The Spy Who - The Spy Who Ran Mossad’s Fake Hotel | Gad Shimron on his Double Life as a Windsurfing Coach | 4

Episode Date: June 10, 2025

Ex-Mossad agent Gad Shimron spent three years at the Arous Diving Resort, in war-torn Sudan. He was hotel staff by day, taking guests out for sailing trips and windsurfing lessons. But by night, he was helping fellow Mossad agent Dani Limor smuggle thousands of persecuted Ethiopian Jews through Sudan and to Jerusalem. He speaks to actor and spy novelist Charlie Higson about this dual life, living under the threat of being discovered, and surviving gunfire by the Sudanese military.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge full seasons of The Spy Who early and ad free on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. From Wondery, I'm Charlie Higson, spy novelist, actor, comedian, and this is The Spy Who. spy novelist, actor, comedian, and this is The Spy Who. Thank you for joining us for our final episode of The Spy Who Ran Mossad's Fake Hotel. Now, this is a story without parallel. It's 1979. Ethiopian Jews are strangers in their own land, persecuted, whilst war rages all around them.

Rumors start circulating that there's a path to Jerusalem. But first they must trek the dangerous 900 kilometres to Sudan, through mountains and jungles facing starvation, wild animals and bandits. Not to mention the Muslim-majority Sudan being at war with Israel. Leaving Ethiopia was already a crime. Leaving to go to Jerusalem, an act of treason. Q Operation Brothers Israeli intelligence agency Mossad acts behind

enemy lines using boats and planes to get people out and to take them to Israel. As the operation grows, they stumble across the dilapidated Arous resort on the Red Sea. It's the perfect cover for their mission and a base for their operations. If you haven't already, go and listen to episodes 1 to 3 of this series to find out exactly how this mission unfolded. In this episode, I'm going to speak to Gad Shimron, a journalist and secret agent working for the Mossad. He was sent to Sudan in 1981, and we featured him in our series

because he worked with Danny Lemoore to fix up the resort. By day, Gad sailed the tourist boats and entertained guests at the hotel. He was known to many. By night, he helped the refugees escape. He spent over three years at the holiday resort before their cover was blown. In his time there, he was shot at, he was arrested, and he was ordered home. But he always found a way to continue his mission. Welcome Gad, thank you so much for joining me today. Where are you talking from? First of all, thank you for having me and I'm talking to you from Tel Aviv.

Okay, well, let's just jump straight into this. I mean, I have written about spies. This is a series about spies and this is a fantastic opportunity to talk to an ex-spy, an ex-secret agent. I don't know how you thought of yourself, but you were a Mossad agent, Mossad obviously being the Israeli intelligence agency. Can you just give us a sense about how Mossad is different or similar to say MI5 or MI6 or the CIA or FBI? Well, this is a good question, but first of all, I would like to point out that in the

Mossad, we don't call ourselves agents. Right. An agent in Hebrew is somebody who's working in an insurance company or something like that. We prefer the word operative or case officer or warrior but the reason why Mossad is quite different from all other well-known intelligence organizations is because of its charter. It is serving the security of the state of Israel. The Mossad has a unique task in the history of world intelligence organizations

and that is to protect and support threatened Jewish communities all over the world because of anti-Semitism, etc. So that makes the Mossad by definition something different than the CIA, MI6, Bundesnachrichtendienst or the Russian KGB and FSB or whatever it is today. Talking of being unique, the operation we're talking about today is setting up a beach resort and a diving club. It feels very, very different. Is there anything else like this in the intelligence world? Everybody all over the world is doing quite strange and extraordinary operations in order

to achieve their goal. But still, some of the operations of the Mossad are beyond imagination. And there are many, many operations I have no clue about. So I mean, this operation, there was an order coming from the top saying, bring me the Ethiopian Jews. Yes, that's true. The origin of the Ethiopian Jews is not quite clear. There are many different stories, but anyhow, in the mid-70s, the chief rabbi of Israel at the time, after looking in details to what they do and what they do not observe, declared that they are Jews.

