True story of Red Sea Diving Resort used by spies to smuggle 12,000 Jews home (2024)

SURROUNDED by white sand and the crystal clear waters of the Red Sea, the Arous Holiday Village was a dream destination for the Brit holiday-makers of the 1980s.

But what the thousands of tourists who flocked there didn’t know, was that the Sudanese holiday resort was an elaborate cover up, devised and maintained by top-secret spies on a dangerous mission to evacuate 12,000 Jews under threat of persecution.

In reality, the diving and windsurfing ‘instructors’ employed at the resort were actually Israeli secret agents, while the organised ‘night dives’ were a cover — an audacious way of smuggling thousands of Ethiopian Jews fleeing civil war in their homeland back to Israel.

The mission’s name was Operation Brothers — and over the course of three years it would save thousands of lives.

The story sounds like the plot of a Hollywood movie — and now, decades since the story was first revealed, the dramatic events that unfolded at Arous are being brought to the small screen in a new Netflix film.

Written and directed by Gideon Raff — who co-created American spy thriller Homeland — Red Sea Diving Resort stars Chris Evans, Haley Bennett and Alessandro Nivola as Mossad agents, and Ben Kingsley as the boss overseeing their daring mission.

A dangerous mission

Former agent Gad Shimron played a key role in creating and running Arous.

“So much happened,” he reflected in a recent interview. “We were shot at; I was arrested and interrogated by Sudanese security.

“Thank goodness nobody was killed or seriously wounded, but the operations moving the immigrants were definitely dangerous…

“It was the experience of a lifetime.”

It’s an experience which has its roots in a partly forgotten slice of history: for centuries, communities of Jews —known as Beta Israel - lived in some 500 villages in northern Ethiopia.

An evacuated 12-year-old Ethiopian Jewish refugee in a Tel Aviv hospital in 1985

By 1979, many had decided to flee to neighbouring Sudan, forced out by the country’s ongoing civil war, famine and religious hostility.

It was a harrowing month-long journey traversing harsh, barren desert and as many as 1,400 died on the way from starvation, exposure and attacks from local bandits.

Arriving in Sudan was only half the battle: those who survived were left languishing with millions of other refugees in squalid camps, living in shacks made of straw and cardboard.

Malnutrition and disease were rife.

Aware of the escalating crisis, the Israeli government was determined to find a way evacuating them — but how?

Geography proved key: Israel and Sudan both have coastlines on the Red Sea, meaning a secret naval rescue operation seemed the most promising method.

By 1982, Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad began scouting the Sudanese coastline, looking for locations where the Navy could pick up groups of Ethiopian Jews and transport them across the sea to safety.

It came across a picturesque group of 15 empty beachside villas that had been built by enterprising Italian investors a decade earlier — abandoned when the Sudanese authorities failed to provide the promised water, electricity and road access.

The deserted holiday village was the ideal staging area from which to smuggle the Ethiopians to Israel by sea and their daring plan was set in motion.

Operation Brothers

Their cover story was simple: Mossad agents would pose as representatives from a Swiss holiday firm eager to create a popular new coastal resort.

They would renovate the abandoned village, they told the Sudanese authorities, and turn it into a fully staffed tourist operation.

Operation Brothers was born, and for three years, from 1982, Mossad agents toured refugee camps in Sudan, secretly filling up trucks with the displaced and starving refugees in order to get them to the safety of Israel.

Their mission was fraught with danger: any suspicious activity would threaten not only the Mossad agents, but the very people they were trying to rescue, who could be subject to violent retaliation.

At the start of the operation, spies would enter the refugee camps and pinpoint the families and individuals they would rescue that night.

The refugees would be briefed. Then when darkness fell, they were ferried into trucks and driven into the desert.

After an arduous 600-mile journey over by moonlight over badly-potholed roads,they would stop and hide in a gully all day to avoid detection.

The second night of travel culminated in a beach rendezvous, where, as genuine tourists slept in the resort, blissfully unaware of the drama unfolding at the shoreline - the refugees were transferred onto Zodiac rubber dinghies under the guise of participating in 'night dives' at the resort.

Israeli naval commandos met them a few hundred metres out at sea and ferried them on a 90-minute high-speed cruise to an Israeli naval ship, waiting outside Sudan's territorial waters.

From there, it was home to Israel.

A dive decoy

But it wasn't always plain sailing.

Gad says the agents often came close to blowing their cover, and recalls an occasion in March 1982 when the Israelis were fired upon by a Sudanese military unit that had followed them and their human cargo to the beach, believing they were smugglers.

The agents were ambushed just as they were loading the last of a group of Ethiopians onto a rubber boat, which would be sent out to rendezvous with an Israeli naval vessel waiting in international waters.

As the shots flew over their heads, only the quick thinking of one of the Mossad agents saved their lives.

“What are you doing, you fool!” he screamed at the Sudanese officer in charge.

“Are you out of your mind shooting at tourists? Can’t you see that we are organising night diving here? We work for the Tourism Ministry, bringing tourists from all over the world to acquaint them with the beauty of Sudan, and all you fools can do is fire at us?!”

The tactic worked and the officer stammered an apology.

'Lived in a paradise'

At the resort itself, meanwhile, the cover story was so perfect that most of the unsuspecting tourists had little idea of the dramatic events unfolding when night fell.

And Gad admits in the periods between operations, agents had “the best time of our lives”.

“Yes, we were living in very simple conditions, with electricity for only a few hours a day — but we lived in a paradise that had a beautiful view, fantastic beaches and diving sites and we were being paid for it,” he recalled.

But it didn’t last forever: by 1985, Sudanese dictator General Gaafar Nimeiry was toppled by a coup and the remaining Israelis were evacuated from the resort.

More than three decades later, Shimron says he’s pleased that this previously little-known story will be told to a global audience.

It is, he says, important to remember that the bravest people in the story aren’t the Mossad operatives but the Ethiopian Jews who endured endless hardships trying to reach Israel by land, sea or air — uncomplaining men, women and children who crowded into trucks, small boats or planes with no guarantee of safe passage.
"They are the real heroes of the stories, not us," he says.

The Red Sea Diving Resort is now available on Netflix

The true story of the Mossad's fake holiday resort will be revealed in the book Red Sea Spies, byRaffi Berg, due to be released by Icon Books on 6 February 2020 andavailable to pre-order now.

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