the spectator | 29 february 2020 | http://www.spectator.co.uk 35Dangerously desirable: the white-morph gyr falcon commands sky-high pricesthe dinghies eventually had to be aban-
doned after Sudanese troops mistook the
convoys for smugglers one night and
opened fire.
Mossad switched to airlifts, flying Beta
Israel out from a disused British airstrip,
although this only drew more attention, and
the operatives found themselves in a series
of close calls. In the end, Jerusalem paid
off Khartoum and was allowed to transfer
a further 6,000 Jews to Israel, provided
they did so in secrecy, for the Sudanese
president, Jaafar an-Nimeiry, feared a
backlash from Arab allies.
To throw off suspicion, a commercial
airliner was eventually used and Beta
Israel flown to Ben Gurion via Belgium.
Despite the spies’ best efforts, the mass
immigration was picked up on, and when
the story hit the press Khartoum cracked
down, under pressure from the Arab world.
In all, 8,000 Jews made it out and a further
14,000 were airlifted in 1991 in the follow-
up Operation Solomon.
The scope of the operation was breath-
takingly daring. As Berg writes:
What the Mossad mission amounted to was
having to engineer a mass exodus of an
unknown number of nationals of a foreign,
hostile state, people who spoke no Hebrew,
were antiquated in their ways, barely trav-
elled and distrusted strangers.Netflix’s Red Sea Diving Resort is an
entertaining but licence-taking version
of the same events, but Red Sea Spies is
what really happened. There is none of the
Hollywood colouring-in, and yet the book
is all the more vivid for it. Berg knows he
has a movie on his hands — part thriller,
part dark comedy, all true — but instead
of embellishing, he brings out the native
drama in an improbable story of a clandes-
tine homecoming, Exodus as orchestrated
by a spy agency.
Berg, Middle East editor of the BBC
News website, is not the first to tell this
tale. One of the operatives, Gad Shimron,
went public in 2007 with Mossad Exodus,
a first-hand account of the perilous jour-
ney from Begin’s order to the airlifts. But
Berg faithfully captures the perspective
of Beta Israel, not least through Ferede
Aklum, the teacher turned secret agent
whose own attempt to reach Israel in 1973
was stymied by the Yom Kippur war, and
who determined that all of Beta Israel
should one day reach Zion.
Berg declines to speak as others do of
a ‘rescue’. Beta Israel were not helpless vic-
tims. They walked in their thousands from
the highlands of Ethiopia to the refugee
camps of Sudan, many dying on the way,
the rest facing death if they were uncov-
ered as Jews. It was a risk they took to
reach the shores of sought-after, dreamed-
of, sung-about Zion and return at last to
Jerusalem.The prize of the skies
Mark Cocker
The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of
Adventure, Treachery and
the Hunt for the Perfect Bird
by Joshua Hammer
Simon & Schuster, £18.99, pp. 336The art of falconry is more than 3,000 years
old and possibly as popular now as at any
time. Its devotees argue that in a pure form
it is a deeply honourable tradition, requiring
superhuman patience to coax a magnificentpredator to hunt at the owner’s behest. It is
a relationship, they would also claim, of
mutual understanding and partnership
between hawk and human. That’s the posi-
tive version.
At its most degraded, falconry seems to
be a psychopathological obsession, rooted
in a fetish for control over beautiful rap-
tors, which sometimes drives practitioners
to morally dubious, even illegal, behaviour.
The American journalist Joshua Hammerhas written a revealing portrait
of the sport that is located at
a point where these two versions
intersect.
The book’s anti-hero is
a complex, troubling and seem-
ingly unrepentant figure called
Jeffrey Lendrum, who grew up
in white Rhodesia. There he
became a passionate naturalist,
placing his obvious physical cour-
age and considerable knowledge
at the service of research pro-
jects to protect rare birds of prey
in Zimbabwe’s national parks.
One of the specialities of this
brave young man was to abseil
down crags to check otherwise
inaccessible eagle nests. How-
ever, these formative episodes
were shared with Lendrum’s
father, Adrian, whose shadowy
role in the son’s descent into
criminality seems to be hinted at
by Hammer.
Gradually it dawned on
friends and colleagues that father
and son were not just collabora-
tors in the conservation work.
They were stealing rare eagle
and owl eggs, among others,
and threatening the very birds
they purported to love. It led
directly to the first of Lendrum’s
court appearances for wildlife
crime, which also seemed to be
the moment that he realised the financial
potential in the illegal sale of rare birds of
prey.
Like a well-schooled crime reporter
Hammer investigates and describes Len-
drum’s 35-year career as an egg thief. He
does a fine job of piecing together the shad-
ow life, and he has also travelled the world,
because his subject is a criminal of global
aspirations. Yet the terminal destination for
Lendrum’s travels was always Dubai, whose
sheikhs are among the world’s wealthiest
and, it would appear, the most unscrupulous
consumers of hunting birds.
The sine qua non for these oil mag-
nates is a white-morph gyr falcon, the larg-
est falcon in the world, said to reach prices
of $400,000 in some exalted quarters. The
problem is that for decades there has been
an international restriction on trade in the
species. Smuggling them is a complex logis-
tical challenge, given that the wild popula-
tion of gyr falcons lives in the Arctic belt
across Canada, Greenland and Russia.
Even peregrines, which are another key
desideratum for Middle Eastern falcon-
ers, are largely found in northern latitudes,
including Britain.
To move wild, adult, highly strung birds
through airports or border controls with-
out detection is almost impossible, so Len-
drum developed a strategy of carrying onlyThe white-morph gyr falcon, the largest falcon in
the world, reaches prices of $400,000Dubai’s sheikhs are among the world’s
wealthiest and most unscrupulous
consumers of hunting birdsALAMYBooks_29 Feb 2020_The Spectator 35 25/02/2020 14:39