Three days later, Prime Minister Shimon Peres told the Knesset: “The government of Israel acted, and will keep acting, to the limit of its powers and even beyond, to continue the operation until the last Ethiopian Jew reached his homeland.” The very same day, the Sudanese canceled the flights and the operation was stopped. The Sudanese were infuriated, not by the articles in the press but by the speech of the Israeli prime minister, who confirmed the story. “If the Israelis had kept quiet for another month,” observed a U.S. official in Washington, “it would have been possible to save all the Jews of Ethiopia.”
Vice President George H. W. Bush was deeply impressed by Operation Moses and Israel’s efforts to bring over the Ethiopians despite great risks. He decided to act. A few weeks after the cancellation of Operation Moses, seven Hercules aircraft of the U.S. Air Force landed in the Sudanese airfield at Al-Qadarif. They carried aboard several CIA agents. The American task force launched Operation Queen of Sheba, and flew the five hundred Ethiopian Jews remaining in Sudan directly to the Israeli Air Force base at Mitzpeh Ramon, in the Negev.
Two months later, Jaafar Nimeiry was deposed by a junta of army officers. Libyan intelligence officers rushed to Sudan in order to find the Mossad agents who were still in Khartoum. The last three remaining agents were discovered by the Libyans and at the last moment were able to escape to the home of a CIA agent. The American hid them in his house and later flew them, hidden in crates, to the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. David Molad, who had been one of the senior Mossad officers in Sudan, slipped quietly out of the country. The rescue of the Ethiopian Jews was to be one of his last operations before his retirement from the Mossad.
In Operations Moses and Queen of Sheba, the U.S.-Israeli cooperation had been perfect, almost idyllic. Unfortunately, shortly after these events, the Pollard affair exploded in Washington: a Jewish employee of the U.S. intelligence community, Jonathan Pollard, was arrested for spying on behalf of Israel. The U.S. government was stunned and furious; the heads of the CIA felt betrayed by the ally whom they had helped and who, in return, had spied on them.
The Israeli government profusely apologized and returned the documents stolen by Pollard to the United States. But the intelligence relations between Jerusalem and Washington had suffered a serious blow. One of Pollard’s handlers turned out to be none other than Rafi Eitan, the legendary Mossad agent, who now headed an obscure intelligence organization in the Ministry of Defense. The organization, Lakam (the Bureau for Scientific Relations), was disbanded right away, and judicial proceedings against Eitan were initiated in Washington. To this very day, he cannot enter the United States for fear of being arrested.
Operation Moses was severely criticized by many Ethiopian Jews, as it took the lives of about four thousand people. In the Mossad, too, the officers of Caesarea, headed at that time by Shabtai Shavit, strongly disapproved of the planning and execution of the operation by the Bitzur department. Shavit and his men claimed that Bitzur was a marginal department that was not equipped to undertake an operation of such magnitude as Moses. The Bitzur people insisted that the operation succeeded precisely because of its spontaneous and improvised character. They also pointed out that they had recruited some of the best Mossad agents for carrying out the various stages of Moses.
The infighting could not change the fact that thousands of Jews had returned to the Land of Israel. And yet, even after the completion of Operation Moses and Operation Queen of Sheba, thousands of Jews remained in Ethiopia. They also wanted to immigrate to Israel, but the gates were locked. Israel felt it was imperative to bring them over, for ideological and Zionist considerations, but also for a humane reason: many families had been split and torn, children had arrived in Israel without their parents, parents without their children, husbands without their wives . . . This separation caused terrible absorption problems—and many personal tragedies, like suicides of young people who could not cope with the new reality without the support of their families. The Jewish Agency emissaries transferred thousands of Jews to camps around the capital Addis Ababa; and the Ethiopian Jews kept praying for a miracle that would take them to the Land of Israel.
And the miracle happened.
Six years after Operation Moses, in May 1991, Operation Solomon was launched. It took place at the height of the civil war, as the rebels against the reigning military junta approached Addis Ababa from all sides. The operation was made possible by a last-minute agreement, brokered by the United States, between the government of Israel and the beleaguered ruler Mengistu in the last days before his collapse.
