New Delhi: It was on 28 February this year that Israel and the US launched their attack on Iran with major targeted assassination strikes. That’s when the entire leadership at that point, especially Ayatollah Khamenei, was assassinated because Israel had hacked all of the traffic cameras in Tehran, and knew exactly when his convoy and his key officials were going to that particular building on Pasteur Street in the Iran capital.
The other bombing: That’s also the day when one more bombing took place; it looked like another targeted assassination. This was at a compound, or as it turned out, next to a compound at the end of a dead-end street in the Narmak area of northeastern Tehran. It was well-known in Tehran that this is where Ahmadinejad has lived for a long time.
Ahmadinejad also had a substantial security detail from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), apparently to keep an eye on him; an entire building had to be vacated for them.
News of Ahmadinejad’s assassination spread, including by the Iranian media like the reformist daily Shargh. That created a great deal of confusion. Why would the Israelis or Americans, the former more likely, assassinate him?
Ahmadinejad did not count for anything at that point. If anything, he was a disgruntled man, arguing with the current regime and generally being a thorn in their side. He had been sending out petitions on public grievances for a long time and creating a nuisance. He also wanted to contest elections again.
After all, he’s just about 70. He was, however, rejected three times by the Guardian Council of the Clergy which has the final say on who gets to contest because they were apparently not happy with his performance.
N for Mahmoud: There are good reasons to use the expression ‘infamous’. Ahmadinejad is the one who sort of turbocharged the Iranian nuclear programme, being really committed to—almost obsessed with—nuclear weapons.
He also talked about destroying Israel, and was a known Holocaust denier. Among the Iranians, other people have also taken ambivalent positions on the Holocaust. When I interviewed former Speaker of Iran’s Parliament Ali Larijani on Walk the Talk and asked him about the Holocaust, he also sort of went around it, not say that he agreed it had taken place, nor denying that it did.
Ahmadinejad had no such problem. And he cracked down violently on dissidents at a time inflation was rising and Iran was increasingly coming under sanctions. That’s why the Guardian Council rejected his renomination as a candidate in the presidential contest.
And that’s why he was a disgruntled man. If so, why would the Israelis kill him? That is what caused quite a bit of confusion at that point, including in the Western media.
Within days, however, word spread that he seemed to have escaped. The Iranian regime did not announce his death, but all this was sort of forgotten at that time, except for some speculation.
Now, a story has come out in the New York Times. And that’s why Ahmadinejad has made it to this episode of Cut the Clutter.
Down the rabbit hole: This is a story by Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, Farnaz Fassihi and Ronen Bergman. It says that Israeli intelligence Mossad tapped Ahmadinejad, that he was compromised maybe beginning sometime in 2023, but definitely by 2024. And their plan when they attacked the Narmak compound was not to kill him.
They attacked the building in which the IRGC guards were located. They also attacked the entrance of the compound so the guards would be killed. In that confusion, some people drove up in a black Peugeot and took Ahmadinejad away, possibly to a Mossad safehouse.
And then something even more mysterious happened. It looks like Ahmadinejad escaped, or, as the NYT story says, he got disillusioned by the way the Israelis had taken him away.
He may have thought it was too abrupt. Or maybe, and that’s guesswork, he figured soon enough that the Iranian regime was not falling, and escaped or he was let go. He went back to the Iranian side. Since then, he’s been under surveillance, probably some kind of house arrest in the custody of IRGC intelligence branch.
Blast man standing: And the first indications of doubt about the bombing of his house and the motives behind it came in a 10 March article in Atlantic magazine written by Graeme Wood. He said that it makes no sense that Israelis would try to kill Ahmadinejad, and that it looks like he was a candidate for the Israelis, for whenever they wanted regime change in Iran. In fact, Wood even quotes Sacha Baron Cohen from The Dictator: “All my friends have got nuclear weapons, even Ahmadinejad.”
“And he looks like a snitch on Miami Vice!” That’s because Ahmadinejad was a big promoter of nuclear weapons. Wood was also wondering why the Israelis want to take Ahmadinejad away at the same time? Why bother killing him? Because he was a nobody right now.
