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Opinion | War on Iran
Why the New York Times story on Mossad recruiting Ahmadinejad doesn't add up
Marco Carnelos
Published date: 30 July 2026 09:19 BST<br>Last update: 1 day 23 hours ago
A toxic figure reviled across the West, the former Iranian president is among the least plausible candidates for an Israeli regime-change plot
Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks in Tehran on 2 June 2024 (Atta Kenare/AFP)
The New York Times published an extraordinary investigation this month, asserting that Israel’s Mossad spent years cultivating former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an intelligence asset, with the aim of installing him as leader of a post-Islamic-Republic Iran.
The report, authored by a team of veteran investigative journalists, describes secret meetings in Budapest, encounters with then-Mossad chief David Barnea, covert payments, and a dramatic wartime extraction of Ahmadinejad from his bombed Tehran compound on 28 February.
From this moment, the story becomes confused. Ahmadinejad was allegedly led to a Mossad safe house inside Iran, but swiftly lost his trust in the Israelis and left. Whether he escaped or was allowed to exit remains unclear; either way, the tale tarnishes Mossad’s image, to say the least.
Yet no matter how gripping the story might sound, upon closer examination, it is riddled with implausibilities, and deserving of far more scrutiny than the breathless coverage it has generated.
Those who know Iran’s complex power structure know perfectly well that the president is not the top decision maker. The supreme leader and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) hold all the major cards, possessing the country’s most delicate secrets and deep knowledge of its operations abroad.
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If Israel’s real intention was to recruit a major Iranian asset, its efforts should have been directed towards an aide to the supreme leader, a member of the Supreme National Security Council, or a top IRGC official.
The most immediately suspicious element of the story is its account of how the “recruitment” allegedly began: a Hungarian government official reportedly asked the rector of a Budapest university to invite Ahmadinejad to a climate change conference as cover for a meeting with Israeli intelligence operatives.
Former Israeli intelligence professionals have themselves publicly balked at this description. Brigadier General (res) Hanan Geffen, a former commander of the Israeli army’s elite Unit 8200, called the sequence of events into question; for a sitting Mossad chief to personally travel to meet a target would be an extraordinary breach of standard operational practice, he noted.
Career intelligence officers do not typically expose their director to a meeting with an unproven, high-risk target. That is precisely the kind of exposure agencies spend decades training to avoid.
Curiously thin veil
A climate conference as cover for a meeting with a globally recognised former head of state, still trailed by intelligence services and journalists worldwide, is also a curiously thin veil for an operation supposedly running since 2024.
Furthermore, sharing part of this operation with another government would be highly risky - no matter how friendly the Orban government was with Israel. Such a move would only have increased the potential for security breaches in an extremely delicate operation.
Even setting aside tradecraft objections, the very choice of Ahmadinejad as a candidate to lead Iran after a regime-change operation is bizarre. The former Iranian president spent eight years loudly denying the Holocaust, calling for Israel’s destruction, and hinting at nuclear ambitions.
He is, by any measure, one of the most internationally toxic Iranian political figures of the last quarter-century: easily recognisable, reviled in much of the West, and permanently associated with the regime’s most extreme rhetoric.
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If Israeli intelligence planners were seeking a figure who could plausibly unify Iranians after a regime collapse, attract international legitimacy, and normalise relations with Israel, Ahmadinejad is close to the least credible choice...