The agreement was negotiated thanks to the secret activity of Uri Lubrani, one of Israel’s “mystery men,” who had been special envoy to Iran and Lebanon; he had undertaken the mission at the request of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Israel agreed to pay Ethiopia $35 million for the immigration of the Jews, while the United States promised some of the major figures in Mengistu’s government political asylum in America. Simultaneously, an understanding was reached with the rebel leaders that they would accept a truce in the fighting for a limited time while Israel carried out its operation. It took thirty-six hours, and the operation was over.
The IDF was charged with executing Operation Solomon. The deputy chief of staff, General Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, took over command of the action. At his orders, Israel sent to Addis Ababa “everything that could fly.” The El Al airline sent to Ethiopia thirty airliners; the air force sent many of its aircraft. Elite squads of Shaldag (Kingfisher) commandos were brought to Addis Ababa. At their sides were hundreds of infantry soldiers and paratroopers of Ethiopian origin, who had immigrated to Israel as children a few years ago. They deployed at the confines of the airport and led the Jews into the planes. In thirty-four hours, 14,400 Jews were brought to the airport. With lightning speed, they boarded the aircraft and took off for Israel. A world record was broken during the operation: an El Al Boeing 747 took on board 1,087 immigrants; but when it landed, it carried 1,088 people. A baby had been born during the flight.
At the sight of the young Ethiopian soldiers who had arrived from Israel to rescue their brothers, tremendous emotions swept the immigrants; even the tough Ethiopian paratroopers, in their green IDF uniforms, red berets, and jumping boots, burst into tears.
Today, more than twenty years after Operation Solomon, there still are many Jews in Ethiopia, and efforts are made to bring them over to Israel. But the absorption of the Ethiopians in the Israeli society has not been easy, often because of the gap between a rural African community and a modern Western nation; but also because of blunt discrimination or ugly claims by some religious leaders that the Ethiopians are not real Jews.
As the last stanza of “The Journey Song” says:
In the moon
The image of my mother looks at me
Mother, don’t disappear!
If only she were by my side
She would be able to convince them
That I am a Jew.
Epilogue
War with Iran?
Entebbe Airport, Uganda, July 4, 1976
In the black of night, four Israeli Hercules aircraft, undetected by Ugandan radar, surreptitiously land at Entebbe Airport. They have flown a distance of 2,500 miles from their base in Israel, carrying the Sayeret Matkal commando and several other elite army units. A week before, Arab and German terrorists hijacked an Air France airliner on its way from Tel-Aviv to Paris, and landed it in Entebbe. Protected and supported by Uganda’s dictator, General Iddi Amin, the terrorists hold ninety-five Israeli civilians hostage. Israel decides to launch a daring operation to the heart of Africa, to rescue the hostages.
Minutes after the landing, the Israeli commandos spread throughout the airport. Yoni Netanyahu, commander of Sayeret Matkal, leads his men in an assault on the terminal where the hostages are held. In the intense firefight that erupts, Yoni suddenly collapses, hit by a bullet. Another Sayeret officer, Captain Tamir Pardo, bends over his fallen commander, switches his mike on, and calls
his comrades. Yoni has been hit, he says. “Muki, take over!” Yoni’s deputy, Muki Betzer, assumes command and pursues the mission. Minutes later, the battle is over. The terrorists are killed, the hostages rescued, and the heavy Hercules planes take off, on their way back to Israel.
The rescue of the hostages, so far away from home, is about to become legend. But it has exacted a price: three of the hostages have died in the firefight. As has one soldier, Lieutenant-Colonel Yoni Netanyahu, brother of future Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The entire Israeli nation mourns Yoni’s death. That night, Tamir Pardo, the Sayeret communications officer, knocks on the door of the Netanyahu family in Jerusalem; he has been sent to inform them about the circumstances of Yoni’s death. A warm relationship will sprout between Netanyahu’s family and Tamir Pardo, who was at Yoni’s side in his last moments.
