The Ahmadinejad Leak: Five Targets of a Single Report

The Ahmadinejad Leak: Five Targets of a Single Report

In a hot war, each bullet strikes one target. In an information war, a single round can hit several at once. The New York Times report on a failed U.S.-Israeli plan to install Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran’s post-war leader — published on May 20 — is not a stray bullet. It is a precision-guided munition in an information campaign whose full target set deserves careful examination.

The New York Times investigation, authored by Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, Farnaz Fassihi, and Ronen Bergman, claims that the United States and Israel entered the February 2026 war with a specific regime-change scenario: replacing the Islamic Republic’s leadership with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — the former president known for denying the Holocaust, calling for Israel’s destruction, and presiding over the violent suppression of the 2009 Green Movement. The plan, attributed to Israel’s Mossad chief David Barnea, was reportedly based on decades of intelligence collection. Ahmadinejad had been consulted. The plan, the report says, “quickly went awry.” His current whereabouts are unknown.

The sourcing rests entirely on unnamed American officials. No Israeli source is cited on the record. No documentary evidence is presented. And the journalists — while distinguished — are operating within a framework that, by definition, prevents independent verification.

This article does not dispute that such a plan may have existed. What it examines is the timing, the pattern, and the question of who benefits from its disclosure at this particular moment.

The Timing Is Not Coincidental

The report was published on May 20, 2026. Consider what else was unfolding that same week.

Inside Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition was facing unprecedented internal challenges. The ultra-Orthodox parties had withdrawn their support over the haredi draft bill. On the same day the Ahmadinejad report was published, the Knesset voted 110-0 in a preliminary reading to dissolve itself — with Netanyahu absent from the chamber.

Six days earlier, on May 14, Netanyahu had threatened to sue The New York Times over a Nicholas Kristof column alleging widespread sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners by Israeli forces. The Israeli Foreign Ministry stated that the column was deliberately published one day before the release of an independent Israeli report documenting Hamas’s systematic use of sexual violence during the October 7, 2023, attack — effectively preempting Israel’s own narrative. Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld assessed that any resulting lawsuit would be “dead on arrival” — suggesting that even critics recognize the legal avenue leads nowhere, leaving the reputational damage as the primary effect.

This is not the first time The New York Times’ coverage of Israel has faced scrutiny for pattern and timing. In October 2023, the paper admitted its initial coverage of the Al-Ahli Hospital explosion in Gaza “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas” — publishing a headline blaming Israel for a blast later attributed to a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket. More recently, Netanyahu accused the Times of defamation over a front-page photo of an emaciated Gazan child that the paper later acknowledged had a preexisting medical condition — cerebral palsy — not........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)