Chapter Thirteen
The Syrian Virgins

On a stormy night in November 1971, an Israeli Navy missile boat was struggling against the raging Mediterranean waves as it plowed its way toward the Syrian coast. It had left the big naval base in Haifa in the early evening, sailed along the Lebanese coast, and entered the Syrian territorial waters. The darkened boat passed by the illuminated Latakiyeh port, and kept its northbound course. It finally moored at a safe distance from a deserted beach, close to the Turkish border. Naval commandos of Flotilla 13 emerged on board of the wildly swaying boat and launched a few rubber dinghies into the water.

When they were ready to depart, the door of a locked side cabin opened, and three men in civilian clothes came out. Their faces were concealed by checkered keffiyehs and in their watertight bags they carried small transceivers, forged passports, personal belongings, and loaded revolvers. Without uttering a word, they jumped into the dinghies and headed toward the beach. The commandos were not told their identities or the reason they were bringing these men to Syria. As they approached the coast, shortly before daybreak, the three civilians dove into the icy waters and swam toward the beach. They crouched in the surf till they saw the silhouette of a man waiting in the sand. They swam the last few yards and joined him. This was Yonatan, code-named “Prosper,” their leader. He had brought dry clothes for his shivering friends and they changed right away. He took them to his concealed car close by. A stranger, apparently Mossad’s local auxiliary, was waiting at the wheel; he started the car and deftly merged into the traffic on one of Syria’s main highways. A few hours later, they entered Damascus.

They checked into two hotels. After a long sleep, they got together and set out to reconnoiter the Syrian capital. They all were former Flotilla 13 commandos, now Mossad agents, and were on the most unusual mission of their lives. Among them was David Molad.

The operation had been planned a few weeks earlier, at Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv. The ramsad, Zvi Zamir; the head of Caesarea, Mike Harari; and a few other department heads met with the four young men, who were between twenty-three and twenty-seven years old. The four of them were close friends, had participated in several operations together, mixing their naval commando skills with their Mossad training. All of them were born in North Africa and spoke excellent French and Arabic. They called themselves the “Cosa Nostra,” like the Sicilian Mafia. Zamir began to brief them.

Two years ago, a message had come from Syria. It had been sent by the leaders of the dwindling Jewish community. The autocratic regime of President Hafez Al-Assad, who had seized power in 1970, oppressed and persecuted the local Jews. Many of them had trickled out of the country, leaving behind a tiny, aging community. The young and able men had escaped from Syria, leaving behind Jewish girls who had no hope of finding husbands. Their best option was to escape to Israel.

Some of the girls, Zamir told the Cosa Nostra, had tried to escape via Lebanon, with the help of smugglers they had bribed. Some of them had been captured, beaten, tortured, even shot. A few had still managed to get to Beirut. All of them had the address of a safe house in the Lebanese capital. Local Mossad helpers had taken care of them until they could be brought to Israel.

One night, in the winter of 1970, an Israeli missile boat approached the port of Jounieh, north of Beirut, and local fishermen brought over the twelve Jewish girls who had fled Syria.

The captain of the Israeli boat was a veteran sea wolf and a submariner, Colonel Avraham (Zabu) Ben-Ze’ev. Before the operation, he and his men had undergone very rigorous training on a model they had built at a navy base. The training had been excellent, and the transfer of the girls on board had been smooth and efficient. Zabu had his men throw blankets on the badly frightened, shivering girls, served them sandwiches and coffee, and then sailed full-throttle to Haifa. He docked at four A.M. and, to his great surprise, saw the unmistakable figure of Prime Minister Golda Meir waiting on the wharf, along with the chief of the IDF staff, General Haim Bar-Lev, and his deputy, General David (Dado) El’azar. Golda threw a modest party for the Syrian girls and was deeply shaken by their stories. During the following year, Ben-Ze’ev and his successor on the job, Amnon Gonen, carried out a few more operations, bringing a few more young Syrian girls from the Lebanese coast to Israel. But crossing the Syrian-Lebanese border had become a very risky business, and the Arab smugglers and fishermen could not be trusted. Golda decided then that she must bring the remaining girls directly from Syria to Israel.

She called Zamir and instructed him to rescue the Syrian girls.

 

At the meeting with the Cosa Nostra, Zamir addressed the four young men. “You have to rescue those girls. That’s your assignment.”

