Operation Brothers | Mossad

Incoming transmission. Welcome. Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission. You'll hear the true stories behind the world's greatest espionage operations. You'll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in that position? This is True Spies. I heard the shots. I heard the shouts. I saw them charging. I saw the fleshes. And off of the muscles of the rifles. It was going to be a massacre. Episode 1. Operation Brothers. My name is Gad Shimran, born in Tel Aviv, Java, Israel, 26 February 1950. Gad Shimran, Mossad Spy, Journalist, and one of the key operatives behind the mission known as Operation Brothers. To be honest, I had many other names and different identities and passports. Unfortunately, I cannot go into details unless you want to cause a diplomatic uproar. We'll have to forget this. Tall, handsome, smart, athletic, but above all, calm, which turned out to be very useful. And by the way, the Mossad doesn't use the term "agents". Agents you have in insurance companies, not Israel is working for the Mossad. Mossad, Israel is working for the Mossad are either called warriors, luchamim, or if they do, they are called Mossad operatives, but never agents. Gad, Mossad's man in Sudan, is going to be your guide through Operation Brothers. First, some context. Ethiopia, 12 September 1974. Highly salassy and his government are overthrown in a military coup. This revolution highlights the political tensions in the country, with the regime's opponents facing the threat of arrest, or even execution. The country descends into civil war, while separatist guerrilla movements are fighting for independence. Ethiopia's Jews, an ancient tribe known as the Better Israel, become prominent political revolutionaries, active in rebel struggles against the military regime. In fighting between the rebel groups, combined with instability in the country, lead to thousands of better Israel refugees fleeing Ethiopia. Many are forced to make a perilous journey across the deserts of the Horn of Africa to reach refugee camps in Sudan. In 1979, Ethiopian activist Faraday Aklam, who was involved in a previous attempt to rescue Ethiopian Jews, writes a letter from a Sudanese refugee camp to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. He tasks Mossad with the rescue of the Better Israel. This operation is really unique in the history of intelligence community. Because it's the only case I believe that professional intelligence organization is giving the order to operate actually as a humanitarian organization. Gattis persuaded to join what would become Operation Brothers by its commander, Dani Lemore. Dani Lemore, I knew vaguely he was a case officer. I knew he was also a troublemaker. It was after my second tour in the Mossad, I was supposed to become a case officer in a different unit. At that time, I also divorced. The Mossad had a policy that divorces are not sent for overseas operations due to some unpleasant affairs of single case officers who fell in love in Europe with locals, etc. I think it's a stupid policy and I went straight to the chief of the Mossad. I told him it's a stupid policy and I resigned. When I came to the headquarters to arrange my, you know, all the bureaucratic paperwork, I met a guy named Dani Lemore. He looked at me and said, "Hey, Gatti, what are you doing?" I said, "Well, I'm here to finish the paperwork. I resigned." He said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, I need you." Then, you know, against all regulations, he took me apart and told me, in what we call a corridor talk, that he is in charge of an operation in Sudan to get the Ethiopian Jews who ran away from the homeland due to the civil war. They ran away to the refugee camps in Sudan and they asked to be rescued and brought to Israel. And I said immediately, it took me between four to five seconds to decide and say, "Okay, I join." Just five seconds to pack up your life, leave your loved ones behind and go to a hostile Arab country. You know, I like the action, I like the push of the adrenaline. That's how I joined the brazen operation. Dani Lemore had been visiting Sudan since 1979, working with Faraday on ways to get the Ethiopian Jews out of the country and into Israel. At first, they used the cover of an international aid agency that allowed them to legally leave Sudan's capital, Khartoum. The problem was, it was very small numbers, five, six, ten every week. In the Mossad, they understood they needed another cover story in order to be able to get big numbers of Jews every time, not family here and a family there. And so, Dani and Faraday, they went looking around and 40 kilometers north of the big port city of Port Sudan. They found a deserted diving resort, which was built in the early 70s by Italian company. On the edge of the Red Sea, a paradise for divers. Those Italian