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........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)