Saga of Secret Airlift : Ethiopian Jews: Exodus of a Tribe

At night, the villages in the Semien Mountains of Ethiopia fall silent early, for no electric light burns to keep the people awake. The cooking fires smolder to white powder ash, and the darkness seals down like a locked box.

Mulu Abebe, 36, lay awake on the night of Feb. 8, 1984, his mind uneasy in the enveloping stillness.

“Our grandmothers and our grandfathers used to tell us that one day we would go to the Holy Land,” Abebe, an Ethiopian Jew, recalled recently. “All of us grew up hearing that, and our people had always heard that. It was a part of our religion.”

In preparation for such a move, he said, “I had sold my cows. I had sold my crops. I sold a cow . . . for 250 birr ($125) that should have brought 600. I was leaving behind my house. It was a good house. It was made of tin and the wood from a eucalyptus tree which I bought myself. It was not because of hunger I was doing these things. I was taking my family because we thought--we had been told--it was the time to go.”

In Abebe’s village of Miliko, the talk of leaving had begun months earlier, and as he and others were soon to find out, it had penetrated the entire area of Gondar province in northwestern Ethiopia, where virtually all the Jews left in Ethiopia lived.

Their villages were widely scattered, but the word spread, marketplace to marketplace, and Mulu Abebe heard what everyone else heard: If the Jews could make it out of Ethiopia and into Sudan, people there would help, would see to it that they were taken to Jerusalem. Just how this was to occur remained a mystery, but it was told as truth by members of their community--mostly young men--who had gone to the Sudanese border, and had come back to tell the people, “Now is the time.”

Coffee and Discussion

The people considered. In the mornings, Abebe recalled, men gathered in front of his house to drink coffee and “discuss and discuss.”

“When the people told us these things, we talk and . . . we think that now is the time. . . . When God tells the people to go to the Holy Land and one does not heed, he will suffer if he stays behind. So I sold some sheep and an ox and my cows. I sold the crops. And when we are ready to go, we are seven families and 45 people. We are frightened, because they tell us there will be death along the way.”

And indeed they found death along the way. More than 2,000-- perhaps as many as 3,000--would die in the ordeal that Abebe and his family were about to undertake. But no one realized what the toll would in time be, or understood that what had begun was one of the epic migrations in modern African history, literally the exodus of an entire tribe.

The Times has pieced together the story of this yearlong movement from diplomatic, military and relief agency sources in Sudan, Kenya, Israel and the United States, as well as from the Ethiopian Jews themselves.

Their movement was expedited by a remarkable evacuation known as “Operation Moses.” That operation, devised and organized by a single American in Sudan, ran from Nov. 21, 1984, to Jan. 6 of this year--a period of 47 days in which 36 clandestine flights carried more than 7,800 Ethiopian Jews to Israel. The airlift was halted two days after Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres announced it to the world, a halt that had the effect of stranding a then-unknown number of the Jews still waiting to be removed from refugee camps in Sudan.

Then, under orders from the White House, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was called on to finish the job. On March 22--more than a year after Mulu Abebe began his trek--the CIA directed a secret airlift to remove the last of the Jews--about 500, as it turned out--from Sudan.

They were picked up on a remote gravel airstrip by U.S. Air Force C-130 transport planes and flown directly to Israel, where with the earlier arrivals, they are now immersed in the slow and sometimes painful process of absorption into modern Israeli life.

The members of this tribe are frequently called Falasha, although they consider that term (its root in Geez, the ancient Ethiopic language, meant exile) to be derogatory. They call themselves Beta Israel (the house of Israel).

Tight security still cloaks major aspects of the airlift operations, but it has been learned that schemes to spirit Ethiopian Jews out of Sudan were in effect even before Operation Moses; that the Israeli government had paid agents operating in Sudan and Ethiopia, and on at least three occasions in late 1983 and early 1984, Israelis landed transport planes in remote areas of Sudan to take out loads of Ethiopian Jews.

