In late 2005, Yitzhak Ilan came for a meeting with the then-Mossad chief, Meir Dagan. At the time, Ilan was a relative veteran in his position as head of the Investigation Branch in Israel's Security Agency, better known as Shin Bet.
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This meeting was no ordinary working meeting. It had been specially convened, and Ilan came to it with Steve, his deputy at the time and who would later replace him as head of the Investigation Branch. "Dagan told us that he wanted to discuss something important with us," Steve recounts, "When we arrived, he told us that he had promised the family that he would leave no stone unturned in the effort to find out what had happened to Ron Arad, and that he wanted us to do this together with him. This sent a veritable chill down our spines."
Dagan had come to earn tremendous respect for Ilan and to trust him following a previous case. This is also the reason why he asked me to take care of the Arad portfolio, which was an extremely sensitive issue, in terms of the security aspects, and vis a vis the public and of course the family.
Arad was taken captive on October 16, 1986. On that fateful morning, he left together with the pilot, Yishai Aviram, for an attack sortie in the area of Sidon in southern Lebanon. During the bombing run, one of the bombs exploded too close to the Phantom jet, and they were forced to eject from the airplane.
Aviram was rescued in a heroic operation during which he hung on to the skis of the Bell AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter. This was the first time that such a daring rescue attempt had been made, under fire and subject to extreme conditions. Two years later, once again, Cobra attack helicopters were used to extricate IDF combat troops in distress in Lebanon. This time, it was four soldiers from the IDF's Golani infantry brigade who had been left behind during a raid on the HQ of Ahmed Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC) in the village of Nu'eima.
The IAF navigator, Ron Arad, was taken captive by the Lebanese Shi'ite organization, Amal. During his initial period in captivity, Israel was able to maintain ongoing contact with him. Though no Red Cross personnel were allowed to visit him, three letters were delivered to his family, along with one photo testifying to the fact that he was alive and in good condition. This is the photo that has remained etched in our collective national memory: Arad appears in it sporting a beard, and his eyes are sad, a completely different picture to the 'baby-faced' IAF navigator who had been taken prisoner only several months previously.
Israel conducted negotiations for Arad's release. The Israeli public was still reeling from the trauma of the infamous Jibril Deal, signed in May 1985, in which 1,150 security prisoners were released in return for three IDF prisoners captured during the First Lebanon War – Hezi Shai, Yosef Grof, and Nissim Salem.
Among those released were Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas who had been sentenced to 13 years imprisonment; Jibril Rajoub, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for throwing a hand grenade at an IDF truck; as well as Kozo Okamoto, who had been given three life sentences for his part in the massacre at Lod Airport in 1972. In addition, numerous other murderers were released too, the majority of whom returned to their previous terrorist activity. It did not take long for those released in the Jibril Deal to become the leaders of the First Intifada, which erupted in December 1987.
The wholesale release of terrorists, including a large number of murderers, stirred up considerable emotion among the Israeli public. The then-unity government was subsequently extremely reluctant to strike another deal, even though the asking price for Arad was relatively inexpensive: several million dollars combined with the release of only a few dozen prisoners.
The working assumption at the time was that there was no urgency involved in this effort. Although Arad was a captive, there was a clear point of contact and ongoing negotiations. This was a tragic working assumption, which not only cost Ron Arad his life but also contributed to the mystery surrounding the circumstances of his disappearance. Since then, the State of Israel has invested extremely larger sums of money than those it had been asked to pay for him at the time – and also endangered the lives of numerous IDF soldiers in a multiplicity of special operations, without any success in bringing him back home.
The last solid testimony as to Arad's whereabouts was on May 4, 1988. He was held by a family known to be a supporter of the Amal organization in the Lebanese town of Nabi Chit. On the previous day, the IDF had just begun a large-scale operation against terrorist targets in the neighboring town of Meidoun. IDF paratrooper forces under the command of the brigade commander at the time, Shaul Mofaz, raided the village, killing 50 terrorists. This was the largest and most successful military operation undertaken by the IDF subsequent to its first pullback of forces to southern Lebanon since the outbreak of war in 1982.
The IDF was not aware that Arad was being held in Nabi Chit, which is only 50 km away from Meidoun. It is not clear what course of action Israel would have chosen had it known that Arad was located relatively close to where the operation was being conducted. Later on, Hezbollah claimed that the men who had been guarding Arad, had heard about the Israeli offensive and abandoned their posts in order to help their colleagues who had been attacked. When they returned home later, Arad was missing. They claim that Arad simply disappeared and that his location was then never known.
Israel had no access to any information as to where Arad had disappeared or who was holding him. In an attempt to gain some progress toward solving this enigmatic issue, Israel began to abduct Lebanese figures to serve as bargaining chips for him. After Hezbollah announced in August 1988 that it was holding Arad, a decision was made to abduct one of the Shi'ite organization's senior figures.
