In the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s, Tel Aviv organised several large-scale operations to get over 23,000 Jews out of Ethiopia, a country plagued by hunger, civil unrest, and Cold War conflict. However, in mid-1986, one of those secret missions ended in disaster.
For over three decades, details on ‘Operation Djibouti', a Mossad extraction mission so secret that not even the Israeli foreign ministry or the army knew about it, remained largely hidden from the public. Officials have refused to talk about it, and those involved have been largely ignored by the media.
The clandestine operation, which kicked off in August 1986, saw a Mossad agent infiltrate Ethiopia's Gondar region, then home to a large population of Ethiopian Jews, offering assistance to help take young Jews out of the country to israel.
The new route was needed after ‘Operation Moses', an earlier operation lasting between 1984 and 1985, and involving Jews being airlifted to israel via Sudan, collapsed after Arab governments found out about it and put pressure on the Sudanese government to stop it. An estimated 8,000 Jews made it to Israel as part of Operation Moses, although some 4,000 more are thought to have died along the way.
Operation Djibouti, kicking off a year later, was much more modest in scale, with a Mossad agent named ‘Z' managing to gather together a group of just 27 people, of whom 23 would eventually reach Israel. The plan was for the group to sneak into Djibouti, from…
