Ethiopian Rescue: An All-U.S. Operation : Airlift Plan Came From Officer in Sudan Embassy, Not Israel

The months-long secret airlift of thousands of Ethiopian Jews from the Sudan, known as Operation Moses, was planned and directed on the ground in Sudan by an officer of the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum.

When news of the flights leaked in Israel and the operation was suspended by the Sudanese government early in January, it was widely assumed that the Israeli government had masterminded and run the airlift, which transported the Ethiopian Jews, known as Falashas, on chartered flights to Europe and Israel.

However, The Times has learned that the Israelis neither planned it nor directed its most crucial elements. Similarly, the CIA, which directed the swift airlift to Israel last Friday of about 500 Falashas remaining in Sudan, had nothing to do with Operation Moses.

U.S. Embassy Official

The plan for Operation Moses was developed and carried out by a U.S. Embassy official in Khartoum, a veteran of several years’ service in Sudan. His efforts had the full support of the State Department, which asked that his name be withheld from this account to avoid possible retaliation from Arab extremists.

He was awarded a special citation for his work during Vice President George Bush’s recent visit to the Sudan, although all references to the Falashas were deleted from the public version of the citation.

Although virtually all the financing for Operation Moses came from Israeli sources--some of it through worldwide Jewish organizations--no Israeli was ever involved in the operation on the ground in Sudan.

Good Sudanese Intelligence

The role of the Sudanese government in the secret airlift has not been spelled out precisely, but it is highly unlikely that large numbers of refugees could be moved without the knowledge of the Sudanese Bureau of State Security, an intelligence unit that, in American terms, serves as a sort of combination FBI and CIA. It is regarded as one of the best intelligence units in Africa.

The U.S. official’s plan for Operation Moses called for the movement of the Falashas from the refugee settlement of Tawawa, two miles north of the eastern Sudanese town of Gedaref. They were transported by buses through the night on the only highway between Gedaref and Khartoum, a distance of about 250 miles.

In Khartoum, they were taken to a back entrance to the international airport, where the buses pulled directly to the loading ramp of a chartered plane parked in the night parking area of the airport.

The aircraft belonged to Trans European Airlines, a Belgian charter company that has been described in some press accounts as a front for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.

Despite the boldness of the plan, the security of the operation was never compromised in Sudan.

“The way you hide something,” the American said, “is that you don’t hide it.”

36 Flights Made

The airlift began on the night of Nov. 21. In total, 36 separate flights were made, and the operation was halted, at the insistence of the Sudanese, two days after news of the airlift was made public by the Israelis. The last flight was on Jan. 6.

The Falasha issue is a delicate matter for the Sudanese government, a member of the Arab League with no relations with Israel.

As it turned out, three more Operation Moses flights would have succeeded in taking out the last of the Falashas who had sought refuge in Sudan, fleeing famine and discrimination in their Ethiopian homeland. When the operation ended, it was believed that about 900 of the Falashas were left, although that number was not based on a firm count.

The actual number remaining--about 500--was discovered when preparations were being made for the CIA-directed airlift that brought out the Falashas in a swift-moving, three-hour operation last Friday.

The Times has learned that the CIA airlift succeeded in removing virtually all of the Falashas left in Sudan. They were picked up on an airstrip near Gedaref by U.S. Air Force C-130 transport planes and flown directly to Israel.

Search of Camps

In the days before the airlift took place Friday, a quiet but diligent search was made of all the refugee camps in eastern Sudan where the Falashas were likely to be found.

Five were located at a camp called Umm Rakoba, about 40 miles inside the Sudanese border, a refugee settlement where about 1,200 Falashas died last summer after they had trekked out of Ethiopia. They were quickly moved to Tawawa camp.

The low number surprised the planners of the operation, who had considered delaying the airlift for a week. They made the decision to go ahead when no one could guarantee that any more Falashas could be found.

With the plan under way, the Falashas were quietly moved from Tawawa, under cover of darkness Thursday night, and carried to the airstrip in souk lorries, trucks locally hired for the job. They were separated into groups and spent the night camped by the rough runway.

The planes, painted in desert camouflage, landed one at a time and, with their engines running, loaded the Falashas in groups of about 80. They were airborne within 20 minutes.

The operation proceeded without a hitch, although high winds in the hours before dawn threatened to stall the evacuation after the planes were already on their way. But as first light broke over the flat, sun-scorched landscape, the winds abated and the first plane touched down just before 6 a.m. The last of the planes was loaded and took off about 9 a.m.

Bush-Numeiri Meeting

The groundwork for the final airlift was prepared in a meeting between Bush and Sudanese President Jaafar Numeiri on March 7. Numeiri reportedly agreed to the evacuation of the remaining Falashas from Sudan, but insisted that it be carried out as quickly and quietly as possible.

The first planning meeting for the operation was held on the evening of March 8, during a “wheels up” party following Bush’s departure from the country. It was learned that President Reagan had given the go-ahead for the evacuation, and in fact asked that it be carried out in 72 to 96 hours. That timetable proved impossible to follow.

The planning and execution of the earlier Operation Moses had proceeded along much more deliberate and complex lines.

The Falashas’ story in the Sudan began to unfold in March, 1984, when word reached Khartoum that large numbers of the Ethiopian Jews had begun to arrive at Umm Rakoba, a refugee settlement created in 1976 and by then a well-established village. Reports said the arriving Falashas were in very bad shape, malnourished and ill, and were huddled, mostly without shelter, in a hastily organized and overwhelmed reception center.

