How Mossad "Recruited" Ahmadinejad and Lost Him: The Asset, the Extraction, and the Double-Agent Question
Amid the recent escalation in conflict with Iran, one story received less than the fair amount of spotlight that it deserved.
Last week, The New York Times published an extraordinary investigation.
Turns out, for years, Israel ran a covert operation to recruit Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president from 2005 to 2013, the man mind you, who restarted enrichment, denied the Holocaust, and called routinely for Israel’s destruction, as an intelligence asset, with the eventual aim of installing him as Iran’s leader after regime change.
The mechanics are confirmed in unusual detail.
Contact began at least as early as 2023, during an environmental conference in Guatemala.
The main channel ran through Orbán’s Hungary, where a senior government official asked the rector of Budapest’s Ludovika University to invite Ahmadinejad to a climate conference in early 2024 as cover for meetings with Israeli intelligence.
The rector, Gergely Deli, has confirmed this on the record, describing himself as a frontman.
Then-Mossad director David Barnea personally traveled to Budapest to meet Ahmadinejad, after which Mossad notified the CIA it had a channel to him. Israel paid him for housing and travel.
He returned to Budapest in June 2025, days before Israel’s twelve-day campaign, and twice shook his IRGC bodyguards for long, unexplained meetings.
His motive was power.
Disqualified from running for president three times, he had concluded he could never return under the existing system.
He told confidants he would be Iran’s Yeltsin, that under him Iran would recognize Israel and join the Abraham Accords, and that if he did not take the role, the Americans and Israelis would impose some exile who did not know the country.
Well, as we all know now, the plan failed.
It died on its first day.
On February 28, the opening day of the war, an Israeli strike hit his compound, targeting his bodyguards’ building and his armored car to free him from IRGC surveillance.
Mossad operatives in a black Peugeot drove him from the scene to a safe house inside Iran.
He was angry about the rushed extraction, disillusioned with the plan, and left the safe house under circumstances still unclear.
The wider scheme, which included arming Iranian Kurdish forces in northern Iraq to seize territory and move on Tehran, never materialized.
He vanished until July 6, when he appeared at Khamenei’s funeral in a heavy jacket in 90-degree heat, masked, silent, ringed by guards, while previous Presidents Rouhani and Khatami were not invited at all.
Four senior Iranian officials say he is now under house arrest by IRGC intelligence.
The story raises two questions that the coverage has not seriously asked.
Why was this exposed at all, and by whom?
And why is Ahmadinejad still alive?
Who Burned the Operation
