Last week, a shipment of unusual postal matter caused a furor in Lebanon: hundreds of color photo…

The $10 million question By Yossi Melman – the Israel Air Force navigator who has been missing in since 1986 – accompanied by an announcement of a $10 million reward to anyone who can provide credible information about his fate, were seized by the authorities. Behind the shipment is the association „Born to Freedom,” which sent thousands of such letters, mainly to public institutions and to villages in the Lebanese Bekaa. The association’s CEO, Uri Chen, maintains adamantly that the address lists were compiled by researchers working for the association and were not received from the intelligence community – even though the association has close ties with the Mossad espionage agency and Military Intelligence and works in cooperation with the two bodies. The shipment of the letters is only one step in an information campaign aimed at publicizing the existence of the reward. Chen and Menashe Amir, Israel’s Radio’s expert on Iran, went on an interview tour in the United States, with a special emphasis on radio and television stations (most of them on the West Coast) which broadcast in Farsi and are popular in Iran as well. Chen was also interviewed by many media outlets in Lebanon and by the cable television stations Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. However, the high point of his media achievements, he says, is the broadcast of an interview with him (which was taken from an international news agency) on Al Manar, the television station of Hezbollah. In addition, the association publishes paid ads in Arabic papers and has placed signs about the reward in airports in the United States. Details about the campaign can also be found at the association’s Internet site (www.10million.org) in four languages: English, Arabic, Farsi and Russian – on the assumption that, given Russia’s ties with Syria and Iran, there might be people in Russia who can supply information. The association has phone and fax numbers in Britain and Israel and e-mail addresses which those with information can contact. Replies are vetted by operators at the association’s headquarters. To date, about 3,000 people have contacted the association. Over the years, Arad’s family, and especially his brothers, David and Chen, alleged that the state was not doing enough to rescue their brother. In 2001, in an attempt to advance the efforts to locate him and release him they established the Born to Freedom association, which received generous government funding. The government’s decision to allocate the reward generated arguments within the intelligence community and the defense establishment. Many officials objected to the move and viewed it as akin to „privatizing” the search efforts for Arad. „Above all else, the private project reflects the Arad family’s lack of confidence in the State of Israel,” says Rami Igra, a former head of the Mossad’s division for prisoners and missing persons. „Israel turned over every possible stone in an effort to find information about Arad and the other MIAs [missing in action]. Although I can understand the Arad family and I know that we must not judge anyone until we are in the same situation, I believe the family’s allegation that not enough was done is groundless. Large-scale resources and, in my estimate, tens of millions of dollars were invested in the efforts to locate Ron.” In one of the two years in which Igra was in charge of the search, he personally flew 100 times to meet with sources and talk to colleagues from foreign intelligence communities and with anyone who might possibly be able to help. Naturally, other personnel from the Mossad and from Military Intelligence (MI) took part in similar operations to collect information. „I am against the reward, because it is not called for,” Igra emphasizes. „The idea was considered before on a number of occasions. I myself raised the proposal but it was rejected, and rightly so, on the grounds that it is wrong to set a ceiling, because that limits the imagination. If the amount of the reward was not set, someone might reach the conclusion that the subject is so important for Israel that it would be ready to pay any amount. Now it is clear that Israel is ready to pay `only’ $10 million.” Immoral decision At first the government tried to hide the decision about the reward, but was forced to admit its existence in the wake of media reports. Originally, the allocation of the funds and the launching of the public campaign were set for September 2003. However, the project was postponed because of the proximity to the negotiations that Israel conducted with Hezbollah for the release of Elhanan Tennenbaum (a colonel in the Israel Defense Forces reserves whom Hezbollah abducted abroad) and for the return of the bodies of the soldiers who were killed in the battle at the Shaba Farms. The Arad family was enraged by the deal, and especially by the release of Mustafa Dirani and Sheikh Abdel Karim Obeid, who had been abducted years earlier by Israel and held as „bargaining chips” for Arad’s return. The family petitioned the High Court of Justice and launched a public campaign against the deal, arguing that Dirani and Obeid must not be part of the deal as long as no information had been received about Ron Arad. In an apparent effort to pacify the family, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz agreed that the entire reward – $10 million – would come from the state budget. Until then, spokesmen for the Prime Minister’s Office and the Defense Ministry claimed the state would