Times report says Israel secretly cultivated Ahmadinejad as asset

A New York Times report said Israel spent years trying to cultivate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an intelligence asset and possible leader in a post-regime-change Iran, an effort that allegedly reached secret meetings in Budapest and a hurried attempt to move him in Tehran after an Israeli strike. If true, the operation would have placed one of Iran’s most hardline former presidents at the center of an extraordinary covert succession gamble.

Ahmadinejad left the Iranian presidency in 2013 and was blocked from contesting the country’s presidential election three times after leaving office. He was long known for anti-Israel rhetoric and Holocaust denial, which made the alleged Israeli courtship especially striking: the same figure presented publicly as an ideological adversary was, in this account, treated as a possible instrument for shaping Iran’s future.

The report said former Mossad chief David Barnea met Ahmadinejad in Budapest in 2024 and 2025, with one of those meetings said to have taken place in June 2025, days before the 12-day Israel-Iran war began. Later coverage said the broader effort came to a head during the opening days of the 2026 Israel-U.S. campaign against Iran, when operatives allegedly tried to move Ahmadinejad from his Tehran residence to a secure location after an Israeli strike.

The alleged operation also went beyond meetings. Israeli intelligence is said to have helped cover some of Ahmadinejad’s housing and travel expenses, and Mossad later informed the CIA that it had established contact with him. Those details, if accurate, point to a level of intelligence targeting that goes beyond surveillance or disruption and into the realm of political engineering, with Israeli planners apparently probing whether an isolated former insider could be used as a lever against Tehran’s ruling system.

Ahmadinejad’s office denied the allegations and called them false, or “Hollywood claims.” Some reports also said Iranian authorities placed him under house arrest after uncovering his contacts with Israel. Even as the claims remain explosive, they underscore how deeply Israeli intelligence appears to have assessed Iran’s internal divisions, and how much value it may have seen in a recognizable hardliner who once sat at the center of the Islamic Republic’s power structure.