Iran's former hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of all people?
The New York Times is out with a bombshell report on Monday which alleges that Israel's Mossad has for years sought to cultivate him as an Israeli intelligence asset.
The apparent multi-year effort to recruit and re-install Ahmadinejad as leader of Iran has come to nothing, at a moment his status and fate remains unclear amid the fog of war, and after a prior US-Israeli strike on his house during the opening salvos of Operation Epic Fury resulted in him being whisked away from his Tehran neighborhood by his bodyguards.
The story, which cites US officials who are for whatever reason choosing this moment to 'leak' the insider info, begins in the following:
In early 2024, the rector of a university in Budapest received a startling request from a top Hungarian government official.
The official told the rector, Professor Gergely Deli, that Ludovika University of Public Service should hold a climate change conference and extend an invitation to an unlikely guest: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the widely reviled former president of Iran.
Even more shocking was the reason. The official told Mr. Deli that the conference was merely a front for Mr. Ahmadinejad to have secret discussions in Budapest with intelligence operatives from Israel, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s avowed enemy.
Back in early March, there were even some (premature) headlines of his death, saying he was 'assassinated' at a moment he was under house arrest at his residence. Supposedly this is what 'freed' him, and since then his whereabouts are unknown.
However, regional reports say he did attend the funeral of slain supreme leader Ali Khamenei earlier this month, and was briefly spotted surrounded by guards while wearing a mask and heavy coat.
The Mossad plot goes all the way back to 2022, NYT detailed based on the sources, and the suggestion is that he played along - seeing some kind of foreign intervention as his path back to leadership over the country. His house arrest sprung from the Iranian government being suspicious of contacts with the Israeli government.
He received Israeli financial support to cover travel and accommodation expenses while going to meet with Israeli operatives in Europe - which Israel prioritized to such an extent that even then-Mossad Director David Barnea personally met Ahmadinejad in the Hungarian capital in 2024. The NYT says that the CIA was eventually read in to the high-risk plan.
But upon the start of Operation Epic Fury and the bombing of his home, Ahmadinejad reportedly soured on the plan - becoming distrustful of the Israelis - and saw it as unrealistic.
From Mossad's point of view, he could emerge as a controllable puppet and new 'face' of the Islamic Republic regime, despite is prior well-documented rhetoric calling for the destruction of Israel and advancement of Iran's nuclear program.
The more believable aspect to this whole alleged saga is that Ahmadinejad was top of the list of West-Israel 'favored' candidates to lead Iran after he personally praised President Trump in a 2019 interview, and argued for a rapprochement between Tehran and Washington.
"Mr Trump is a man of action," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying. "He is a businessman and therefore he is capable of calculating cost-benefits and making a decision. We say to him, let’s calculate the long-term cost-benefit of our two nations and not be shortsighted."
Apparently some of the aspects which made him a candidate, or potential future US-Israeli puppet in Tehran (Delcy Rodriguez-style), was that he had been barred three times from running for president by Iran's unelected 12-member Guardian Council (in 2017, 2021, and 2024). Following his 2017 disqualification, he apparently flipped, becoming a highly vocal critic of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
This isn't the first time the NY Times has floated this story, but the publication is now seeking to fill in more details, apparently.
Amid the ongoing fog of war and heavy propaganda coming from all sides, this could simply by mythology - Hollywood script style - in order to continue sowing fragmentation, distrust, and discord among Iranian ranks. It wouldn't be the first time such a tall tale was spun for such purposes, and the whole thing ultimately will remain unverifiable, for likely at least years to come.