Operation Brothers | Mossad
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This is True Spies.

I heard the shots, I heard the shouts, I saw them charging, I saw the flashes, you know, from the muzzles of the rifles. It was going to be a massacre. My name is Gad Shimran, born in Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Israel, 26 February 1950.

Gad Shimron, 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, and 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. Israelis who work for the Mossad are either called warriors, lochamim, or if they...

Whatever they do, they're 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, 12th of September 1974. Haile Selassie 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. Infighting 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 Fereyde Aklem, 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 a professional intelligence organization is giving the order to operate actually as a humanitarian organization. GAD is persuaded to join what would become Operation Brothers by its commander, Danny L'Amour.

I knew him 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.

And at that time, I also divorced. And the Mossad at the time had a policy that divorcees are not sent for overseas operations due to some unpleasant affairs of single case officers who fell in love, you know, in Europe with locals, etc., etc.,

I think it's a stupid policy and I went straight to the chief of the Mossad and I told him it's a stupid policy and I resigned. And when I came to the headquarters to arrange my, you know, all the bureaucratic paperwork, I met a guy named Ghani Limor. He looked at me and said, "Hey Ghani, what are you doing?" And I said, "Well, I'm here to finish the paperwork." I resigned. He said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I need you."

And 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 their 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, OK, 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 brothers' operation.

Danny Lamour had been visiting Sudan since 1979, working with Farideh 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. And 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 Feride, 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 an Italian company. On the edge of the Red Sea.

A paradise for divers. Those Italian entrepreneurs, they decided they're going to build a diving resort in the best diving spot in the world.

They started investing money in building this holiday resort. No road, no electricity, no water supply. Relying on the promise of the Sudanese officials that inshallah, there will be an electric line going from Port Sudan and of course a pipeline of water and a decent road, etc., etc. And of course nothing was done.

After a brief time, the Italians realized they were in the wrong place, packed up, and disappeared. And Danny found this place, deserted as it is, and he came up with the idea that we, I mean, the Mossad,

We'll take over the place. We'll pay the Sudanese government, the Sudanese tourist corporation some money every year. And, you know, kind of a lend-lease deal. And the idea was that this diving resort will enable the Mossad to bring operatives to Sudan. And 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, you know, nobody knew what it is. Towards the end of 1981, Danny L'Amour is given the go-ahead to invest money in the Red Sea Diving School, and Gad and a colleague, Robby, 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. Ruby 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 are talking about a dictatorship. They were controlling whatever was going on the only road 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 Roby and I enjoy the hot tea, all of a sudden we see a very nervous and excited policeman talking very fast to his friends and pointing at us, at our car. And in 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 on the wrong side of a barrel, you know, when you zip tea.

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 Klatchnikov AK-47 magazine. I emptied into this car, which was driven by a Khawaja, by a Farangi, which means a European. And he disappeared in the desert. And he was right, by the way, because the car,

car we were driving, we had taken it from another Mossad operative who was at the time stationed in Khartoum. He broke the road blocks a week before with his car. It's true. But somehow they didn't tell us this. The headquarters just told us the car was in some kind of trouble at point A, so go straight to point B. But they made a mistake and they sent us to point A. 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 Gedarev. 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. Roby'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.

He spoke what we say, Pinglish, you know, Palestinian English. 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, another captain, they questioned me in English. If somebody would have attached some kind of heart measuring instrument to my body, it would probably have exploded. Of course, I played the complete European idiot who 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, he's 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 Khartoum. He 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 Sudanese Tourist Organization." And they were very harsh, you know, they told me, "Shut up, sit down," and looking for all kinds of details. It went on like this, I think, for two or three hours.

All of a sudden I remembered 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, "Yeah, Saleh Tayeb." And he smiled and said, "My cousin." So this was the end of the investigation, you know, as you 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 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 a foreign 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 ordinary English, let's say.

Gad's 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. Gad 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 is Israel doing in the Negev in Dimona.

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 Shabak and the Mossad, it was kind of a norm in the neighborhood that you volunteer to the top units.

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 kinds of questions. If you're thinking that all sounds rather easy, then you're mistaken.

The fact that Gad 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 Gad finally on his way to the Arous 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, 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 16 or 18 small huts, red roofs, no trees, of course. Nobody, don't see anybody moving around.