A heated debate broke out in the conference room. Is this a job for Mossad agents? one of the men asked. This task should be given to the Jewish Agency. Another angrily added that the Mossad was not a matchmaking agency, and its officers should not have to risk their lives in one of the most dangerous and cruel Arab countries just to ensure that a few Jewish virgins would find grooms.

The ramsad did not budge. He reminded his men that rescuing the Jewish communities in enemy countries was one of the Mossad’s missions from its very inception.

The operation was code-named “Smicha”—Hebrew for “blanket.”

 

The day after the Cosa Nostra landed on Syrian territory, their self-confidence improved. They walked the streets of Damascus, chatting in French. They checked their surroundings and made sure they were not followed by the Mukhabarat, the dreaded Syrian Intelligence service. Later that day, they strolled in the illuminated markets of the city, and entered a jewelry store. “Prosper” and “Claudie” (Emanuel Allon) were examining the jewelry, conversing in French, when the merchant bent toward them and whispered: “You are from Bnai Amenu (Hebrew for ‘our people’), aren’t you?”

The agents were stunned. If they were so easy to identify, they were in mortal danger. They ignored the merchant’s remark and quickly slipped out of the store and disappeared in the crowd.

The news about the chance to escape Syria and reach Israel had spread among the young girls of the Jewish community. “Our situation in Syria was very bad,” Sara Gafni, one of the young women, said later. “We were under pressure to marry—but whom? There was nobody. We heard a lot of stories and rumors, and we became obsessed with the idea: to get to Israel, to the land of the Jews.”

A message was secretly delivered to Prosper: tomorrow evening, the girls will be waiting in a small truck not far from your hotels.

The following evening, indeed, the Cosa Nostra found the small truck, its back covered with a canvas roof, parked in a dark street. The agents had previously checked out of their hotels and carried their bags with them. Two of the Cosa Nostra sat in the front of the car, and two others got in the back; under the canvas roof were several girls, between the ages of fifteen and twenty, and a teenage boy. The Cosa Nostra were wearing keffiyehs again, covering their heads and leaving just a narrow slit for their eyes. They knew that on the Syrian highways, the army and police often established barriers and checkpoints. They decided that if they were stopped by the police, they would say that the truck was taking the girls to a high school field trip.

The local auxiliary, who had brought over the truck, was driving. He picked up a couple of girls in prearranged locations and then headed north, toward Tartus. They reached a deserted beach; the young Syrian Jews and the agents hid in an abandoned hut. Far from the beach, an IDF missile boat was waiting. Prosper signaled the boat with his flashlight and called them on his radio. The rubber dinghies, manned with Flotilla 13 commandos, started making their way toward the beach.

All of a sudden, bursts of gunfire echoed very close to Prosper and his friends. They scrambled for cover, but soon found out that the shots were not aimed at them. Who was firing? Had the Syrians detected the flotilla dinghies? “Mess on the beach,” the naval commandos’ chief, Gadi Kroll, radioed to Israel. But he did not give up. He called back the flotilla dinghies and sailed north, to an alternative beach that had been selected beforehand. Simultaneously, Prosper and his men rushed the girls back to the truck, drove north, and again made contact with the navy boat. This time, the beach was quiet. The girls and the Cosa Nostra men, their keffiyehs again masking their faces, waded in the water up to their waists, and jumped into the dinghies that took them to the open sea; after a long and bumpy sail in the stormy waters, they finally boarded the navy boat that turned back to Israel. The agents disappeared in a cabin; the girls were taken to another, and ordered never to say a word to anybody about their escape from Syria. They had left their families in Damascus, and if their flight to Israel became known, their parents could pay for it with their lives.

The local auxiliary drove the truck back to Damascus, to prepare for the next operation.

The missile boat arrived to Haifa without any further incident. But before sending out the boys on their next mission, the Mossad tried to find out who had fired that night on the beach. The intelligence department checked spies’ reports, activated its sleepers in Syria, contacted its sources in the army—but to no avail. They concluded that the incident might have been a badly planned ambush or a nervous response by Syrian soldiers to suspicious movements in the water.

 

The next time, the Cosa Nostra arrived in Damascus by air. They came from Paris, using the cover of archaeology students, coming to visit Syria’s antiquities. They carried false papers, and their pockets were full of metro (the Parisian subway) tickets, coins, receipts from cafés and restaurants, and other tangible proof of their assumed identities. Their documents were in order, yet they were nervous and edgy; perhaps the Mukhabarat had blown their cover? They went through immigration without any problems, and yet they could not calm down. They crossed the crowded arrival hall of the airport and left for the city in several taxis. The Cosa Nostra settled in different hotels. Claudie checked into the Damascus Hilton.

