In public, Iran’s surviving leaders have defiantly refused to negotiate with President Trump to end the American and Israeli assault on their country. But a day after the attacks began, operatives from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence reached out indirectly to the C.I.A. with an offer to discuss terms for ending the conflict, according to officials briefed on the outreach.
U.S. officials are skeptical — at least in the short term — that either the Trump administration or Iran is really ready for an offramp, the officials briefed on the outreach said.
Still, the offer, which was made through another country’s spy agency, raises critical questions about whether any Iranian officials could put into place a cease-fire agreement with the Tehran government in chaos as its leaders are methodically picked off by Israeli strikes.
The offer was described on the condition of anonymity to The New York Times by Middle Eastern officials and officials from a Western country.
White House and Iranian officials did not respond to requests for comment. The C.I.A. declined to comment.
Israeli officials, who want a weekslong campaign to inflict maximum damage on Iran’s military capabilities, and perhaps cause Iran’s government to collapse, have urged the United States to ignore the approach. For now, the offer is not considered serious in Washington.
And after saying for days that he was open to discussing a deal with Iran, Mr. Trump posted on social media on Tuesday morning that it was now “too late” for talks.
Speaking with reporters later in the day, Mr. Trump lamented that the Iranian officials the United States knew and had considered as potential leaders were being killed.
“Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” Mr. Trump said. “Pretty soon we are not going to know anybody.”
The Iranian outreach, and the chaos in Iran’s leadership ranks as the assault continues, highlights the key issue Mr. Trump faces as he decides what sort of Iranian government he might hope to shape, or at least settle for. He already seems to have stopped promoting his initial scenario of a popular uprising against the government yielding a new set of leaders and instead seems to view the best outcome as more pragmatic figures emerging atop the existing political structure.
At a minimum, Trump officials will expect any agreement to stop the bombing to include a pledge from Tehran to abandon or drastically curtail its ballistic missile and nuclear programs, and its support for foreign proxy groups like Hezbollah. In return, Mr. Trump has suggested that he would allow Iran’s surviving leaders to maintain their economic and political power.
Mr. Trump suggested again on Tuesday that his model would be Venezuela after the U.S. capture in January of the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. Under threat of additional force, Mr. Trump has compelled Mr. Maduro’s successor to grant the United States control over Venezuela’s oil exports while making few demands for political reform.
“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect scenario,” Mr. Trump said in a Sunday interview with The New York Times. “Leaders can be picked.”
But that vision could be a mirage.
First, it is not clear that Iran is actually open to a deal, despite the recent outreach from its intelligence arm. Some Iranian leaders may believe they can inflict enough physical, economic and political pain on the United States and Israel to force an end to their assault. Mr. Trump already faces growing political pressure from Republican allies unhappy about the operation.
Mr. Trump’s shifting statements on Iranian leadership might reflect tension with Israel about the war’s goals, said Steven A. Cook, a Middle East expert with the Council on Foreign Relations.
Israel, Mr. Cook said in a briefing on Monday for reporters, does not want to see Mr. Trump engineer a “Venezuela-like solution to change in Iran,” possibly with a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The elite military force controls much of Iran’s economy. Some analysts and U.S. officials believe its ranks might include pragmatists less invested in their regime’s fundamentalist principles than in preserving their power and wealth.
On Tuesday, Israel struck a compound where senior Iranian clerics were meeting to choose a successor to their supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an airstrike on Saturday.
Ahead of the strikes on Iran, the C.I.A. produced an intelligence assessment examining various scenarios of what sort of Iranian leadership might emerge after a U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran. People briefed on the various scenarios produced by the agency note that none had a high degree of confidence — there were simply too many unknown variables to predict how it would play out.
But policymakers who have reviewed the intelligence have made their own conclusions about the most likely scenarios. Some have been dismissive of the idea that the Iranian opposition would find a way to seize power. They have been more focused on the prospect that a group of Islamic Revolutionary Guard members might emerge as the most influential voice in the government.
