A NEW LIFE IN ISRAEL FOR ETHIOPIANS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605190002-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 2, 2012
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: July 8, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/02 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000605190002-2
ARTICLE APPEARED
ON PAGE
Prophecy Fulfilled
A New Life
in Israel for
Ethiopians
By CHARLES T. POWERS,
Times Staff Writer
For as long as anyone could
remember, the teachers and elders
had been reciting the prophecy:
One day, the black Jews of Ethiopia
would be led back to Jerusalem, the
city where Judaism had been
taught to their ancestors, the de-
scendants of Solomon and the
Queen of Sheba.
In early 1984, almost two-thirds
of the Jews remaining in Ethiopia
were told that the time of 'the
prophecy was at hand, and 12,000
of them marched out of -their
homelands.
They were drawn not only by
faith., A score of secret schemes
over the previous six years had
spirited 5,000 of their people to
Israel. But now they found them-
selves trapped in refugee camps in
Sudan, their presumed rescuers
caught by surprise and seemingly
paralyzed. They had begun to die at
alarming rates.
The rescue effort was at a stand-
still. Officially, the Islamic govern-
ment of Sudan was an enemy of
Israel. The surreptitious methods
previously employed to smuggle
Ethiopian Jews to Israel were inca-
pable of moving numbers so large.
The governments of the United
States and Israel, where concern
was mounting, were stymied.
Then in September, 1984, an
officer of the U.S. Embassy in
Khartoum, the Sudanese
came u with a plan extract
ews from uuda : e'T~i mango
devised it was a 46-year-old for-
mer college professor named Jerry
Weaver, the em s refugee
affairs coordinator . The plan came
to be known as "Operation Mons--
Key Man Picked
In late November, it was ready to
go. The Israelis set the time or e
first flight-Nov. 20. at rou
a.m. Mossad. Israel's intelligence
LOS ANGELES TIMES
8 July 1985
agency, had located a young Ethio-
ian Jew to whom they would
entrust the key task of ens
that those who came on the
tg is
were indeed ews. James, the man
they chose w o cannot enti
-
fied further, arrived in um
on Nov. 18.
James was slight, soft-spoken
almost to the point of timidity, the
son of an old Ethiopian Jewish
family, whose name had been
prominent among the community's
leadership for generations. Now
about 35, he had left Ethiopia years
earlier, spent time in Djibouti and
attended a university in France
before going to work in a Swiss
bank. James had never been in
Sudan. To Weaver, he looked frag-
ile.
Weaver and Christopher, his Su-
danese aide, took him to the eastern
Sudanese town of Gedaref, and on
the morning of Nov. 19, James first
ennered the nearby camp at Tawa-
we where the Jews were staying.
Weaver was nervous. The begin-
ning of the airlift was just hours
away. It seemed to him that for an
operation of this importance, the
key man should have been on the
scene much earlier.
"He had never been there, no
one knew him," Weaver said of
James. "So he had to go in and
introduce himself-'I am the son of
.... and I am here to take you out.'
About 2 o'clock, he comes out and
he says, 'I think I've made contact,
and I think we'll have the people
tonight.' "
Word Passed to Sudanese
Weaver passed the word to the
Sudanese. The four buses rented to
move the Jews from their camp to
the Khartoum airport left a grimy,
brick-walled warehouse where
they had been hidden and were
driven across an open field to the
stew-roofed tukels (huts) at the
southwest corner of Tawawa. It
was 5 p.m. A cordon of security
officers fanned out behind the
buses.
James disappeared into the
camp. Weaver climbed down off
the bus and waited. Minutes passed
and nothing happened-5:15 p.m.,
5:20. Weaver grimly noted that the
place they had chosen to wait was,
in ;tact, a vast, open toilet. In the
distance, Ethiopian refugees,
squatting in the fields, stared in
-wider.
"About 5,30, Weaver recalled,
"I see a man, a woman and three
little children come walking out,
looking around. very cautious. I
motioned for them to squat down,
and they immediately squatted
down and didn't move. Five min-
utes pass, 10 minutes pass. It's now
5:40. The sun's going down. Then I
see, coming out from the huts-3, 4,
6, 10, 20, 30-I we a rivulet of
people starting to come down.
"As they approach. I again mo-
tion for them to sit down. I'm not
sure who these people are. I
haven't seen James since he went
into the camp, but people are really
coming out now, in a, steady
?
Weaver stood by the closed
doors of the first bus, not knowing
what to do. He didn't know wheth-
er the people who had appeared out
of the camp were Ethiopian Jews or
not, or if they were, which ones
were supposed to be going. The
plan had been to take out the
vulnerable first-the sick, the old,
the orphans. But at this stage, it
looked impossible to sort out.
Around him in the rapidly closing
darkness were women with chil-
dren, old men, hundreds of others,
and they had begun to push for-
ward, shoving and shouting.
James reappeared and pushed
his way to the bus. Weaver, grate-
ful to see him and watched as
James tried to question the first
five or six people to get on the bus.
But then a wail erupted from the
waiting' people as the first passen-
gers climbed the steps, and the
crowd pushed forward again.
James was tossed aside-"like a
stick," Weaver said. The Ethiopi-
ans tore at each other's clothes,
tried to get through the iron bars
on the windows, climbed on top of
the bus. Weaver tore a stick away
from an old man and began crack-
ing people over the shoulders,
pushing them back.
Convoy on Wrong Bond
"By now it is 6 o'clock and dark,"
Weaver recalled. "The Sudanese
are nervous, I'm nervous, and obvi-
ously, the people getting on the
buses are very nervous. By about
6:30, we have packed no-one-
knows how many people aboard
the buses, and we try to leave.
People are running after us, total
pandemonium. In the confusion, we
take the wrong road. We are
driving on a dirt track parallel to
the Gedaref-Khartoum highway,
but we can't seem to get to it. So we
stop the caravan, turn the whole
damn thing around and go back
Conbnued
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/02 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000605190002-2