US and Israel planned to install Ahmadinejad as Iranian leader, NYT says

The United States and Israel went into war on Iran intending to replace the regime’s leadership with hardline former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, The New York Times reported.

Quoting US officials who were briefed on the “audacious plan”, the newspaper said things “quickly went awry”, and Ahmadinejad’s “current whereabouts and condition are unknown”.

After the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, US President Donald Trump mused that it would be best if “someone from within” Iran took over the country, the Times reported.

“To say that Mr Ahmadinejad was an unusual choice would be a vast understatement,” the newspaper said.

“While he had increasingly clashed with the regime’s leaders and had been placed under close watch by the Iranian authorities, he was known during his term as president, from 2005 to 2013, for his calls to ‘wipe Israel off the map’. He was a strong supporter of Iran’s nuclear program, a fierce critic of the United States and known for violently cracking down on internal dissent.”

The newspaper noted, however, that in a 2019 interview, Ahmadinejad praised President Trump and argued for a rapprochement between Iran and the US.

“Mr Trump is a man of action,” Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying. “He is a businessman and therefore he is capable of calculating cost-benefits and making a decision. We say to him, let’s calculate the long-term cost-benefit of our two nations and not be shortsighted.”

The Times said Trump was relishing the success of the special forces raid that kidnapped Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, and the willingness of his interim replacement, Delcy Rodriguez, to work with the White House, and believed the same model could be replicated in Iran.

‘A jailbreak operation’

However, the US-Israeli plan, which Ahmadinejad had been consulted about, “quickly went awry”, according to the US officials who spoke to the Times.

Ahmadinejad was reportedly wounded on the first day of the war by an Israeli strike on his home in Tehran, which was intended to free him from house arrest, American officials told the Times. Ahmadinejad survived the strike, they said, but after the near-miss, he changed his mind about the regime change plan, and he has not been located since.

An article in the Atlantic in March said the attack on the house was “in effect a jailbreak operation”, citing anonymous associates of Ahmadinejad.

After that article, the Times said it received confirmation from an associate of Ahmadinejad that he recognised the air strike was an attempt to free him. The associate said the Americans believed Ahmadinejad could lead the country and had the ability to manage “Iran’s political, social and military situation”.