The question for the Trump administration now is whether any of those officials will emerge alive from the repeated attacks on the government.
Mr. Trump has made several contradictory statements about his war aims, so it is possible that he will change his mind after ruling out negotiations.
But even if he renews his search for an Iranian leader, as the government weakens, it could be harder to find a person with enough influence to compel the country to abide by a deal with the United States.
Many analysts warn that Iran’s government could soon lose control over remote regions dominated by ethnic minorities like the Kurds or collapse entirely, leading to chaos and violence reminiscent of the civil wars in Syria and Libya.
Iranians could overthrow their weakened government. Experts say that the regime is deeply unpopular and has retained power only through the brutal repression of popular uprisings. Mr. Trump’s talk of regime change came after a vicious crackdown in January.
In a video announcing the assault early Saturday, Mr. Trump encouraged Iranians to rise up, saying that “the hour of your freedom is at hand” and that when the attack was finished, “take over your government, it will be yours to take.”
Since then, Mr. Trump has adopted a more passive tone. “They’ll have that opportunity, but honestly that’s going to be up to them,” he told The Times. “They’re going to have to make that decision.”
But there is no guarantee that Mr. Trump would welcome the outcome of a popular revolution, analysts warn.
“There’s a low likelihood that a successor state would be a liberal democracy friendly to the United States — given that it was forged in a war with the United States,” said Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a group generally opposed to U.S. foreign interventions.
Mr. Trump acknowledged that risk on Tuesday.
“The worst case would be we do this, and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person, right?” he said. “We’d like to see somebody in there that’s going to bring it back for the people.”
Asked about the potential for reinstalling Reza Pahlavi, the eldest son of Iran’s former shah, or king, who was overthrown in 1979, Mr. Trump seemed unenthusiastic. Mr. Pahlavi “looks like a very nice person,” he said, but indicated that he would prefer “somebody that’s there that’s currently popular, if there’s such a person.”
Mr. Pahlavi has not lived in Iran since the 1970s.
Some Iranians chanted his name during the recent protests, but it is unclear how wide his popular support might be.
Mr. Pahlavi is, however, a living reminder of a closer relationship between America and Iran. His father, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, was backed by the U.S. in the 1950s coup that secured his rule for decades. He sold oil to and bought weapons from the United States, was celebrated at the Nixon and Carter White Houses, and had good relations with Israel.
The Islamic revolutionaries who overthrew him were led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who installed a religious government fervently hostile to the United States and Israel and dedicated to spreading its fundamentalist vision of Shia Islam across the Middle East.
Mr. Trump and his top advisers say it is impossible to do business with Iran’s current leaders given their religiously based radicalism and avowed hatred of the West. They argue that Iran’s refusal to accept Mr. Trump’s demands during last month’s nuclear negotiations, at what amounted to gunpoint, demonstrated its leaders’ fanaticism.
On Monday, Mr. Trump called Iran’s leaders “radical lunatics,” adding: “They’re sick people. They’re mentally ill. Sick people. They are angry. They are crazy. They are sick.”
If Iran’s government survives, the question may be whether Mr. Trump can find a “more moderate” interlocutor, as he put it on Tuesday. That would mean someone senior enough in the current government to command authority, but not too invested in its revolutionary ideology.
Past American presidents have negotiated with relative moderates within Iran’s political system who appeared open to closer relations with the West. President Barack Obama struck a 2015 deal with a reformist Iranian president to limit the country’s nuclear program in return for economic sanctions relief. (Mr. Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018.)
Some officials in the Obama administration hoped the deal might empower moderates and open Iran to the West over time. But critics, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, noted that Iran’s political system was controlled by its clerics and argued that the idea of a moderate there was an illusion.
“I have been involved in the search for the elusive Iranian moderate for 30 years,” Robert Gates, then the U.S. defense secretary, joked in 2008.
Farnaz Fassihi in New York contributed reporting.
Michael Crowley covers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times. He has reported from nearly three dozen countries and often travels with the secretary of state.
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