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Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Israel's Deepest Mystery: Iran & the Airman Down
January 27, 2004
Ha'aretz
Bradley Burston
It is Israel's deepest mystery, and for many, the most painful of its myriad open wounds.
As Israel prepares to free hundreds of jailed Palestinians, Lebanese, and residents of a dozen other Arab states this week in return for one abducted Israeli and the remains of three IDF soldiers, old, unanswered questions yet again take center stage.
Could airman Ron Arad still be alive, more than 17 years after he was seized by Lebanese militiamen, later to be spirited away to captivity in an ultra-secret safe house in Iran?
Did Yitzhak Rabin make an early, ultimately irreversible error in judgement that cost Arad his freedom and, perhaps, his life?
Israeli officials have taken pains to declare that the mass prisoner exchange slated to take place on Thursday may be their best, if not last, chance to finally secure definitive information on the fate of the navigator. They said the second phase of the exchange would not go forward unless and until Israel was told definitively, at long last, what became of the missing airman.
"Israel is closer than ever to getting real information about Ron Arad's fate," Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said in a speech on Sunday. Despite the "heavy price" that Israel was paying, "I can look into the eyes of the Arad family and of Israel's citizens and say that we have not left a stone unturned."
In the fall of 1986, Arad, then a 28-year-old chemical engineering student at Haifa's prestigious Technion, was called up to reserve duty as a navigator on an Israel Air Force Phantom fighter-bomber. Waiting at home were his young wife, Tami, and a baby daughter named Yuval.
Flying a mission to attack Palestinian targets over Sidon, Lebanon, Arad's Phantom was crippled, reportedly when a bomb it was dropping exploded prematurely. Arad and his pilot bailed out over territory where both Lebanese and Palestinians bore fiery hostility to Israel.
The pilot was safely recovered in a daring rescue operation behind enemy guerrilla lines, but navigator Arad, injured in the parachute jump, was seized by Shi'ite Amal militiamen and was never seen again.
The disappearance prompted an unprecedented effort by Israel's vaunted intelligence services, which searched literally the world over for any clues to Arad's whereabouts and well-being.
The Mossad international espionage agency went so far as to establish an entire department specifically devoted to tracking down Arad and three Israeli servicemen who had gone missing at the outset of Operation Peace for Galilee, Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
Throughout the world, "in the intelligence community, when every case officer, every head of mission, every head of station in the Mossad received their list of priority subjects, Arad was always there," notes Haaretz commentator and intelligence authority Yossi Melman.
The case is, as well, generally acknowledged as one of the most colossal and complete failures in the agency's long history.
Years later, the return of Ron Arad - a matter of daily activist work on the part of an army of volunteers in Israel and abroad - is still of painful personal significance to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who as defense minister spearheaded the Israeli push into Lebanon.
Sharon was himself wounded and nearly left for dead as a young commander in the 1948 war for Israel's independence, and has ever since preached that Israeli troops must never be abandoned on the battlefield.
Arad's disappearance continues to yield new revelations with regularity - but no reliable clues whatsoever as to his fate.
On Tuesday, reserve major general Yossi Peled, Israel's overall northern front commander when Arad's warplane went down, stepped carefully between areas of still-classified military information to describe a mission the IDF was poised to launch in order to rescue Arad in the period following his capture.
"We had very large forces along the northern border, and were very, very, very close to launching a ground operation with very large forces, in order to reach Ron Arad," who had bailed out a few kilometers north of the buffer zone the IDF occupied in southern Lebanon, Peled said.
The trail leading to Arad went cold, apparently when he was taken, in the trunks of civilian vehicles, to an ever-shifting range of locations within the civilian population of southern Lebanon.
"In the end, a decision was taken, that we did not truly know how to act and where to act, in an immediate ground operation in order to reach him, and so we did not carry it out," Peled said, adding that one factor in the decision was that "We were not far [in time] from Operation Peace for Galilee, with all of its trauma and fears."
Peled said that in the end "It was a failure of our intelligence, which spent so much time, in so many directions. It was very odd, truly, that intelligence services such as ours could not pinpoint [him] and say, 'He's here.'"
There were signs of life, including a letter to his wife, and a photographs of a bearded Arad, for some 20 months following his disappearance.
"Please do your best to get me out of here, because Lebanon is no place to be, and I really want to see you all," he wrote his wife in 1987. "No one should have to remain in captivity when there are other alternatives."