Do Israelis do these things just because they carry old grudges? In the article, Wood writes, and quite presciently, that the circumstances of his survival may prove significant as the war drags on. Published on 10 March, it must have been written a few days earlier. So, Graham Wood is writing this within a few days of the bombing, the news of Ahmadinejad’s death, and then his supposed escape.
He also analyses Ahmadinejad in terms of his importance and why the Iranian regime struggles to deal with him. Because, one, he’s too much of an insider. He knows too much about them. Also, at some point of time, he had collected, he says, IOUs with the Supreme Leader as well. Wood, therefore, takes us back to something a former defence minister of Iran, Hossein Dehghan, said in 2018. He had compared Ahmedinejad, and I’m quoting, “to the door of the mosque which can’t be burned or thrown away”. That means he’s just an extra door. But you can’t burn it or throw it away. You have to endure with him. That is the man who’s hit the headlines now.
It’s just after the January protests in Iran, when the regime was beginning to worry about dissidents and the challenge to its authority, that they increased Ahmadinejad’s security detail, meaning they increased his surveillance. That is when they took an additional building for the IRGC personnel, which was bombed on February 28.
Also read Who is Ahmadinejad & why NYT report on US-Israel ‘Iran regime change plan’ has triggered outrage
Climate Game: The lead reporter and writer on the New York Times article is Mark Mazzetti, one of the top reporters on intelligence in Washington. He wrote the famous book, The Way of the Knife, the story of how the CIA in Afghanistan morphed into a killing machine from an intelligence organisation post 9-11. His byline gives this story a great deal of credibility.
This story tells us that in 2023, it looks like there was an environmental conference in Guatemala, a country which has probably the closest relations with Israel in all of Latin America. In 2023, Ahmadinejad wanted to go to an environmental conference.
It looks like he went to the airport, but the Iranian administration or airport security would not let him go because they were not giving him a boarding pass. That’s when he sat on protest there, taking his pictures with other passengers, posting them on social media and embarrassing the regime.
Finally, they let him go. It looks like that is when he made active contact with Mossad, or to put it more correctly, when Mossad made its first active contact with him.
The scene shifts to 2024. Early that year, Professor Gergely Deli, who heads the Ludovika University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary, was approached by a top Hungarian official on holding a climate change conference. He should hold a conference on climate change, the official said, and that he must invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to it. The NYT exposé also says it was indicated that the idea was for Ahmadinejad to meet some Israeli officials there.
Professor Deli, who later describes himself as a frontman or go-between, says, I thought two sides are fighting each other; they want to talk to each other, and you can bring them together.
He said: “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.” Now, this talk happened early 2024, then a second visit took place in 2024 and the third visit took place barely days before Israel launched the June 2025 attacks on Iran.
In the course of these visits, he met David Barnea, who was then the Mossad chief. In fact, he was Mossad chief for five years and finished his tenure just about a month back. So he flew to Budapest and Hungary and met Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Reluctant recruit? The story is that the Israelis were grooming him, cultivating him, etc. in the hope that when this regime collapses or when they make this regime collapse maybe through assassinations, sanctions or whatever, they will have somebody from inside available to take over, somebody with a great following, particularly among the working classes in Iran.
It looks like that did not work and the failure of that operation, if anything, became evident on 28 February or after it, when obviously Mossad agents in that Black Peugeot took Ahmadinejad away but he did not stay with them. Why he did not stay with them? How did he escape? Did he jump a wall? Did the Mossad agents just let him go? Or was the idea to let him escape? We don’t know, at least not yet.
Now, what other evidence is there that there was some Israeli secret operation with a key role for Ahmadinejad? We still don’t know where Ahmadinejad belongs. I will also not rule out the possibility that he was actually a double agent for the Iranian side, for his own country, pretending to be a Mossad agent, but I don’t know for sure.
Nobody knows anything because he is around. He is around and he has been seen. I will bring you to that. He has been seen. He has not been hidden or sent to any Gulag, not until 10 days ago. That was the funeral of Ayatollah Khamenei, because he was seen there.
NYT quotes Tamir Hayman, former Israeli Defence Forces Intelligence Chief. In May this year, in a public broadcast service (PBS) show called Firing Line, Hayman said that regime change in Iran was going to be a sequel of special operations; very, very unique, and Ahmadinejad was part of that anticipated or planned sequence.