provide only a third of the amount, with the rest to come from donations and from the family. By taking this step, the government may have scored points with the Arad family and its supporters, but it outraged the families of the other missing soldiers – no reward is being offered for information about them. „This is discrimination between blood and blood,” says Yona Baumel, father of Zachary Baumel, who has been missing since the battle at Sultan Yakub, in Lebanon, in June 1982. „This is an immoral decision which is sowing destruction in the IDF,” Baumel asserts. Baumel says he sent a letter to the prime minister complaining about the unfair treatment five months ago. „I know you are under various pressures,” he wrote. „It is not yet too late to rectify this fatal mistake.” Receiving no reply, he sent Sharon a reminder two months later, in which he noted that „10 million, most of which is Israeli government money, is also money of the taxpaying families of Feldman, Katz, Hever and Baumel,” all of which have sons missing in action. Sharon has yet to reply to either letter. Baumel’s feelings are shared by the family of the missing soldier Yehuda Katz. „More than a month ago my family and I met with the prime minister,” says Pirhiya Katz, Yehuda’s sister. „We asked him why this discrimination between the Arad family and our families. Is the blood of Ron Arad thicker than the blood of my brother, Yehuda? The prime minister squirmed and answered that the body is against it. I understood that he was referring to the Ron Arad association. `But this is state money,’ I told him, `you are responsible for it and you can allocate a similar amount for our struggle, too.’ The prime minister did not have an answer.” This week, Pirhiya Katz decided to file a petition to the High Court of Justice against the prime minister, the defense minister, the chief of staff and the head of the Personnel Directorate in the IDF. Katz’s lawyer, Yishai Sarid, is asking the court to instruct the government to allocate a similar reward for information about Yehuda Katz. Repeated requests to the Prime Minister’s Bureau and the Defense Ministry by Haaretz for a reto this development went unanswered. The spokeswomen of the Defense Ministry stated, „Since this is not a routine matter, it is only reasonable that the establishment should act in stages. In the first stage, each of the MIAs from Sultan Yakub and Guy Hever (who disappeared without trace on the Golan Heights in August 1997) has a page on the association’s Internet site. In the second stage, a decision will be made, based on the results in practice, whether to continue with the project, expand it, or move to a new format.” Shooting in the dark Born to Freedom was established at Farm 40 in Moshav Shdema, the address of Avihu Bin Nun, a former chief commander of the Air Force, who is the chairman of the association’s board. The vice chairman is attorney Elad Shraga, who has gone to court several times on the family’s behalf. The association’s declared aim is „to act in every possible way and by every legal means to bring about the release of the imprisoned navigator Major Ron Arad and to act by every means and by every legal means to bring about the release of other prisoners, MIAs and abductees.” In addition to members of the Arad family, the board of directors includes Ami Ayalon, a former chief of the Shin Bet security service; Major General (res.) Yehuda Segev, a former head of the Personnel Directorate; Major General (res.) Gabi Ophir, former chief of the Home Front Command; Brigadier General (res.) Doran Tamir, a former chief intelligence officer and several leading businessmen, among them Avi Wertheim. Six months ago, Uri Chen, a senior member of the defense establishment until his retirement, was appointed the association’s CEO. Chen is running the association clandestinely. He made his agreement to grant an interview conditional on Haaretz not publishing the association’s Tel Aviv address, even though it appears on the business cards he hands out liberally in Israel and abroad, and even though it has previously been reported in the Israeli media. He also declined to provide details about the operating budget of the public association which he manages or about its salaried employees, noting only that his salary does not even cover his expenses. (Requests for information from David and Chen Arad went unanswered.) According to reports filed by the association, as required by law, with the Registrar of Associations, its outlays for salaries in 2002 were approximately NIS 268,000. Of this amount, Assaf Harel, a former officer whom Uri Chen replaced as CEO, received about NIS 35,000. A year later the expenses for salaries had grown fourfold, totaling NIS 1.18 million in 2003 – 23.6 percent of the annual budget of NIS 5 million. The association’s employees earn handsome salaries. Within one year (2002 to 2003) the salary of former CEO Harel spiraled by more than tenfold, to NIS 376,600 (an average monthly wage cost of NIS 31,000). Other salaried employees were Merav Sarel, who is in charge of marketing (NIS 150,000 a year), Adi Gotshal (NIS 212,000) and Florine Kramer (NIS 150,000). The financial reports for 2004 have yet to be filed, and because of the association’s refusal to provide data about its activity it is necessary to rely on the figures supplied by the spokeswoman of the Defense Ministry, Rachel Naidek Ashkenazi. „The multiyear operating budget, which is allocated by the Defense Ministry, is NIS 12.4 million,” she stated. „From 2002 until today, the Defense Ministry paid NIS 9.1 million of that