US, Israel reportedly saw Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the unlikely face of post-Khamenei Iran

The United States and Israel had reportedly considered installing former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran’s new leader after the killing of supreme leader Ali Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials at the start of the war, according to the New York Times.

The idea of Ahmadinejad leading a US and Israeli-backed administration was widely seen as an extraordinary and controversial choice. During his presidency from 2005 to 2013, Ahmadinejad was notorious for his inflammatory rhetoric. He denied the Holocaust, claimed there were no gay people in Iran and repeatedly spoke of removing Israel from the map. He also strongly defended Iran’s nuclear programme, criticised the United States and oversaw the suppression of internal dissent. For many observers, the idea that Washington and Tel Aviv would support a politician with such a record appeared deeply contradictory. Even some aides within President Donald Trump’s circle were reportedly sceptical.

Yet Ahmadinejad’s relationship with Iran’s ruling establishment had changed dramatically after he left office. Over the years, he increasingly criticised the clerical leadership, accusing senior officials of corruption and openly clashing with Khamenei and other powerful figures. Iran’s Guardian Council barred him from running for president in 2017, 2021 and 2024. Despite his political isolation, he remained popular among sections of the Iranian public and retained extensive knowledge of the state’s internal workings. Former defence minister Hossein Dehghan reportedly warned that arresting Ahmadinejad could destabilise the regime itself.

At the same time, Ahmadinejad appeared to signal greater openness towards the West. In a 2019 interview, he described Trump as a pragmatic businessman capable of weighing long-term costs and benefits, and he called for better relations between Tehran and Washington. Some of his associates were publicly accused of links to British and Israeli intelligence agencies. His foreign trips also attracted attention, including visits to Guatemala in 2023 and Hungary in 2024 and 2025. During one visit to Budapest, he spoke at a university linked to then prime minister Viktor Orbán, a close ally of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

According to the report, US officials believed Ahmadinejad might be capable of managing Iran’s unstable political environment in the event of regime collapse. The strategy reportedly resembled earlier US efforts in Venezuela, where Washington backed an alternative leadership against Nicolás Maduro.

The broader operation was reportedly designed in several stages and largely coordinated by Israeli intelligence. Israeli defence officials said the plan began with extensive US and Israeli air strikes and the targeted killing of Iran’s senior leadership. These attacks were expected to coincide with a Kurdish uprising against the Iranian military. Israel also planned large-scale influence operations aimed at exploiting political instability inside the country. Israeli planners believed that sustained military pressure and damage to critical infrastructure, including electricity networks, would eventually trigger the collapse of the Iranian government. In that scenario, an alternative administration led by Ahmadinejad would take power. Reports claimed that Ahmadinejad himself had been consulted during the planning process.

A key part of the plan involved freeing Ahmadinejad from what officials described as effective house arrest. Following protests in January, Iranian authorities reportedly confiscated his phones and stationed around 50 members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps near his residence in Tehran’s Narmak district.

On February 28, the first day of the war, the Israeli Air Force carried out a targeted strike against the security outpost near Ahmadinejad’s residence. According to reports, the objective was to eliminate the guards without harming the former president himself.

The strike destroyed the security building and killed the guards. According to Al Jazeera, two children at a nearby school were also killed. Ahmadinejad’s home itself was not seriously damaged. Amid the confusion following the attack, Ahmadinejad and his family reportedly escaped and went into hiding. Iranian state media initially claimed he had died in the strike, fuelling speculation within the regime that he had been removed to lead a foreign-backed coup.

However, the plan quickly began to unravel. Although Ahmadinejad survived, reports suggested the experience left him injured and increasingly distrustful of the broader regime-change effort. Since the attack, he has largely disappeared from public view. His whereabouts and condition reportedly remain unclear to both Iranian authorities and foreign officials involved in the operation. His only public communication has been a brief message mourning Khamenei, apparently intended to show he was still alive and to avoid accusations of collaborating with foreign powers.

In the end, the wider US-Israeli strategy appears to have significantly underestimated the resilience of Iran’s political system and the difficulty of carrying out such a complex operation. The expected Kurdish mobilisation did not take place and the Iranian government did not collapse despite the initial military pressure. While the US-Israeli attacks caused considerable military damage, the political effort to position Ahmadinejad as a replacement leader ultimately failed.