These small, piecemeal successes brought about the conditions leading to Operation Moses--an emergency response, painfully arrived at, to a situation that had spun out of control when about 12,000 Ethiopian Jews marched unexpectedly out of their homelands, determined to go to the Holy Land.

Almost Total Secrecy

Operation Moses was carried out in almost total secrecy because the Sudanese government, a member of the Arab League, does not officially acknowledge Israel’s existence and is officially an adversary of the Jewish state.

Sudanese President Jaafar Numeiri, who has since been ousted in a military coup, had set his nation on a course of Islamization, adopting sharia law, including such measures as public amputation of the hands and feet of thieves and bootleggers, and had diligently courted favor with the Arab world.

His country’s economy was on a downhill slide. Sudan was host to a flood of refugees and locked in a tremendous drought. A longtime guerrilla war was again festering in the south, with no end in sight. Political tensions in the capital of Khartoum were rising as Numeiri, with his usual nervy confidence, pulled what strings he had and maneuvered for advantage among the forces converging to end his 16-year rule.

This was, in short, a setting for still another crisis.

On Feb. 9, after the half-moon slipped over the horizon, Mulu Abebe’s family began to walk.

After the first night, they picked up, by prearrangement, their guides--Christian Ethiopians from neighboring villages who agreed to lead them to the Sudanese border. The price was 100 birr for each adult, 60 birr for each child old enough to walk.

The armed guides were young men who, the Jews knew, worked the remote countryside trails in bandit gangs called shifta. They were outlaws but they knew the way. In the days ahead, when the caravan reached the lowland areas, only the guides would be able to find water. In the daytime the caravan, with its donkeys and pack horses, hid in forested areas--under the cover of trees or in dry riverbeds. At sunset, they walked. After three days, they met two other groups also being led out, and the groups converged, 400 members strong.

They were robbed three times along the way. Abebe and others suspected that their guides cooperated with other bandits, for after a show of shooting, long negotiations would lead to a collection of money from the Jews, and the caravan would be allowed to pass. As predicted, water in the lowlands was scarce.

Babies, Elderly Died

Old people and babies were dying. On Feb. 23, they reached the Sudanese border. A day later, Sudanese soldiers took them in trucks to a camp called Um Rakuba, 40 miles from the Ethiopian border.

Um Rakuba, from a distance, lay almost invisible at the foot of a few red rock hills, heaved-up, wind-worn and treeless. It was an old refugee settlement, dating from an influx of Ethiopian drought victims in 1974 and 1975, and augmented in 1977 and 1978 with the arrival of young men trying to avoid conscription into the Ethiopian military or the rebel armies of Eritrea and Tigre, restive provinces in northern Ethiopia.

By 1984, with a population of 12,000, the camp had become indistinguishable from any other village in eastern Sudan: It was not a tent city filled with half-starved refugees, but a well-developed town of straw huts neatly enclosed by cane fences, a few tin-roofed shops and a marketplace.

At first, little notice was taken of the fact that the new arrivals at Um Rakuba were coming from Ethiopia’s Gondar province, not from Eritrea or Tigre, from which most recent Ethiopian refugees had come. But Ethiopians already in the camp picked up the significance quickly. These people, they knew, were Falasha.

Relief Workers Overwhelmed

Ethiopian Jews had come through Um Rakuba before, but not like this. Some days, 200 to 300 arrived all at once. They seemed to have been walking for many days, and the most vulnerable of them--the elderly and the very young--were dying of maladies common to all refugee camps: dysentery and dehydration, fever, pneumonia, exhaustion.

The few relief workers at Um Rakuba found themselves overwhelmed. No more shelter was available; the few tents they had were crammed. The temperature at midday sometimes reached 110 degrees. Food and medicine were gone, and the camp’s water system was breaking down.