The first significant abduction was carried out in July 1989. A force from the IDF's General Staff Reconnaissance Unit, or Sayeret Matkal as it is called in Hebrew, abducted Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid, from his home in the village of Jibshit in southern Lebanon. Obeid was a key spiritual leader and the Hezbollah military commander in southern Lebanon. He was also a senior figure involved in the kidnapping of several foreign nationals in Lebanon, carried out for the purpose of gaining ransoms.
Under the authorization of the then Director of Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, the Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, summoned Ilan for a special meeting. His request was simple: "Take all the material that has been accumulated on Arad from the moment he was taken captive, conduct any investigative action required, and come back with the answer to what happened to him."
The abduction of Obeid did not lead to any solution. Neither did his interrogation raise any new information as to Arad's fate. At the time, Israel was not even able to say whether he was alive or dead, or who was holding him.
In an attempt to go further back and decipher what had become of Arad, Sayeret Matkal abducted an additional senior Lebanese. Mustafa Dirani was abducted from his home in the village of Kasarnaba in Lebanon's Beqa'a Valley and was taken to Israel for interrogation. Dirani had been the security officer of Amal for many years and was responsible for Arad's imprisonment from the moment he was taken captive. He also allowed various other entities to interrogate Arad, including officers from Syrian intelligence.
In the year before the disappearance of the IAF navigator, a rift developed between Dirani and Amal, and he began to draw closer to Hezbollah and various Iranian entities. In response, he was dismissed from the organization by its leader, Nabih Berri, but he continued to keep hold of Arad.
In Israel, the working premise was that Dirani had either handed over or sold Arad to other organizations. Although he denied any connection to the disappearance of the IAF navigator, but in Israel they decided to abduct him in any case, in an attempt to get to the bottom of the issue. A long, intensive interrogation process in Israel produced no results. At the end of which, nobody was any the wiser as to what had happened to Ron.
Obeid and Dirani were released in January 2004 as part of a deal between Israel and Hezbollah. In addition to them, a further 400 Palestinian terrorists were also released along with 27 foreign nationals, most of them Lebanese. All of these were handed over in return for Colonel (res.) Elhanan Tannenbaum. Israel also received the bodies of three IDF KIAs – Benny Avraham, Adi Avitan, and Omar Sawaid – who had been abducted and taken to Lebanon in October 2000.
In the years that elapsed following the disappearance of Arad, Israel invested tremendous efforts to understand what had happened to him. Considerable amounts of money were paid to a variety of elements, including criminal ones, in an attempt to learn something new. Non-profit organizations that had been established offered extremely generous rewards for anybody able to provide information about him.
Both the IDF's Military Intelligence Directorate and the Mossad painstakingly collected any available scrap of information that might shed some light on the case. A good deal of the information collected was erroneous and often contradictory. In 1995, an Iranian exile in the USA was interviewed, claiming that Arad was being held at a prison belonging to the Iranian intelligence in the city of Esfahan and that he was paralyzed in both legs and was bound to a wheelchair after being wounded in an escape attempt. Two German civilians who had been released at that time from jail in Iran claimed that they had heard that an Israeli pilot was being held there in solitary confinement.
But Ilan and his team had unequivocally determined that Arad had never left Lebanon. Steve, who worked alongside him, says: "Yitzhak placed emphasis on facts alone. He sketched out the various steps, and then said to me, 'Listen, Ron Arad never left Nabi Chit'."
Although these pieces of information were never actually verified, many in the Israeli intelligence community believed that Arad had been taken to Iran. This was also the popular working assumption in the security establishment for many years: that Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons did know what had happened to Arad.
The working plan was thus clearly derived from this assumption. Consequently, all the efforts were focused on Iran and its Lebanese protege. Attempts by others to claim that this was a mistake were simply dismissed. Members of German intelligence, who claimed in 1997 that Arad was no longer alive, were also summarily dismissed.
In December 2000, Israel released 40 Palestinian and 12 Lebanese prisoners. In return, it received from Hezbollah Arad's personal survival weapon, that had been taken when he was captured. As far as Israel was concerned, this was additional proof of the fact that Hezbollah was calling the shots and that the Shi'ite organization had the key to solving the mystery once and for all.
In the absence of hard intelligence to either support or refute the existing working assumptions, Israel continued to act in accordance with the assumption that Ron Arad was alive and being held by Shi'ite factions, either in Lebanon or Iran. Even a special committee headed by the retired judge, Justice Eliyahu Winograd, determined that there is no reason to change the existing assumption that Arad is alive.
Arad's family has acted with considerable dignity from the moment he was taken captive. In the first few years, at the request of the defense establishment, it remained quiet, as government officials explained that should it choose to make waves this would only prompt Amal to push up the price it was demanding for Ron's release.
Only in the early 90's, did the family opt to engage on a public campaign. By this stage, it really was too little, and mainly too late. A few years later it decided once again to adopt a lower profile. The one person who continued to manage the campaign until the end of her days (she died in 2002), was Ron's mother, Batya.
Batya Arad was a realistic and down-to-earth woman. She understood that Ron was most likely no longer alive, and so she simply asked to know what had become of him. If he was dead, she said, then don't pay one cent to bring his body back. Just tell me what happened to him.
This last will of Batya Arad was placed in the trust of Mossad chief Meir Dagan. Ron Arad's other relatives – his wife Tami, his daughter Yuval, and his siblings Chen and Dudu – have been in charge of it ever since. "It is the state's responsibility to solve this mystery," they explained, "The state sent him on the mission and the state should tell us what happened to him."
As far as Dagan was concerned, this was a lifetime mission. As a combatant and a commander who took part in a series of bold operations, he fully understood the importance of ensuring that all soldiers returned safely home. He fully intended to use his term of office as Director of the Mossad in order to do what he had pledged to do: to leave no stone unturned until the mystery was solved.
Under Dagan, the Mossad engaged in a number of efforts to obtain a lead. One of these efforts even led to the death of a Mossad agent. Throughout this entire time, contradictory information as to Ron's ultimate fate continued to arrive too. While senior Iranians claimed that he was being held in Iran, in 2005 a secret report of the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate was published, determining that Ron Arad had died in Lebanon in the mid-1990s.
According to this report, Arad was held in Iran and then returned to Lebanon as the Iranians feared that Dirani would break under interrogation and reveal that the Iranians were holding him. A minority opinion in the report stated that Arad had never left Lebanon and that he had remained in Lebanon under the auspices of elements related to the IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps).
This contradictory information never really led to any decisive conclusion, but it did lead Dagan to try another approach. Under the authorization of the then Director of Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, Dagan summoned Ilan for a special meeting. Dagan's request was simple: "Take all the material that has been accumulated on Arad from the moment he was taken captive until today, conduct any investigative action required, and come back with the answer to what happened to him."
"When we came into this story, the dominant approach in the establishment was that Ron Arad had been lost in Iran," Diskin states. "I think that Meir knew full well that there is no entity in the establishment that is as good at operational intelligence and that would be able to understand the sources of information as the Shin Bet. Meir also greatly appreciated Yitzhak's abilities and qualities, following a number of cases that we had worked on together."
Ilan established a special team to deal with this task. A limited group of people, privy to the sensitive information worked in parallel to their regular jobs and reopened all the case files of the Military Intelligence Directorate and the Mossad on the Ron Arad affair. "A truly meaningful Zionist mission of the greatest importance," was how one official referred to it.
"From the moment he brought us in on this mission, Yitzhak became totally preoccupied with it," says Steve. "He took Dagan's request, won us all over and took him with us to deal with it. We analyzed the case file together with the key events and the last actions of Ron Arad, drilling down to the level of specific minutes – anybody who met him, who was involved when he moved to the right or to the left."
"Yitzhak and his team went through the case files with a fine toothcomb for a long period of time. Afterwards, they came to present me with their findings," Diskin recounts. "They showed me that all the intelligence relating to Arad's transfer to Iran was faulty, while the pre-existing intelligence was solid and reliable."
David Meidan: "I can tell you about a lesson regarding Ron Arad that accompanied me throughout the entire negotiations for the release of Gilad Shalit: opportunities in such situations, between states or between a state and an organization, are like fruit on a tree. Sometimes if you hesitate before picking them, they fall off the tree."
Ilan and his team reached an unequivocal conclusion that Arad had never left Lebanon. Steve, who worked alongside him, claimed: "Yitzhak placed emphasis on facts alone, not on assessments. He sketched out the various steps, and then said to me, 'Listen, Ron Arad never left Nabi Chit. He ended his life there.'"
Ilan's words completely shook up the entire establishment. "Until then, there had been broad consensus that he was in Iran. Suddenly, we came along and showed that was not the case," Diskin explains.
Dagan accepted Ilan's assertion that Ron Arad had never left Lebanon. He asked Diskin to continue to work together at this stage too: to try and find out what had become of Ron Arad.
"One month after I was appointed prime minister, Meir came to me with an operation that was to be carried out in the Far East," tells former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, "It was an operation involving substantial risk, one that everybody else had recommended not to carry out, but Meir came to press me.
I told everybody that I was only interested in knowing what Arad's fate was – if he was alive or dead, and if he was alive, then where. After all, we were talking about an Israeli soldier who had been captured and was alive, from whom we initially received letters, and then suddenly it was as though he had simply disappeared off the face of the earth. I did not address the issue of what price we would be forced to pay in order to release him. Even his mother said that she would make do with simply knowing what had happened, so I felt it was my duty just to provide her with an answer.
I asked everybody to rethink the operation one more time and to get back to me with an answer. They did get back to me and I decided to go ahead with that operation. In the meantime, they changed the operation's location and its parameters. It was carried out in another country and under different circumstances. It was a Mossad operation, but Yitzhak was in charge of the investigation."
This operation was only one in a long series of other operations led by Ilan over a number of years. "These were sensitive and irregular operations, which included joint Mossad and Shin Bet teams in all sorts of locations around the world, on occasions in conjunction with foreign intelligence organizations too," Diskin explains. "In these operations, we corroborated the claim that Ron Arad had never left Lebanon."
"These were extremely sensitive, clandestine operations, with the potential for enormous damage," says Olmert. "In one of them, there was a dominant character who had to be questioned. Ilan's team questioned that character for a month and eventually, we came to the conclusion that this individual actually knew nothing about what had happened to Ron. Having said that, this was a dramatic investigation, for as a result of it we came to the final conclusion that Ron had never been outside Lebanon."
Another dramatic operation was conducted in Europe. It involved the interrogation of individuals who were relatives of the family that had held Arad in the village of Nabi Chit. The Mossad reached them in the European country where they lived, and they agreed to be questioned, out of fear that they might be killed if they refused. The interrogation itself was conducted in another European country to the one where they had been caught. "Yitzhak and his team questioned them, but they failed to uncover anything new," says Olmert.
Ilan never spoke to anybody outside the security establishment regarding the investigation into Ron Arad, or the part he played in it. Neither did he meet with the family. "If only we could tell them what Yitzhak did," says Steve. Ilan passed away on October 16, the very same date on which Ron Arad was taken captive.
Yitzhak and his team traveled abroad on 25 occasions to take part in different investigative actions related to the case. "Individuals who had been extremely close to those who had held Ron were questioned, and this entire effort was completely focused on finding out what had happened to him," says Steve. "We came as close as possible to determining what had occurred to him. Based on our assertion, the then IDF Chief Military Rabbi, Rafi Peretz, was about to declare him a fallen soldier whose place of burial is unknown."
At the end of all these operations and investigations, Ilan established that Ron Arad had been killed in the village of Nabi Chit where he had been held, or in the surrounding vicinity. It occurred during the IDF operation in Meidoun, apparently as an act of revenge. "In our opinion, what occurred is that the brother-in-law of the family holding him was killed in Meidoun, and then the head of the family decided to "get even'. He took Ron out, killed him and then buried him in some hidden location," as Olmert puts it. "We tried to find that location based on the investigations we conducted, but unfortunately without success. But I am convinced that he is buried there."
Both Diskin and Steve agree with Ilan's conclusion. "Following the IDF operation in Meidoun, somebody from the family holding Ron Arad in Nabi Chit took him, and from that point onwards, we lost any trace of him," says Diskin. "Where is his body? After 30 years it is somewhat difficult to get to it, but we believe that from an intelligence point of view this case is closed."
"We conducted a very large number of activities in Israel and Europe in order to confirm our findings," says Steve. "What happened on the night he disappeared is connected to the issue of revenge. There were numerous indications pointing in that direction. Somebody killed him and somebody buried him."
David Meidan, the former senior Mossad official who was later appointed the government's coordinator on the issue of POWs and MIAs, and who led the negotiations on the deal for the release of Gilad Shalit from Hamas captivity, also believes that Ilan was right. "My position is the same as that of Yitzhak Ilan," he said in an interview to the Yediot Aharonot newspaper. "We spoke about this and we analyzed it from every possible angle. I can't think of any intelligence issue that Israel has invested such considerable efforts in an attempt to solve it. Endless resources and efforts were invested, and unfortunately, in the end, it all came to nothing."
Meidan adds that he implemented the lessons learned from the Ron Arad affair in the negotiations for the release of Shalit. "I can tell you one lesson regarding Arad that accompanied me throughout the entire negotiations for the release of Gilad Shalit: opportunities in such situations, between states or between a state and an organization, are like fruit on a tree. Sometimes if you hesitate before picking them, they fall off the tree. You have to be extremely swift to respond and must not begin to hesitate. We apparently had an opportunity to conclude a deal to bring back Ron Arad for a relatively paltry sum, and we failed to take it."
Ilan never spoke to anybody outside the security establishment regarding the investigation into Ron Arad, or the part he played in it. Neither did he meet with the family. "If only we could tell them what Yitzhak did," says Steve.
Yitzhak Ilan passed away on October 16. The very same date on which Ron Arad was taken captive.
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