On Monday, the New York Times reported that Israel spent years trying to recruit former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — through secret meetings in Budapest, financed travel, a personal sit-down with the Mossad chief, and a failed plan to extract him from Tehran on the first day of the war — and install him as the face of a new regime.

Ahmadinejad’s office called it completely false. Israeli intelligence veterans called it implausible. One of them said the most useful thing anyone has said about the entire affair: The motive for the disclosure matters more than the disclosure itself.