entrepreneurs, they decided they were going to build a diving resort in the best diving sport in the world. They started investing money in building this holiday resort, known road, now electricity, no water supply. Relying on the promise of Sudan's officials that in Shalabukra, there will be an electric line going from Port Sudan and of course, pipeline of water and decent roads, etc. etc. And of course, nothing was realized. After a brief time, the Italians realized they were in the wrong place, packed up and disappeared. And Dani found this place deserted, as it is, and he came up with the idea that we, I mean the Mossad, will take over the place, will pay the Sudanist government, the Sudanist tourist cooperation some money, you know, every year. And in our kind of a land lease deal, and the idea was that this diving resort will enable the Mossad to bring operatives to Sudan. It's a good cover story. Indeed, it is one of the best. And so they build a high-end, high-class diving operation from the ground up. This is a remarkable feat as the infrastructure is, let's say, limited. There was not one single gasoline station on the way. Not one single normal hotel, not one single normal garage. Maintenance is a word nobody knew what it is. Towards the end of 1981, Dani Lamore is given the go-ahead to invest money in the Red Sea diving school. And GAD and a colleague Robbie are sent to Khartoum to start setting up. They run into trouble straight away. It started very badly because we were arrested on the way to Port Sudan. Due to an idiotic failure by some bureaucrat at the headquarters in Tel Aviv, we were sent at the wrong time to the wrong place. Robbie and I were told by the headquarters not to stop in a certain point, but drive through it and stop only at the next point. Now, when I say point, that means roadblocks. Because every 50 kilometers, there were roadblocks either police or army or both of them. Because we were talking about a dictatorship. They were controlling whatever was going on. They only rode in the country, only main road in the country. And that's what we did. I mean, we didn't stop at a place we were told not to stop and we continued to the next place. We had a cup of tea in one of those sheds along the way. And while Robbie and I enjoy the hot tea, we see a very nervous and excited policeman talking very fast to his friends and pointing at us at our car. Two minutes we were surrounded by about ten policemen and soldiers, all of them of course with weapons. And it's not very nice to look at the wrong side of a barrel, you know, when you zip-tie. I spoke little Arabic at the time, and I could understand that they have identified our Toyota pickup as a car that broke through the roadblock a week before our arrival. And they even shot at it, you know. And one of the soldiers said, "I emptied my whole clutching of AK-47 magazine. I emptied into this car, which was driven by a Khawaja, by Faranghi, which means a European, when he disappeared in the desert." And he was right, by the way, because the car we were driving, we had taken it from another Mossad operative who was at the time stationed in Khartoum. He broke the roadblock a week before with his car, it's true. But somehow they didn't tell us this, they had quarters, just told us the car was in some kind of a trouble at a point A, so go straight to point B. But they made a mistake and they sent us to point A, you know, that's where we were stopped. The operation has barely begun and they're arrested. A guy was sitting next to us in the cabin of the Toyota pickup and another policeman in the back of the pickup. And we drove some 200 kilometers to the headquarters in Gdaref. And when we arrived at the compound, my friend Ruby, he was called for investigation. And I knew that his cover story is rather weak, flimsy. He spoke what we say, "Pinglish," you know, Palestinian English. Just pause for a moment. You've just been arrested by Sudanese police. The operation hasn't even started and everything hangs in the balance. Your vehicle is compromised. Your partner? He's a former Israeli Navy SEAL, but he's a liability here. There's going to be an interrogation. Ruby's cover story and his accent might jeopardize the whole operation. If your cover is blown, forget Port Sudan, forget Israel. What's your plan? What would you do? Let's find out what God did. So I made myself as if I got wrong the name and I stepped into the investigation instead of him. There was an interrogation. I'm sorry that it was not so dramatic as it sounds because I was not tortured, no nails were pushed, but it was a very professional investigation. Two officers, one colonel and another captain, they questioned me in English. If somebody would have attached a some kind of heart measuring instrument to my body, it would probably have exploded. Of course, I played the complete