By the time Mulu Abebe’s family arrived in Um Rakuba on Feb. 25, there were, he reckons, 4,000 Ethiopian Jews there.

“We were taken to a tent and they gave us bread,” he recalled. “Every day, they gave us bread. But it was not enough. After two weeks, we were moved to a house, but there were too many of us there, maybe 15 people. Now, many people were sick, and death started. This was the first time I was seeing this death. The first day, when we moved to the house, my uncle’s daughter died.

“The day after that, three people from our village died, a baby and two old ones. Two of my own children were sick, and I feared for their lives. My daughter--she is 3--she was shaking, and we covered her in our clothes, and my wife, she became sick as well. We all had very great fear.”

A small graveyard on the slope behind the camp grew daily. In the sunset, glowing hugely through the blown dust, burial parties trekked out from the camp, their burdens wrapped in homespun cotton and borne on stretchers made of sticks, to the holes dug out of the stony ground. And every day, more people came.

During the first week of March, 1984, Sudanese nomadic camel herders, encamped in a dry wadi (a creek bed) in the remote bush country of eastern Sudan witnessed an unusual sight--the landing, late one afternoon, of a large airplane. The plane, as nearly as they could tell from their distant vantage point, had no identifiable markings, and it either took on or discharged a number of passengers.

Several vehicles, at least one heavy market truck and perhaps a couple of Land Rovers, met the plane and left after it departed. There was no airstrip--simply open, barren scrubland. The nomads, in a day or two, reported the incident to the nearest post of Sudanese state security--at Doka, 15 miles from Um Rakuba.

Officers sent to investigate found signs confirming the story told by the nomads. Tracks suggested that the plane had probably been a C-130 Hercules. What had happened was uncertain, but from the Sudanese point of view, it could not be good.

In a country like Sudan, news of such an incident moves quickly through diplomatic and intelligence channels, and some people plugged into that circuit were fairly confident that the plane had something to do with Ethiopian Jews--not the new arrivals at Um Rakuba, in all probability, but others. The Ethiopian Jews were no longer the forgotten tribe of Israel.

The true history of the black Jews of Ethiopia remains disputed by scholars. Their own legends say they are the descendants of Menelik, the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and that they followed Menelik from Jerusalem to his mother’s homeland, Ethiopia.

Scholars suggest two other routes by which these followers of an early, pre-Talmudic form of Judaism arrived in the highlands of Ethiopia. One is that their religion came to them from Jews living in southern Arabia, in what is now Yemen. Another is that they are descended from Jews who had settled 2,500 years ago in Egypt, gradually migrated up the Nile River to the ancient kingdom of Meroe, then traveled east to Ethiopia along the Blue Nile River, whose source, Lake Tana, forms the southern boundary of their modern homeland.

Jewish scholars first approached the Ethiopians in the 1800s. In 1904, a Frenchman, Jacques Faitlovich, made the first of several extended trips to Ethiopia and became convinced, as others had been, that the people he met in Gondar province were indeed Jews. He and other scholars noted that their religion was based on the Bible, certain books of the Apocrypha, and, although traces of Christian and pagan influence had fused in their belief, its foundation was unquestionably Judaism.

Faitlovich found them living in small villages, situated mainly around the regional capital of Gondar. Most were craftsmen--weavers, potters and blacksmiths. The surrounding Christians ascribed evil powers to them, believing blacksmiths to be sorcerers and charging that the Falasha could turn into hyenas and devour their neighbors’ cattle. Faitlovich traveled widely among them and appealed to the Ethiopian emperor, Menelik II, to help end discrimination against them. In Europe, Faitlovich set up “pro-Falasha committees” to raise money to further their education abroad.

Held to Their Old Ways

Faitlovich estimated their population at about 50,000 at the beginning of the century. By the mid-1970s, it had fallen to a range of 25,000 to 28,000. They still lived in much the same way, as tenant farmers or craftsmen, still holding to their religion and the old ways. They could not own land; their schools were closed. Jews from the modern world came to visit them, regarding them with curiosity and sympathy. Over the years, some left the country, and by the early 1970s, perhaps 100 were believed to be living in Israel.

