Iran was the bogeyman." This is how retired senior Israeli army officer Avi Kalu describes the fixation behind decades of kidnapping and killing Israelis in the hunt for Ron Arad, an Israeli pilot who has been missing since 1986, according to an investigation by the New York Times.
In December 2006, Mossad operatives kidnapped Iranian General Alireza Asgari in Istanbul, interrogated him for weeks and killed him, former US officials told The Times.
One said he was interrogated on a boat and thrown into the Black Sea. He knew nothing about Arad. In September 2021, Israeli agents posing as carriers drugged General Abdullah Sabri in Damascus, forced him into a refrigerator box and took him to Israel for questioning. He says he was tortured.
The attacks were carried out despite Israeli intelligence reviews in 2006 and 2016 concluding that Arad had never been to Iran.