European idiot to doesn't understand what they want from me. And I was lucky for, you know, as we say in Hebrew, we say the difference between a medal and being demoted is very short. There's planning and execution, but in espionage, luck can be useful too. Almost as important as good planning and brave operatives. There's a very famous story about Napoleon, who promoted one of his favorite generals to Marshal, and his fellow generals came to Napoleon and said, "This is a lousy officer. He's only lucky." And Napoleon said, "I love lucky generals." And I had a lot of luck in this case because first of all, as I walked into the interrogation room, I saw that the aerial on top of the building is broken. And I saw that the telephones on the desk are dusty. So I understood they have no direct communication to cartoon. I kept, you know, poker face. And I played the idiot, you know, I asked them all the time, "What do you want from me? I'm just here. I'm an employee of the Southern Historian's Organization." And they were very harsh, you know. They totally shut up, sit down, you know. And looking for all kinds of details. It went on like this, I think, for two, three hours. All of a sudden, I remember a book I read many years before about Sudan, called "The Migration of the Birds to the North" or something like this. And I see the colonel smiling. And he asked me, "Do you know who wrote it?" And I told him the name, "Salahtayib." And he smiled and said, "My cousin." So this was the end of the investigation, you know, as it can imagine. And we departed as good friends. I even invited them to come to the diving resort. But how can you guarantee if someone is right for a job this ambitious? Gad had run several European missions before Sudan. He knew how to convince people. This was something he'd trained for. And Mossad looked for these sorts of characteristics in its warriors. They try to select and find the people who are independent, maybe, you know, who know how to think out of the box, know how to improvise. They are brave, but not stupidly brave. And they know how to hold their nerves in difficult situations. And of course, you need also to have some background, which will enable you to operate under a false identity. That means, for in language, the right look. The biggest problem, of course, is to find people who, first of all, can live under a cover story, which means that maybe they should speak to a certain level, a foreign language. When I was approached in the 70s by the Mossad, I could speak rather fluent German and a ordinary English, let's say. Gads' parents were from Vienna, young, Hebrew-speaking Zionists. They came to Jerusalem in the 30s. During the Second World War, his father volunteered for the British Royal Engineers, and his mother was a nurse in a British military hospital. Gads moved to Europe in the 60s when he was 14. After his father was appointed the Israeli delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. It was a time when it was a very tough job, because everybody in the world was wondering what Israel doing in the Negev in Dimonah. And is it really a textile factory like the official version was? And because I came from a neighborhood where many people were with what we call a security background, either army officers or members of the Shabbakh in the Mossad, it was kind of a norm in the neighborhood that you volunteer to the top units. And I went to officer school and then I was relocated at the Intelligence Unit, it was called 848 and then I served as an officer until my release in 1971. Enter Mossad. In the early days, in the 70s and 60s etc., Mossad recruiting was done by the very simple method of a friend brings a friend. I remember the guy who came to my house, I was a student at the time and I knew him very vaguely and he started talking with me and asking me all kind of questions. If you're thinking that all sounds rather easy, then you're mistaken. The fact that guard makes it seem that way just illustrates his low-key character, which makes him a perfect operative. In reality, that call from Mossad is simply the beginning. It's followed up by a rigorous recruitment and selection process lasting a whole year. Of the 100 or so recruits who started the training with Gadi, only six graduated from his class. There were more instructors around the table than recruits. And after a very short while, I found myself in Europe running after the enemies of Israel. I was a member of a very operative team at the time and we were doing a real, what James Bond worked, observation and planting microphones and following Palestinians and Egyptians and Arabs, but I cannot go into details. Sorry. Released by the Sudanese police with the help of a book about migrating birds, we find Gadi finally on his way to the Arus Holiday Village, now famously known as the Red Sea Diving School. There's a