Mossad seized two Iranian generals hunting for Ron Arad, NYT investigation says

Israel's foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, abducted and interrogated two Iranian generals as part of its long effort to learn the fate of missing Israeli navigator Ron Arad, according to an investigation by The New York Times that was summarised by several Israeli news organisations on Sunday. Ynet reported that the investigation, published as four decades pass since Arad was taken captive, reveals these operations for the first time.

The same investigation concludes that Arad most likely never reached Iran. N12's foreign desk reported that the prevailing view in Israel today is that he died in 1988 in the Lebanese village of Nabi Shit and was never moved to Iran, and that Israel kept its focus on Iran for decades even as evidence pointing elsewhere built up. N12 described the findings as exposing a failure, saying Israel ignored intelligence warnings and searched in the wrong place for years.

Who Ron Arad was

Ron Arad was an Israeli air force navigator whose capture became one of the most enduring missing-person cases in Israel's history. Israeli outlets now refer to him with the Hebrew honorific used for the dead. For years, Israeli efforts to find him centred on the belief that Iran was holding him, a theory the Times investigation, as relayed by Israeli media, now portrays as mistaken. News.co.il described the case as some 30 years of pursuit, abductions and errors, adding that the search today concentrates mainly on Lebanese territory after decades of intelligence leads that failed to solve the mystery.

The two generals

The accounts of the two abductions differ in detail between the Israeli summaries.

• The first case. According to N12, the Mossad seized an Iranian general in 2006, questioned him about Arad and then killed him. Ynet's summary adds that, according to senior American officials cited in the investigation, this general was interrogated aboard a ship before the Mossad killed him, and that his death had been regarded as a major mystery for 20 years.
• The second case. N12 reported that in 2021 the Mossad abducted another Iranian general in central Damascus, using Israeli intelligence operatives who posed as movers. Ynet's account says one general was taken away in Damascus inside a refrigerator carton, questioned, and then left in a dazed state in South Africa.

News.co.il, in a shorter summary, said Iranian figures were abducted and questioned from both Syria and Turkey over the years as part of the search. The reports do not reconcile that reference to Turkey with the two cases set out by Ynet and N12.

The Hezbollah and Iran report

A central element of the investigation is a secret report drawn up jointly by Iran and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite armed group backed by Tehran. Ynet's news alerts channel reported that this document determined Arad died in 1988 in Nabi Shit, where he was buried. N12 dated the joint inquiry to 2004 and said it found Arad had probably died there. Ynet said the details of that report are only now becoming public, and that Israel is also now searching in Nabi Shit.

N12 also reported that in 2016 a further assessment was passed to Israel's prime minister concluding that Arad had probably died in Lebanon.

Why the timeline matters

Taken together, the summaries describe a gap of many years between what Israel's adversaries had concluded internally and the direction of Israel's own search. By the accounts relayed in Israeli media, the joint Iran and Hezbollah finding pointing to Lebanon came in 2004, an Israeli assessment pointing the same way reached the prime minister in 2016, and yet one of the abductions of Iranian officers took place in 2021. The reports do not say why the Iran theory persisted after those assessments.

What the reports do not say

None of the summaries reports any response from the Mossad, the Prime Minister's Office or the Israeli military to the investigation's claims. The two generals are not named in the material, and the reports do not explain how the Times obtained the joint Iran and Hezbollah document or whether its conclusions have been confirmed. They also do not say whether the current search in Lebanon has produced any findings.