A Raid on the Red Sea: The Israeli Capture of the Karine A

A Raid on the Red Sea is the thrilling, real-life tale of illegal gun-running in the Middle East. In this firsthand account, Amos Gilboa gives the harrowing details of the secret close-working relations between Israeli and American intelligence in the seizure of the Karine A ship, the most successful Israeli intelligence operation since the legendary Entebbe hostage rescue.

At 0400 hours, January 3, 2002, two fast boats of Israel’s naval commando unit closed in on the stern of the Palestinian Authority’s Karine A. The Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had clandestinely loaded its cargo: fifty-six tons of high-grade, long-range weapons destined for the Gaza Strip. The Israelis’ plan to seize it went awry when they found nothing but a confused group of Egyptians, Jordanians, and Palestinians. Had they boarded the wrong ship? Was there going to be an international incident disgracing Israel?

This drama has more than its share of plot twists. The story’s hero, a low-level female intelligence analyst, was the first to grasp the grave danger posed by the Karine A. Analyzing piles of disinformation, she kept on the scent of the ship, tracking it from Egypt to Sudan to Dubai. Only through the joint efforts of Israeli and U.S. naval intelligence, Mossad and the CIA, was the ship stopped and calamity averted. Seizing the ship led to a fateful reorientation of U.S. policy regarding the Middle East with consequences to this day, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the 2020 assassination of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force chief Qasem Soleimani.

 

Brig. Gen. Amos Gilboa (Res.) is a former head of the Analysis and Production Division of Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence and military attaché in Washington. For more than a decade he was a special advisor for methodology in military intelligence and teacher of various intelligence and technology-related courses at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya and the Technion University. He is the author of several books, including Israel’s Silent Defender: An Inside Look at Sixty Years of Israeli Intelligence and Mr. Intelligence: Arale, the Biography of General Aharon Yariv.

Yonah Jeremy Bob is an intelligence, terrorism, and legal analyst as well as a literary editor for the Jerusalem Post. He is the author of Justice in the West Bank? The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Goes to Court.