Gradually, interest in them increased in Israel. Some Israelis, won over to their case, believed that their young nation was remiss in not including the Ethiopians in the in-gathering of Jews after the modern state’s founding in 1948.

In 1973, the slowly building pressure on behalf of the Ethiopian Jews led to a declaration by the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, Ovadia Yosef, that they were members of the tribe of Dan and were entitled, as other Jews are, to return to Israel. Two years later, the Israeli government granted their right of immigration under the Law of Return.

Still, only faint tangible progress had been made, and the pressure continued. The American Assn. for Ethiopian Jews (AAEJ), established in 1974 in Highland Park, Ill., had begun goading the Jewish Agency, Israel’s semi-official resettlement and welfare organization, and the government as well to get the Jews out of Ethiopia.

Fund-raising efforts of this new group left the impression with many American Jews that its efforts were the only ones being made on behalf of the Ethiopians. Then on Aug. 26, 1977, in a deal with the revolutionary government of Ethiopia, 60 Jews were taken to Israel. In December, 61 more went.

The details of that arrangement were secret, but in February, 1978, Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan admitted that the Israelis had been selling arms to the Ethiopians, leaving the impression that the Ethiopian Jews were part of the agreement. The Ethiopians were embarrassed and angered; any prospect of a direct agreement for the release of the Jews seemed to vanish. At the time, about 350 Ethiopians had made it to Israel, and if others were to come, they would have to come by more hidden routes. Sudan was the obvious choice.

The first Ethiopian Jews began heading toward Sudan in the fall of 1978, according to the representative of a national Jewish organization in New York, who asked to remain unidentified.

“It was all very secret stuff, very dangerous,” he said. “And very small numbers. Groups ranging from six to 20, totaling over a year’s time only in the hundreds.

“This same methodology was employed right up to the early months of 1984,” he said. “It was one of the most sophisticated and dangerous operations the Israeli government has ever pulled off.”

Sources in Israel, who likewise cannot be identified, speak in similar terms. “When the full story of this is told,” one well-placed Israeli said, “it will make the story of Entebbe (the 1976 hostage rescue in Uganda) seem tame.”

Ethiopian Jews were taken out of Sudan on ships, sometimes boarding landing craft on isolated Red Sea beaches. Some were smuggled through the south and out through Kenya. Some of the operations were carried out by the American Assn. for Ethiopian Jewry or other groups not directly associated with the Israeli government. Sometimes the operations stumbled over one another, complicating life for all concerned.

Paid Israeli Agents

Interviews in the United States, Sudan and Israel indicate that the Israelis had paid agents on the ground in Sudan and Ethiopia, some of whom bribed local police or security officials to look the other way. Sources said that at least twice in 1983, planes either flown or directed by Israelis landed in isolated areas near Ethiopia’s border with Sudan to pick up loads of the Jews. Few people knew more than small parts of the whole story.

By the end of 1983, there were about 5,700 Ethiopian Jews in Israel. And roughly one-third of them had come in 1983.

But the C-130 caught with its wheels down in the Sudanese desert in the first week in March, 1984, put a stop to the sort of measures that had been successful in the past. Intelligence sources were nervous, if not compromised. Besides, the methods used until then were inadequate in the face of a calamity from drought and hunger unfolding at Um Rakuba. Something else had to be done.

By May, 1984, almost 8,000 Ethiopian Jews had jammed into the camp, and almost nothing was being done for them. The Swedish nursing team felt helpless. The Sudanese Commission of Refugees was diverted by the Ethiopian drought victims starting to pour into Sudan from Tigre and Eritrea, at rates as great as 5,000 a day. Food supplies were a problem everywhere, not just at Um Rakuba.