And once the chief rabbi said they are Jews, then the government dealt with the issue and decided, okay, if they are Jews, then the government dealt with the issue and decided, okay, if they're Jews, then they're entitled to come to Israel. You know, the prime minister told the chief of staff, bring me the Jews of Ethiopia. They're in dire straits. They need help. The problem was that when this decision was taken, when Ethiopia was in turmoil and civil war and the Jews were cut off and nobody could reach them.

And they had to hide the fact that they're Jews because it's an Arab country. And the Musaad said, okay, we'll do it. We'll plan it for six months. It will cost $10 million and maybe we will get out 15 Ethiopian Jews. And therefore came up the need for a covert operation. Can you just talk us through how you ended up being a Mossad operative? Well, my personal story is, I think, is quite different from other careers in the Mossad. I was a troublemaker.

I had a big mouth. I asked too many questions. Did they approach you first to join or did you, I don't know how that works, do you apply to join? How does it work? No, no. At that time I was a student in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and one day I was approached by somebody I'd known before from the neighborhood and he

approached me and asked all kinds of questions, etc. I realized he is wanting to recruit me to something, but I didn't know to what. After a very long and strenuous course, which made a nerd like me from Tel Aviv to a super spy, I found myself in operational unit doing all kind of things that you usually see in James Bond movies. It was really like that? Yeah. I was in the Mossad. I was also a very active journalist, never at the same time. But then I understood how little journalists actually know of what's going on in the intelligence world.

I was kicked out once, I resigned twice. Every time they called me back. And I gather you were about to leave or you had just left when you first met Danny Lemo? Yes, that's true. It was, I think, my second resignation in 1981. I had the resignation letter in my pocket when I bumped into Dani. I've known him before, not very well, but I knew who he was, and he asked me, Gadas, that was my nickname at the time. What's going on? Where are you going to? And I said, I'm going to give in my resignation. I said, no, no, no, no, no. He said, I need you. And they took me to the corner of one of the rooms. He said, I need you because you speak Arabic.

I know you are very active with all marine sports like sailing, etc. And I asked, I told him, OK, Danny, I mean, you know, I resign if you manage to convince high authorities in the office that I'm fit for this operation, welcome. I joined, that was at the end of 1981 and I found myself in Sudan. What age were you at the time that you signed on for this? At the time I was 30, 31, Danny was 33, 34 I believe. Was he quite inspiring? I mean what was it about this mission that you thought, yes actually that sounds like something I should do? You know I felt kind of elated for after being in the operative unit and doing all kinds of operations, which, you

know, they're not very nice. You follow people, you break into all kinds of places. I mean, the end is positive, of course, you do it in order to get information and intelligence for the state of Israel, but it's not a very nice way of living, shall I say it. Yeah. And then comes up the opportunity to do something which, you know, is completely opposite. You mean, you are being asked to recruit all your abilities to save people. Don't forget, it was really, it was a unique operation in the history of world intelligence. I believe it is also the first case and only case of Europeans taking out of Africa Africans, not to enslave them, but to liberate them.

And what was your reaction when Danny said that the central part of the plan would be to build a holiday resort. Well, you know, because I came from the operative unit of the Mossad and I was used to all the craziest cover stories in the world. I said, interesting. Okay, so you need people like the Club Méditerranée, where you have a gentil organisateur, those people who take charge of the guests and sing in the evenings. I said, okay, I think I can do it and I'll be happy to join. Can you tell me about the first time you saw the Arousse Resort? Because at this point it was just a dilapidated shell, wasn't it? There wasn't really anything there.

