THE SECRET AGENT

In the 1980s, a Red Sea holiday resort was opened in Sudan. Except the whole place was actually run as a cover for an secret scheme – to rescue 7 000 Jews from Ethiopia. For the first time, the mission’s mastermind reveals what happened

IT’S A scorching hot day on the Red Sea coast. The sun sits high in a cloudless sky and holidaymakers from across Europe and the Middle East are relaxing on a white sandy beach. The year is 1982 – think Speedos, bikinis, and the smell of suntan oil and cigarettes drifting on a warm breeze – and these men and women are all enjoying their stay at a nearby resort.

The Arous Holiday Village in Sudan, about 160km south of the Egyptian border, is a new operation. Comprising a large clubhouse flanked by a dozen or so pretty whitewashed bungalows with red tile roofs, the resort specifically markets itself as a watersports destination.

Its colourful brochure breathily promises “adventure, à la carte”, and features stagey shots of attractive models windsurfing and posing in scuba gear, as well as photographs of the kaleidoscopic array of sea life to be encountered among the nearby coral reefs.

It is, the brochure concludes, a resort “unique in all the world”.

Guests, who range from serious scuba enthusiasts to senior Sudanese government officials, pass their days in the easy company of the resort’s small team of staff and diving instructors. These employees are mostly European and are young, fit and friendly, sharing drinks and jokes with guests at the clubhouse come sunset, and even putting on the occasional amateur stage show.

The resort itself is the brainchild of a wiry 37-year-old French anthropologist named Dani, who’d been studying the tribes of the region when he came across these 12 empty white cottages about 50km north of Port Sudan.