The Ethiopian Jews were hiding their dying children even from the nurses, so fearful were they of being identified as Jews by the Ethiopian Christians working in the camp. Demoralized and frightened, they tried to remain out of sight, hidden in their tents or huts, if they had them.

Ayaraw Engeda, 40, a farmer and weaver, had left his home in Davark, in Gondar province, in January, with his wife and three children. He had crossed the Sudanese border in a party of 300.

“We lived 42 people in one tent,” he said. “My daughter died in May. She was sick for a week. She did not eat. I took her to the clinic. They gave her an injection. She died. She was 2 1/2 years old. She was lying in the bed and she was suffering, and she died while I was watching her. Then my family came and they carried her outside. When this happened, we thought that we would all die soon.”

Two weeks later, the youngest son of Engeda’s brother died. A woman in the hut next to them fell unconscious, and she died. A boy in their own hut shook for two days, and died.

‘In Very Bad Shape’

Elizabeth Broberg, one of the Swedish nurses, remembered when she first arrived in Um Rakuba in May.

“People were lying all over the place,” she said. “There wasn’t enough shelter. There wasn’t enough food. We had very little medicine. There were people still coming in, and they were in very bad shape. There was a lot of sickness, everything you can imagine. They were afraid of medical care, didn’t want anything to do with it. Some of them practiced bloodletting. Then came the measles, first in the reception center, but it spread throughout. It was incredible how many died.”

Anders Maltson, the nurse who had been in Um Rakuba the longest, went to Khartoum to try to get help.

One of the first people he went to see was Jerry Weaver, the refugee affairs coordinator at the U.S. Embassy.

It didn’t take most people long to realize that Jerry Weaver was no romantic about Africa. “Do-gooders,” as he called the more wistful of Africa’s sojourners, made him impatient. International relief agencies and volunteer organizations had been growing steadily in Khartoum for the last year, the town filling with experts in disaster and veterans of world-class tragedies from around the globe. Weaver’s opinion was that some of them followed famine more dependably than cholera, and were just about as much help.

The view from the other side was similarly suspicious. Around Khartoum, Weaver had a reputation as “a cowboy,” “the ugly American,” and mistakenly to some, “a definite CIA agent.” Some of his colleagues in the embassy now and then wished aloud that he would “learn to be more diplomatic.” But he also had a reputation for getting things done.

Forty-six years old and physically imposing--at 250 pounds, well over his Ohio University football weight--bearded and bespectacled, Weaver exuded a macho air unfashionable in relief circles. A framed photograph in his office showed him kneeling with his high-powered rifle beside a freshly killed lion in southern Sudan.

He was not a professional diplomat but came from an academic background. He had written four books and about 40 scholarly articles, mainly on political systems in the developing world. Twice divorced and the father of three college-age daughters, he had arrived in Sudan in 1979, not as a member of the embassy staff but as a project officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development, with responsibility for southern Sudan.

Left Position at UCLA

He had resigned as a professor of political science at UCLA to take the job in Sudan because, he said, “Sudan was the real world.”

The problem that Anders Maltson brought to Weaver in late June was consonant with that world--unexpected, immediate, not admitting of a solution written on paper. Maltson was not just worried. He was distraught.

“We cannot feed them,” he told Weaver, “and they are dying quite alarmingly.”

“How many have you got?” Weaver asked.

“Seven, eight thousand,” Maltson said. “We can’t be sure. Some may be leaving. . . . We’re not sure how many have died. We have no medicine. . . . I’ve spent 200 pounds of my own money, but that is nothing. We need food, we need medicine, we need oral rehydration salts. We are in very desperate shape.”

The next day, Weaver and his Sudanese assistant--called “Christopher” here because he cannot be identified--made the daylong journey to Um Rakuba.

