By Way of Deception

BY WAY OF DECEPTION 289In 1977, when Menachem Begin became prime minister, he vowedto help the Falashas come to the promised land. Ethiopian leaderMengitsu Haile Mariam, struggling with a bitter civil war in theearly 1970s, had ordered harsh punishment for any Ethiopianattempting to escape, so Begin drew up a plan for secret armsdeals with that country in exchange for covert missions from bothEthiopia and Sudan to rescue the Falashas. Only 122 black Jewshad been flown out of Addis Ababa when Israeli foreign ministerMoshe Dayan told a radio reporter in Zurich on February 6, 1978,that Israel was selling weapons to Ethiopia. Mariam, who haddemanded the deal be kept secret, immediately called it off.In 1979, when Begin and Anwar Sadat of Egypt signed the CampDavid agreement, Begin persuaded Sadat to talk Sudan'sPresident Jaafar al-Nemery into allowing the Falashas to flow outof refugee camps in Sudan into Israel. Over the next few years, atrickle of Falashas, perhaps as many as 4,000, did make their wayto Israel, although that plan died, too, when Sadat wasassassinated in 1981, and alNemery converted to Islamicfundamentalism.By 1984, however, the situation had become critical. TheFalashas, along with legions of other Ethiopians, were sufferinghorrible drought and famine. Now they began to pour into Sudanin search of food. In September 1984, when Israel's then deputyprime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, met U.S. Secretary of StateGeorge Shultz in Washington, Shamir asked the Americans to usetheir clout with both the Egyptians and the Saudi Arabians topersuade al-Nemery to allow a rescue operation under cover of theInternational Food Aid operation. Sudan, which had its ownproblems with drought, and with civil war in the south, was notunhappy at the prospect of having a few thousand less mouths tofeed. But again, both the Sudanese and the Ethiopian officialsdemanded absolute secrecy.Indeed, between November 1984 and January 1985, the operationwas secret. During the first week of January 1985, George Bush,then U.S. vice-president, having received alNemery's approval,ordered a U.S. Hercules aircraft into