Did the US and Israel plan to install Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran after Khamenei’s death?

The US-Israel war on Iran wanted to install the former President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to a Times report. The report claimed that Ahmadinejad was consulted about leadership succession. But things completely went south as Ahmadinejad's house was reportedly targeted in an attempt to “free” him.

On the first day of the beginning of the war following the death of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Trump said that he wanted someone from “inside” to lead the Islamic Republic. Ahmadinejad has been an ideological anti-imperialist and pro-theocratic, but since leaving his office, he has formally criticised the Iranian government, leading to his exclusion from the Presidential run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Force. He was heavily surveilled and placed under house arrest in Tehran, and foreign intelligence agencies saw an opportunity to exploit his rift with the establishment.

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But after narrowly surviving the attack, he was disillusioned about the regime change plan. He issued a eulogy mourning the death of Iran's Supreme Leader, distancing himself from the plotter and then disappeared from view. His exact whereabouts and current physical condition remain unknown to both Iranian authorities and Western intelligence

It is unclear if the US-Israel wanted to kill Ahmadinejad and failed to do so, or wanted to stage a “jail break”. The fact that he went into hiding further raises questions about why the US freed him for him to go into hiding and why the US did not extract him like Nicolas Maduro. The NYT report is, however, based on unnamed US-Israeli officials and paraphrases an associate of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and lacks official quotes or attribution. The choice of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems unusual, as he had been framed by the Atlantic as “a Holocaust denier, an atom-bomb fetishist, and shoving Islamic revolutionary ideology down the throats of a country already weary of it”.