And the view is magnificent. And we came to the village and there were some local Sudanese employees who were 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 serene and quiet in my life. We were two Mossad operatives in a deserted diving resort in the process of being rebuilt with five or six Sudanese employees. And we really had the time of our life.

I 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 a rubber dinghy, a Zodiac.

And we would go in the lagoon and he would tow me, you know, water skiing in the name of the security of Israel, which is very nice if you think about it. Whenever 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 for lunch.

Or a lobster or two. But after a while, reality knocked on the door. We had to rescue Jews, not to enjoy life. Hello, True Spies listener. This episode is made possible with the support of June's Journey, a riveting little caper of a game which you can play right now on your phone. Since you're listening to this show, it's safe to assume you love a good mystery, some compelling detective work,

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And I absolutely love all the little period details packed into this world. I don't want to give too much away because the real fun of June's journey is seeing where this adventure will take you. But I've just reached a part of the story that's set in Paris.

And I'm so excited to get back to it. Like I said, if you love a salacious little mystery, then give it a go. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I tech all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read.

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, socializing,

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more. Early February 1982, Operation Brothers leader Danny L'Amour returned to Sudan with his number two in command.

The Mossad operative from Khartoum, the one who 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, travelling in a convoy of two trucks and two pick-ups.

The modus operandi of those actions was quite simple. An Israeli Navy vessel with some Navy SEALs on it would sail out under a foreign flag, posing like a commercial vessel. And when they arrived vis-a-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 immediately.

Friday, 8 o'clock, 160 Jews at the abandoned quarry five 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, you know, 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 Dani 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 on 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 with 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 Zodiac dinghies to transfer the Jews to the waiting ship, which would then ferry them to safety in Israel. All was going, well, swimmingly. And it was a success because instead of taking out a family in a week, 200 brothers were rescued in one shot.

It went on like this in the early months of 1982. And somehow it almost never happened. Only in March '82 we had an incident, a very violent incident, which ended the naval operations.

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 convoy which we left a few hours before. The Sudanese Army unit observed them and followed them without lights 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 shouts, I saw them charging, I saw the flashes, you know, from the muzzles of the rifles. And in the corner of my eye, I saw this last dinghy boat on the shore.

with two Navy SEALs and 20 brothers on it. And I didn't think about it. 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 Gad'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. 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, with the 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, they were already about a kilometer away in the open sea, and concentrated a force on three boats in order to charge the shore and free Danny and the three other guys who were caught by the Sudanese army. It was going to be a massacre.

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 boats. Some were white, some were black.

He had no idea what happened and that's why he waited till there was only one boat and then he charged. And then he started shouting at him and said, "You're an idiot who 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, Lihwa Yousuf. You will end your career as an officer."

And the officer said, "Oh, excuse me," he apologized and told his soldiers, "Okay, let's go. They are not smugglers, wrong target." And he left. If the mission would have been exposed, we were 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 we 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

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 entertaining 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 are actually Mossad people, you know? I mean, we had a desalination plant brought from Israel.

The air conditions, which proudly were marked as made by company Luxair California USA, were actually made in Israel and were brought by the Israeli Air Force on the way in. I mean, 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 subterfuge.

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, GAD 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. You know, once it lands, it makes such a 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 seeing Israeli Mossad agents and Israeli commandos coming from the airplanes and running after Jews in the desert and bringing them back and putting them on the airplanes. And also there was a case where the Sudanese fired an anti-aircraft missile, a SAM-2 on the airplanes.

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

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 called foreign legionaries. And the foreign legionaries who were very courageous and really I have very high esteem of them,

They didn't really know what they were doing. Some of them came to Sudan, which is an Arab hostile country, with a bag of medicine, pills from Israeli pharmacy in Hebrew, you know. Or at the time there were music cassettes for the Walkman, if you remember this, with, you know, Israeli cassettes with Israeli music. They were, how should I say it, 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 money,

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.

Gad Shimron 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 their mother knew. Today, Gad Shimron 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, you know, I meet with old friends and sometimes, you know, 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. It's things that are already in your blood system and you don't get rid of it. And I don't think it's bad, you know. It gives more colors to the daily routine.

I think spies do the same thing as normal people, you know. It's only that I call it a partial schizophrenia, you know, because you are trained to manipulate people and do 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 are 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 Hayley Atwell. Join us next week for another encounter with True Spies. True Spies