This time, the first night they spent in Damascus was tense. The four young men knew well that if they were caught, their fate was sealed: torture and horrible death. They asked the auxiliary to take them to the square where a few years ago the Syrians had hanged Israel’s greatest spy, Elie Cohen. Standing at the very place where the body of Cohen had hung from the gallows, while a fanatic crowd cheered and waved its fists, was too much for them. Claudie left his friends and ran back to his hotel; he was deeply shaken by the experience.

Haunted by the sinister image of the square, he tossed and turned on his bed, but could not sleep. Suddenly, at midnight, he heard a noise coming from the door, and immediately knew what it was: a key being inserted in the keyhole. That’s it, he thought. They’ve got me. I’ll be the next to hang in the city square. He rushed to the door and looked through the peephole. What he saw was an elderly American tourist trying in vain to open the door. After several failed attempts, she walked away. It turned out that the lady had got off the elevator on the wrong floor. Claudie felt reborn.

While they waited for the next group of girls to be prepared, they walked Damascus’s streets and visited cafés and restaurants. The waiters gaped in amazement at the quartet of Fransaouees (Frenchmen) who split their sides laughing during the meals. It was all Claudie’s fault: he repeatedly succeeded in dispelling his buddies’ tremendous tension—and his own—by improvising bombastic speeches in French, inserting words and jokes in Hebrew slang.

This and future operations were flawlessly executed, until the day when Prosper and his friends noticed unusual traffic and large concentrations of troops along the beach. They could not risk an operation on the heavily patrolled coast. Prosper decided to change the itinerary.

“Go to Beirut!” he told his helper and they raced to Lebanon’s capital, a hundred kilometers away. After crossing the border into Lebanon, Prosper headed for Jounieh, a port north of Beirut, inhabited mainly by Christians. In no time he rented a boat, a midsize yacht, after explaining to its owner that he wanted to take about fifteen guests on a pleasure cruise, a “surprise party” for one of his friends’ birthday. Once the boat was secured and ready for departure, he cabled in code his superiors in Paris and informed them of the change in plans. Shortly after, he received confirmation by the same channel.

That night, the truck came from Damascus, carrying its usual load of young Jewish women. Claudie was at the wheel. The truck stopped a few kilometers from the Lebanese border and unloaded its human cargo. Claudie continued, alone in the truck, presented his papers at the border checkpoint, and crossed into Lebanon. There he stopped the truck on the roadside and waited. The young women, carrying their heavy suitcases, escorted by the Mossad agents, walked in the darkness for hours, stumbling on the rock-strewn ground and bypassing the border control barrier. After an exhausting march, they reached the road on the other side of the border, and met with Claudie, who drove them to Jounieh. They boarded the yacht, one by one, and finally the yacht sailed on its “birthday voyage.” In the open sea, the girls were transferred to a navy boat.

The Cosa Nostra spent the following day in Beirut, strolling and shopping. At night, they headed back to Damascus by the same way they had come; a few kilometers before the border, three of the agents got off and made their way in the dark fields around the checkpoint. Claudie crossed legally with his vehicle, met his friends down the road, and took them back to Damascus.

The day after, they were on their way back to Paris, and to Tel Aviv.

The operation ended in April 1973, when Golda Meir came to Haifa naval base to personally thank Prosper, Claudie, and their friends for what they had done. Between September 1970 and April 1973, the Mossad and the navy had carried out about twenty operations for bringing young Jews and Jewesses from Syria via the Tartus beaches and the Lebanese coast. All the operations were successful, and about 120 young people were brought to Israel. The operation was kept secret for more than thirty years.

That was the end of the Cosa Nostra. Its members turned to more peaceful activities, like business, tourism, and civil service, even though they were still called back for special Mossad operations once in a while.

Time passed, and Emanuel Allon (Claudie) was invited to the wedding of a relative. He was introduced to the bride and recognized her immediately: she was one of the virgins he had helped bring over from Syria. He asked her: “Where do you come from?”

The girl paled. She felt she was still bound by the secret of her past. Allon smiled at her: “Didn’t you come from Syria? By sea?”

The stunned woman almost fainted, and then all of a sudden grabbed his arms, hugged and kissed him warmly. “It was you,” she mumbled. “You took me out of there!”

“This moment,” Allon said later, “was worth all the risks we took.”