Mengistu was furious. He could not publicly admit he maintained secret relations with Israel, and canceled the agreement with the Mossad right away. The direct channel for Jewish immigration was now blocked, but Begin’s order to Haka was still in force.
The gates of Ethiopia were locked once again, but a letter that reached Mossad headquarters from Khartoum, the capital of Ethiopia’s neighbor Sudan, suddenly offered another escape route for the Ethiopian Jews.
The letter was signed by Fereda Aklum, an Ethiopian Jew, a teacher, who had succeeded in crossing the border into Sudan. From Israel’s point of view, Sudan was an enemy country. It was plagued with famine, drought, and tribal and religious wars. Thousands of refugees from various parts of the country—and from neighboring Ethiopia—gathered in squalid tent camps. Aklum posted several letters to Israel, and to relief organizations throughout the world, in a desperate effort to get urgent help for the emigration of the Ethiopian Jews. One of Aklum’s letters landed in Mossad headquarters and attracted the attention of a senior official. “I am in Sudan,” Aklum wrote, “send me a plane ticket.” Instead of a plane ticket, the Mossad sent to Sudan one of its men, Danny Limor, to meet Aklum.
When they met, the two of them agreed that Aklum would try to find Jews in the refugee camps and keep Danny informed. In a few months, he, indeed, located thirty Jews, and the Mossad discreetly organized their immigration to Israel. A month later, Aklum was co-opted by the Mossad and charged with tracing Jews in Khartoum. He did not find any Jews there, though, and the Mossad envoy decided to return to Israel. Before leaving, Limor instructed Aklum to leave for Israel as well. But Aklum wanted to stay and keep looking for Jews in other parts of Sudan. Limor, however, was adamant. He ordered Aklum to put an end to his activities and return to Israel within a week.
But Aklum disobeyed the order and started traveling from one town to another, from one refugee camp to another, hoping to find Jews there. He did not find even one Jew, but he knew well that if he returned to Israel now, this would put an end to the immigration of Ethiopian Jews via Sudan. He therefore composed a mendacious report, mentioning the names of many Jews whom he allegedly found in Sudan, faxed it to the Mossad, and announced that he was staying in Sudan “to take care of them.”
The Jews whom Aklum included in his lists existed, indeed, but they were not in Sudan; they still lived in their villages in Ethiopia. Now Aklum started operating in Ethiopia as a lone wolf. He visited the villages and tried to convince the local Jews to immigrate to the Land of Israel. The rumor that a secret route to Jerusalem had been found spread like wildfire. First a few men, then families, finally entire villages packed their meager belongings and set off. Thousands of people, including old men, women, and children, secretly left Ethiopia. They were inspired by a messianic dream, by the biblical promises of return to the land of milk and honey.
They prepared food and water, crossed the border, and started an exhausting and dangerous journey in the desert. They marched at night, and during the day they hid in caves and crannies. Many fell sick and died. Babies died of dehydration in their mothers’ arms. A father lost his four children during the terrible journey. Some were bitten by snakes and scorpions, others died of infectious diseases. The water and the food they had taken with them were insufficient. Several groups were attacked by robbers that took all their belongings and often left behind heaps of corpses. Years later, the actress Mehereta Barush, who had participated in the journey, described its terrible toll. Every morning, she said, the travelers counted the corpses of their friends. Sometimes there were ten dead bodies spread in the sand, sometimes fifteen. There was not a family that had not lost at least one of their children.
In the summer of 1981, Danny Limor and his Mossad team were back in Sudan, operating under cover. They called themselves “the Hafis,” the initials of “Haka’s Force in Sudan.” Their goal was to establish contact with the Ethiopian Jews throughout Sudan.
But the surviving Jews met with other difficulties when trying to get in touch with the Mossad envoys; even those who reached the refugee camps around Khartoum were heartbroken. They had to conceal their Jewish religion, and yet avoided eating the nonkosher food that the relief agencies were distributing to the refugees. Women were raped and young girls kidnapped by bullies and criminals who were the real rulers of the camps. A group of one hundred girls was abducted and vanished. Their relatives who looked for them learned that they had been sold to Saudi Arabia, where about 120,000 women were held in bondage. Several Jews were identified as such by their neighbors in the camps; they were arrested and tortured by the Sudanese police. Many stayed in the refugee camps for months and even years till they were able to set off for Israel.
The Ethiopian Jews paid a heavy price for their dream to enter the gates of Jerusalem. More than four thousand Jews died during the various stages of their journey. Henry Gold, a Canadian Jew who worked as a volunteer in the camps in Sudan and Ethiopia, was deeply shocked by the situation of the Jews he found there, and harshly criticized the Israeli envoys for failing to carry out their mission properly.
Yet the Mossad was looking for a secure way to get the Jews to Israel. The exodus from Sudan started by regular commercial flights, with forged passports; but the Mossad soon decided to take the refugees to Israel by sea, sending boats that would take them through the Red Sea and the Straits of Tiran—to the port of Eilat.
As a cover, the Mossad established in Europe a company of tourism and travel. “In order to operate in this area, one needs a cover story,” said Mossad agent Yonatan Shefa, one of the operation leaders, “for if you don’t have a cover story after a week, they would ask you: What are you doing here? You’re a tourist? What is here to see?” The company leased an abandoned beach resort close to Port Sudan, called “Arous,” and signed an agreement with the Sudanese government for the development of maritime sports in the Red Sea. All the administrative dealings were entrusted to Yehuda Gil, who was regarded then as one of the best Mossad officers. Gil came to Khartoum, met with the regime officials, and with a lot of savvy explained, convinced, and bribed—till finally he got all the necessary permits and licenses for operating the Arous Resort. The man charged with the setting up and the management of the resort was Yonatan Shefa, who had taken part in many Mossad operations. Arous was actually built as a village, with individual bungalows and a few public buildings. Several Mossad agents, carrying forged passports, were sent from Israel and became the resort’s instructors and employees. They stuffed the resort store with diving equipment, scuba apparatus, masks, flippers, and snorkels. In the store was hidden a transceiver that was in permanent contact with Mossad headquarters. Emanuel Allon, who had participated in many operations with Shefa, including the rescue of the Syrian virgins, got a call from Yonatan. “He told me, ‘I need you for something special. This time it is an operation without killing; something special; something humane. I am talking to you, and I am getting so emotional. I want to establish a resort village in Sudan.’ ” The village was open to the public, and its posters soon sprouted on the walls of European travel agencies.
Many tourists spent their vacation in Arous, and at least from their point of view, the resort was a success. During the day, they dived, swam, and enjoyed the Red Sea beach. But they did not know that almost every night the Mossad agents set off from the village to bring over Jews from the refugee camps. The “diving instructors” invented a cover story for the local employees of the resort, who were Sudanese. They told the locals that they were going to spend the night with the Swedish nurses of the Red Cross hospital in the town of Kassala. When the merry departures reached a dubious frequency, the local employees started suspecting that something fishy was going on there; but as long as they got their generous salaries, they preferred to look the other way.
The nightly journeys were carried out with four old trucks. The Mossad agents, under the command of Danny Limor, drove to the vicinity of the camps. The young members of a secret Ethiopian orga
nization, the Committee, would gather groups of Jews and take them to the trucks.
But that was not easy. The Israelis were running many dangers. David Ben-Uziel, one of the operation leaders, deemed the approach to the camps as “the most dangerous part” of the mission. “We were very close to the camps,” he said. “We could be caught and had to finish this part as soon as possible.”
While the Committee was trying to locate the Jews in the refugee camps, there were many who refrained from identifying themselves, for fear of the Sudanese police. The Jews from the mountain villages in Ethiopia had never seen a white man before; they refused to believe that the Israelis were Jews who came to save them, for they did not know that there were also white Jews. Only when Danny Limor came to pray with them did they start believing he was a Jew—a strange one, praying in an unusual way, but a Jew all the same.
Fearing a leak, the Mossad agents did not warn the Jews beforehand. The Committee people told them to be ready to leave at any moment, and when they were contacted, they had to leave everything and go. And so, night after night, groups of Jews sneaked out of the camps and surreptitiously walked to the meeting point in a small ravine close by, where the Mossad agents were waiting.