dust road along the shore, 40 kilometers in the desert, you drive, you drive, you drive, you drive and then you come on top of a hill and you look down and there's a beautiful lagoon and on the verge of the lagoon, I think, 60 or 18 small hats, red roofs, no trees, of course, nobody, don't see anybody moving around and the view is my magnificent. And we came to the village and there were some local Sudanese employees who in charge of watching the place and keeping all the looters away and they became our employees, of course. The first months of 1982 were probably the most Syrian and quiet in my life, you know. There were two Mossad operatives in a deserted and diving resort in the process of being rebuilt with five or six Sudanese employees and we really had the time of our life. Remember Ruby lying on the beach, he spread his fingers in order to let the sun reach every centimeter of his skin. I took one of the locals and taught him how to drive Rabadinguye, Zodiac and we would go in the lagoon and he would tell me, you know, what a skin in the name of the security of Israel, which is very nice if you think about it. Whatever we were hungry, we would take one of the boats we had there and go out to the most beautiful blue seas of the world and we would just, you know, pick up a nice grouper and catch him and bring him full lunch or a lobster or two. But after a while, reality knocked on the door. We had to rescue Jews not to enjoy life. Early February 1982, Operation Brothers Leader Daniela Moore returned to Sudan with his number two in command. The Mossad operative from Khartoum, the one who'd lent them the car that nearly blew their cover, remember? Also joined them. Under the cover of Darkness, telling the staff they were off to party with some Swedish nurses in the nearby Red Cross Hospital, they would leave the resort village, traveling in a convoy of two trucks and two pickups. The modest operandi of those actions was quite simple. An Israeli navy vessel with some navy seals on it would sail out under foreign flag posing like a commercial vessel. And when they arrive vis-à-vis Sudan, we left the village with gasoline and water and some food. Meanwhile, in the refugee camps, there was a group of very courageous young Ethiopian Jews. We call them the committees. They were in charge of organizing the group that should go to this operation. They knew who came first. They made the list. They would get a message Friday, 8 o'clock, 160 Jews at the abandoned quarry, 5 kilometers south of the refugee camps. We arrived there at night, switched off the lights. It was dark. It was pitch dark. It was a desert and all of a sudden there was a whistle and 200 people rose up 10 meters away from you. We didn't even see them coming. Then they had to get the Jews across the desert to the shore. But remember, this is Sudan under a dictatorship. And all those roadblocks gad had to cross? They're still in effect. You've got to smuggle 200 people in a convoy of trucks across a police checkpoint. Any ideas how? Brute force? bribery? Sweet talking? Or maybe just distraction? Know your audience. Understand local traditions. And don't overcomplicate things. The system was quite simple. Danny, who was our chief, when we approached a roadblock, he went very fast to the roadblock. Stopped. Came out of his cabin, chatting with the officer in charge. It was always done on Friday, because on Friday it was the day off for the soldiers and policemen. And they were mostly drunk from dates, liquor. And Danny would start chatting with the officer, giving them whiskey cigarettes. And tell the officer, "Oh, by the way, I have two trucks and a pickup coming behind me and we are in a hurry, so just let them go if that's okay with you." And I remember very vividly this picture that you drive in this very dark night, in the impossible road. And you approach a roadblock and you see Danny standing on top of one of the barrels. The roadblocks were made of barrels filled cement or rocks. And behaving like the landlord, you know, and waving us, "Come on, come on, go through, go through, go through." And it worked. In 95% of the cases, relying on the fact that we knew that in each roadblock there is at least one Jeep, but that 95% of them, they had no ignition. Once the trucks reached the shore, they were met by Israeli commandos who used desodiac dinghies to transfer the Jews to the waiting ship, which would then ferry them to safety in Israel, always going, well, swimmingly. And it was a success because instead of taking out a family in a wake, 200 brothers were rescued in one shot. It went on like this at the early months of 1982. And somehow it almost never happened. Only on March 82, we had an incident, a very violent incident, which ended the naval operations. [Music] It started with me being sent before to an observation point to see if everything