On February 28, the United States and Israel began a war with Iran, the main result of which (for now, because the war is still ongoing) is the disruption of global oil trade and the strengthening of the Iranian regime. The Americans, and above all the Israelis, wanted to achieve the opposite – eliminate the Ayatollah, destabilize the government, and put “their man” in charge of Iran. The first point of the plan was accomplished, but problems arose with the second and third points. The Israeli intelligence service Mossad relied on Kurdish groups and former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but none of these bets worked. Haaretz and New York Times The New York Times discovered from sources in the United States, Israel and Iran how the Iranian regime change operation was planned and why it failed. Some information about this has already appeared in the media, but new materials paint a more complete picture. “Medusa” retold it.
As president, Ahmadinejad was a hawk. After his departure, he began criticizing the Iranian regime (and he was allowed to do so).
In October 2023, a group of Mossad agents headed to Guatemala. When they got off the plane, they learned that the Iranian-backed Hamas movement had attacked Israel. Meanwhile, the intelligence officers’ mission was to recruit former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He led the country from 2005 to 2013 and was a harsh critic of the Israelis and Americans. Ahmadinejad Named Israel is a “racist state,” a “cancerous tumor,” and “Satan’s banner.” Under his rule, Iran resumed uranium enrichment and brutally suppressed internal opposition.
Ahmadinejad had gained a reputation as a hard-line fundamentalist, but after leaving power he began to change his rhetoric. He began wearing suits instead of camouflage, learning English, praising US President Donald Trump, and criticizing corruption in Iran. His relationship with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has become complicated: Ahmadinejad has been banned from participating in the presidential elections three times (in 2017, 2021 and 2024), his aides have been arrested and his movements restricted. At the same time, he continued to engage in politics, meeting with supporters and sitting on the Expediency Discernment Council, an advisory body to Iran’s supreme leader.
Ahmadinejad’s aides told the New York Times that he became disillusioned with the Iranian regime when he realized he could not return to the presidency. He expressed fears that in the event of war, the United States and Israel would bring to power in Iran a stranger who does not live in the country and does not know it. He tried to present himself as a pragmatist and reformer capable of normalizing relations with the outside world. Ahmadinejad will not do this [идти на сотрудничество с Израилем] For money. He has money…he will do it for power. “He wants to be responsible,” said Abdolreza Davari, a senior adviser to Ahmadinejad, with whom he later fell out.
Haaretz reported that Ahmadinejad’s relationship with the Mossad began to “crystalize” in 2022. The intelligence service collected intelligence about the change in his rhetoric and concluded that his differences with the Iranian regime had become so acute that he would cooperate. Ahmadinejad had contact with the Mossad at least three times – during the aforementioned trip to Guatemala in 2023, as well as during two trips to Hungary in 2024 and 2025. The Mossad paid for his trips abroad. The intelligence service considered Ahmadinejad such a valuable asset that its then-head, David Barnea, personally supervised the recruitment process and met with him in Budapest.
Ahmadinejad has long been a source of suspicion among the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Iranian regime’s security bloc. It all started in 2017, when suddenly books A polite letter to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, a US ally in the Middle East. A lot of other things seemed suspicious. Guatemala and Hungary, where Ahmadinejad allegedly went to attend conferences, are friends of Israel. The conferences themselves were dedicated to protecting the environment, a topic that had nothing to do with the former Iranian president. In addition, after his return from Hungary in 2025, Ahmadinejad He did not condemn Israel to launch attacks on Iranian nuclear infrastructure. At the same time, according to the New York Times, the investigation into his ties with Mossad did not begin until after the start of the 2026 war.
Many people did not like the Mossad’s coup plan in Iran. But Netanyahu’s advisors did not dare to object to him
Over the past 20 years, Mossad leadership has maintained its assessment that Israel does not have the resources necessary to overthrow the Ayatollah regime in Iran. But in the summer of 2024, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on intelligence chief David Barnea to change course. Netanyahu may have been upset by the progress of Iran’s nuclear program and the stalemate in the war with Hamas, Haaretz wrote, discussing the Israeli prime minister’s motives. One way or another, he was ordered to look for ways to change power in Iran. Mossad began planning influence operations, warning that it would take at least three years to achieve any significant impact.
