Iran reached out to CIA to discuss end of conflict, Trump is saying it’s too late – report
The contact landed as Iran’s leadership structure was thrown into deeper disarray by continued Israeli strikes, complicating even the basic question of who can commit Iran to any ceasefire.
Iran’s surviving leaders have publicly projected defiance and refused to negotiate with US President Donald Trump to halt the American and Israeli assault on their country. But operatives from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence quietly reached out indirectly to the CIA with an offer to discuss terms for ending the conflict, according to officials briefed on the outreach cited by The New York Times.
The contact, delivered through another country’s intelligence service, landed as Iran’s leadership structure was thrown into deeper disarray by continued Israeli strikes, complicating even the basic question of who can commit Iran to any ceasefire, the report said. US officials described the approach as not serious for now, and said they were skeptical that either Washington or Tehran is genuinely ready for an immediate offramp.
The White House and Iranian officials did not respond to requests for comment, according to the report. The CIA declined to comment.
Israeli officials, the report said, have urged Washington to disregard the overture as Israel pursues a sustained campaign aimed at inflicting maximum damage on Iran’s military capabilities and, potentially, bringing about the collapse of Iran’s government. In Washington, the approach is being treated with caution, in part because the conflict’s trajectory has become increasingly intertwined with leadership decapitation, succession uncertainty, and competing endgame theories.
Trump, who had suggested in recent days that he was open to discussions, adopted a harder line publicly after the outreach was reported. In a social media post, he wrote that it was “too late” for talks, and later repeated the message in remarks to reporters
Trump underscored how quickly the pool of potential Iranian interlocutors is shrinking. “Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” he said, adding, “Pretty soon we are not going to know anybody,” according to the account cite
That dynamic goes to the heart of the problem now confronting Washington: even if Iran’s security establishment decided it wanted a pause, it is unclear whether anyone can enforce it across Iran’s fractured power centers, or whether a deal could survive the pace of strikes and counterstrikes. The more the Iranian system is degraded, analysts say, the more a negotiation could resemble a scramble to identify a signatory rather than a classic bargaining process between intact governments.
US officials, according to the report, are expected to insist that any agreement to stop the bombing includes a pledge by Tehran to abandon or drastically curtail its ballistic missile and nuclear programs and end or sharply reduce support for proxy groups such as Hezbollah. Trump has indicated he could allow Iran’s surviving leaders to retain significant economic and political power in return, a formula that would prioritize compliance on strategic programs over sweeping internal political reform.
Trump has repeatedly pointed to Venezuela as a preferred model, describing it as a scenario in which pressure and targeted action produce a controllable political outcome rather than prolonged instability. “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect scenario,” he said in an interview cited by The New York Times. “Leaders can be picked.”
Critics of that approach argue that Iran is structurally different, with parallel chains of command, ideological institutions, and a security apparatus that can survive decapitation by redistributing authority downward. They also warn that a “picked” leadership outcome could amount to a rebranding of the same coercive networks, especially if the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps emerges as the dominant force in a weakened state.
Do Israel and US see eye to eye on regime change?
The report also described growing signs of tension over war aims between Washington and Jerusalem, with analysts arguing that Israel does not want the United States to engineer a “Venezuela-like solution” that leaves core power structures intact under new faces. Steven A. Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations said Trump’s shifting statements could reflect that divergence, according to the account.
Beyond the leadership question sits a second strategic risk: state fracture. Analysts cited by The New York Times warned that Iran could lose control over remote regions dominated by ethnic minorities, or collapse into chaos and violence resembling the civil wars in Syria and Libya, outcomes that would be harder to contain and could create new security vacuums.
Trump initially leaned into the idea of popular revolt, urging Iranians in a video message to rise up and saying “the hour of your freedom is at hand,” according to the report. He later struck a more passive note, saying the decision would be “up to them,” language reflecting the uncertainty over whether Washington could shape, or even tolerate, the outcome of a bottom-up revolution.
Some experts argue that even a successful uprising would not reliably produce a US-friendly successor government. “There’s a low likelihood that a successor state would be a liberal democracy friendly to the United States,” said Rosemary Kelanic of Defense Priorities, in remarks cited by The New York Times, noting the legacy of a war with the United States would shape any new order.
Trump himself acknowledged the risk of replacement without improvement. “The worst case would be we do this, and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person,” he said, according to the report.
Questions about alternative figures have also resurfaced, including Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s former shah. Trump appeared unenthusiastic, describing him as someone who “looks like a very nice person,” while indicating a preference for “somebody that’s there that’s currently popular, if there’s such a person,” according to the report.
The broader context is a long, frustrated American debate about whether Tehran contains a workable “moderate” interlocutor within its existing political structure. Trump and some of his advisers have portrayed Iran’s current leadership as irredeemably ideological, with Trump branding them “radical lunatics” in recent remarks cited by The New York Times.
At the same time, past US administrations have tried negotiating through Iranian officials framed as more pragmatic, including the 2015 nuclear deal reached under President Barack Obama, which Trump later abandoned. Skeptics have long argued that Iran’s clerical system constrains any individual leader’s flexibility, a point often summarized by former US defense secretary Robert Gates’s quip about searching for the “elusive Iranian moderate.”
For now, the backchannel approach appears to have changed little in the immediate calculus in Washington. But it has sharpened the central dilemma: the harder the campaign hits Iran’s leadership, the more difficult it becomes to identify a counterpart capable of delivering the kind of sweeping strategic concessions the United States says it wants/Sourced from Jerusalem Post
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