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Spy Recalls Secret Mission Saving Ethiopian Jews

[Reuters/Washington Post] Dan Williams - In the early 1980s, Gad Shimron, then a young Mossad operative, was sent to Africa to find a way of spiriting away to Israel the thousands of Ethiopian Jewish refugees in Sudan who had fled the Eritrean conflict. Shimron, now 57, said in an interview promoting the English edition of his book Mossad Exodus, "We're the only Westernized country to have brought out Africans in order to liberate, rather than enslave them." Tens of thousands moved to Israel, where their community now numbers 100,000. Shimron and a small Mossad team flew to Khartoum in 1981, posing as entrepreneurs from a Swiss travel firm. The Mossad bought a defunct resort up the coast from Port Sudan, which Shimron and his comrades renovated and staffed with locals. It was a front, yet proved to be surprisingly successful, drawing foreign scuba divers and sport fishermen. "Most Mossad operations lose money, but we found ourselves making a small profit," Shimron said. From 1982 to 1984 the Israelis shuttled between the resort and inland areas where they had located 8,000 Ethiopian Jews. Traveling by night and ever conscious of the fact that they were in a country deeply hostile to the Jewish state, the Mossad men took hundreds of refugees to a beach rendezvous where they were collected by Israeli naval commandos and ferried to their new home.
2007-08-03 01:00:00
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