Historical Dictionary of Israeli Intelligence

things were going badly. Nasser tried to convince the king that the air

attack on 5 June had been carried out jointly by the Israeli, U.S., and

British air forces—which Nasser himself might indeed have be-

lieved. The monitored phone conversation was made public by Israel

at the instructions of Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan, despite the

recommendation of the director of MI, Yariv. The result was that the

Arab armies upgraded their communications security and made mon-

itoring substantially more difficult for Israeli intelligence.

On the afternoon of 6 June, Israeli SIGINT monitored Nasser’s or-

ders to his forces to fall back to the Suez Canal following the break-

through of the Israeli forces on the north and on the south of the Sinai

early on that morning. The disclosure of this order enabled the IDF to

start an offensive against Syria on the Golan Heights three days later.

SOLOMON OPERATION/MIVTSA SHLOMO.Despite the rescue

operations of the Ethiopian Jews in the 1980s, notably the Moses Op-

eration, many Jews still remained in that country. Numerous families

had been divided. Following the resumption of diplomatic relations be-

tween Israel and Ethiopia in early 1990 and the beginning of a pro-

longed civil war in that country, thousands of Jews flocked to the com-

pound around the Israeli embassy in Addis Ababa, awaiting their turn

to go to Israel. In 1990 the Mossadembarked on a complex and polit-

ically sensitive mission, code-named the Solomon Operation, to airlift

thousands of Jews from Ethiopia to Israel. The Israeli government

reached an agreement with Ethiopia’s ruler, Colonel Haile Mariam

Mengistu, to allow their departure for a payment of $30 million. But as

civil war brought Mengistu’s regime to the brink of collapse, and with

famine rapidly claiming the lives of hundreds of Ethiopian Jews, it be-

came clear that those who remained would have to emigrate at once.

On 24 May 1991, with antigovernment rebels closing in on the

Ethiopian capital, the Solomon Operation began. Israel Air Force and

El Al airplanes took off and landed continuously at Addis Ababa air-

port. Thirty-three hours after the first plane left Israel, the last plane

returned to Israel and some 14,325 Ethiopian Jews had been flown to

the country.

The Mossad, which had a key role in the operation, had been as-

sisted on the ground in Ethiopia mainly by Wonderferer Aweke, an

Ethiopian Jew who for years had worked secretly for the Mossad in

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