is okay. While Ruby was going out with a boat to bring the Navy Seals, and Danny was coming with the Conway, which we left few hours before. The Sudanese Army units observed them and followed them without lights along the all the way from Port Sudan to the evacuation lagoon. And when there was only one boat left on the shore, the last one, then they charged. They opened fire, shouting, "Hands up." You're caught. What are you going to do? What are your options? Stand your ground? Save your colleagues? Or save the people you're there to rescue? What does your training tell you? What gives you your edge? When you hear shots in a very dark night, when you're in the middle of a very intense operation, the right thing to do is to look around and see what you can do. I remember I heard the shots, I heard the shots, I saw them charging, I saw the flashes, you know, from the muscles of the rifles. And the corner of my eye, I saw this last dingy boat on the shore with two Navy Seals and 20 brothers on it. And I didn't think what, I just ran to the boat and, you know, together with my friend and we pushed it into the water and somehow we kept very cold heads. Cold heads. There's God's understatement again. I told the Navy Seals, don't go away. We wait 50 meters in the water. I have to report back what I see because I saw what's going on the beach, you know, Danny and the three other guys were surrounded by the Sudanese soldiers. Their hands were up. It looked like a very bad scene from a second world war movie, you know, with a Gestapo rounding up resistance fighters. And I heard in the wireless system, the commander of the Israeli Seals, he heard the shots, he understood something wrong is going on. He reorganized his forces. This were already about a kilometer away, the open sea. And concentrated a force on three boats in order to charge the shore and free Danny and the three other guys were caught by the Sudanese Army. Remember what Gad said earlier about the importance of being able to improvise? All of a sudden I see Danny taking his hands down and shouting at the officer and he immediately understood that the officer in charge had no idea what happened in front of his eyes because he was told to catch smugglers. What he saw was many boats coming and going, people going off trucks and getting into the boat somewhere, white somewhere, black. He had no idea what happened and that's why he waited till there was only one boat and then he charged. And Danny started shouting in him and say, And India took gave you the ranks of an officer. I'm working for the Sudanese tourist organization. I bring tourists to night dives and you almost kill them. Tomorrow I go to Port Sudan. I will complain to the chief of the Navy. I know him very well. Liba Yusuf, you will end your career as an officer. And the officer said, oh, excuse me, you apologize. And told his soldiers, OK, let's go. There are not smugglers, wrong target. And he left. If the mission would have been exposed, we would have either been shot in the first 24 hours or beaten up in the next 48 hours. But we always remember that if we somehow managed to get to Khartoum through international pressure will be released because we were not working against the Sudanese government. We were working in order to save Jews due to the existing circumstances. And here is something that I must stress again and again. The real heroes of the whole story we are telling are not the Mossad operatives, nor the Israeli Navy seals. The Ethiopian Jews, they are the real heroes. They went through in order to achieve the goal of coming to Zion. I think a normal white Israeli would not survive one week. [SIRENS] The diving resort was working. It allowed money, equipment, and crucially people to flow in and out of Sudan without being scrutinized. It was a brilliant cover story. And while the operations were going on, there were always two or three Mossad operatives in the village and to taining European tourists or Saudi Arabian millionaires who paid a lot of money to get a very high quality holiday in one of the most difficult places to run a resort place. With the most professional diving equipment and diving instructors, I think it was one of the only cases in the history of the Mossad, where a cover company was actually making money. The funny thing is that nobody thought that the operatives were actually Mossad people. I mean, we had a disillination plan brought from Israel. The air conditions, which proudly were marked as made by a company, Luxe Air, California, USA, were actually made in Israel and were brought by the Israeli Air Force on the way in. They brought air conditions and took out brothers. Goods in and people out. And everything scaled up once Mossad decided to employ the Israeli Air Force in its sub-diffuse. After the incident in March 1982, Mossad decided the naval operations were too risky. Apparently invading Sudanese airspace at low altitude would be more subtle. So God went back to Israel for some training and then returned to Port Sudan to scope out locations for planes to land. These were big aircraft. 