“The situation was really appalling,” he recalled later. “Christopher and I went alone to the camp. We talked to the people and they said, yes, probably as many as 300 or 400 or 500 people had died. No one actually knew how many. We visited the clinic, the one the Swedes worked out of, and they didn’t have any medicine. The supplementary feeding program was without food. Walking through, it was obvious there were a lot of people just not eating. You could see it. Also, it was raining around then, so the sanitation situation was just horrendous, because the Falasha would not go out of their tukels (straw huts). They were urinating and defecating in their tukels, and some of these huts contained as many as 10, 12, 15 people. The Swedes told us, and the Commission of Refugees people told us, and the Ethiopians told us--it was just impossible to get the Falasha to come out. They were terrified.”

A Cable to Washington

On his return to Khartoum, Weaver filed a cable to Washington describing what he saw. There followed several weeks of bureaucratic teeth-gnashing.

Richard Krieger, an official in the office of the U.S. Coordinator of Refugees, who had taken a personal interest in the Ethiopian Jews, fired off questions to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. The U.N. agency responded by sending to Sudan its own investigator, whose conclusion was that the situation was not critical, that food and medicine were available and that the death rate was not abnormal.

Richard Smyser, the U.N. office’s second-in-command, cabled Washington and asked how Weaver’s report could be squared with the one filed by the Geneva refugee agency. Washington passed the query back to Weaver, and Weaver returned to Um Rakuba and found out that the U.N. investigator had never been there. The investigator later admitted he had never actually been to the camp, but had spoken with “informed sources.”

In Khartoum, the “Falasha issue” was the hottest topic in town. Nicholas Morris, the U.N. refugee representative there, held the view that the Jews could be treated no differently from any other refugee group, and the mandate of his organization forbade favoritism.

“My argument was that we would accomplish nothing by sending in some high-tech medical team for the Falasha,” he recalled later. “The problem was getting them to use the services we had there.”

Deaths Kept Increasing

Weaver made sure--using funds available through the embassy and the refugee programs bureau of the State Department--that food was gotten out to Um Rakuba. The death rate, however, continued to climb.

Weaver took home leave in late August. He had anticipated four days of consultations in Washington. It turned out to be 10, and he was called back from his hometown in Ohio for still more talks. The subject of all the concern was the Ethiopian Jews.

The meetings were going on at a high level, involving the top officers in his own bureau, James N. Purcell Jr. and Arthur E. Dewey, as well as Princeton Lyman, the deputy assistant secretary for East Africa; Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary for human rights, and the U.S. coordinator of refugees, Ambassador H. Eugene Douglas, and his assistant, Krieger.

Although the Ethiopian Jews had not yet made news, to the Israelis and members of the American Jewish community, they had become a major concern. The attention paid the matter by the State Department in part reflected that concern. Krieger, a political appointee who came from a background of Jewish community service, pressed the case strenuously.

Sudan Relations a Worry

America’s relations with the Sudanese government were also a concern. The United States saw Sudan as a key player in its Africa and Mideast policies and wanted to avoid damaging that relationship. There was a fear that the Israelis might try some spectacular rescue, producing an international outcry in which the Sudanese, the United States and Israel would all be losers. It seemed unlikely that the Israelis would undertake an Entebbe-style rescue--the logistics of such an operation were virtually impossible--but the thought weighed on several minds. Also, the troublesome free-lance rescue operations were making the Sudanese increasingly testy, and if continued could jeopardize any future agreement to get the Jews out of Sudan.

“We wanted to get the Falasha out,” Weaver said, “but not using a ‘black’ (illegal undercover) operation. We wanted something straightforward that would not create an embarrassing situation for the government of Sudan.”

No one had an answer.

Weaver returned to Khartoum and puzzled over the problem. The reports from Um Rakuba were not good. Food had gotten there, but the Jewish refugees apparently became ill from it, and they remained difficult to work with. The death rate continued to climb--40 or 50 a day by some reports.

“I had never felt so frustrated,” Weaver recalled. “Here was an apparently intractable situation that had all kinds of humanitarian and political implications, and we could not find a solution.”

