Former Mossad official Rami Igra on Ron Arad: ‘At that moment, Israel lost the thread’

Rami Igra, former head of the Mossad’s division for prisoners of war and missing persons, spoke on Sunday about the disappearance of missing Israeli airman Ron Arad with Prof. Arieh Eldad and Ron Kofman on 103FM, following a New York Times investigation into the decades-long search for him.

Arad, an Israeli Air Force navigator, has been missing since his plane went down over Lebanon in October 1986.

The New York Times reported that the Mossad abducted former Iranian deputy defense minister Ali Reza Asgari in Turkey in 2006 and interrogated him about Arad, and that Israeli officials now believe Arad was most likely executed in 1988. Israel has denied involvement in Asgari’s disappearance.

'When they came back, he wasn’t in the room'

Igra began by describing the night Arad’s trail went cold.

“Let’s say what can be said. On the night of May 4, 1988, Israel carried out an operation in Lebanon, and Ron Arad’s guards left him to go fight Israel. When they came back, he wasn’t in the room. At that moment, Israel lost the thread that connected it to Ron,” he said.

For about 20 years, the prevailing assessment in Israel’s intelligence community was that Arad had been taken to Iran.

“That view was based on two things,” Igra said. “First, a source said he had seen him in Iran. Second, his captor, [Mustafa] Dirani, who was interrogated in Israel, was fairly sure the Iranians had ‘stolen his goods.’”

Igra said he began to doubt that theory as early as 1996.

“I opposed the Iranian theory for two reasons,” he said. “First, the information that reached us from dozens of sources did not support the claim that he had been taken to Iran. Second, we were negotiating with Iran, and they insisted throughout that they had nothing to do with it. To get us off their backs, in ‘97 they allowed, or ordered, Hezbollah to hand over the bodies of [IDF soldiers Yossi] Fink and [Rahamim] Alsheikh, whom we were able to bring home for burial in Israel.”

Hezbollah also had an interest in proving it did not know Arad’s fate, especially after the 2006 Second Lebanon War, Igra said.

“To prove it, [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah sent Israel DNA samples in abundance. To his regret and ours, none of them was linked to Ron Arad. He was, by the way, very disappointed by that,” Igra said. “You have to understand that in Hezbollah’s organizational culture, Nasrallah knows. So if something happened to Ron Arad that night, he knows.”

'There is nothing Israel doesn’t know how to do'

Had Arad been in Iranian hands, Igra argued, Israel would likely have been able to strike a deal for him.

“We all know the Iranians. If they had something to trade, they would negotiate, and they could have gotten anything they wanted for Ron Arad. Israel had quite a few cards to play, including money owed to Iran by the Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline Company, and there’s a whole story there,” he said.

Only in recent years has the intelligence community’s view changed, according to Igra.

“For many years, the intelligence community was divided, but the general understanding was that he had been taken to Iran,” he said. “Only in recent years, after a series of operations Israel carried out against Iran and others, has it become fairly clear that this is not the story.”

“According to foreign reports, Israel recently brought in the owner of that building and even examined the site that had been identified as Ron’s burial place,” Igra said, referring to efforts to enlist help from Syria in the search.

In March 2026, IDF troops opened a grave in the village cemetery of Nabi Chit, in eastern Lebanon, while searching for Arad’s remains, but found nothing.

“Unfortunately, Ron was not found there, and we are left with a mystery that has lasted 40 years,” Igra said. “But it proves that intelligence is never a closed case, and that Israel did everything it could to bring Ron home and did not succeed, because of a freak event in which, in that moment, Ron disappeared, and no one knows where.”

“There is nothing Israel doesn’t know how to do,” he added. “If we needed to talk to one general or another, we know how to reach him and talk to him.”