Former Iranian president Ahmadinejad 'is put under house arrest by regime over secret dealings with Israel in plan to install him as new leader'

By IMOGEN GARFINKEL - SENIOR FOREIGN NEWS REPORTER Published: 16:32, 13 July 2026 | Updated: 16:55, 13 July 2026 Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been put under house arrest by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps after intelligence authorities uncovered his secret dealings with Israel, The New York Times has claimed. For years, Israel conducted a covert operation aimed at grooming Ahmadinejad as an intelligence asset who, when the time came, could be installed as Iran's new leader, American and Iranian sources told the newspaper. Israel even secretly transferred money to Ahmadinejad for housing and travel, while operatives met him abroad on several occasions. The discovery of the secret relationship is shocking given that Ahmadinejad was known for accelerating Tehran's nuclear programme, calling regularly for the destruction of Israel and denying the Holocaust.  The clandestine operation culminated in February this year, during the early days of the US-Israeli war on Iran, with an audacious attempt to relocate the former leader. The ambition was to set in motion the toppling of the current regime, and to install Ahmadinejad as leader, who had been living under strict surveillance in Tehran. On February 28, Ahmadinejad's compound was struck by an Israeli airstrike aiming towards the building of his bodyguards and his armoured vehicle. Iranian former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks during an exclusive interview on the upcoming presidential elections in Tehran, Iran on May 6, 2021 Footage showing the complete destruction inside the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's compound following a deadly US-Israel airstrike on February 28  Following the strike, a black Peugeot car arrived, picked up Ahmadinejad, and took him away at high speed from the dramatic scene, according to four senior Iranian officials. The vehicle was driven by agents of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, who whisked Ahmadinejad away to a secret safe house in Iran, American and Iranian officials said. But the former Iranian president was discontented with the chaotic rescue operation, and apparently appeared disillusioned about Mossad's plan to return him to power. Ahmadinejad subsequently left the safe house under circumstances that are still unclear, and was not seen in public until last Monday when he made a quick appearance at the funeral for the slain supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. While his current status is unknown, four senior Iranian officials claimed that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) intelligence wing had taken Ahmadinejad into custody and put him under house arrest. The development came after the regime learned about the extent of his interactions with Israel. Tel Aviv is yet to comment publicly about its mission to install Ahmadinejad, which is part of a broader effort to bring down the government in Tehran. A second element involved training Iranian Kurdish opposition forces located in northern Iraq, arming them with weapons, and ordering them to cross into western Iran, where they would hold territory and eventually move toward the capital Tehran. This effort never came to fruition. The regime-change mission involved a 'sequence of special operations, very, very unique, that was supposed to happen,' Tamir Hayman, a former head of intelligence for the Israeli Defence Forces, told the PBS talk show 'Firing Line' in May. 'And Ahmadinejad was part of that sequence.' Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, June 2, 2024 The US-Israel airstrike on February 28 obliterated the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's headquarters According to the report, one of the operation's stages took place in 2024, when the rector of a university in Budapest received a strange request from a senior Hungarian government official. The official told the rector, Professor Gergely Deli, that Ludovika University of Public Service should host a climate change conference and invite an unlikely guest: Ahmadinejad, the widely scorned former president of Iran.  The official revealed to Deli that the conference would in fact only serve as a guise, enabling Ahmadinejad to hold covert talks in Budapest with intelligence operatives from Israel. While Deli was worried the invitation would negatively impact his own reputation and that of the university, he agreed anyway, telling the publication: 'You have two enemies, and if these enemies want to talk with each other, then it’s best to do what you can to make them talk.'   Ahmadinejad's 2024 trip to the university in Budapest and a second one the following year were part of a yearslong Israeli initiative to install him as Iran's new leader. He was such a priority for Israel that the country’s then-Mossad chief, David Barnea, even flew to the Hungarian capital in 2024 to talk with Ahmadinejad personally, former American officials claimed. Soon afterward, they said, Mossad contacted the CIA to confirm that it had been in discussions with Ahmadinejad. During his time as president of Iran between 2005 and 2013, Ahmadinejad was the country's most prominent hardline politician. He regularly spoke about destroying Israel, and under his authority Tehran restarted a programme to enrich uranium, raising concern that it was pursuing a clandestine nuclear weapons strategy.  Ahmadinejad also ordered brutal crackdowns on a nationwide demonstration contesting his re-election in 2009, and, under his rule, the judiciary ordered mass executions of dissidents and imprisoned opponents and rivals.  But the politician changed in the years following his presidency. Not only did he groom his messy beard, appear to get Botox and began learning English, he also tempered his views and dialled back his anti-Israel rhetoric. From his office in the capital, he organised hourlong public meetings every morning to hear the grievances of ordinary citizens.  