More on Israel’s Wild Regime-Change Scheme for Iran
Israeli intelligence reporter Yossi Melman explores the Mossad’s bizarre plot to replace Iran's leadership with former extremist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the opening weeks of the war.
“It is the craziest idea I have ever heard—and I have heard no shortage of borderline insane ideas,” one former Mossad chief told me after reading this week’s New York Times report claiming that the Mossad had persuaded the CIA to consider installing former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran’s leader if Israel succeeded in creating the conditions for the collapse of the clerical regime in the first weeks of the war.
Inside both the CIA and the upper echelons of Israeli intelligence, there was deep skepticism about the viability of the operation, which was conducted under extraordinary secrecy. Yet Mossad chief David Barnea and his deputy, known publicly only as “A,” men who for years have attached enormous importance to “influence operations”—i.e. psychological warfare—evidently persuaded the doubters to give the plan a chance.
According to sources who requested anonymity, indirect contact has taken place over the past three years between the Mossad, the CIA and aides to Ahmadinejad—and perhaps even with Ahmadinejad himself. Those contacts allegedly occurred during the former Iranian president’s visits to Guatemala and Hungary, two governments considered especially friendly toward both Israel and the United States.