The reports continued through April, May and June, and the American’s visits to the camp confirmed the stories circulating through the refugee aid establishment in Khartoum. The death rate among the Falashas was alarmingly high; some days, as many as 50 people died.

By summer, the situation had begun to stabilize somewhat, with various agencies sending medical teams and supplies of food. But the Falashas, accustomed to secrecy and made timid by “literally centuries of persecution,” as the American official put it, were resistant to help--often shunning medical attention for fear that their identities would be revealed and persecution against them would continue.

“It was terrible,” said Elizabeth Broberg, a Swedish nurse working in Umm Rakoba. “It was terrible how many died. And for some of them, it was impossible to get them to come for medical care. They would try to hide their sick ones and care for them themselves.”

Problem Without Solution

By late summer, the problem had begun to seem intractable. It had reached the attention of high State Department officials in Washington as well as leaders of Jewish organizations in the United States, but a solution eluded everyone.

Then in September, the American approached a Sudanese official, from whom he learned that the main obstacle to moving the Falashas was their lack of travel documents. He asked the official, whom he described as “a devout Muslim, very sympathetic and a genuine humanist,” to try to set up a meeting with a much higher official in the Sudanese government to resolve the problem.

Within 24 hours, a meeting was arranged between the ranking Sudanese and a ranking U.S. diplomat.

The diplomat outlined the background of the Falashas issue and pointed out that they were becoming a far larger problem than their numbers would suggest.

The Falashas, as the Sudanese knew, had begun to attract the attention of various free-lance groups operating under the cover of charity organizations. These groups were attempting to smuggle small numbers of Falashas out of the country.

In one incident in March that especially alarmed the Sudanese, a C-130 transport plane of unknown origin was seen by Arab nomads when it landed in the desert, loaded an unknown number of passengers and took off for an unknown destination. For the Sudanese, whose relations with neighboring Ethiopia are uneasy at best, such activities were intolerable.

The diplomat is believed to have suggested to the Sudanese official that the removal of the Falashas would be the only sure way to put an end to similar clandestine activities in the future.

That day, Sept. 21, a cable was drafted to the State Department suggesting that a breakthrough may have occurred on the Falasha issue.

A plan for their evacuation was ordered drafted.

Information Kept Limited

Fewer than half a dozen Americans in Khartoum--all key U.S. Embassy personnel--knew that a plan was in the works, and only the one American official was actually involved in the plan’s execution.

By early October, he had completed the outlines of his plan for Operation Moses and traveled to Geneva for a meeting that included key Israeli contacts. The Israelis, for their part, were believed to be making preparations to receive the Falashas.

“There were three days of extensive discussions,” the American recalled. “We had to work out the division of labor--who was going to be the control officer, who was responsible for chartering the aircraft, how we were going to get funds, how each party’s interests could be protected.”

In all, about $1 million, all believed to be from Israeli sources, passed through his hands during the operation. None of it, he said, came from the U.S. government.

“Here’s what we agreed we had to have,” he said. “We had to have four buses. We had to have about five vehicles--strong, long-range vehicles. We had to have a safehouse in Gedaref. We had to have a safehouse in Khartoum. We had to have fuel. When I got back to Khartoum, I immediately made arrangements to get 500 metric tons of fuel, which I figured would be enough to run us for three months.” The fuel alone cost about $175,000.

By then, about 2,000 of the Falashas had managed to move, of their own accord, from Umm Rakoba to Tawawa, near Gedaref, where a small number of Falashas had been living for several years.

It was decided to move this group first, then transport the others from the more remote camps. As it turned out, all the Falashas eventually moved through the Tawawa camp.

Assembly Line of Buses

A staging area was created at the camp by purchasing six huts at the southwest corner of the settlement and moving out the former occupants. According to the plan, the buses would arrive at the corner of the camp just before sunset, loading the Falashas for the five-hour journey through the night to Khartoum.

The first movement, on Nov. 21, was marked by high tension and some confusion. The organizer and his aides were almost overwhelmed when the Falashas began to panic and rush aboard the buses. When the vehicles finally pulled away, the lead bus--seeking a shortcut to the main highway--drove for 30 minutes in the wrong direction, forcing the caravan to backtrack all the way to Tawawa and head for the highway again.

At the edge of Khartoum, the buses paused to await the arrival and refueling of the Belgian chartered plane, a Boeing 707. On the first night, apparently miscalculating the flying time to Khartoum, the plane was late, arriving around 3 a.m. Then, once the Falashas were aboard, the Belgian pilot threatened not to fly the plane. There were more than 250 passengers on board, he pointed out, and oxygen masks for only 220.

“It finally came down to making him an offer he couldn’t refuse,” the American said. “He flew the plane.”

Although it was initially believed that the flights could be organized at three- or four-day intervals, the airlift quickly began functioning every other day. After about three weeks, it was operating on a 24-hour turnaround, using two shifts of bus drivers and airline crewmen, who spent one day in Khartoum between their flights.

The system was devised to strictly control the numbers of Falashas going out, with each of the buses carrying roughly 55 passengers, so that about 220 of the Ethiopians departed on each flight.

In short, Operation Moses began to function almost on its own--until news of the evacuation broke in Israel.

The American official, who is due soon to be reassigned to a new post, said he regards Operation Moses as a sort of gift--a farewell present to him from Africa and particularly from Sudan. Of the people with whom he worked in Sudan--and whom he declines to identify--he said, “I cannot express adequately my admiration for their professionalism.

“On the whole operation we only lost one person--an old man, I think it was, died on one of the flights. But we had three babies born, so I guess we came out ahead.”