Months of intensive negotiations between Israel and Amal, using intermediaries from London to Sierra Leone, followed the capture.
But then-defense minister Yitzhak Rabin was under intense pressure to limit the number of prisoners to be exchanged for Arad, says Melman.
Much of the pressure came from bitterness over and heavy criticism of Rabin's agreement to the "Jibril deal" of 1985, in which 1,150 Palestinians were traded for three Israeli soldiers captured in Lebanon and held by Ahmed Jibril's militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.
Most of the men freed under the Jibril deal returned to homes in the West Bank, where they would take leading roles in the first intifada, which erupted in December 1987.
"Under the 'Jibril' cloud, Rabin halted the negotiations in 1988, because he believed he could clinch a better deal," Melman says.
Mustafa Dirani, who at the time headed Amal's security apparatus, then escaped with Arad, and Israel lost all contact with the airman.
Later, Dirani, kidnapped by Israel in a 1994 commando operation aimed at securing Arad's release with new information or by holding Dirani as a bargaining chip, was to claim that Iran's Republican Guards kidnapped Arad from Dirani's custody, and had made off with him.
Israel, for its part, maintains that Dirani "sold" Arad to the Iranians for $300,000.
Another account has it that Arad was being held near the Lebanese village of Maidoun, when the hamlet came under Israeli bombing. Arad's guards reportedly had relatives in the village, and went to see if they had been hurt, locking Arad in a cellar. When the guards returned, the account continued, Arad was gone.
Is Ron Arad still alive? Senior Israeli security officials were quoted late Monday as saying that their latest assessment indicated that he had died while in captivity.
Minutes later, however, Shlomo Shavit, who headed the Mossad from 1989 until 1996, surprised a panel news program by saying "It is my assessment that Ron Arad is alive."
The much-watched Channel 2 television program also broadcast an interview with an Iranian exile who identified himself as having served as a security officer supervising safe houses operated by Iran's Revolutionary Guard to hold prisoners in secret.
The Iranian, named only as Samavat, said he had first met Arad in 1996, in a safe house operated by the Guard in Tehran. "He was guarded by 16 members of the Al-Quds [Revolutionary] Guards," Samavat said. "His code name was Taban."
The last time he saw Arad was in 1998, when the captive flyer "was hospitalized after a cardiac incident," Samavat said, saying he was one of Arad's guards while in the hospital.
According to leaks from a secret government inquiry conducted recently, a high-level panel has recommended "maintaining and acting upon the assumption that Arad is still alive."
"From an intelligence standpoint, in a relatively early stage, it was proven beyond nearly any doubt that he was in the hands of the Iranians, that he was taken from Hezbollah in Lebanon and taken to the Iranians," Shavit said.
"We must assume that the Iranians are holding him alive," continued Shavit, now board chairman of the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center's International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism.
"The Iranians wanted him as a bargaining chip. At first, they held him as an asset, believing that they could exact a very high price for his return. As time went on, and no deal was struck, he gradually turned into a liability.
"Nonetheless,' he told Channel 2 television, "given that the whole world knows and believes that he is in Iranian hands, the Iranians have nearly no alternative but to keep him alive - within Iran, a country as big as Europe. There's no problem whatsoever holding and hiding a single person in that country."
Melman agrees that Arad was probably taken to Iran by the Revolutionary Guards and hidden away in its network of safe houses, much as Al-Qaida operatives have been kept there in recent years.
However, Melman emphasizes, "the prevailing assumption in Israeli intelligence is that Arad is dead, either because he was injured and ill and received poor treatment, or because they killed him, like the Wallenberg case."
Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from death in Nazi extermination camps in World War II, was taken afterward to the Gulag prison camp network of Stalin's Soviet Union, which refused to acknowledge the abduction and said nothing when Wallenberg died there.
"In dictatorial nations, once top leaders claim they have no knowledge of someone in their custody, eventually he has to be killed," Melman says. "For many, many years, they denied that they had Wallenberg at all. Later on, it became clear that he had been taken to the Soviet union after the war. And then, they executed him, to prevent their becoming embarrassed."
In the Arad case, Iran has been pressed for answers by nearly every visiting foreign dignitary. "The Iranians, having denied it so often, came to decide 'He's no longer an asset. Let's get rid of the goods.'"
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