Sometimes, he wrote letters addressed to government ministries recommending petitioners for loans. His relationship with the Iranian government was fraught: senior leaders marginalised him and restricted his movements, but they permitted him a seat alongside other senior officials on a high-level council that advises the supreme leader. Some in Tehran saw the cynical political motivation behind Ahmadinejad’s transformation, which they perceived as an attempt to distance himself from ruling officials and appeal to working-class Iranians. 'Ahmadinejad would not do this for money. He has money; he has a wide economic network. He would do it for power. He wants to be at the helm of power,' Abdolreza Davari, a former close associate and senior adviser of Ahmadinejad, told the New York Times. The two men had a falling-out many years ago.  The former president communicated with a handful of his closest associates and confidants about his plans to become the country's future leader with the aid of foreign powers, according to an associate of his close circle. Ahmadinejad had apparently become disillusioned with the Islamic Republic after he was disqualified to run for president three times, eventually concluding that he could not rise to power as long as the current system remained unchanged. One associate described how Ahmadinejad was concerned that, in the event of a war and regime change, the US and Israel would choose an opposition figure from outside Iran to take power, who didn't know the country. Such a move would create instability, he thought. He pitched himself to those around him as a man who could play the role of a reformer, reminiscent of the former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, and said that if he came to power, Tehran would recognise Israel and normalise relations as part of President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords, the associate claimed. During this period, Mossad agents were closely monitoring the escalating rift between Ahmadinejad and the Iranian regime, according to two Israeli defence officials. They were especially interested with Ahmadinejad’s growing resentment of Ayatollah Khamenei and other senior politicians who had disqualified Ahmadinejad from running for president again. Eventually, Ahmadinejad’s behaviour began to arouse suspicion within the intelligence branch of IRGC, responsible for safeguarding the Islamic regime against foreign interference. That suspicion multiplied, according to two members of the Guards and an intelligence official familiar with the case, after Ahmadinejad began writing public letters in 2017 to Trump and later to Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.  The US president lavished praise on both figures. It was only after Israel's strike this year that freed Ahmadinejad from surveillance by the Guards that Iran’s intelligence agencies began investigating his ties to Israel. While it is not known when Israeli operatives first tried to recruit Ahmadinejad, Iranian officials claimed there was at least some contact during a 2023 trip that the former president took to Guatemala to attend a conference about the environment.  The invitation was issued from the government of Guatemala, a country that has a closer diplomatic relationship to Israel than most in Latin America. Ahmadinejad almost did not make the trip, however, as he was stopped at the airport in Tehran by security forces who refused to give him a boarding pass and allow him to exit the country. He subsequently staged an hourslong sit-in at the airport, making the situation into an opportunity for publicity as he took photographs with ordinary Iranian travellers, airport and airline crew and posted updates on his social media. Eventually, Iranian officials allowed Ahmadinejad to leave the country and attend the conference. 'Some people told me not to travel to Guatemala; I told them my brother the minister of environment invited me,' Ahmadinejad said in one of the videos of the trip.  'This is a very important country in Latin America.' In 2024, he made his first trip to Hungary for the Ludovika University conference where he met with Barnea, who led Mossad for five years, until last month. Hungary, which at the time was led by the hard-Right prime minister Viktor Orban, had arguably closer ties to Israel than any other European nation. During his premiership, Orban and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made trips to each other’s countries. In April 2025, Netanyahu gave a speech of his own at Ludovika University, which awarded him with a public service prize. Just days before Israel launched a war with Iran in June that year, Ahmadinejad returned to Budapest in a visit that was a front for him to meet with Israeli intelligence operatives.  His Iranian bodyguards from the Guards’ Ansar unit claimed that on at least two occasions, Ahmadinejad had managed to escape his security detail and disappear for elongated meetings during the June 2025 trip. In a report about the trip, the bodyguards claimed that they had confronted Ahmadinejad about his strange disappearances, and that he insisted he had been meeting with university professors. At the conference, the former president delivered a lecture in English, shocking attendees by abandoning the signature Quranic verse he used to recite at the beginning of every public address. He referenced 'shared humanity' and a 'changing world order,' according to videos from the speech posted on his social media page. He presented Deli, the university rector, with a copy of the Book of Kings, written by the ancient Iranian poet Ferdowsi, while Deli gave Ahmadinejad an emblem of the university. In an interview last month, Deli admitted that, in extending an invitation to Ahmadinejad, he had played the role of a 'strohmann' - a German word meaning 'frontman' or 'puppet'. The former president has not been seen in public since last February until last week, when on Monday he made a brief appearance as part of Khamenei’s grand funeral procession. Wearing a surgical mask and a heavy jacket in the sweltering heat, Ahmadinejad stood with his head down, silent, flanked on both sides by security guards.