(BBC News) Raffi Berg - A soon-to-be released Hollywood film called "Red Sea Diving Resort" tells the story of Arous Village, an idyllic holiday resort in Sudan on the banks of the Red Sea. It was set up and run for more than four years in the early 1980s by operatives from the Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, as a cover for an extraordinary humanitarian mission - to rescue thousands of Ethiopian Jews stranded in refugee camps in Sudan. Sudan was an enemy Arab country, and it had to be done without anyone finding out. When Mossad agents went to Sudan looking for possible landing beaches, they stumbled across the deserted village on the coast that had been built in 1972 by Italian entrepreneurs. With no electricity, water supply or even a road, the Italians found the project impossible and the resort never opened. The agents, posing as employees of a Swiss company, rented the village for three years. Arous Village became so successful that it became financially self-sustaining, hosting an Egyptian army unit, a group of British SAS soldiers, foreign diplomats from Khartoum and Sudanese officials - all unaware of their hosts' true identity. Every so often at night a squad from the staff would leave under cover of darkness, pick up groups of Ethiopian Jews, and bring them to the beach where Israeli navy teams would collect them and bring them to Israel.
2018-04-20 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive