In public, Iran’s surviving leaders have defiantly refused to negotiate with US President Donald Trump to end the American and Israeli assault on their country. But a day after the attacks began, operatives from Iran’s ministry of intelligence reached out indirectly to the CIA with an offer to discuss terms for ending the conflict, according to officials briefed on the outreach.

US officials are sceptical — at least in the short term — that either the Trump administration or Iran is really ready for an offramp, the officials briefed on the outreach said.

Still, the offer, which was made through another country’s spy agency, raises critical questions about whether any Iranian officials could put into place a ceasefire agreement with the Tehran government in chaos as its leaders are methodically picked off by Israeli strikes.

The offer was described on the condition of anonymity to The New York Times by West Asian officials and officials from a western country.

White House and Iranian officials did not respond to requests for comment. The CIA declined to comment.

Israeli officials, who want a weekslong campaign to inflict maximum damage on Iran’s military capabilities, and perhaps cause Iran’s government to collapse, have urged the US to ignore the approach. For now, the offer is not considered serious in Washington.

And after saying for days that he was open to discussing a deal with Iran, Trump posted on social media on Tuesday morning that it was now “too late” for talks.

Speaking with reporters later in the day, Trump lamented that the Iranian officials the US knew and had considered as potential leaders were being killed.

“Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” Trump said. “Pretty soon we are not going to know anybody.”

The Iranian outreach, and the chaos in Iran’s leadership ranks as the assault continues, highlights the key issue Trump faces as he decides what sort of Iranian government he might hope to shape, or at least settle for. He already seems to have stopped promoting his initial scenario of a popular uprising against the government yielding a new set of leaders and instead seems to view the best outcome as more pragmatic figures emerging atop the existing political structure.

At a minimum, Trump officials will expect any agreement to stop the bombing to include a pledge from Tehran to abandon or drastically curtail its ballistic missile and nuclear programmes, and its support for foreign proxy groups like Hezbollah. In return, Trump has suggested that he would allow Iran’s surviving leaders to maintain their economic and political power.

Trump suggested again on Tuesday that his model would be Venezuela after the US capture in January of the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. Under threat of additional force, Trump has compelled Maduro’s successor to grant the US control over Venezuela’s oil exports while making few demands for political reform.

“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect scenario,” Trump said in a Sunday interview with The New York Times. “Leaders can be picked.”

But that vision could be a mirage.

First, it is not clear that Iran is actually open to a deal, despite the recent outreach from its intelligence arm. Some Iranian leaders may believe they can inflict enough physical, economic and political pain on the US and Israel to force an end to their assault. Trump already faces growing political pressure from Republican allies unhappy about the operation.

Trump’s shifting statements on Iranian leadership might reflect tension with Israel about the war’s goals, said Steven A. Cook, a West Asia expert with the Council on Foreign Relations.

Israel, Cook said in a briefing on Monday for reporters, does not want to see Trump engineer a "Venezuela-like solution to change in Iran", possibly with a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The elite military force controls much of Iran’s economy. Some analysts and US officials believe its ranks might include pragmatists less invested in their regime’s fundamentalist principles than in preserving their power and wealth.

On Tuesday, Israel struck a compound where senior Iranian clerics were meeting to choose a successor to their supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an airstrike on Saturday.

Ahead of the strikes on Iran, the CIA produced an intelligence assessment examining various scenarios of what sort of Iranian leadership might emerge after a US-Israeli attack on Iran. People briefed on the various scenarios produced by the agency note that none had a high degree of confidence — there were simply too many unknown variables to predict how it would play out.

But policymakers who have reviewed the intelligence have made their own conclusions about the most likely scenarios. Some have been dismissive of the idea that the Iranian Opposition would find a way to seize power. They have been more focused on the prospect that a group of Islamic Revolutionary Guard members might emerge as the most influential voice in the government.

The question for the Trump administration now is whether any of those officials will emerge alive from the repeated attacks on the government.

Trump has made several contradictory statements about his war aims, so it is possible that he will change his mind after ruling out negotiations.

But even if he renews his search for an Iranian leader, as the government weakens, it could be harder to find a person with enough influence to compel the country to abide by a deal with the US.

Many analysts warn that Iran’s government could soon lose control over remote regions dominated by ethnic minorities like the Kurds or collapse entirely, leading to chaos and violence reminiscent of the civil wars in Syria and Libya.

New York Times News Service