What if you found out that the luxury hotel where you booked yourself for that surfing vacation turned out to be a spy den? It would be pretty challenging to achieve that today due to the presence of the internet and websites like Yelp, making it kind of hard to pop out a beach resort without arranging that internet presence. Fortunately for the Israeli Secret Service, the internet was not a thing yet when they had to run a fake luxury beach resort in Sudan as a front for their task of smuggling thousands of Jewish refugees into Ethiopia.

Mossad Agents on the Move

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Israeli secret service agents were tasked to smuggle thousands of Jewish refugees from Ethiopia to Israel. These Beta Israelis, as they were called, were stranded in Sudan, a Muslim-majority nation hostile to the Israel people since Sudan and Israel were enemies then. Due to the same reason, the Israeli agents, called Mossad agents, also had to keep their identities hidden. With that, they had to keep their operation covert and come up with a convincing front so their activities would not raise suspicions among the Sudanese people.

As published in the People’s Daily newspaper,

A couple of Mossad guys went down to Sudan looking for possible landing beaches. They just stumbled across this deserted village on the coast, in the middle of nowhere. For us it was a godsend. If we could get hold of this place and do it up, we could say we’re running a diving village, which would give us a reason for being in Sudan and furthermore for roaming around near the beach.