In mid-September, Weaver sought out a man in the Sudanese government, a middle-level official whose name must remain secret. He was, said Weaver, “a Muslim and a humanist.” Weaver raised the Falasha question with him.

“What is the roadblock to getting these people out of the country?” Weaver asked him.

The official pondered. “Travel documents,” he said.

“And who issues the travel papers?” Weaver asked.

“State security.”

“Let me be sure I’ve got this straight,” Weaver said. “It is not a problem with the (Sudanese) Commission of Refugees, or immigration or anyone else. It’s a state security problem, right?”

“That’s right,” the official said.

Vice President Involved

The head of Sudanese state security (a combination of intelligence and secret police) was a formidable figure in Sudan, the first vice president, Gen. Omar Tayeb.

Weaver made a reach in the dark. He knew that the middle-level official and the vice president were friends.

“I wonder,” said Weaver, “if you could speak to the vice president and ask him if he would be willing to talk with someone about this.”

The official thought about it carefully and agreed to approach the vice president on an informal basis.

Within a day, Weaver was notified that the vice president would make time available for a meeting.

U.S. Ambassador Hume Horan went to the meeting with Tayeb. Horan laid out the problem, it is believed, along the following lines: The Ethiopian Jews had become a problem far beyond their actual numbers. They were, in essence, a special group. They were dying in numbers far beyond the ordinary refugee population. Furthermore, it was becoming a matter of international concern. As the vice president was no doubt aware, halting attempts had been made to smuggle them out of the country. These had not been entirely successful, but they had been a continuing irritant to the Sudanese. Now, with the general refugee situation worsening, it was likely that the Jews would attract even more attention, and even more sub rosa attempts to get them out.

He concluded that the best way to control the situation was simply to devise a way to remove the Ethiopian Jews from Sudan.

Insisted on Secrecy

Tayeb listened carefully. He agreed in principle, his major condition being secrecy. He did not want international agencies involved in it. They were incapable, he said, of keeping a secret. Within days, he said, it would be all over Geneva, then all over the world. He would agree to further discussions about a plan only if it were run by the CIA. In the meantime, he would appoint a couple of trusted officers to meet further with the Americans.

That evening, the embassy drafted a cable to Washington. It suggested “a breakthrough on the Falasha issue” and requested instructions.

The reply came swiftly. The State Department told the embassy to proceed, but stipulated that the CIA would not be involved in whatever plan was developed. (It was not learned why the instructions explicitly eliminated the CIA from the operation, but the State Department and the CIA apparently agreed on the matter. One suggestion was that the CIA did not want to set a precedent by getting involved in the movement of large numbers of refugees, a difficult and explosive issue in many parts of the world.)

The CIA station chief in Khartoum then went to see Vice President Tayeb and said the American contact man on the project would be Weaver. That was the last of the CIA’s involvement in Operation Moses.

Within a day or two, Weaver met two Sudanese colonels, whom he would identify later only as Col. X and Col. Y.

“We drank fruit juice,” Weaver recalled, “sized each other up like marriage brokers. We talked about hunting, guns, that sort of thing. Just got to know each other.”

In the months that followed, they would become close friends.

In early October, Weaver flew to Geneva with his plan, its essentials approved by the Sudanese.

“It would be a Midnight Express-type operation,” Weaver said. “Simple, nothing elaborate. I figured the best way to hide something is not to hide it.”

Several hundred Ethiopian Jews, on their own initiative, had already moved from Um Rakuba to a camp at Tawawa, near the eastern Sudanese town of Gedaref, essentially following the old underground route that others had taken before them. If Weaver’s scheme worked--the Ethiopian Jews would be moved by road from Tawawa to the Khartoum airport, and flown out to Europe.

The Geneva meeting included key contacts in the Jewish Agency, the Israeli government, and among U.S. officials. Col. Y did not participate in the meetings but was also in town.