Thirty-five years later, fifty-seven-year-old Tamir Pardo is appointed ramsad, replacing Meir Dagan.
Born in Tel Aviv to a Jewish family of Turkish and Serbian origin, eighteen-year-old Tamir had volunteered for the paratroopers, graduated from the officers academy, and served in the Sayeret Matkal and at Shaldag (Kingfisher) commando units. Four years after Entebbe, he joined the Mossad, took part in several unnamed operations, and was awarded the Israel Security Prize three times. In 1998 he was appointed chairman of the Mossad inquiry board that investigated Khaled Mashal’s flawed assassination attempt in Amman. Soon after, he became the head of Nevioth, the Mossad department charged with electronic collection of intelligence in foreign countries. He specialized in new technologies and creative planning. In 2002, when Dagan was appointed ramsad, Pardo became one of his two deputies, and for the next four years headed the Mossad Operations Staff; but in 2006 he spent a year with the IDF as an army general, advising the General Staff on special operations. He was said to have planned several daring missions during the Second Lebanon War. Pardo was called back to Dagan’s side in 2007. He expected to be appointed ramsad when Dagan’s tenure came to an end in 2009, but the cabinet, impressed by Dagan’s achievements, extended his service for another year. Pardo, disappointed, resigned from the Mossad and went into business with a medical services company. That did not last long. On November 29, 2010, Prime Minister Netanyahu appointed him the next ramsad, and he assumed his functions in January 2011.
In many ways, Pardo followed the footsteps of his predecessor. The ruthless covert war against Iran continued. In November and December 2011, several explosions rocked a military base where Shehab missiles were being tested, and a Isfahan suburb where the uranium gas, separated in the centrifuge cascades, was again converted to solid matter. Then another scientist, Dr. Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, the deputy director of the Natanz underground facility, was killed while driving his car in the streets of Tehran. The modus operandi was similar to others used in several past assassinations.
Iran accused Israel of the attacks and swore revenge. For the first time, the Iranian secret services tried to carry out several coups against Israeli targets in Asia: a bombing of a car in New Delhi wounded an Israeli diplomat’s wife; a similar attempt in Tbilisi, Georgia, failed; several explosions went off in Bangkok, Thailand, one of which wounded the perpetrator, an Iranian national. The Egyptian secret services foiled a plot by Iranian agents to blow up an Israeli ship sailing through the Suez Canal. The covert war between Israel and Iran was now coming into the open. Police investigators in New Delhi, Bangkok, and Cairo pointed a finger at Iran’s secret services. The world press described in detail the rather clumsy attempts by Iranian spooks to attack Israeli targets abroad.
Coming into the open were also new details about the Israeli operations inside Iran. Western sources claimed that the Mossad had established operational bases in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan, right on the Iranian border. They served as the training grounds and dispatch for agents inside Iranian territory. The same sources claimed that many of the Mossad agents operating inside Iran were actually members of the M.E.K. opposition, Iranian Muslims who could blend into the local population better than any Israeli officer. Quite a few M.E.K. militants had been trained in secret facilities in Israel, and even rehearsed some of the operations on specially built models—like a Tehran street—where they were to ambush an Iranian nuclear scientist’s car or plant a bomb near his home.
In other cases, Iranian dissidents were approached by different means. Several CIA memos even maintained that Mossad officers carried out “False Flag” recruiting missions. The Israelis, allegedly posing as CIA agents, recruited militants of the Pakistani terrorist organization Jundallah and sent them on sabotage and assassination missions inside Iran. According to the CIA memos, the Israelis posed as American intelligence officers in order to overcome the devout Muslims’ objection to serving the Jewish state.
In the spring of 2012, worried international observers claimed that the Iranian nuclear project was close to completion and sources in the International Atomic Energy Agency even declared that Iran has produced 109 kilograms of enriched uranium, enough to assemble four atomic bombs. If Israel decided to deal a major blow to the Iranian project by launching an all-out attack against its nuclear centers, the covert war would give way to an open one.
