Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is reported to be under house arrest by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ intelligence arm after Iranian authorities uncovered a significant portion of his contacts with Israel. The account, published Monday and citing four senior Iranian officials, puts a former Iranian president at the center of a security case that reaches into Mossad and the highest level of state power.
That is why the story is being searched now: it does not describe an old political quarrel, but a current detention status involving a figure who once sat at the center of Iran’s leadership. The report says Israel ran a covert operation for years aimed at recruiting Ahmadinejad as an intelligence asset, and later planned to install him as Iran’s leader after the regime was overthrown. If true, that would make the house arrest less a narrow disciplinary measure than a response to a much larger intelligence gamble.
One person drawn into the same chain of events was Gergely Deli. In early 2024, a senior Hungarian government official asked him to invite Ahmadinejad to a climate conference in Budapest, and Deli was told the event would be cover for secret talks with Israeli intelligence officials. He later described the logic in plain terms: if two enemies want to talk, he said, it is best to do what you can to make them talk.
The backstory is even stranger. Former Mossad head David Barnea personally traveled to Budapest to meet with Ahmadinejad, and Israeli agents met with Ali Akbar Javanfekr several more times before the beginning of Operation Roaring Lion. In February, Ahmadinejad’s home compound was hit by an Israeli airstrike targeting his bodyguards and armored car, and after that he was picked up by Mossad operatives and taken to a secret safe house. He later appeared at Ali Khamenei’s funeral, but the reporting leaves open how much of that path was voluntary, and how much was shaped by pressure from both sides.
That tension matters because the motives attached to him do not line up neatly. Abdolreza Davari said Ahmadinejad would not have worked with Israel for money, while another associate said he had spoken about becoming Iran’s new ruler with the help of foreign powers and about normalizing relations with Israel through the Abraham Accords if he returned to power. For now, the clearest fact is also the hardest to pin down: Iranian authorities say they uncovered a significant portion of his contacts with Israel, but they have not publicly detailed what those contacts were or when the house arrest began.
