The Mossad abducted former Iranian deputy defense minister Ali Reza Asgari in Turkey, interrogated him for weeks about the disappearance of Israeli Air Force navigator Ron Arad, and killed him after the questioning failed to uncover evidence linking him to the case, according to an extensive investigation published by The New York Times on Sunday.
The investigation was based on interviews with dozens of Israeli, Iranian and American officials, as well as individuals involved in the search for Arad. One of three former senior US officials who described the operation told the newspaper that Asgari was interrogated aboard a vessel and that his body was dumped into the Black Sea.
According to Asgari's wife, he disappeared from a hotel in Istanbul in December 2006. Asgari, a general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force, had maintained contact with senior Hezbollah officials and arrived in Lebanon shortly after Arad disappeared.
Israel has denied involvement in Asgari's disappearance over the years. According to a former senior US official, when Iran raised his case during talks with the United States years later, Israeli officials told the American negotiating team that Asgari was dead.
The Damascus abduction that ended on a Johannesburg street
The investigation also reveals for the first time how Iranian Gen. Abdullah Saberi was abducted in September 2021.
According to Iranian officials close to Saberi and a Syrian source who reviewed footage of the abduction, Israeli intelligence operatives disguised themselves as movers and passed through checkpoints in Damascus's diplomatic quarter.
When Saberi went out for a morning run, the operatives seized him, drugged him, covered his head with a refrigerator box, and placed him inside a white commercial van.
Saberi was taken to Israel, where, according to Iranian sources, his interrogators questioned him exclusively about Ron Arad.
After a lengthy interrogation, he was left on a street in Johannesburg, South Africa. He later claimed that he had been tortured.
Then-Mossad director David Barnea said at the time that he had authorized an operation to obtain information about Arad, describing it as daring but unsuccessful.
According to people close to Barnea, he subsequently told Mossad personnel that everything they knew about the case could be shredded.
The Mossad then began concentrating its search efforts on the village of Nabi Chit in eastern Lebanon.
Reports pointed to Lebanon more than two decades ago
One of the investigation's revelations concerns a search conducted by Iran and Hezbollah as early as 2004, during negotiations in which Israel was prepared to release a senior Lebanese prisoner in exchange for genetic evidence that would establish what had happened to Arad.
According to three former senior Iranian officials, a classified report compiled following the search concluded that Arad had died in Nabi Chit in 1988 and was likely buried in the area.
Former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani sent one of his children to Germany to personally deliver the findings.
At the time, Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate interpreted Iran's decision to send Saberi to Lebanon to assist with the search as reinforcing suspicions that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had been involved in Arad's disappearance.
Raz Zimmt, who participated in the 2005 intelligence assessment implicating Iran, told The New York Times that, in retrospect, the assessment was probably mistaken.
Saberi himself was abducted by the Mossad 17 years later and questioned about Arad.
A review led in 2006 by then-Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) director Yuval Diskin concluded that reports claiming Arad had been transferred to Iran were based on unreliable information or errors in intelligence analysis.
Another review, led in 2016 by Avi Kalo, a former head of the IDF's missing-persons unit, concluded that Arad had most likely died in 1988, probably in Nabi Chit.
According to officials familiar with the intelligence, information gathered during wars against Iran and Hezbollah strengthened the assessment that Arad had never been held in Iran and that Tehran had not been involved in his disappearance.
Suspected execution and cemetery search
In December 2025, Ahmad Shukr, a retired Lebanese security official, disappeared after leaving for what he believed was a meeting concerning a commercial transaction.
Lebanese officials believe Israeli agents abducted him.
According to former Israeli officials and Lebanese sources, Shukr was among the few people suspected of knowing where Arad had been in 1988.
His whereabouts remain unknown, and it is also unclear whether he provided any information about Arad.
Shukr's niece told The New York Times that her uncle had no connection to the case.
Israeli officials told the newspaper that the leading theory is now that Arad was executed in retaliation for the killing of Shukr's brother, who died in a battle with Israeli troops on the same night in 1988.
In March 2026, IDF troops raided Nabi Chit and opened a grave in the village cemetery while searching for Arad's remains.
Dozens of Lebanese were killed and wounded in exchanges of fire and strikes surrounding the operation.
The search of the grave yielded no findings.
According to the officials who spoke to The New York Times, the search for Arad continues in Lebanon.