Report: Israel kidnapped and interrogated Iranian generals in search for Ron Arad

Israel abducted two Iranian generals over the past two decades, one from Syria and the other from Turkey, as part of its efforts to determine the fate of missing Israeli airman Ron Arad. One of them, Gen. Abdullah Saberi, was kidnapped using an oversized refrigerator box. The other, Gen. Alireza Asgari, disappeared in Istanbul in 2006, and his fate remained a mystery for years. Now, an extensive New York Times investigation has revealed what allegedly happened to him, based on accounts from former senior American officials: Mossad agents interrogated him for weeks about possible involvement in Arad's disappearance.

When the questioning produced no useful information, they killed him. According to one former American official, his body was dumped into the Black Sea. The New York Times investigation draws on interviews with dozens of officials and other individuals from Iran, Israel, the United States and elsewhere in the Middle East, including people directly involved in the decades-long search for Arad. At the center of the investigation is the assessment now widely held among Israeli officials familiar with the case: Arad was never held in Iran, and neither Tehran nor Hezbollah was involved in his disappearance.

That conclusion is based on intelligence reviews conducted over the years, along with information gathered during Israel's more recent wars against Iran and Hezbollah. Several former intelligence officials interviewed by The Times acknowledged that earlier assessments had relied on fragmentary, circumstantial evidence and confirmation bias, the tendency to favor information that supports an existing belief. Iran expert Raz Zimmt said investigators had been inclined to blame Tehran, while retired Israeli military officer Avi Kalo described the failure as a collective blind spot. ‘Israel was obsessed.

We had nothing to do with it’ The theory of Iranian involvement gained significant momentum within the Mossad in 1992, when an Iranian doctor claimed to have treated Arad in both Lebanon and Tehran. Veteran Mossad officer Israel Perlov located the doctor and questioned him about the missing airman. The doctor underwent two polygraph examinations, but neither produced conclusive results concerning his claim that he had treated Arad in Iran.

Perlov then offered him a substantial cash reward if he could provide proof. The doctor disappeared without producing evidence, and Mossad agents never corroborated his account. Rami Igra, a former senior Mossad officer responsible for the missing-persons issue, later told The New York Times that he believed the doctor had fabricated his story in pursuit of money. Igra suspected that the Mossad had set out to confirm its own assumptions and found precisely what it was looking for.

His assessment gained little support within the organization, and the doctor's unverified account became part of the evidence cited against Iran. Two years later, in 1994, Israeli commandos abducted Mustafa Dirani from Lebanon in an operation known as Poisonous Sting. Dirani, the Amal militia security chief who had held Arad, told Israeli interrogators that the navigator had been kept in a house in the Lebanese village of Nabi Chit. According to his account, the guards left one night, apparently to respond to fighting involving Israeli forces, and returned to find Arad missing.

During harsh interrogation, Dirani also claimed that an Iranian official had subsequently told him the Revolutionary Guards had taken Arad to Iran. However, officials interviewed by The Times said no evidence had ever emerged to substantiate that claim. Igra concluded there was no proof Iran had held Arad and suggested he might have been killed while attempting to escape or executed in retaliation for an Israeli military operation. Either way, he believed Arad's story had begun and ended in Lebanon.

Then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin took the opposite position, publicly declaring in 1995 that Iran was directly responsible for Arad's fate. Convinced that Iran held the missing navigator, Israel exerted considerable international pressure on Tehran. Mohammad Ali Abtahi, Iran's vice president from 1997 to 2005, told The New York Times that the Arad case followed Iranian officials into virtually every diplomatic encounter. He described Israel as obsessed with the possibility of Iranian involvement and insisted that Tehran had consistently maintained that the disappearance had occurred in Lebanon and had nothing to do with Iran.

The issue even reached the Vatican. When Iranian President Mohammad Khatami visited Rome in 1999, Pope John Paul II presented him with a letter from Arad's wife pleading for information about her husband, according to Abtahi. In 2004, Israel agreed to release a prominent Lebanese prisoner in exchange for genetic evidence establishing what had happened to Arad. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, aware that information about the navigator could secure major concessions from Israel, enlisted Iranian assistance in searching for him in Lebanon.

Gerhard Conrad, a German intelligence officer who helped mediate the negotiations, told The Times that he believed Hezbollah and Iran had made a serious effort to locate Arad's remains. Tehran assigned the task to Gen. Abdullah Saberi, a Revolutionary Guards commander who had spent years in Lebanon and maintained close connections with Hezbollah. An Iranian president's child delivers the findings to Germany Three former Iranian officials disclosed to The New York Times that a confidential report produced by the joint Iranian-Hezbollah investigation concluded that Arad had died in 1988 in Nabi Chit, the Lebanese village where he had been held.

The report, whose contents had not previously been made public, also indicated that he was probably buried somewhere in or around the village. Iranian officials considered the findings important enough that former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was involved in the search, arranged for one of his children to deliver them personally to Germany. German mediators regarded the high-level involvement as evidence that Iran was making a genuine effort to resolve the case.

Israeli intelligence officials interpreted it differently. In their view, the very fact that Tehran had assigned a senior Revolutionary Guards commander to help locate Arad suggested that Iran possessed inside knowledge of his disappearance. An Israeli intelligence report in 2005 concluded that Arad had been abducted by the Revolutionary Guards. Zimmt, who helped prepare the assessment, now acknowledges that he and his colleagues probably misinterpreted the available intelligence.

