The late James Kanyotu.
Nairobi was asleep when the call came, and so was James Kanyotu’s Special Branch. It was past midnight. At the residence of Bill Mosebey, America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief in Kenya, the gate had already been opened. Inside, drinks had been poured, and a man from what would only be described as a “friendly, but unnamed, intelligence service” was waiting.
Jack Kassinger, then a regional support officer in Nairobi, had been summoned without ceremony.
“Can you come over, Jack?” Mosebey asked.
When Kassinger asked when, the answer was immediate: “Right now.”
He drove through the sleeping city and found Mosebey ready for him. He was given a gin and tonic and introduced as Jack to the visitor, who had no name. The visitor was from Mossad, and according to Jack, he resembled an undertaker.
It happened that following the April 1985 coup that toppled Sudan’s Jaffer Nimeiri, four of the undertaker’s colleagues were trapped in Khartoum after their cover had been blown. Sudanese intelligence, now aided by Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi operatives, was hunting them. If captured, they would be treated as enemy agents and executed.
“The current thoughts,” the Mossad man said, “are to try and get them onto a cargo plane of some sort and bring them here (to Kenya).”
Former spymaster James Kanyotu.
Under Nimeiri, the Mossad officers had lived under European business covers. They were supposed to be businessmen, technicians and travellers. At that time, there was no Israeli embassy in Sudan, no diplomatic gate to run through, and no ambassador who could demand protection. Once exposed, they were alone in a hostile capital.
That is how they fled to the home of Milt Bearden, the CIA station chief in Khartoum. Bearden lived with his wife, Marie-Catherine, in a large walled compound on the edge of the city, and as he would later narrate in The Main Enemy, the Israelis began arriving at his door in desperate sequence. First two came, then another, and finally a fourth. They had managed to save some secret communications equipment, but even that equipment was now dangerous, since to transmit was to risk giving away their hiding place.
For nearly a month, Bearden and his CIA officers moved the Mossad men from one hiding place to another, playing a cat-and-mouse game across Khartoum’s anxious streets as every movement increased the risk and every day widened the circle of suspicion. Eventually, Bearden knew he could not hide them forever, and so he sent a cable to headquarters: “We need to devise a means to get these people out of here. Time is of the essence.”
That message travelled to Nairobi, where Mosebey had to decide how much Kenya should know. Should James Kanyotu’s Special Branch be informed, as was the case during the 1976 Entebbe raid in Uganda? Should Moi’s government be briefed? Should Kenyan intelligence be told that an American military aircraft might soon land at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport carrying four Mossad fugitives under alias passports? The answer was no, and Mosebey’s reasoning was as cold as it was revealing. The Entebbe raid and its consequences on Kenya had taught them a lesson.
“Politically speaking,” he told Kassinger, “it is better to conceal the op (operation) from the Kenyans rather than risk informing them and having it blown due to some unfortunate leak.”
Then came the doctrine behind the whole operation: “A blown op with their foreknowledge will make it much more difficult for the government to deal with Sudan and the media. Besides, this is a case where it is better to act rather than to ask permission; it’s the best way to create a case of plausible deniability for the Kenyans.”
Remarkable calculation
It was a remarkable calculation. Kenya was to be used but not informed. Its airport would receive the aircraft, its immigration desk would stamp the passports, its hotels would house the men, and its territory would become the escape corridor; yet officially, Kenya would know nothing. That was the genius and the insult of plausible deniability. Kanyotu’s silence was not accidental; it was engineered. The CIA had not forgotten Kenya’s intelligence chief. It had been decided that the safest way to move through Kenya was to move around him.
The plan was to use an American C-141 transport aircraft, a type of plane familiar enough in the region to pass as routine. Such aircraft carried official cargo, military supplies, embassy material and diplomatic freight, and Kassinger’s own cover in Nairobi made the operation possible because at JKIA he was known not as CIA but as the logistics man who handled American military air command flights. He knew the tarmac, the passport routine, the crew accommodation arrangements and the small rituals by which extraordinary things could be made to look ordinary.