Three events accelerated this work. The first was the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in November 2024. Netanyahu was impressed by the rapid success of the Syrian rebels and decided that Israel should train an armed militia inside Iran. The second was the Israeli and American strikes on Iran in June 2025. The Israeli Prime Minister was very happy with the way things had gone and he seriously believed in the possibility of a change of power in Iran: he began asking his advisors whether it was possible to kill Ayatollah Khamenei. The third event was the Iranian protests at the end of 2025. Netanyahu saw an opportunity in them, and demanded that a plan to overthrow the regime be presented to him as soon as possible.
The Mossad plans for groups of Iranian Kurds stationed abroad in the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq to play the role of armed militias. They were to invade western Iran under the cover of the Israeli Air Force. Other opposition forces cooperating with Mossad are scheduled to appear in other parts of the country. The goal was to shift Iranian forces from the center to the peripheries and decapitate the political and security elite of the regime in Tehran. What followed were popular protests, and ultimately the return of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power.
Many did not appreciate this plan. Shlomi Binder, head of AMAN’s Military Intelligence Directorate, and Tzachi Hanegbi, Netanyahu’s national security adviser at the time, believed his chances of success were slim. Members of Trump’s team, to whom Netanyahu came in February 2026 to persuade him to join the operation against Iran, were also skeptical about the plan. Despite the opinions of his advisors, Trump agreed, deciding that regime change in Iran would be “them.” [израильтян] problem.”
“Netanyahu was determined to see this plan through to completion, and those around him felt that they did not have a strong enough counterargument — one worth putting on the table and speaking against. The prevailing view was that in the worst-case scenario, the plan simply would not work. Some were generally dismissive of that idea. Behind the scenes, senior officers were joking that the Kurds would have a very difficult time. They asked when the shooting range would open. But they did not object at the meetings themselves, perhaps because “they did not object,” one source told Haaretz. “I want to stand against the Prime Minister and act as spoilers.”
The Mossad plan failed and Israeli intelligence believes he demanded at least 10 years of work
On February 28, Israel launched an air strike on the residence of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran. The target was a site for guards who were monitoring the politician who was under house arrest. The guards died, and Mossad agents took Ahmadinejad to a secret hideout. New York Times I mentionedThe former Iranian president was injured in the strike, but he saw it as a way to free him from detention. However, according to the newspaper’s sources, he ultimately became disillusioned with the Israeli plan to return him to power and left the shelter prepared for him “in unclear circumstances.”
After that, Ahmadinejad did not appear in public for a long time. Four senior Iranian officials told the New York Times that he is now back under house arrest because the Iranian Revolutionary Guard learned of his contacts with Israel. Last week, Ahmadinejad made a surprise appearance at one of Ayatollah Khamenei’s funeral ceremonies. He stood silently, surrounded by people who seemed to be his guards. Iran’s other former presidents, Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Khatami, did not attend the funeral.
The Kurdish uprising did not start either. The Mossad expected that they would provide 16,000 armed fighters to fight the battle on the sixth day of the war. But first, the operation had to be postponed due to the unwillingness of the Israeli Air Force to provide cover for the Kurds, and then they themselves refused to act, because the United States never gave them the green light. As Haaretz explains, Kurdish leaders initially insisted that the agreement with Washington was of paramount importance to them. They explained that they already had a painful experience in cooperating with the United States: when Washington’s interests changed, American support stopped, sometimes leaving the Kurds facing disaster.
“Although some senior Israeli officers were willing to accept the possibility that the whole thing could turn into a shooting range, the Kurds would not be easy targets,” Haaretz wrote.
The publication notes that the Mossad’s plan seemed impressive: David Parnia’s agents recruited the former Iranian president and gained the support of Kurdish groups, arming and training them – but at the “tenth hour” everything collapsed. Former and current Mossad employees told Haaretz that an ambitious mission such as regime change in Iran requires 10 to 15 years of work and a huge amount of resources, which does not yet guarantee success. Barnea himself believes that the Iranian regime will collapse in the coming years anyway, only if it does not agree with the United States to freeze assets and lift sanctions. In this case, he will become stronger, richer and more aggressive.