The four-truck convoy would travel hundreds of kilometers to the Red Sea coast. En route, they had to go through army and police checkpoints. Danny would bribe the guards, and the trucks would be allowed to continue. At the meeting point on the coast, the Israeli Navy would be waiting.
A navy boat would be moored at some distance, and the naval commandos came to the coast in rubber dinghies to collect the Jews and take them aboard the mother ship. The main boat that came every week to the Sudanese coast was Bat-Galim. None of the Mossad agents and the naval commandos would ever forget the emotional meeting with their Ethiopian brethren and their dramatic departure toward Israel. Mossad agent David Ben-Uziel described the transfer of the Jews to the boats in a handheld tape recorder. “The sea is stormy,” he said. “We are carrying each one of our brothers in our arms so nobody would drown. The emotions of our men here run very high. Some say the sights remind them of their parents, who came to Israel as illegal immigrants; they were on the verge of bursting into tears when they saw our brothers enter the ship.”
“They came in complete silence,” added Gadi Kroll, the commander of the naval force. “Old men, women, babies in arms. We immediately sailed on the stormy seas. They sat down and didn’t utter a word.” The navy boats took them to Eilat.
One day, the Canadian-Jewish volunteer Henry Gold came to the resort village. He was exhausted from the hard work at the refugee camps, and some friends talked him into taking a couple of days off, to sun, swim, and dive. He had no idea of the secret activities taking place in and around Arous. But when he toured the village, he felt something was very strange here: he had the impression he was surrounded by Mossad agents. The staff seemed very weird. “They had a strange accent. One woman introduced herself as Swiss, but she didn’t have a Swiss accent, and the Iranian didn’t have an Iranian accent. At dinner, they put on the tables a very thinly chopped salad. I have been in many places all over the world, but such a salad is served only in Israel.” The following morning, Gold did not hesitate anymore and turned to the diving instructor, to ask in Hebrew: “Tell me, what are you people doing here?” The guy, amazed, blushed and collapsed on a chair. Finally, he asked Gold, also in Hebrew: “Who are you?” The very same day, a senior Mossad officer arrived and took Gold aside. Gold confronted him angrily about the treatment of the Jews in the refugee camps.
In one of the operations, in March 1982, while several boats were carrying the Ethiopians to the ship, in complete darkness, a dinghy with four Mossad agents got stuck among some rocks by the beach. At that moment, a squad of Sudanese soldiers armed with AK-47 rifles suddenly emerged on the beach and aimed their weapons at the tiny boat.
Danny Limor pulled himself together, hurled himself on the soldiers, and yelled in English at their commander: “Are you out of your mind? Are you going to fire on tourists?” He kept shouting about the tourists who came to dive in this resort, about Arous’s contribution to the tourist trade in Sudan, then threatened to lodge a complaint against the squad commander in Khartoum. The officer, stunned, apologized and explained he had assumed that the people in the boat were smugglers. He ordered his soldiers to leave the place at once.
The Mossad agents were safe, but the departures by sea apparently could not continue. A new way had to be found to transport the Jews to Israel. One morning, the tourists in Arous woke up to find that the entire foreign staff had vanished, except for some locals who had stayed behind to prepare breakfast for the guests. The previous night, the Mossad agents had left the village. They left letters of apology saying that the resort was closed because of budgetary difficulties. The tourists were to get their money back upon return to their countries. That was done, and all the divers were reimbursed in the coming weeks.
After long discussions at Mossad headquarters, the ramsad decided that the next transports would be carried out by air, with Rhinos—Hercules C-130 transport aircraft of the Israeli Air Force. It was a risky gamble, implying the penetration into Sudan’s air space and the repeated landing of Israeli soldiers on the territory of an enemy country. But Israel had no choice: the Ethiopian Jews had to be rescued.
