During the Ethiopian famine of 1983–1985, when more than a million Africans starved to death, Major Dawit Giorgis was the presentable face of the Marxist-Leninist junta that ruled his country. He was on TV all the time. The prime-time audience would listen to “We Are the World,” and watch images of stick-limbed children, and then Dawit would smile and ask for donations. At the United Nations, he reassured members that aid and food were saving lives. He was often photographed with Bob Geldof and Mother Theresa. He was young, handsome, and spoke excellent English.

He was also an ambitious ideologue. Dawit was born into the ruling elite of Ethiopia; his father was Emperor Haile Sellassie’s first vice-minister of information; and he served in the emperor’s army. But education at Columbia University radicalized him, and when a gang of junior army officers overthrew the emperor in September, 1974, he rushed home to take part in the revolution. For eleven years, Dawit was a member of the Dergue, the governing Provisional Military Administrative Council. He was, successively, deputy foreign minister, governor of Eritrea, and finally chief of Ethiopia’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission. He was a cautious ally of the Council’s leading light and Ethiopia’s dictator, Colonel Haile Mariam Mengistu—until the day in 1985 when Mengistu turned his fickle eye on him, and Dawit defected to the United States.

In the following years, Major Dawit went to ground. He wrote a self-justifying autobiography while at Princeton University; he joined the Ethiopian opposition in exile; and he worked for the United Nations in some of Africa’s worst conflicts. But he disappeared from the public eye.

This last winter, I found Dawit in Simon’s Town, south of Cape Town, where the houses tumble down a steep, windy promontory into the sea. I wanted to ask him if he felt culpable for the radical dystopia the Dergue had constructed in Ethiopia, and if so, how much. But Dawit is only partly “reconstructed,” to use the jargon of the 1960s: he is still sentimental about revolution. We drank tea. His speech is courtly, circumspect, and chaste.

—Jason Pontin

DAWIT GIORGIS: On September 14th, 1974, Ras Tafari, the Emperor Haile Sellassie, was deposed. It was the most important moment in my life. I had left the emperor’s army in 1968 and won a scholarship to study law at Columbia University. I said I would never go back to Ethiopia unless things really changed. I was living in Texas, working towards a PhD at Southern Methodist, when I heard there had been a coup d’etat in Addis Ababa. I hurried home. I left everything: my studies, my fiancée, everything. I was ready to go and...