Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has placed former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad under house arrest after he left a safe house operated by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, the New York Post reported Monday, citing a New York Times investigation that relied on four Iranian officials as sources.
The 69-year-old former president, who once denied the Holocaust and called for Israel's destruction, had reportedly been in secret contact with Israeli intelligence since at least 2023. The alleged plot aimed to install Ahmadinejad in place of Iran's theocratic regime. It failed.
Now the man who led the Islamic Republic from 2005 to 2013 sits under the watch of the IRGC's intelligence wing, detained by the very security apparatus that has tightened its grip on Iranian governance in recent months. The details of his confinement, its location, conditions, and any formal charges, remain unknown.
The New York Times reported that Ahmadinejad first made contact with Israeli intelligence in 2023, when he traveled to Guatemala for an environmental conference. Even getting out of the country required a confrontation: Iranian security forces initially blocked him from leaving, and Ahmadinejad staged an hours-long sit-in at Tehran's airport before he was allowed to depart.
The following year, the contacts deepened. Ahmadinejad attended a climate change conference at the Ludovika University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary. The event, according to the Times reporting, served as a pretext for a meeting that included then-Mossad chief David Barnea. Former U.S. officials told the Times that the Israelis covered some of Ahmadinejad's housing and travel expenses.
Gergely Deli, the university's rector, told the Times he had extended the invitation to Ahmadinejad at the request of a Hungarian government official. Deli framed the decision in pragmatic terms:
"You have two enemies, and if these enemies want to talk with each other, then it's best to do what you can to make them talk."
The identity of the Hungarian official who made the request has not been disclosed.
The timeline took a dramatic turn on February 28, when an Israeli airstrike, designated Operation Epic Fury, struck Ahmadinejad's compound in the early morning hours. The same day, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, was killed. In the chaos that followed, Ahmadinejad was spirited away to a Mossad-run safe house. Its location has not been reported.
From that point until last week, Ahmadinejad vanished from public view entirely. His re-emergence came during funeral ceremonies for the late Khamenei, where he appeared flanked by security guards. The massive security operation Iran mounted ahead of Khamenei's burial underscored the regime's anxiety about internal stability during the power transition.
Then came Monday's report: the IRGC had taken Ahmadinejad into custody after he left the Mossad safe house. Whether he departed voluntarily or was removed remains unclear.
The IRGC's move against Ahmadinejad fits a broader pattern. Iran's Revolutionary Guard has been consolidating power in Tehran, marginalizing the civilian presidency and asserting direct control over the country's political direction. The IRGC's tightening grip on the government preceded the Ahmadinejad revelation but now takes on sharper significance.
The regime had already signaled deep distrust of Ahmadinejad long before any Israeli contacts surfaced. He was blocked from seeking the presidency in 2017, again in 2021, and a third time in 2024. Each rejection reinforced what observers had long noted: the Islamic Republic's rulers viewed Ahmadinejad as a threat to their authority, even without evidence of foreign entanglements.
Behnam Ben Taleblu of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies described Ahmadinejad's post-presidency political identity to the Post as a "hybrid populism-nationalism-Islamism" that "posed a real ideological and class-based challenge to the Islamic Republic." That challenge, it now appears, extended well beyond domestic politics.
Abdolreza Davari, a former adviser to Ahmadinejad, offered the Times a blunt assessment of his old boss's motivations:
"Ahmadinejad would not do this for money. He has money; he has a wide economic network. He would do it for power. He wants to be at the helm of power."
That appetite for power reportedly included grandiose self-comparisons. The Times reported that Ahmadinejad told associates he saw himself as a reformist leader in the mold of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin and said he would normalize relations with Israel if he came to power.
The irony is difficult to overstate. During his presidency, Ahmadinejad publicly denied the Holocaust, called for the destruction of Israel, and restarted Iran's nuclear program. That he would then seek Israeli help to reclaim power speaks less to any ideological conversion than to the raw transactional nature of the arrangement.
The reported plot did not unfold in a vacuum. The U.S. and Israel have been engaged in an escalating confrontation with Iran across multiple fronts. U.S. Central Command struck more than 80 Iranian targets after Tehran attacked commercial shipping lanes, and Israel warned the United States of an Iranian assassination plot targeting President Trump, according to earlier reporting.
The New York Times initially reported in May that the U.S. and Israel had attempted to put Ahmadinejad back in the seat of power. Monday's report added the house arrest detail, sourced to the four Iranian officials.
Iran's new leadership has responded to the broader conflict with defiance. The country's new supreme leader pledged revenge following the strikes that killed Khamenei, while the Trump administration warned that a thousand missiles stood ready.
Significant questions hang over this story. What exactly did Ahmadinejad communicate to Israeli intelligence during the Guatemala and Budapest contacts? At what stage did the plot to install him fail, and why? What specific role did the United States play beyond what has been reported? And what happens to Ahmadinejad now, does the IRGC intend a trial, prolonged detention, or something else entirely?
The identities of the four Iranian officials who spoke to the Times remain undisclosed. So does the location of the Mossad safe house where Ahmadinejad spent months out of public view. The covert dimensions of the Iran-Israel conflict continue to surface in fragments, each one revealing a deeper layer of a shadow war that has been waged far from public view.
The full scope of the Ahmadinejad affair may take years to emerge. But what is already visible tells a familiar story: a former leader willing to deal with his country's sworn enemy to get back to power, and a regime so brittle it treats even a disgraced ex-president as a mortal threat.
When a government's first instinct is house arrest, it tells you everything about how much confidence that government has in its own legitimacy.