The Shin Bet conducted another comprehensive examination of the case in 2006. Former agency chief Yuval Diskin told The New York Times that investigators reviewed the evidence, its sources and the methods by which it had been obtained, ultimately concluding that assessments placing Arad in Iran were fundamentally mistaken. The agency determined that Arad had never fallen into the hands of Hezbollah or the Revolutionary Guards and that the answer to his disappearance most likely lay in Nabi Chit, the same village identified by the Iranian-Hezbollah investigation.

Like other assessments challenging the Iran theory, the Shin Bet findings received little attention from the wider intelligence establishment and political leadership. The Mossad, however, did not abandon its suspicions. Instead, it pursued another extraordinary operation, whose details were revealed for the first time in The New York Times investigation. Its target was Gen. Alireza Asgari, a senior Revolutionary Guards officer who had served in Lebanon shortly after Arad disappeared and maintained close relationships with Hezbollah leaders.

Asgari had also served as Iran's deputy defense minister. The mystery of the missing Iranian general In December 2006, Asgari traveled to Istanbul and checked into the Ceylan Hotel. He subsequently disappeared without a trace. His disappearance became one of the enduring mysteries of the intelligence world, producing years of speculation about possible defections, covert operations and secret intelligence deals. Some reports suggested that Asgari had escaped to the United States and received a new identity.

Others linked him to sensitive intelligence concerning Iran's regional activities. None of those accounts established what had actually happened to him. The mystery was particularly significant because Asgari had spent years working with senior figures in Hezbollah and Iran's security establishment and was believed to possess extensive knowledge of Iranian operations abroad. Israel denied involvement in Asgari's disappearance. The United States also maintained that it did not know what had happened to him, despite speculation that he had defected with valuable intelligence.

His name resurfaced years later during negotiations over Iran's nuclear program and possible prisoner exchanges, when Iranian officials asked their American counterparts about the missing general. The Americans denied any role in his disappearance but began making inquiries of their own, including with Israel. Former American officials told The New York Times that Israeli intelligence subsequently informed U.S. negotiators that Asgari was dead.

Three other former American officials familiar with Israel's activities said Mossad operatives had kidnapped the general, interrogated him for weeks about Arad and killed him. One official said Asgari was questioned aboard a boat and that his body was subsequently dumped into the Black Sea. The interrogation reportedly failed to uncover any connection between Asgari and Arad's disappearance. Asgari's widow, Ziba Ahmadi, told The Times that an independent Iranian investigation had concluded that Israeli operatives entered her husband's hotel room, drugged him and abducted him.

According to Ahmadi, investigators later found the vehicle believed to have been used in the kidnapping abandoned near the Black Sea. When the Mossad chief decided the intelligence belonged in the shredder Retired Lt. Col. Avi Kalo, who headed the IDF's missing-in-action unit, reached conclusions similar to those of the Shin Bet and the joint Iranian-Hezbollah investigation. After reviewing years of intelligence reports, intercepted communications and assessments, he submitted a detailed report to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in late 2016.

Kalo concluded that Arad had probably died in 1988 in Nabi Chit and had never been taken to Iran. He said he warned Israeli intelligence officers that abducting Iranians would not resolve the mystery. When he retired in 2019, he believed the theory of Iranian involvement had finally been discarded and urged investigators to concentrate their efforts on Nabi Chit. But the Mossad continued pursuing Iranian leads. According to The New York Times, Gen. Abdullah Saberi, who had been dispatched to Lebanon in 2004 to help coordinate the Iranian-Hezbollah investigation, was abducted in Damascus in September 2021.

He had left his apartment for an early-morning jog in a heavily guarded diplomatic neighborhood when Israeli operatives, disguised as movers, intercepted him. Two men carrying an oversized refrigerator box suddenly restrained and drugged the general before placing the box over him and loading him into a white van. Saberi was taken to Israel for interrogation. Iranian officials, including people close to the general, told The Times that despite his extensive knowledge of Revolutionary Guards operations, the interrogators focused exclusively on one subject: Ron Arad.

After a lengthy interrogation, Saberi was abandoned on a street in Johannesburg, South Africa. He later alleged that he had been tortured. Then-Mossad chief David Barnea subsequently acknowledged authorizing a daring operation to obtain information about Arad, but admitted that it had failed. That failure contributed to a significant reassessment. Saberi had played a major role in Iranian operations in Lebanon and had personally participated in efforts to locate Arad, yet his interrogation had produced no breakthrough.

According to associates interviewed by The Times, Barnea eventually told Mossad personnel that they could effectively discard everything they thought they knew about the case. Decades of intelligence gathering, covert operations and interrogations had failed to establish Iranian responsibility or uncover Arad's fate. The Mossad finally began concentrating seriously on Nabi Chit. That was the last location where Arad was known to have been held.

One of the few individuals suspected of knowing what happened to him in 1988 was Ahmad Shukr, a retired Lebanese security officer. His name emerged as investigators reconsidered the circumstances surrounding the navigator's disappearance and the people who had been present in the area at the time. In December 2025, Shukr left his home for what he believed was a business meeting and disappeared. Lebanese officials suspect he was kidnapped by Israeli agents, although his whereabouts remain unknown.

Israeli officials told The New York Times that the strongest current theory is that Arad was executed in retaliation for the death of Shukr's brother, who was killed while fighting Israeli forces