Mossad Abducted Iranian Officials During Long Search for Missing Navigator Ron Arad, Investigation Finds

The Mossad abducted a former Iranian deputy defense minister in Turkey, interrogated him for weeks about the fate of missing Israeli Air Force navigator Ron Arad, and killed him after the questioning produced no evidence linking him to the case, according to a New York Times investigation published Sunday.

The report drew on interviews with dozens of Israeli, Iranian and American officials and with people involved in the search. One of three former senior US officials who described the operation said Ali Reza Asgari was interrogated aboard a vessel and that his body was dumped into the Black Sea.

Asgari's wife said he disappeared from an Istanbul hotel in December 2006. A general in the Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force, he had contacts with senior Hezbollah officials and arrived in Lebanon shortly after Arad vanished. Israel denied involvement for years, but when Iran later raised the case in talks with Washington, Israeli officials told the American negotiating team that Asgari was dead, a former senior US official said.

The report also reveals for the first time how Iranian Gen. Abdullah Saberi was abducted in September 2021. Iranian officials close to Saberi and a Syrian source who reviewed footage said operatives disguised as movers passed checkpoints in the Damascus diplomatic quarter, seized him during a morning run, drugged him, covered his head with a refrigerator box and loaded him into a white commercial van.

Saberi was taken to Israel and questioned exclusively about Arad, according to Iranian sources. After a lengthy interrogation he was left on a Johannesburg street and later claimed he had been tortured. Then-Mossad director David Barnea said he had authorized an operation to obtain information about Arad, calling it daring but unsuccessful, and people close to him said he later told Mossad personnel that everything they knew about the case could be shredded.

The Mossad then concentrated its search on Nabi Chit in eastern Lebanon. The investigation reveals that Iran and Hezbollah searched there as early as 2004, during negotiations in which Israel was prepared to free a senior Lebanese prisoner for genetic evidence about Arad's fate. Three former senior Iranian officials said a classified report concluded Arad died in Nabi Chit in 1988 and was likely buried in the area, and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani sent one of his children to Germany to deliver the findings.

Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate saw Iran's decision to send Saberi to Lebanon for that search as reinforcing suspicions of Revolutionary Guard involvement. Raz Zimmt, who participated in the 2005 assessment implicating Iran, told the newspaper it was probably mistaken in retrospect.

A 2006 review led by then-Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin found that reports claiming Arad had been transferred to Iran rested on unreliable information or analytical errors. A 2016 review led by Avi Kalo, a former head of the IDF's missing-persons unit, concluded Arad most likely died in 1988, probably in Nabi Chit. Officials said intelligence from wars against Iran and Hezbollah strengthened the assessment that Arad was never held in Iran.

In December 2025, Ahmad Shukr, a retired Lebanese security official, disappeared after leaving for what he believed was a business meeting. Lebanese officials believe Israeli agents abducted him, and former Israeli officials and Lebanese sources said he was among the few people suspected of knowing where Arad had been in 1988. His whereabouts remain unknown, and his niece said he had no connection to the case.

Israeli officials said the leading theory is now that Arad was executed in retaliation for the killing of Shukr's brother, who died battling Israeli troops on the same night in 1988. In March, IDF troops raided Nabi Chit and opened a grave in the village cemetery. Dozens of Lebanese were killed and wounded in the surrounding firefights and strikes, and the grave yielded nothing. Officials said the search for Arad continues in Lebanon.