The first time I saw the village was at the end of January 1982, and there was a place at the end of the world. Really, I mean, it was about 40 kilometres north of Port Sudan. No road, you just follow camel tracks and things like this. It was on board of a beautiful lagoon. There were about 16 little huts that from far away looked very nice but once we approached it, as you saw, it was deserted with holes in the walls and the roofs, etc. A central building. You think that only in National Geographic movies you see places like this. And that's how Ruby, that's the name of the other guy, and myself found ourselves on January

1982 looking at this deserted place and asking ourselves, how are we going to make it to a successful diving resort? So how did your Mossad training help you in operating the resort? I mean, you've talked about a sort of James Bond training, but we never see James Bond in the films being taught how to run a holiday resort. Well, the operation was based on two groups of people. One was Mossad operatives who, you know, have special training to handle all kinds of odd situations and react accordingly. And the other part was what we used to call the foreign legionaries.

Those were Israelis with some kind of professional abilities such as divers, mechanics, there was a doctor also. We worked together, you know. We were, the Mossad people were supposed to chaperone or oversee those amateurs who were very nice people, very courageous, but sometimes they made stupid mistakes, like, you know, coming to an enemy country with the cassettes of popular Israeli music or wearing shirts with a label made in Israel. So with a small group of Mossad people, actually we were there in order to make sure that the

operation is going well. I mean, it's quite extraordinary. So, I mean, what was your typical day? I gather you weren't necessarily on the sort of the day-to-day running of the hotel side of it. There was a local team, you know, cooks, chambermaids, etc. I think they, from the beginning, they suspected that something funny is going on in the village. I think they believe that we are active in smuggling goods to Saudi Arabia, which is on the other side of the Red Sea. But you know, because we gave them quite a nice pay and they had no interest in going

to the local authorities and giving them information about what's going on in a Rus village. And there is one thing that one should remember, not a single Ethiopian Jew went through the village. There was a wall of steel, the iron wall, between the day-to-day operation of the village and the covert operations to extricate the Jews from the refugee camps. So the day-to-day, you know, when there were no operations, you would wake up to a sunrise in one of the most

beautiful places in the world with flamingos taking off from the lagoon nearby, slowly walking to the dining hall where a very nice breakfast was laid up for you by the local staff. And then because the number of tourists at the village was never too big, you know, there was a very big transportation problem to bring the people there. So there were, you know, six tourists, 10 tourists who were receiving really VIP treatment. We had the, I think the best diving equipment between what? Egypt and South Africa. The divers were super professionals, all of them either ex-Navy SEALs or ex-Israeli diving instructors,

civilian diving instructors. We brought the first windsurfer to Sudan, by the way. I was a windsurfing instructor, among other things. We published announcements in divers magazines. And by the way, from word to mouth, you know, the news spread that this beautiful area of diving in Sudan is open for adventurers. It was not cheap. it was quite expensive. It was not easy to get there because first of all you had to fly in a Russian-made Tupolev from Amsterdam to Sofia and from Sofia to Khartoum where you were received by one of

our representatives and put on a Sudan air flight. And from there in a quite unpleasant jeep ride, four by four, four-wheel drive to the village. And once they arrived in the village, the conditions were very rudimentary, you know. We had electricity only from, let's say, five o'clock in the afternoon till about 11 by our own generators. I mean, you could take a shower, but a very quick one, and quite often you had to do it straight from a bucket. The food was very good, always fresh fish and lobsters,

and of course, first rate VIP diving opportunities. Also, after a while, the word spread out that somewhere on the Red Sea shore, and a place named Arus, there is a kind of a Club Mediterranea. And here, in this operation, all of a sudden, money started to flow in. Now, how do you explain to the guy from the Ministry of Finance, who is in charge of overlooking the expenditures of the Mossad, how come there is an inflow from someplace in Africa? We managed to get over it. Well, as you say, it was a very positive operation.

So talk us through what a typical evacuation looked like, either by boat or later on by plane. looked like, either by boat or later on by plane? At the beginning, from 81 till March 82, we were having what we called marine operations, and tell our Ethiopian activists, we used to call them a committee, to get, let's say, 200 Jews ready for departure. And then we, from the village, from the resort, we would tell our local employees and the tourists some kind of a story, like we are going to Khartoum to bring new boats or trying to locate new diving spots, etc. But always we left at least two guys in the village to take care of the tourists. Drive all the way from Port Sudan area to where the refugee camps were, something like, I believe, 400 miles with roadblocks, military police roadblocks, every 25 kilometers or so.

