Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Improbable Journey

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the face of the Islamic Republic of Iran for eight years.

As Iran’s president from 2005 to 2013, he brutally suppressed domestic protests, constantly called for Israel’s destruction, and perversely denied the Holocaust.

He played a central role in the formation of the Axis of Resistance, the regional alliance arrayed against Israel, and he was instrumental in the building of Iran’s nuclear program, which triggered the joint attack launched by the United States and Israel against Iran last February.

Ahmadinejad was a real hardliner, arguably Iran’s most vociferous and most vocal anti-Israel president since the 1979 Islamic revolution, which overturned the pro-Western Pahlavi monarchy.

So imagine the shock created by the news that the Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence agency, tried to recruit and install him as Iran’s next leader.

Recently, The New York Times and the Israeli daily, Haaretz, published lengthy accounts of this astounding effort, which could have been taken from the screenplay of a Hollywood espionage thriller.

Not surprisingly, Ahmadinejad’s spokesman denied the reports, yet they sound plausible.

As a host of newspaper and press agency reports have indicated, the Mossad penetrated the Iranian political and military elite to an astonishing degree. The personal and business addresses of its leaders were known to Israel long before the Israeli Air Force eliminated many of them in precision strikes during the June 2025 war and the longer and still unfinished war that erupted this year on February 28.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was among one of the high-ranking figures killed by Israeli and US air strikes on the very first day of the war.

Shortly after their sudden deaths, Mossad operatives in Tehran reportedly whisked away Ahmadinejad to a safe house in the Iranian capital with the intention of installing him as Iran’s next president.

US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly thought that the Iranian regime would implode and fall under the weight of their ferocious air campaign.

The Islamic regime proved to be stronger, more entrenched and more resilient than the United States and Israel had calculated. Regime change did not occur. Indeed, the current Iranian regime is probably more radical than the old one, say a wide range of analysts.

As for Ahmadinejad, he left the safe house that Israel had provided for him, having grown disillusioned with the Mossad’s plan. Why he changed his mind about cooperating with Israel has yet to be determined.

According to The New York Times and Haaretz, his current status remains unclear. He was last seen in public attending Khamenei’s ostentatious funeral in Tehran earlier this month.

The former director of the Mossad, David Barnea, was at the center of the scheme to recruit Ahmadinejad, who had grown disillusioned with the regime after it repeatedly disqualified him from running in elections.

Due to these rebuffs, he became a vocal critic of the regime, accusing it of poor governance and corruption. One of his close associates told the Times that, as Iran’s new president, he would join the 2020 Abraham accords, recognize Israel and normalize relations with it.

Ahmadinejad reportedly met Barnea in Budapest in 2024 and again in 2025. The contents of their discussions remain secret. Mossad agents previously met him in Guatemala in 2023. These contacts are shrouded in secrecy as well.

Ahmadinejad’s apparent conversion to moderation with respect to Israel stands in sharp contrast to his previous views.

In 2005, Ahmadinejad claimed that most Jews in Israel have “no roots” in historic Palestine, and that Germany and Austria should allow a Jewish state to be established on their soil.

When Israel’s marked its 60th anniversary in 2008, he said, “Those who think they can revive the stinking corpse of the usurping and fake Israeli regime by throwing a birthday party are seriously mistaken … The Zionist regime … is on its way to annihilation.”

In 2009, Ahmadinejad described Israel as “the most criminal regime in human history.”

Occasionally, Ahmadinejad deployed antisemitic rhetoric to  bash Israel. As he stated in 2008, “The Zionists are crooks. A small handful of Zionists, with a very intricate organization, have taken over the power centers of the world … Because of their control of power centers in the US and Europe, and their control of the financial centers and the news and propaganda agencies, they spread propaganda as if they were the majority ruling the world.”

He hewed to this theme at a conference at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran when he claimed, “Today the Zionists dominate many of the world’s centers of power, wealth, and media. Unfortunately, they have ensnared many politicians and parties, and they are plundering the wealth and assets of nations in this way, depriving peoples of their freedoms and destroying their cultures and human values by spreading their nexus of corruption.”

Four years later, comparing Israel to a “cancerous tumor,” Ahmadinejad said, “The very existence of the Zionist regime is an insult to humanity.” He predicted that “the nations of the region will soon finish off the usurper Zionists on Palestinian land.”

He never tired of questioning the Holocaust.

Deutsche Welle, in 2006, reported that Ahmadinejad had written a letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggesting that the victorious Allied powers in World War II may have invented the Holocaust to embarrass Germany. “Is it not a reasonable possibility that some countries that had won the war made up this excuse to constantly embarrass the defeated people … to bar their progress?”

Ahmadinejad’s audacity spurred the head of Iran’s Jewish community,  Haroun Yashayaei, to send him a tart letter: “How is it possible to ignore all of the undeniable evidence existing for the exile and massacre of the Jews in Europe during World War Two? Challenging one of the most obvious and saddening events of 20th-century humanity has created astonishment among the people of the world and spread fear and anxiety among the small Jewish community of Iran.”

At a Holocaust conference at Sharif University of Technology in 2009, Ahmadinejad said, “For 60 years (Israel) allowed no one to question and cast doubt on the logic of the Holocaust and its very essence, because if the truth were to be exposed, nothing would remain of their logic of liberal democracy. It is the very advocates of liberal democracy who defend the Holocaust, who have sanctified it to the point where none may enter. Breaking the padlock of the Holocaust and reexamining it will be tantamount to cutting the vital arteries of the Zionist regime. It will destroy the philosophical foundation and raison d’être of this regime”

He added, “I invite dear researchers, intellectuals, young people and students, who are the trailblazers, to reexamine not only the Holocaust, but also its consequences and aftermath and inform others of their studies and research. Let us not forget that more than ever before, the Zionist network, which came up with the issue of the Holocaust, must be exposed, and be presented to the peoples as it really is.”

During the same year, he spoke about the “great deception of the Holocaust” and claimed that Western powers “launched the myth of the Holocaust” to support the establishment of Israel.

Ahmadinejad, in his prime as a two-term president, was an extremist who sought to delegitimize and destroy Israel and who mocked the Holocaust. Viewed from this perspective, his apparent transition from radical to moderate is nothing less than  astounding.

The manner in which he is presented by The New York Times and Haaretz is compelling. But his supposed transformation into an open-minded reformer capable of normalizing relations with Israel should be confirmed by Ahmadinejad himself, either in person or in a newspaper piece.

Only then will we truly know whether he has changed for the better.