Back in early October 2024, I indicated that the United States and Israel were preparing for regime change in Iran, and that President Ahmadinejad’s visit to Budapest was also part of this plan, as he was intended to play a leading role in the operation. In the article, I explain in detail why Ahmadinejad came to be seen by the United States and Israel as suitable for this purpose, and I also warn that this regime-change plan could very easily turn out to be a poorly thought-out trap. Yesterday’s issue of The New York Times reports that this was exactly the plan, and notes that this may have been the purpose of Ahmadinejad’s visit to Budapest. Below, for the sake of objectivity, I compared my forecast with the aforementioned New York Times article using Gemini Pro.
In early October 2024, the Substack post authored by Péter Buda outlined a highly unconventional geopolitical theory regarding Iran, which included three central claims:
A Planned Leadership Role: The post suggested that the United States and Israeli leadership had designated former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to play a central role in an orchestrated regime change.
The Budapest Back-Channel: It hypothesized that Ahmadinejad’s unexpected visits to Budapest, Hungary, served as covert preparatory meetings to lay the groundwork for this political transition.
The Warning of a Trap: Crucially, the publication forwarded a strict warning: this entire scheme could easily prove to be a dangerous trap or a fatal miscalculation, questioning the viability and realism of trying to manipulate such a volatile figure and regime structure.
The New York Times article published yesterday (May 19, 2026) provides point-by-point confirmation of the core assertions, logistical timelines, and the cynical foresight highlighted in the Substack post more than a year and a half earlier.
The article validates the claim that Ahmadinejad was chosen by Western and Israeli intelligence to lead a post-collapse Iranian government. The text explicitly states that the U.S. and Israel “went into the conflict with a particular and very surprising someone in mind: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad” (n. 3).
The NYT confirms this was an actionable “multistage plan developed by Israel to topple Iran’s theocratic government” (n. 8), and notes that Ahmadinejad himself had been “consulted about” the operation beforehand (n. 4). Furthermore, physical military steps were taken to execute this plan: an Israeli airstrike on the first day of the war was specifically “designed to free him from house arrest” and put him in power (n. 1; n. 5).
The NYT report substantiates the Substack post’s suspicions regarding the Hungarian connection. It notes that Ahmadinejad’s recent foreign travel “further fueled speculation” regarding his ties to Western and Israeli intelligence (n. 26).
The article underscores the strategic nature of the Budapest visits by highlighting that Hungary maintains “close ties to Israel” (n. 27) and drawing attention to the “close relationship” between Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (n. 28). Most tellingly, it confirms the tight timeline: Ahmadinejad “returned from Budapest just days before Israel began attacking Iran” (n. 29), validating the assertion that these trips were directly tied to the operation’s launch.
The NYT article heavily validates the Substack post’s warning that the plan was an implausible gamble that would backfire or fall into a trap of the planners’ own making. The text states that the plan “quickly went awry” (n. 4) and characterized it as “gambling to some degree on a risky plan... that even some of Mr. Trump’s aides found implausible” (n. 8).
The operation proved to be a catastrophic miscalculation on multiple fronts:
The Target Disillusioned: Instead of being liberated, Ahmadinejad was injured by the very airstrike meant to free him, causing him to become “disillusioned with the regime change plan” before vanishing from public view entirely (n. 5; n. 6).
A Failure of Intelligence: The report explicitly concludes that the plan “appears in retrospect to have profoundly misjudged Iran’s resilience and the capacity of the United States and Israel to exert their will,” leaving the planners empty-handed after completely miscalculating how the war would unfold (n. 31).
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