Humanitarian Spies — Part Two
How easy would it be to find refugees in camps, organise them, quietly load them into vehicles, drive more than 800km through hostile checkpoints, and exfiltrate them? Not very.
Continued from Part One.
The Resort
When they reached Arous and the Red Sea Diving Resort, they realised why the Italians had left. No electricity, no water, no telephones, and a backbreaking drive from Port Sudan. But they did have native Sudanese staff, and the resort was well built. More importantly, it stood right at the edge of a lagoon that opened out into the Red Sea through a narrow passage flanked by coral reefs. Perfect for diving. Also perfect for a rescue mission.
Made in Denmark, no, in Israel
They also found a disassembled Denmark-made desalination plant that Kuwait had donated to the Sudanese government. Except it was massive, large enough to provide for the needs of a small city. When Shimron investigated some of the parts closely, he found a couple of Hebrew markings. After the oil embargo of 1973, Arab states had stopped trading with the Israelis. This explained why a desalination plant of Israeli origin had been disguised as Denmark-made and sold to Kuwait. The plant was much too big for the resort, and with no electricity supply it remained in a disassembled state.
Getting the essentials sorted took a lot of effort and time, and Shimron and Ruby made the most of the latter. Shimron couldn’t dive for health reasons, but the Navy SEAL spent his days doing nothing but dive and sun himself, using matchsticks to separate his fingers:
So that the sun can reach everywhere.
The movie mercifully did not cut this detail out, something I’m grateful for. Evenings were spent stargazing in the dark.
Water supply came from springs a little distance from the village. These were owned by the local power company, and for a suitable donation to its Director’s orphanage fund, the Red Sea Diving Resort was permitted to send a 5,000 litre tanker to the springs “as needed”. Fuel came from the Shell refinery in Port Sudan whose manager — a Brit — was happy to sell them as much fuel as they needed so long as they paid market rates.
The First Rescue Attempt
A few more Mossad operatives joined Shimron and Ruby at the resort over the next few weeks. Once the team was assembled, they job of evacuating Jewish refugees began. They drove trucks down south to near Gedaref, telling the Sudanese employees of the resort that they were going to Kassala to spend the night with Swedish female volunteers at the Red Cross hospital — and waited outside town in a wadi or valley at night.
A wadi in the Negev desert, Israel
Government Guesthouse at Gedaref
But the refugees didn’t show up. After two days of waiting out in the heat and cold of the wadi, the team was miserable. Unable to make contact with Uri, the guy responsible for bringing the refugees to them, Danny took the team into Gedaref to the government guesthouse which, as it turned out, stood in the middle of a military camp. They were let in by the sentry after Danny claimed they were “employees of the Tourism Ministry”, and showed a document with signatures of various factotums including a senior military officer.
As they got down from their vehicles, they saw a well-groomed European sitting in the balcony of the guesthouse, smoking a pipe: contact had finally been made with Uri. That night the team sent a radio transmission to headquarters that began with the following words:
This is a direct broadcast from the government guesthouse latrine in Gedaref.
Another Wadi
The next morning they left the guesthouse and spent the day in another wadi outside Gedaref. Late in the evening, as they stood waiting in the dark, worried about being spotted by the police or worse, the silence of the wadi was cut by a sharp whistle, and hundreds of people stood up in the shadows and began walking down the walls of the wadi towards them. The refugees had been organised and led to them by The Committee, a group of Ethiopian Jews who worked with the Mossad to identify, contact, and organise Jewish refugees in camps. The Committee would decide a passenger manifest of sorts for each rescue attempt. They would sneak the refugees out of their camps after dusk.
Checkpoint Monitor
After the refugees had all boarded the truck and been given strict instructions by the committeemen, Danny Limor got into the Toyota Hilux and drove some distance ahead of the convoy. The resort was 800 km away. Since Sudan was a military dictatorship, numerous police or military checkpoints — a row of oil drums across the road, a narrow passage between them manned by a sleepy sentry, with the rest of the team sitting in a shack by the roadside — stood between them and Arous. Navigating the convoy through them was Danny’s job as checkpoint monitor.
He raced ahead and stopped at each checkpoint, handed the soldiers cigarettes and rusk, and engaged the officer in idle chit chat — weather and whatnot. Then, almost as an afterthought, he mentioned to the officer that his trucks were coming up and would the officer be so kind as to let them through because they were pressed for time? The cigarettes and rusk never failed. By the time the trucks arrived at the checkpoint, Shimron and the rest of the team saw Danny standing on one of the oil drums and waving them through as if he owned the place.
They stopped in another remote wadi at daybreak and stayed there till nightfall, reaching the rendezvous point near Arous in the middle of the night. A few minutes after radio contact was made, Zodiac boats appeared from the darkness.
An example of a Zodiac boat
The Ethiopians were loaded into them. It took the Navy SEALs almost two hours to motor back to INS Bat Galim, an Israeli naval vessal which waited outside Sudanese waters in the Red Sea. Once the refugees were onboard, the Bat Galim sailed back via the Suez Canal to Israel. The Mossad team went back to the resort and got on with their usual schedule.
Not INS Bat Galim
The next attempt wouldn’t go as smoothly.
Continued in Part Three.
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.