In May 1982, the Mossad agents returned to Sudan. Their first mission was to locate possible landing areas south of Port Sudan. They found an abandoned British airfield and repaired its runway, making it suitable for the landing of the heavy Rhinos. The first group of Jews was brought from the meeting point to the airfield. Torches were used to light up the landing strip. But when the enormous Air Force Rhino landed, the Ethiopian Jews were scared to death. The huge metal bird that they saw for the first time in their lives landed in a roar of engines, rising clouds of dust, and seemed to head straight at them. Many ran away and agreed to come back only after exhausting efforts of persuasion by the Mossad people. Others stubbornly refused to enter the belly of the steel monster. The aircraft that was supposed to depart immediately finally took off with an hour delay, carrying 213 Jews.
The agents got a telegram of congratulations from headquarters, but they learned an important lesson. In the future, the trucks would wait until the Rhino landed and extended its ramp, and then they would drive to the very tail of the aircraft, so that the Jews would get right into the gaping belly of the plane.
That was a success—but it did not last long. The Sudanese authorities discovered the strange traffic at the abandoned airstrip, and the Mossad agents had to find another landing area. Soon they found another strip, forty-six kilometers southwest of Port Sudan. This time, the Mossad decided to carry out a large rescue operation of seven Hercules flights, each flight to carry two hundred Jews.
Operation Brothers took place under the personal command of the ramsad, Haka, and the commander of the Paratrooper Corps, General Amos Yaron. In the following two years, from mid-1982 to mid-1984, it brought to Israel fifteen hundred Ethiopian Jews.
That successful operation almost ended in failure. An informer of the Sudanese security forces pinpointed the contact man of the Mossad in the refugee camps. Addis Solomon, an Ethiopian Jew, was arrested and tortured for forty-two days by the Sudanese. They wanted to know the names of his handlers, and the location of the meeting places with the Mossad agents. But Solomon did not break down and did not reveal the secret.
At the end of 1984, the situation in the camps worsened. The famine and the infectious diseases caused many deaths among the Ethiopians. A civil war raged in Sudan, and threatened the regime of the nation’s dictator, Jaafar Nimeiry. His survival now depended on an urgent grant of financial aid and food supplies by the United States.
Israel asked Washington to help Sudan if it allowed the airlift to Israel to continue. The administration agreed, and the U.S. ambassador in Khartoum was instructed to negotiate along those lines. The result was a compromise: the Jews would
not be flown to Israel directly but via a third country; Israel would not be involved in the operation; the compensation to Sudan would be in the form of food and fuel shipments.
The U.S. embassy in Khartoum informed Washington that the Jews can be evacuated from Sudan in five or six weeks.
That’s how Operation Moses was born.
In the meantime, Haka had been replaced as ramsad by his deputy, Nahum Admoni, who had distinguished himself in the previous years by his energetic efforts to organize the immigration of the Ethiopian Jews. Admoni now authorized his men to fly the Jews via Belgium. A Jewish businessman who owned a small air-charter company agreed to help the operation with his Boeing airliners.
And so, on November 18, 1984, at one twenty A.M., the first Belgian aircraft landed in Sudan. Two hundred fifty starving, exhausted, and badly scared refugees got on the plane. But the Belgian pilot refused to take off, because the plane was equipped with only two hundred ten oxygen masks, not enough for two hundred fifty passengers. The Mossad agent in charge took him aside and whispered, quietly but firmly: “Please, make the selection yourself and decide who will live and who will die!” He then added, not so quietly: “If you don’t get in the cockpit and start the engines, I’ll throw you out of the plane and put another pilot in your seat.”
That was a very persuasive argument. The pilot got in the cockpit, and at two forty A.M., the first flight of Operation Moses took off for Israel, with a stopover in Brussels. During the next forty-seven days, the Boeings carried out thirty-six secret flights and brought over 7,800 Ethiopian Jews.
In Israel, the military censorship made desperate efforts to prevent any leakage of information about the operation. Their efforts succeeded until the Jewish Agency chairman, Arie Dulzin, published a statement saying that “one of the Jewish tribes is about to return to our homeland.” In the wake of this communiqué, the New York Jewish Press published the details of the operation, followed by the Los Angeles Times.
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