Now, once again a question comes up that if Ahmadinejad was supposed to be such a key part of that operation, why were the Israelis talking about it in May when the operation apparently had failed? And why has all this stuff leaked about him? Because if he was actually compromised, then he is toast because then the IRGC will not let him survive. He will not be treated well. At the same time, this may be some other complicated game that we don’t know.
As I said earlier, this will leave us with more questions than answers, because the story as such is above doubt but the conclusions leave themselves open to a lot of questions. Why would Ahmadinejad sell out to the Israelis? As his former colleagues, also his former senior advisor, Abdul Reza Dabari, has been quoted as saying, “He won’t do it for money.”
If he would do it, it would be for power. He left power too young, just in his late fifties in 2013 when his second term ended. He would still have ambitions, thwarted by the clergy and Supreme Leader who did not let him contest again. He started doing other things to draw attention. In 2017, when Trump was in his first term, he wrote letters to Trump and Mohammed bin Salman. At that point, Trump praised him for it, raising suspicion in Iran. But the Iranians had nothing on him then.
What happened in 2024 in Hungary, in Budapest and early 2025 was more dramatic, because by this time a lot of the international media and some Iranian media as well had noted that Ahmadinejad was changing his image. He was wearing sharp suits instead of his trademark khaki duffle coats. Even his beard was now well-kept. And he had begun to speak a lot of English. He was learning English. In fact, on Ahmadinejad’s last visit to Budapest at Ludovika University, which had now become frequently visited university, he delivered a speech in English. Even the IRGC detail accompanying him noted that.
He dispensed with his usual Quranic verses and invocations. And also, he gave a gift to the university president, Professor Deli, which was The Book of Kings by Ferdowsi, who’s a well-known Persian poet. Also on that trip, it looks like he disappeared a couple of times. The IRGC detail accompanying him reported that. He just said that he had gone out to meet some professor.
All of this creates many questions. If all these suspicions existed, how was he not put away? How was he not arrested? Or not interrogated by the Iranians? And then finally, in spite of all that, how come he was seen at Khamenei’s funeral?
Also read: Khamenei funeral shows religion still shapes power in West Asia
Cloak and dagger: At Khamenei’s funeral, he was wearing a heavy jacket. It was hot weather, 32 or 33 degrees centigrade in Tehran that day, and very crowded. But he was wearing a heavy jacket. Nobody knows why. He also had a mask, which had slipped down to his chin, obviously, because somebody wanted the world to see that he was alive and he was there.
And he was either in the Iranian regime’s custody or part of the Iranian regime or staying loyal to it. So we don’t know who was using him to play games with who.
Now, look at this tweet from Professor Mohammad Marandi, one of the most prominent and most articulate spokesmen of the Iranian regime. He says that this is probably somebody’s way of threatening and alerting all their agents and all their spies: look, if you don’t cooperate fully with us, we will out you and you will face the consequences.
My analysis would be that he’s still keeping up the ambiguity. He’s not condemning Ahmadinejad. He’s not saying we’ve got him now, or that we made sure the Mossad operation failed. Nor has he said, see, Ahmadinejad is so loyal to us. He’s not saying any of that.
I would say this tweet is quite significant because this is directed to the outside world, to people like us, who analyse what is coming out of Iran. At the same time, it is directed at an internal audience as well and also Israeli agents and spies, more of whom probably are found in Iran than in any other country.
The second significant thing is that two other living former presidents, that is Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Khatami were not present at the funeral. Why were they not present while Ahmadinejad, who, if all the tales are correct, should be treated as a traitor, was? So is it the Iranian regime flaunting him to tell the Israelis and Americans that we have got your man. You thought that you got him compromised and you were going to topple us using him but now we have got him: a statement of defiance.
This can also lead to two conclusions. One is just to tell the Israelis, also the Americans but mostly the Israelis, look, we have got your man. You got this man compromised, he had become your man but now we have got him, we will treat him as we wish.
The second argument which may come up because the two other former living presidents were not present at the funeral, that is Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Khatami, is that Iranian regime is saying, he was always our man, so much so that he is the only former president we have invited to this funeral.
We don’t know what the answers are. That’s the reason I said this is a fascinating story but one that leaves us with more questions than answers.