokesman for Mr. Vance declined to comment.
Before the meeting, Mr. Trump appeared to have been leaning toward a strategy of a smaller strike, followed by a bigger one if Iran did not give up its nuclear enrichment. But Mr. Vance’s arguments seemed to resonate. And in the coming days, more officials moved toward the idea that the United States and Israel should jointly take aim not just at the Iranian missile and nuclear programs, but also at the leadership itself.
The C.I.A. had produced a series of scenarios that might play out if Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, were killed in an offensive. They laid out multiple possible outcomes, as the numbers of variables made it difficult for the agency to assess with confidence what might happen.
One envisioned a hard-line cleric replacing Ayatollah Khamenei — perhaps even a leader more bent on acquiring a nuclear weapon. Another scenario predicted an uprising against the government, a possibility many intelligence officials thought was remote, given the weakness of Iran’s opposition.
A number of senior Trump administration officials seized on a third scenario: that a faction of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps more pragmatic than the hard-line clerics might take power. Even though a cleric was likely to still be nominally in charge, that group of I.R.G.C. leaders would actually lead the country.
Such a move would be a dramatic turn for an officer corps that had been staunchly anti-American for four decades and deeply intertwined with Iran’s clerical leadership.
But the C.I.A. analysis suggested that as long as the United States did not interfere with the economic activities of this faction, such as its influence in the oil industry, a group of officers might be conciliatory toward the United States. They might even give up Iran’s nuclear program or prevent Iran’s proxy forces from attacking the United States.
The C.I.A. declined to comment.
There were few voices lobbying against military action. One exception was Tucker Carlson, the right-wing podcaster and close ally of the president, who has met with him in the Oval Office three times in the past month to argue against an attack.
He outlined the risks to U.S. military personnel, energy prices and Arab partners in the region if the United States went to war with Iran. He told the president that he should not be boxed in by Israel, arguing that its desire to attack Iran was the only reason the United States was even considering a strike. He encouraged Mr. Trump to restrain Mr. Netanyahu.
The president said he understood the risks of an attack, but he conveyed to Mr. Carlson that he had no choice but to join a strike that Israel would launch.
After Mr. Carlson left the White House midday on Feb. 23, he told others he thought Mr. Trump was leaning toward military action.
One Last Round of Diplomacy
The White House ignored demands by some lawmakers that Mr. Trump get consent from Congress to launch a campaign against Iran, and made few efforts to make the case for war on Capitol Hill.
But on Feb. 24, hours before Mr. Trump’s annual State of the Union address, congressional leaders from the so-called Gang of Eight gathered in a secure conference room in the Capitol to speak on video teleconference with Mr. Rubio and Mr. Ratcliffe. The two officials were just down Pennsylvania Avenue at the White House, but security arrangements for the president’s speech made the two-mile trip onerous.
Mr. Rubio and Mr. Ratcliffe talked about the intelligence behind the strikes, the possible timing and the potential “offramp”— if the Iranians were to give up nuclear enrichment at upcoming talks.
And yet Mr. Rubio never mentioned that the administration was considering a regime-change operation.
In the briefing, Mr. Rubio argued that, no matter if Israel or the United States struck first, Iran would respond with a powerful barrage of weapons against U.S. bases and embassies. It was logical then, Mr. Rubio said, that the United States should act in concert with Israel, since America would be dragged in anyway. And Israel, Mr. Rubio said, was determined to act.
This logic sat poorly with some Democrats, who thought the Trump administration was letting Mr. Netanyahu dictate American policy — and was making a circular argument that the United States had to attack because its military buildup could prompt Iran to strike.
On Thursday, two days after the State of the Union address, Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner traveled to Geneva to negotiate one more time with Abbas Araghchi, the English-speaking, America-savvy foreign minister.
The Iranians presented the Americans with a seven-page plan with proposed levels of future nuclear enrichment, numbers that alarmed Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner.
The Americans still wanted the Iranians to commit to zero enrichment, and proposed giving them free nuclear fuel for a civil nuclear program, but the Iranians refused, a U.S. official said. After the talks ended, Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner told Mr. Trump they did not think a deal could be reached.
That day, Mr. Trump hosted four senators in the Oval Office for a meeting on his legislative agenda. The conversation eventually turned to Iran.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a vocal proponent of striking Iran, said the president was frustrated and did not think the Iranians were interested in making a deal.
“I think President Trump really felt like he needed to pursue diplomacy, that he wanted to pursue diplomacy, that the military option was the last option,” Mr. Graham said in an interview. He said he told Mr. Trump that he should not let the Iranians drag out the negotiations for too long.
“He was very comfortable with the idea that he tried,” Mr. Graham said.
Others believe that the diplomacy was just pantomime — always doomed to fail.
Barbara Leaf, a retired career diplomat who was an assistant secretary of state in the Biden administration overseeing Middle East policy, said it was obvious that Mr. Trump was heading inevitably toward military action, noting he deployed a second carrier strike group to the region in the midst of the talks.
“That was evidence of war planning,” she said. “You don’t need that for more leverage in diplomacy. I was never in any doubt he would go for a military strike.”
An Intelligence Coup
In fact, the United States and Israel were already discussing a potential strike on Wednesday, the day before the scheduled talks in Geneva. The White House moved it to Thursday night to give the Iranians one last chance to give up their nuclear enrichment ambitions. It was then pushed again until Friday, with the idea of hitting Tehran under the cover of darkness.
The timing was ultimately determined by a remarkable intelligence coup.
The C.I.A., which had been closely tracking Ayatollah Khamenei’s movements, learned that the supreme leader was planning to be at his residential compound in central Tehran on Saturday morning. Senior Iranian civilian and military leaders were also set to convene at the same location, at the same time.
The C.I.A. passed the intelligence to the Israelis, and leaders of both countries decided to kick off the war with a bold “decapitation” strike in daylight.
As he flew to Corpus Christi on Friday afternoon to deliver a speech about energy, Mr. Trump gave the official go order.
Once on the ground, the president hinted that diplomacy had hit a wall, telling reporters that he was “not happy with the negotiation.” For decades, he said, Iran had been “blowing the legs off our people, blowing the face off our people, the arms. They’ve been knocking our ships one by one and every month there’s something else.”
While there were ample clues that the Americans were preparing a possible assault, the Iranians believed a strike was unlikely to happen in daylight, according to four Iranian officials.
It was Saturday morning, the beginning of the workweek in Iran, when children were at school and people headed to work.
Those who attended the meeting of the Supreme National Security Council felt no urgency to meet in underground bunkers or other secret locations that might be unknown to American or Israeli spies.
Ayatollah Khamenei told a close circle that, in the event of a war, he preferred to stay in place and become a martyr rather than be judged by history as a leader who had gone into hiding, according to the officials.
He was in his office in another part of the compound as senior leaders gathered for their meeting. He asked to get a briefing when it concluded.
The missiles struck soon after it began.
Helene Cooper, Farnaz Fassihi, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, David E. Sanger and Michael Crowley contributed reporting.
Mark Mazzetti is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book about the C.I.A.
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