Jesse Jackson to Help Find Missing Israeli Airman Arad

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has striven recently to repair his strained relations with Jewish groups, said Tuesday he would use his contacts in the Middle East to help locate captured Israeli navigator Ron Arad and determine whether he is still alive. Arad was shot down over Lebanon in October 1986 and was supposedly taken captive by a fundamentalist Moslem group. He has not been heard from since late 1987, but his family and some Israeli officials believe the Iranian government holds the key to his release.

Arad’s wife, Tami, said in an interview that she enlisted Jackson’s aid because she believes he can help pressure Iranians to release her husband. Iran has not admitted to holding Arad or to knowing his whereabouts.

President Bush, concluding meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, said Tuesday that he would do whatever he could to locate Arad, but that the United States does not have much leverage with the Iranian government.

Tami Arad said she was pleased Bush mentioned her husband’s case, but his statement that the United States lacks influence “can be damaging” to her cause.

“If he said the issue is important to Americans, that’s very good,” she said. “But my opinion is, when he says there is no leverage, they (the Iranians) hear him and say, “We can play games now.”

Jackson, who has led previous efforts to release political and military prisoners in the Middle East, said his experience could aid Arad’s cause.

“Our real strength is not military strength. It’s moral strength,” he said.

But Jackson also said his efforts in the Arad case would merely reinforce earlier attempts by others to track the Israeli navigator. “I don’t think this is anything so new,” he said.

Over the past five years, Tami Arad has appealed to numerous humanitarian and political organizations to locate her husband, but none has discovered his whereabouts or learned anything about his condition.