amount.” From this it can be inferred that the association will receive more than NIS 3 million from the Defense Ministry this year. In June 2003, the Israeli government agreed to budget an additional – and far larger – amount for the association: $10 million, in the form of a reward for reliable and current information about Ron Arad. The reward offer is the jewel in the crown of the publicity campaign the association launched in December 2004, when Uri Chen took over as CEO. „The key is marketing and publicity,” Chen says. „The goal is to reach the target audiences, namely in Syria, Iran, Lebanon and in the migrant communities from those countries, in which, we believe, there is a person or a group of people who have information about Ron Arad. I find it difficult to believe that the earth simply swallowed him and he disappeared without leaving any trace for the past 16 years [the last reliable information that he is alive was received in 1988].” Can you be specific about the target audience? Chen: „I can’t say for sure, but we are aiming at senior army and intelligence officers who served in the Revolutionary Guards, Syrian and Iranian officers, physicians and medics who may have treated him, and prison guards who perhaps worked in prisons where he was held. I do not pretend to know all the answers. We are shooting in the dark and engaged in trial and error in order to reach the widest possible target public. If we encounter a blocked door we will try to enter through the window.” The association’s point of departure, like that of the Israeli intelligence community, is that as long as there is no proof to the contrary, Ron Arad is still alive. But there are many in the intelligence community who do not believe this is the case. „Since 1988 there has been no definitive information that Arad is alive,” Rami Igra says. The person who was responsible for the last reliable piece of information received by Israel was Jamil Said, a Shi’ite who died about five years ago in Lebanon, in his early 70s. Said’s body language and facial expression made it plain that he did not like Israelis. Nevertheless, he agreed to mediate in the contacts involving Arad’s release and transmitted messages between Israel and the Shi’ite leadership. His motives were not clear, but Israelis who met him are convinced he did not do it for money. He did not need money. Said was a wealthy businessman. He emigrated from Lebanon to Sierra Leone, where he dealt in commerce, including the diamond trade. Within a few years he established himself financially in his new country and got to know the heads of government, and his business flourished. In the mid-1980s he met the Israeli businessman Shabtai Kalmanovitch in Freetown, the capital. Kalmanovitch, who immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union in 1972, made his fortune in Bophutswana, a protectorate of the apartheid regime in South Africa, which was not recognized by any other country. On one of his flights to Africa, Kalmanovitch met the wife of General Joseph Momo, the chief of staff of the Sierra Leone armed forces. After Momo became president of the country, in January 1986, he invited Kalmanovitch to visit and awarded him franchises to mine diamonds, open casinos and build a residential neighborhood. Kalmanovitch, who three years later would be convicted in Israel of spying for the Soviet Union, brought with him to Sierra Leone his Israeli coterie of architects, contractors, soccer trainers, merchants, physicians and his lawyer, Amnon Zichroni. This time he also added a few senior army officers, one of whom was Dov Tamari, a brigadier general in the reserves and former commander of the ultra-elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit and an intelligence officer. Tamari was asked to act as a security consultant and to help improve security for president Momo and his government. These ties only raised Kalmanovitch’s stock with his KGB handlers. Secret meeting in London At 4 P.M. on October 16, 1986, an Israeli Phantom jet from Squadron 69 (the Hammers) attacked an entrenched position of Palestinians about four kilometers southeast of Sidon, in Lebanon. The pilot, Yishai A., and the navigator, Ron Arad, reached the target and identified it, and following the procedures with which they were very familiar, released the bomb – a regular bomb of 360 kilograms. Because of a defect, the bomb exploded in the air and the plane was severely buffeted. The pilot, understanding that the plane had been badly damaged, decided to abandon the aircraft. He and Arad bailed out and landed on the ground a few hundred meters from each other. About two hours later, an air force rescue helicopter located the pilot and got him out under fire. However, communication with Arad was lost and the rescue crews could not find him. Possibly his radio device was damaged, or he may have been injured. A few days later, based on interviews that were published in the press with local residents who witnessed the incident, and based on intelligence investigations, it emerged that Arad had been taken captive by Shi’ite fighters from Nabih Berri’s Amal organization. It also turned out that he had been injured and had received medical treatment in Sidon and afterward in a clinic in Beirut. Officials in the defense establishment breathed a sigh of relief over the fact that Arad was not in the hands of a Palestinian organization. Now the goal was to make contact with Berri in order to obtain Arad’s release. In intelligence argot this approach is known as „levers”: locating people through whom a message can be transmitted. At the time, Uri Lubrani, a veteran diplomat and intelligence man, who was Israel’s ambassador to Iran, was the government’s coordinator of activities in Lebanon. He, too, looked for a „lever” into the Shi’ite community. On one of his trips abroad he met attorney Amnon Zichroni on the plane and explained the problem to him. „I have an idea for you,” Zichroni said, and proceeded to tell him about his client, Shabtai Kalmanovitch, and about the latter’s ties with Shi’ite businessmen in Sierra Leone. Zichroni set up the meeting for a Tel Aviv hotel. Lubrani came to the meeting knowing from the Shin Bet that Kalmanovitch was suspected of having very close ties with the Soviet KGB. Kalmanovitch told Lubrani about Jamil Said, whom he knew, and promised to speak to him and ask for his help. As good as his word, Kalmanovitch arranged for Lubrani to meet Said in London. In the meantime, Lubrani had perused intelligence community files and discovered that Said was close to the Amal movement in general and to Nabih Berri in particular and had donated money to him. This would have seemed to be a tailor-made mission for the Mossad. Indeed, this is the espionage agency’s mandate: to maintain secret ties and contacts abroad. However, the Mossad’s methods of operation involve numerous precautions, such as changing meeting places and securing them; Lubrani was more flexible. He phoned Said and arranged a time and place to meet him, even though he knew that he was taking a risk – someone could ambush and liquidate him. The Mossad, which was then headed by Nahum Admoni, had reservations about the fact that the contacts about Arad were not entrusted to them, but did not actually object. At that time, neither the Mossad nor MI had special units to locate MIAs or prisoners; such units were established afterward, as a lesson of the botched handling of the Arad affair. In the months that followed, Lubrani met several times with Said, always in London hotels and always alone or in the presence of another Lebanese Shi’ite, who was Said’s courier. Lubrani’s impression was that the courier loathed Israel even more than Said. Nevertheless, the meetings bore fruit. Through Said and the courier, two letters and several photographs arrived from Arad to the family, attesting that he was alive. The family sent him regards through the same channel. Lubrani understood from Said that Arad was being held by Amal security men. To allay Israel’s fears and show that the prisoner’s wellbeing was being looked after, Said told Lubrani that Arad had been held for a time in the basement of Berri’s home. In short order the meetings went from being exchanges of information to negotiations on a prisoner exchange. Intelligence failure Said came to every meeting with new demands from Berri, and the price rose from one meeting to the next. Berri wanted the release of all the prisoners Israel was holding in Al Hayam prison in southern Lebanon. The prison was ostensibly administered by the South Lebanon Army (SLA), Israel’s allies, but in practice was under the full supervision and control of the Shin Bet and MI Unit 504, which is responsible for running agents and for interrogations. Israel had no problem with this demand, the more so because in the wake of Arad’s capture the Shin Bet and MI moved quickly to arrest many Lebanese, to be used as hostages and bargaining chips for a future deal. The new prisoners were indeed suspected of having ties with Hezbollah but were not considered central or important activists; normally, the security forces would not have bothered to arrest them. Another Amal demand was a ransom payment of between $3 million and $4 million. Israel was willing to pay this price, too. The problem lay with the third demand. Nabih Berri insisted that Palestinian prisoners in Israel also be part of the trade, including some „with blood on their hands.” The defense minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was opposed. Rabin remembered vividly how he had been pilloried after the prisoner exchange with Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front-General Command. In May 1985, when Rabin was defense minister in the national unity government, Israel received three soldiers who had been captured in Lebanon and in return released 1,150 security prisoners, many of them „with blood on their hands.” This time Rabin decided not to accede to Berri’s request. He instructed Lubrani to continue with the negotiations in the hope that he would be able to lower the price. Through his emissary, Berri urged Lubrani to complete the deal quickly, but Rabin would not budge and had the support of the prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir. The precious time that was lost in the negotiations proved critical. The last testimony of Ron Arad being seen alive is from the night between May 4 and 5, 1988. By an ironic coincidence, it was his 30th birthday. Arad was then being held in a secret apartment in the village of Nebi Shait in the Lebanese Bekaa. Since then the defense establishment has made incessant efforts to find out what happened to Arad and whether he is still alive. It later turned out that Mustafa Dirani, the chief of the Amal security service, had decide to leave the movement and by then was already the head of a separate organization. Dirani then held talks about joining Hezbollah and apparently made contact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, which were operating in the Bekaa. „Based on the result, this is an intelligence failure of the State of Israel,” says a senior Mossad figure who was responsible for coordinating the efforts to obtain information about Ron Arad. „To this day no one has unequivocal proof about whether he is alive or dead, and so we are groping in the dark and acting solely on the basis of situation appraisals and working assumptions. Therefore, the appraisal of any person in the country is just as good as the appraisal of the chief of the intelligence division in the Mossad.” Rami Igra, basing his assessment on the character of Ron Arad as described by his friends, raises the possibility that Arad may have succeeded in escaping from his captors on that night in May 1988. According to this theory, something happened to him while he was in flight – perhaps he fell off a cliff or was attacked by people who did not know who he was. „The fact that Hezbollah recently searched for his body in the possible area of his escape, and even sent bones, reinforces this supposition, even though it turned out that the bones did not belong to Arad,” Igra says. But even those who believe that the Iranians abducted Arad that night, or received him in return for a payment, are inclined to accept the assessment that a certain stage – probably around 1994 and perhaps in an Iranian prison – he died under unknown circumstances, possibly in an interrogation or from a medical complication. Financial temptation The intelligence failure and the failure of the negotiations with Berri because of the decision by Rabin and Shamir, constitute the major ammunition that for years has nourished the Arad family’s criticism of the state authorities. Igra rejects this criticism. „Generally speaking and over the years, Israel did everything it could in allocating resources and attention to locating Ron Arad and resolving the affair, certainly out of all proportion to the importance of the subject as compared with other matters, which create genuine threats and dangers to Israel,” he says. „Israel acted in the recognition that bringing about the return of captives is a value in itself and carries a special weight in the element of national security and in the readiness of the nation – or, if you will, our sons – to go into battle.” However, this was not the case all along. Even after all traces of Arad were lost, his location was not yet considered important enough in the intelligence order of priorities. „Even though Ron was always mentioned in the tsiach [notation of vital information] which was sent from Mossad headquarters to its stations abroad, the subject was not given high priority,” a senior Mossad figure who heads two stations confirms. In the IDF, the responsible officer was Amos Gilad, from MI’s Research Division (Gilad was afterward IDF Spokesman and the head of the Research Division, and today, as a retired major general, is head of the political-security unit in the Defense Ministry). Gilad effectively appointed himself as the liaison with the Arad family out of a sense of mission and because of his very high security clearance. The change in the attitude of the intelligence community was gradual. It began after the appointment of Shabtai Shavit as chief of the Mossad in 1991, succeeding Admoni. Shavit appointed a senior figure from Tevel (the Mossad division responsible for ties with other intelligence communities) as coordinator of the efforts. However, no special unit was established even then. Such units were not set up until 1994, following the recommendation of a commission appointed by the prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and headed by a former Mossad chief, Yitzhak Hofi. The Hofi commission recommended the creation of units in MI, the Mossad and the Shin Bet for MIAs and captives. The head of the first division in the Mossad was Yisrael Perlov, followed by Rami Igra. The importance the subject has been accorded since then can be seen in the fact that the head of the unit in the Mossad is directly subordinate to the organization’s chief, whose door is always open to him. Igra thinks the reward as an incentive, combined with the media marketing campaign „is not effective in terms of intelligence. It also weighs on the system because it introduces an overload of information that makes it difficult to tell the wheat from the chaff. Besides, even before the reward there was no doubt in the Arab and Muslim world that Israel was ready to pay almost any price for Ron Arad.” „The association does not have professional tools with which to examine the truth of the information that is reaching it,” says another Mossad man who was a senior official in the organization, „and therefore in many cases it consults with the intelligence community. But what do we need them for?” Uri Chen, of course, rejects this criticism. „We have created tools to examine the information,” he says. „We chose professionals, interviewers who are capable and are fluent in languages, and we have the capability to examine the information that is received independently. The matter is being handled at the highest professional level.” Don’t you feel you are lending a hand to a campaign that expresses lack of confidence, not to say ungratefulness, in the defense establishment of which you were a part until recently? Chen: „I am not judging the system. The system in fact did a great deal in the political and intelligence spheres and invested great efforts. However, it also left many questions, and we are now trying new approach of financial temptation which was not used before. It may be that in a few months we will reach the conclusion that this is not working and did not generate the results that were hoped for. We will then undertake a reassessment.” BPI-info