80-foot-long four-engine Hercules military planes, which had to land without being seen. I don't know if our listener understands what does it mean to land a heavy transport in a desert. Once it lands, it makes such cloud of dust and so much noise that you don't have to be an African refugee in order to panic. In the first flights, we had cases where the brothers ran away and it was a very surrealistic picture in our seeing Israeli Mossad agents and Israeli commando's coming from the aeroplanes and running after Jews in the desert and bringing back and putting them on the aeroplanes. And also there was a case where the Sudanese fired an anti-craft missile, a Sam II on non-Ana on the aeroplanes. It was really all those aerial operations we had in mind the picture of the big American fuck-up in Iran in 1980 when they tried to rescue the embassy hostages through a commando operation and lost one Hercules and two helicopters. And we understood that in case of an accident or just bedlock, probably the next picture, "Sin in the World" is some Israeli agents hanging from the tail of a burned-out Hercules. But none of that happened. There were no deaths of Mossad operatives or Ethiopian Jews. In 1983 to 1984, there were nights when three Hercules transports landed in Sudan in succession, loading up hundreds of Jewish refugees, flying them directly to Israel. And everything was kept under wraps. This was a huge success by any standards, but one that didn't always go by the playbook. I think there was not one operation without some kind of incident. First of all, it started with the fact that in every operation, every night like this, there were two or three real Mossad operatives and two or three what we call foreign legioners. And the foreign legioners who were very courageous and really I have very high esteem of them. They didn't really know what they're doing. Some of them came to Sudan, which is an Arab hostile country with a bag of medicine pills from Israeli pharmacy in Hebrew. Or the time they were music cassettes for the Walkman, if you remember this, with Israeli cassettes, with Israeli music. They were, how shall I say, very unprofessional. There are always random elements you can't predict in any mission. This operation was really something, I think unseen before and never to be seen again in the history of the Mossad. There was a joke in the Mossad that if the operation would have been given to the real operative unit, the real professionals would sit down and plan it for half a year, invest $20 million, make 30 or 40 rehearsals. And at the end, rescue 40 Jews. And I think one of the strong points of the Mossad, it's their flexibility to see that sometimes you have to break the rules. And it was decided that in this case, all the rules will be broken because it's the only way to take out big groups of refugees or brothers out of Sudan. Over two decades and several Mossad operations, an estimated 90,000 Jews from the better Israel community made it to the promised land. Gadshim Ron went back to being a journalist, where his secret life as a spy served him well. I remember that some of the Palestinians that we tried to get information about them at the time, about 15 years later, being a journalist, I had the pleasure of interviewing them in the Israeli radio. And I knew about them more than they mother knew. [MUSIC PLAYING] Today, Gadshim Ron says he lives a normal life, a grandfather who enjoys hiking and windsurfing. These operations are in the past, but the skills that he employed, do they ever fade? The truth is that sometimes I meet with old friends, and sometimes we sit in a cafe house. And first of all, we see things that other people don't see. For example, if there's a police squad following a drug dealer, we see it immediately. Because once you know the technique, you see it. We film. We take a picture of anybody walking into the restaurants we sit in, which thinks that already in your blood system, and you don't get rid of it. And I don't think it's bad. It gives more colors to the daily routine. I think spies do the same thing as normal people. It's only that I call it a partial schizophrenia, because you are trained to manipulate people and two things which normal people don't do. I mean, the government gives you a license to be a thief, sometimes a murderer, a conman. And once you are off duty and you're back to your real identity, you have to remember that you are just another normal citizen of the state of Israel. Gad Shimron, just an unassuming, unremarkable, normal citizen. I'm Haley Atwell. Join us next week for another encounter with true spies. I love you, Shush.