“We sat down to work out the logistics of it,” Weaver went on. “We had three days of very intense discussion over who was going to be the control officer, how we were going to get funds, who was responsible for chartering the aircraft--the basic division of labor. How the policy and other interests of the U.S. government would be protected, how the Sudanese interests would be protected. Each morning, we would have these marathon meetings, and then . . . Col. Y and I would take long walks through the gardens and I would tell him what was going on in my meetings and he would give me--very accurately, it turned out--the Sudanese feedback.”

An important Israeli official who was at some of these early meetings later recalled his first impression of the scene.

‘Knew What He Was Doing’

“I thought, ‘They’ve got to be kidding with this guy Weaver.’ ‘A cowboy,’ I thought. But by the second day, I was a believer. We were talking about having some agency do some task or other, and Weaver was saying, ‘No, if you do this, you’re going to have an unholy mess on your hands,’ and he explained why. And the more I listened, the more I realized he knew what he was doing.”

The planners worked out the financing arrangements. The Israelis would arrange for a plane, chartered from a Belgian company, Trans European Airlines in Brussels. By international standards, the budget was minuscule, but almost $1 million passed through Weaver’s hands in the coming weeks, and he kept scrupulous account of what was spent. All the funds came from Israeli sources. None came from the U.S. government, and none of it went for bribes or any other sort of payoff. (And, as far as Weaver knew, no one in the Sudanese government, all the way to the top, was ever paid in any way to allow the operation to go on).

“Here’s what we agreed we had to have,” Weaver recalled. “We had to have four buses. We had to have about five other vehicles, strong, long-range vehicles. We had to have personnel--in other words, we had to reimburse the Sudanese for the wear and tear on their personnel. We had to have communications equipment. We had to have a safe house in Gedaref. We had to have a safe house in Khartoum. We had to have fuel. When I got back to Khartoum, I immediately started making arrangements to get 500 metric tons of fuel, which I figured was enough to run us for three months.” The fuel cost about $175,000.

Reported to Ambassador

Weaver enlisted the aid of his assistant, Christopher, but otherwise, he worked alone, reporting his progress only to the ambassador. No other Americans were involved. He found the fuel through a Pakistani broker, but then had to wait for the delivery in trucks loaded with 55-gallon drums. Weaver needed the fuel in Gedaref and Christopher was sent to wait for it.

Weaver found a house in Gedaref, and the state security people found another in Khartoum. Later, they located an abandoned bottling plant in Gedaref to store the fuel and to put up the buses during the day.

The safe house in Gedaref, located at the southern edge of town, was equipped with a portable generator (because the power supply in Gedaref is unreliable), a refrigerator, a few chairs and half a dozen iron cots and foam-rubber mattresses.

In Khartoum, Weaver and his helpers located another warehouse near the airport. He stockpiled 250 blankets, a supply of water and 220 pounds of dried biscuits. If some hitch developed with the arrival of the airplane, he needed a place to hide the Ethiopian Jews overnight. The biscuits, water and blankets would hold them for 24, even 48, hours. Another 250 blankets were reserved for the buses.

By mid-November, only the buses were missing. Because none were for sale in Sudan, Weaver and Christopher had made a hurried trip to Saudi Arabia, carrying a suitcase stuffed with Sudanese currency, and bought four stripped-down truck frames, which they sent back to Khartoum to be converted to buses. Since the trucks were not yet ready, they decided to start the operation with rented buses that cost $10,000 to $15,000 each.

The Israelis had one other major concern, and that was the safety of the “selector,” the person who would have to be delegated to be sure that those who came on the flights were, indeed, Ethiopian Jews. They needed a man who knew how to tell and who was incorruptible. They found him--strangely or perhaps logically--working in a Swiss bank.

“James,” who cannot be identified by his real name, was the final element.

NEXT: Operation Moses and resettlement in Israel