The New York Times reported Tuesday what the paper has been waiting four months to learn: that the United States approved an Israeli plan to install Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran's leader after the February 28 strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The plan was multistage. The plan failed on the first day. The White House would not answer for it. [1] [2]

This is the document layer the paper's March 20 coverage of the war's cracking story said was missing. For two and a half months the war's stated aims — degrade, contain, deny — coexisted with an obvious gap: nothing in the public record explained what the US thought would replace the Islamic Republic if the strikes succeeded. The NYT investigation, sourced to US officials and an Ahmadinejad associate, fills the gap. The aim was a name. The name was Ahmadinejad. [1]

The paper's March account of Diego Garcia read the war's geographic expansion as a sign that operational planning had outrun stated aims. The Times investigation now closes that loop. Israeli planners, according to two Israeli defense officials briefed on the operation, designed the war in four phases: an air campaign to eliminate the supreme leadership, a Kurdish ground mobilization to apply military pressure, a sustained influence operation to erode public confidence in the Tehran government, and finally a leadership transition to what the planners internally called an "alternative government." [3]

Ahmadinejad was that alternative. The choice baffled the analysts the Times consulted. The former president, who served from 2005 to 2013, was known for calling to "wipe Israel off the map," for Holocaust denial, and for the violent suppression of the 2009 Green Movement. [4] But he had fallen out with Iran's ruling establishment over the past decade — disqualified from the 2017, 2021, and 2024 presidential elections, placed under close surveillance, increasingly confined to his home in Tehran's Narmak district. US officials told the Times he had been consulted about the regime-change effort. [1]

On the war's first day, an Israeli Air Force strike hit a security outpost at the entrance of Ahmadinejad's dead-end street. The strike was, according to the officials, "essentially a prison break" — designed to kill the IRGC security personnel both guarding and confining him. The strike succeeded in killing the guards. It also injured Ahmadinejad. He survived. He was reported dead, then reported alive. He has not been seen publicly since. The US, the Times said, does not know his current condition or whereabouts. [5]

The White House response is the second receipt. Asked about Ahmadinejad, spokesperson Anna Kelly declined to address the regime-change angle and released a statement of US war objectives instead: "From the outset, President Trump was clear about his goals for Operation Epic Fury: destroy Iran's ballistic missiles, dismantle their production facilities, sink their navy, and weaken their proxy." [6] None of those four objectives names a successor government. The administration's stated aims and its documented operational aims are not the same document.

This is the gap the paper's dormant iran-war-aims thread flagged on April 11 and the May 20 digest noted had received no new artifact in five weeks. The Times investigation is the artifact. It is sourced to US officials, corroborated by Israeli defense officials, and confirmed by an Ahmadinejad associate. Anadolu, the Independent, The Hill, Telegraph India, Israel National News, Yeni Safak, L'Orient Today, and The Media Line have all run the story. The Iranian state press has not. Ahmadinejad has not. [7] [8] [9]

The reaction inside Iran-watching circles is the disclosure's third layer. Patrick Wintour, the Guardian's diplomatic editor, confirmed the NYT account on X within hours. Sina Toossi, the National Iranian American Council senior fellow, walked through the four-phase structure. Mario Nawfal's syndication account framed the operation as a "secret plan" the rest of Tehran was not told about. The X discourse converged on the multistage architecture as the actual story; the Israeli plan was not an opportunistic response to Khamenei's death, it was the plan from the start. [10] [11] [12]

What this does not produce is a Congressional hearing. The Senate's war-powers discharge two days ago authorized no second floor vote, no Trump veto override, no House action. The NYT investigation lands inside the same procedural silence. The Foreign Relations Committee has not called Vance. The Intelligence Committee has not called CIA Director John Ratcliffe. The HPSCI has not called DNI Tulsi Gabbard. The disclosure of an approved regime-change plan against a sovereign state — a plan the constitutional record does not authorize — has not produced a single committee subpoena before edition close.

Russia and China, which co-issued the Putin-Xi "comprehensive ceasefire is of utmost urgency" line on Wednesday, have not responded publicly to the regime-change disclosure either. Iraq, which shares a 1,000-mile border with Iran and houses thousands of US troops, has not. Turkey, which has 800 km of Iranian border and a 70-year history of NATO-aligned regime-change skepticism, has not. The diplomatic silence around a disclosed regime-change plan is the silence of partners who have already priced it.

The paper's running count of shifting war aims — rescue, eviscerate, take the oil, end without Hormuz, leave in two to three weeks, Power Plant Day, total and complete victory — now has a thirteenth entry, and it is the only one with a name attached. The aim was Ahmadinejad. The plan was multistage. The first stage killed the supreme leader. The fourth stage, the leadership transition, never opened. What remains is a war without a stated political endpoint, run by an executive that will not testify to its own plan, with a Congress that discharged a resolution and then went silent.

-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington