Humanitarian Spies — Part One
"The Red Sea Diving Resort" or "Getting there is difficult enough"
Red Sea Diving Resort brochure
The 1970s saw unrest in Ethiopia. Haile Selassie was deposed in a coup, replaced by a Marxist–Leninist military dictatorship led by Mengistu Haile Mariam. Mengistu’s government suffered several uprisings and drought. Somalia invaded Ethiopia in 1977, capturing the Ogaden region which Ethiopia later recovered. 1977 also saw the beginning of Qey Shibir, a violent political repression campaign in Ethiopia that accounted for up to 750,000 deaths.
All this resulted in millions of refugees fleeing Ethiopia and streaming into neighbouring Sudan. Among these were thousands of Beta Israel, a community of Ethiopian Jews from the northern and north-western Ethiopia.
The Jewish refugees, afraid of reprisals from the Sudanese as well as fellow refugees, kept their religion hidden. One of them wrote to the Prime Minister of Israel from a refugee camp in Sudan, and that led to the Mossad being tasked with getting them out. But it wasn’t just a question of logistics. For the Mossad and indeed the broader Israeli state, operating in Sudan, an Arab Muslim country, would be fraught with danger. But the first order of business would be to find and make contact with the Ethiopian Jews in refugee camps.
The Mossad infiltrated multiple operatives into Khartoum.
Mossad hates their people being called ‘agents’. Agents are found in insurance companies.
—Gad Shimron
One of them was Danny Limor, infiltrated as a research anthropologist. Danny made contact with Ferede Aklum, an Ethiopian Jewish refugee, and together they began scouring refugee camps discreetly looking for more of the Beta Israel. With time the magnitude of the problem became apparent, and Danny realised that he would need a larger team and solid cover if they were to succeed. Enter Arous.
Arous
Arous is a village located roughly 40km north of Port Sudan, on the coast of the Red Sea opposite the Saudi port city of Jeddah. A group of Italians had built a diving resort in Arous, but after sinking a fair sum of money into it, they had abandoned it in the early ‘70s.
Danny Limor convinced his bosses in the Mossad to lease it from the Sudanese. This was done through a Mossad front company based in Europe. Danny also recruited Gad Shimron into the operation. Shimron found himself in Khartoum in January 1982, desperately looking to procure a vehicle to drive almost 1,300km to Arous via Gedaref (Al Qadarif) and Kassala.
Toyota Hilux
Finding a vehicle that could survive such a long journey through the desert was their immediate challenge. It took them a couple of weeks to find an American jeep, but that vehicle gave up a hundred kilometres from Khartoum near Hasaisa (Al Hasaheisa) on the banks of the Blue Nile. They turned back to Khartoum and managed to get there thanks to a tow by a friendly Sudanese.
At Khartoum the search for a suitable vehicle began again, but they delays were beginning to make headquarters anxious. HQ ordered them to move immediately, and had another Mossad operative who was also staying at the Khartoum Hilton give them his Toyota Hilux.
There were many carts, countless Toyota Hilux pickup trucks, which have successfully replaced the camel throughout the Arab world, and several camels taken by Bedouin to be slaughtered.
—Gad Shimron
1975 Toyota Hilux
He warned them that he had had some kind of security problems with the car, and told them to make sure headquarters briefed them about it before they set off.
Headquarters had warned Shimron to not stop at Gedaref, so he and his partner — an Israeli Navy SEAL named Ruby — decided to stop at a small village called Kheir a hundred-odd kilometres before Gedaref. They were at a small roadside shack sipping tea when they noticed a policeman near their Toyota, walking around it as if in inspection. Before they could figure out what was going on, they found themselves staring at the wrong end of the policeman’s barrel.
“Show us your papers right away.”
When they did, they were bundled into the same Toyota with two policemen sitting in the rear seat, guns drawn, and made to drive to Gedaref.
Gedaref
Taken to an obviously military compound in Gedaref, they were ordered to pull up in front of the main building. Shimron noticed that the radio antenna on the building was broken. After a few minutes in a holding cell, a young civilian came and called out Ruby’s alias. Shimron figured that his cover story was better, so he motioned Ruby to remain seated and walked into the interrogation room in his stead. Inside he leaned forward across the table to shake hands and noticed that the telephone had a thick layer of dust on it.
No fingernails were pulled, no slaps were administered. There were two interrogators: a Captain, and a Colonel. The Colonel began by asking questions in rapid succession: “Who are you? Why are you here? What were you doing in that area?” et cetera.
Shimron pretended to be the consummate European idiot, baffled at the mere existence of the compound as well as his own mysterious presence in it. As time went by, the tempo of questions being fired at him eased.
Now after each question the Colonel and the Captain would discuss Shimron’s answers amongst themselves. In Arabic. Which Shimron understood. Over time he began anticipating the next question, and the interrogation proceeded smoothly. With each question Shimron began channelling an annoyed European investor, asking to know what was wrong. The broken radio antenna and the dusty telephone had convinced him that this compound did not have direct communication with Khartoum.
Back to the Toyota Hilux
With the interrogation now going nowhere and the European investor getting more and more annoyed, they turned their attention to the Toyota, asking about its antecedents.
Turns out, the operative who had given the Toyota to Shimron & Ruby had blown through a checkpoint near Kheir two weeks earlier — the security problem he had mentioned. Headquarters had messed up, telling Shimron to not stop at Gedaref instead of telling him to not stop at Kheir.
Shimron answered a few questions, then feigned exasperation and demanded that they contact the Hilton hotel in Khartoum and get all the details about the Toyota that they need. The interrogators then called in the policeman who had first identified the vehicle. He swore he had shot at the Toyota that day and couldn’t possibly have missed.
A long and detailed inspection of the Toyota by the interrogators showed no bullet marks, and the tone of the interrogation softened. While talking with the Colonel about tourism in Sudan, Shimron remembered a book he had read many years ago about birds in that country. When he mentioned the book, the Colonel smiled and asked:
“Do you know who wrote it?”
Shimron told him the name he remembered. Turned out the author was the Colonel’s cousin, and that was the end of the interrogation. Shimron was treated to a glass of whisky by the interrogators, and him and Ruby were on their way to Arous.
Shaunak Agarkhedkar writes spy novels. His first two - Let Bhutto Eat Grass & Let Bhutto Eat Grass: Part 2 - deal with nuclear weapons espionage in 1970s India, Pakistan, and Europe.