But first, the Mossad men had to survive Khartoum. In the Sudanese capital, CIA technicians prepared oxygen-fitted containers in which the men would be hidden as cargo during the journey to the airport and the loading of the aircraft. There would be little room, little comfort and no dignity. To reduce heat and allow them to fit inside, the men were stripped naked before being sealed in.
The question was whether they could sustain the heat during the 20-kilometre drive to the airport. In Khartoum’s punishing climate, the vehicle carrying the containers could not leave too early because the men would overheat while waiting, and it could not leave too late because the aircraft could not sit exposed on the tarmac. A medic was placed on standby aboard the aircraft so that once airborne, he could treat the men for dehydration, heat stress and whatever physical damage the sealed journey had caused.
Then came the warning. The Sudanese had begun to suspect that the Americans would try to move the Israelis out on the C-141 sitting at the airport. A Sudanese helicopter was reported hovering nearby. The engines were started as the cargo was loaded. With no permission, the aircraft began to taxi while frantic calls, warnings and threats came from the control tower. The pilot did not wait for clearance, did not argue and did not explain. He rolled onto the runway and took off for Nairobi, chased by Sudanese fury and carrying, in its belly, four naked men breathing through the machinery that kept them alive.
At Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Kassinger was waiting. He had arrived early, as he always did, and that too was part of the cover because nothing about him looked unusual. He was the American logistics man receiving an American military aircraft, a familiar figure to airport and immigration officials. The C-141 landed ahead of schedule, and when Kassinger boarded, he found the men alive. The medic had done his work, the containers had done theirs, and the most dangerous physical part of the operation had passed. Now they were clothed, and another problem appeared: money belts.
“How much money?” Kassinger asked. “Lots,” one replied. Kassinger knew immediately that men carrying hidden belts stuffed with dollars should not be walked through Kenyan immigration, and so he collected the belts and placed them in his Samsonite briefcase. Later, when he opened it, he found more than a million dollars, all in hundred-dollar bills.
Mossad fugitives
First, however, came the passports. There were the crew’s official passports and the four alias passports issued to the Israelis in Khartoum. Kassinger gathered nine passports and presented them to the Kenyan immigration officer, who stamped them without raising an alarm. No Special Branch officer appeared. No one asked why four extra men had emerged from an American military aircraft. No report was rushed to Nyati House. The men walked out, and a bus took them to the Hilton Hotel.
Think about the choreography. Four Mossad fugitives, hunted in Khartoum by Sudanese and Libyan intelligence, were hidden in oxygen-fitted containers, driven 20 kilometres through the heat, flown out on an American military aircraft, treated by a medic once airborne, landed in Nairobi, passed through Kenyan immigration on alias passports, carried more than a million dollars in cash, and were taken to the Hilton Hotel. And Kenya, officially, knew nothing.
That evening, Kassinger took the crew to Carnivore Restaurant, where, midway through the meal, a waiter arrived with four bottles of champagne and pointed across the room. Four men raised their glasses. They were the Mossad operatives, already refreshed, already transformed, and already moving toward the next layer of secrecy. “We smiled, waved back and raised our glasses,” Kassinger later recalled. It was a toast to survival, but it was also a toast to Nairobi’s usefulness as a covert corridor.
Bearden himself would later pass through Nairobi under an alias and take a room at the Norfolk Hotel, opening onto an inner garden. What did Kanyotu know? The surviving accounts suggest that the operation was deliberately structured so that Kenyan intelligence would not be formally brought in, and that is the remarkable part.
In the Kenya of the 1980s, where the Special Branch listened, watched and frightened citizens into silence, a foreign intelligence rescue moved through JKIA under its nose. Perhaps Kanyotu learnt later, and perhaps some officer filed a small note that disappeared into the archives, but the operational premise was clear: do not tell the Kenyans.
In the end, the CIA did not have to overpower Kenyan intelligence. It simply used Kenya’s routines: the airport stamp, the cargo flight, the familiar American logistics officer, the hotel bus and the Nairobi restaurant — and turned them into an escape tunnel. We still don’t know how Kanyotu reacted.
John Kamau is a PhD candidate in History, University of Toronto. Email: [email protected]; X: @johnkamau1