We put them on the trucks and started driving all the way back to the Red Seashore. They were given a cover story that we are mercenaries and in case we were stopped by the police and asked about, they had to say that they are going to Port Sudan to work in some farms or something like this. Right. There were some incidents, very scary ones I should say, you know, when the guards were suspicious. There was one case where this, you know, we had to run away into the desert, relying on the fact that the jeep of the Sudanese army would probably break down after 300 meters in the desert, relying on the fact that the Jeep of the Sudanese army would probably break down after 300 meters in the desert, and it happened.

There was one case, one of our drivers was so tired he fell asleep, and we had a small accident in the roadblock. But somehow we managed to do it, and this was only phase one of the operation, because then Israeli Navy SEALs from an Israeli Navy boat which was traveling in the Red Sea disguised as a normal cargo vessel, the Bat-Galim vessel, we would come with our trucks, put the Jews on the boat. By the way, first time for all of them ever to see water. Some of them were so thirsty they tried to drink the water, didn't understand why it's salty.

They had the long sail to Bad Galeen. I mean, I described it as a, by the way, operation, but each time was, believe me, very difficult and very complicated. I understood that even if we get caught, which was, of course, everyday possibility, if they don't kill us on the first hour or the first day, the government of Israel will do everything it can

to get us out of this place, because we were not working against the Sudanese government. We covered at the end of episode two, the incident in 1982, when you were on the lookout during a sea evacuation, and you saw two soldiers walking towards the boat with the refugees. Can you just talk us through what that was like being involved in that? I remember this. It was one of the scariest nights in my life. I mean I waded through the shallow waters to the shore. I lied down. I took out my binoculars and looked

around at the beach to see that everything is okay. And then all of a sudden, I started seeing motion, silhouettes. And I took my walkie-talkie and I told Danny, look, there is traffic going around me like if we were in Piccadilly Square or something. Something is wrong. And as I came down to the shore and joined the group, just the minute that most of the boats were already in the water, heading back to the Bad Ghalim vessel, we heard yells and orders and commands and something like 30 Sudanese soldiers were charging us, some of them firing. I ran to the boat that was still on the shore, and together we managed to push the boat back into the water.

We jumped on it. Okay, let's get away. I heard shots, no script writers, I told you before, I'd ever thought of something like this. Danny, with his hands up, because you know, he had 25 AK-47 aimed at his belly, and at that moment I say, wait, wait, something is happening. In my earphone, I heard Danny started shouting on the officer, you're an idiot, what are you doing?

I'm working for the government tourist corporation. I just arranged night diving and night sailing for tourists and you shoot at them and I'll fly tomorrow to Khartoum, I'll complain about you, what are you doing, etc. Now obviously the unit was supposed to catch smugglers. So he apologized and said, sorry, I'm sorry for the incident. And funny enough, later we found out it was never reported up in the echelons. The consequences were that it was decided to discontinue the marine operations because they were so complicated and so dangerous and taking too much time.

And that's when we moved to aerial operations. So tell me about that. I mean, I believe you'd left the resort by then and this was part of a different operation, but just give us a sense of what was involved in these aerial operations. The summer of 84, the plight of the Jewish refugees in the refugee camps was becoming unbearable.

There were epidemics and hunger and there was a lot of pressure to bring out as many Jews as possible. And therefore, in the autumn of 84, Operation Moses started, where we landed Israeli C-130 transport airplanes in the middle of the desert. It was much easier than the Marine operations because we could do it much closer to the refugee camps. We didn't have to drive whole nights, you know.

