Gideon Raff and Daniel on “The Red Sea Diving Resort”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: I mean, you live, you were brought up in Israel and yet, you didn’t know about the air lift and about these incredible operations to bring Ethiopian Jews out. How did you first learn about it?

GIDEON RAFF, DIRECTOR, “THE RED SEA DIVING RESORT”: Well, I knew about the bigger operations later in the ’90s and I grew up on those images, of course. But I did not know about this one operation that used a hotel in Sudan as a cover to keep our agents on the ground there. And I got a call from my producer, Alexandria, who told me this story and we flew to Israel and met with many of the people who were involved in these operations and many of the Ethiopian who have left their homes courageously and embarked on this journey to Sudan. And I was just so inspired and so humbled by their stories that I had to tell it.

AMANPOUR: Let me turn to Daniel, you were, in fact, involved in the original Mossad squad, the intelligence team, Daniel, that found this location. And we do have a very nice brochure from the time of how it was advertised by you all as this diving resort. But give me a sense of the undercover that went into, Daniel.

DANIEL, MOSSAD AGENT INVOLVED IN “OPERATION BROTHERS”: OK. About 70 kilometers north of Sudan, we came across this village and then I spoke to the guardian, which was the local Sudanese, who told me that the village had been abandoned a few years earlier and it was under the responsibility of the Ministry of Tourism and actually, the vice minister. So, I went to Khartoum and met that guy, discussed with him, negotiated with him and then we came to an agreement and I became the general manager and I signed a contract with them.

AMANPOUR: So, Daniel, you became general manager of a hotel, right. You didn’t actually tell the Sudanese government that you were looking for a front operation to air lift Ethiopian Jews to Israel. Is that correct?

DANIEL: How could we? You know, this is Arab country. We’re talking about Jews. That doesn’t go together.

AMANPOUR: I mean, you had guests who came to the hotel not knowing what you were doing, correct?

DANIEL: Of course. We had guests and we had people coming from Europe and from Sudan and from other Arab countries. And there was — I was not managing directly the hotel. I had a team. In the team, there were some guys who were — at the same time, were operating undercover to get the Ethiopian Jews from one place to the shore. And one of my team was a lady. And she was actually running the hotel and doing all the logistics. You know, it was a real hotel. We had to feed them and to give them — and it was not easy because there was no supermarkets in the area.