According to the world press and quite a few talkative spokesmen, Israel was not alone in its consideration of a military option. In Jerusalem and Washington, official sources confirmed that Israel and the United States were acting together, but disagreed on a major point: when would Iran have to be stopped by all means necessary—military or other. The American services claimed that this would be the moment when the enrichment of uranium by Iran reached 80 percent, a crucial stage in the development of their nuclear capability. Uranium enriched to that level could be very quickly upgraded to 97 percent, the degree needed for the assembly of an atomic bomb.
Israel’s timetable was different, based on reports from the ground and satellite detection. The Mossad had discovered that Iran was engaged in a chaotic race against time, building a large number of underground facilities buried at a depth of eighty meters or more. They were transferring all their fissile materials and their secret labs underground. Intelligence reports obtained by the Mossad, with the help of the M.E.K. resistance organization, claimed that Iran had built a new underground facility close to Fordo. In the huge halls of the new facility the Iranians planned to install three thousand new centrifuges, far faster and more sophisticated than the equipment now in service. In that facility the Iranians could feed the centrifuges uranium enriched up to 3.5 percent and keep enriching it till it was ready for use. Israel was convinced that this doomsday cave, like many other bases and labs, had to be destroyed before the centrifuges were installed, becoming fully protected against an aerial attack. “When they reach the critical stage of enrichment,” the Israeli envoys told the Americans, “it will be too late to hit them. They will have entered an ‘immune area’ where no bombings will be able to destroy their project. The time to act is now, in the spring of 2012.”
Washington was not convinced and wanted to try a campaign of harsh sanctions. Israel did not believe the sanctions would stop Iran. At a summit meeting in Washington in early spring 2012, President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu praised the firm strategic alliance between the two nations but could not agree on a way forward against the Iranian nuclear project. The Mossad reports still indicated that Tehran was relentlessly pursuing atomic power. At the same time, Iranian leaders relentlessly threatened Israel with total annihilation. The very thought of the danger that a fanatic, nuclear Iran represented for Israel and the world reminded the Israelis of the old Talmudic adage: “If someone comes to kill you—rise up and kill him first.”
Israel felt that once again it was standing alone. And, as in 1948, the year of its creation, and in 1967, on the eve of the Six-Day War, Israel again faces the most fateful decision of its existence.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of Mossad was published in Israel in 2010, where it stayed on the bestselle
r lists for seventy weeks, and received the gold, platinum, and diamond shields for breaking sales records. We want to thank first of all our Israeli publisher, Dov Eichenwald, director general of Yedioth Ahronoth publishing house, who conceived the idea and then encouraged and supported us all along the way.
We are deeply grateful to the former directors and agents of the intelligence community—we could name only a few of them—who helped us with information and advice.
Our research assistants Oriana Almassi and Nilly Ovnat made a tremendous effort to bring the project to life. Nilly Ovnat also assisted us greatly in preparing the rewritten and updated English version of Mossad.
In the U.S., we were happy to collaborate with our publisher, Dan Halpern, at HarperCollins/Ecco, and with our devoted editors, Abigail Holstein and Karen Maine. We also want to thank our copyeditor, Olga Gardner Galvin, for her X-ray eyes and inquisitive pencil.
This book appears almost simultaneously in more than twenty countries all over the world, and we greatly appreciate the efforts of our agents, Writers’ House of New York, especially of “Mr. Writers’ House,” Al Zuckerman, and the indefatigable foreign rights director Maja Nikolic.
Finally we thank our ladies, Galila Bar-Zohar and Amy Korman, for advising, reading, correcting, suggesting, arguing—and still apparently not giving up on us.
Michael Bar-Zohar
Nissim Mishal
Bibliography and Sources
Mossad is based on a large variety of sources, books, documents, newspaper articles, and interviews. As it deals with exclusively secret materials, the importance of reliable, solid sources is crucial. Most of the sources in Hebrew were unpublished documents and in-depth interviews with many of the major players in that world of shadows. We also used a great number of sources in English, after trying to separate the genuine information from the fantastic inventions of fertile minds. We hope to have succeeded in this endeavor.
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