We drove 100 kilometers off to the desert, call in the airplanes and in five hours they were in Israel. And these operations went for a while in 82, 83, 84. It was done by other people in a different way, very successful by the way, with large numbers being carried out of Sudan every night. Every night there was an airplane flying from Sudan through Europe to Israel. The village continued to function all the time because we said we keep it as a backup plan. I left in the end of 82, but I continued to visit the whole village and take part in operations

in 83 and 84 as a reserve officer of the Israeli army, I was recruited for this Mossad operation. Because as you know, every Israeli is entitled or must do reserve duty. And I would receive what we say we call it order eight. Order eight is a reserve order which tells you from today to tomorrow you leave everything and you come to serve and find myself two days later in Sudan with a cover story. You know why? The village was fully booked for the holiday season, Christmas and Sylvester. So they called me in for holiday, you know, to DJ the Christmas celebration in the village. And it was around this time there'd been a leak about the operations going on there.

When was this and what exactly happened? I think it was the 5th of January 1985, I was already back in Khartoum on my way to Israel, when the cover story of Operation Moses was blown up by, unfortunately, an Israeli politician who couldn't hold his mouth shut. The operation had to be stopped immediately. And therefore, I believe it was in April 1985, the Israeli personnel of the village, there were five at the time, told the tourists and the local staff that they are going for a day to find new diving spots, drove to the desert, called in Israel on emergency call,

and a few hours later an Israeli C-130 landed in the middle of the desert. They drove in, left the place, leaving behind in the village some tourists stranded with local employees who didn't know what to do. And if by any chance one of our listeners is one of those unfortunate tourists who were abandoned by the Gentile Organisateur in April 1985 on behalf of the Israeli Mossad. I apologize. Maybe you could offer them their money back. I don't believe. So when you think back about all this, how do you feel about the operation? I think

not only in my case, all of us who served in Sudan in those very dramatic days, see the activity in Sudan, in Aroo, Port Sudan, Gadaref, Kassala, all those exotic places, as a highlight of our life. Especially for me, I remember clearly every day in Sudan. I remember as if I live it now because it was such a positive thing to do. But the real heroes of the whole operation are not the Mossad operatives, and not the Israeli Navy SEALs, and not the Israeli Air Force pilots who later landed in all kinds of places in Sudan, the Ethiopian Jews, they are the real heroes. What they went through in order to arrive to the Holy Land, to the place where

they were dreaming about for a thousand years, I believe a normal Israeli wouldn't have survived a week in the conditions that those Ethiopian Jews had to go through in order to arrive in Israel finally. And really, I believe we have done something so beautiful, so positive, so good that makes me happy. Well it was an amazing thing to be part of and an extraordinary story and thank you so much for giving us your first-hand memories of that time. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure. It's been really interesting for me on this series, talking to actual operatives from within the Secret Service. And Gad was very open about a lot of the stuff,

but he did also talk about some very intense moments, such as when they were shot at and apprehended by the Sudanese army, having to watch while Danny desperately talked his way out of the situation. And, you know, that's a real insight into the actual day-to-day reality of doing what Gad did. And Mossad smuggled some 7,000 Ethiopian Jewish refugees to Israel through these missions. 80% of the Ethiopian Jewish community who are now in Israel. Thank you for listening, and do join us for our next episode of The Spy Who, hosted by Indra Varma.

From Wondery, this is the final episode in our series, The Spy Who Ran Mossad's Fake Hotel. This episode of The Spy Who is hosted by me, Charlie Higson. Our show is produced by Vespucci for Wondery, with story consultancy by Yellow Ant. For Vespucci, our senior producers are Ashley Clevery and Philippa Gearing. Our sound designer is Ivor Manley. Music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Frisson's SYNC. Executive producers for Vespucci are Johnny Galvin and Daniel Turkin.

The executive producer for Yellow Ant is Tristan Donovan. Our senior producer for Wondery is Theodora Louloudis. And our senior managing producer for Wondery is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondery is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Chris Bourne and Marshall Louis.