The War that Never Was

by Duff Hart-Davis

  In 1963 Johnny was serving as second-in command of the Muscat Regiment of the Sultan of Oman’s armed forces and, since he spoke Arabic, was a natural candidate for the new enterprise. Out went a telegram from Stirling: ‘Join me Aden soonest possible’. Johnny replied with a radio message: there was no commercial air service between Muscat and Aden, but he could catch the weekly plane to Bahrain. Another cable from Stirling: ‘Meet me soonest Speedbird Hotel Bahrain’.

  Realising that some secret operation was in the offing, Colonel Hugh Oldman, commander of the Sultan’s armed forces, arranged for a telegram to be sent to Johnny saying that his mother was dying and that he was being granted two weeks’ compassionate leave. Released by this swift manoeuvre, Johnny took the plane for Bahrain.23

  Stirling was not entirely fit, having recently suffered a minor stroke; so to look after him during the journey to the Middle East, Jim appointed Philip Horniblow as his baggage handler and medical assistant. When the two boarded the Comet at Heathrow, Horniblow became apprehensive, because his charge’s hand-luggage was bulging with weapons and Stirling was, in his view, the ‘most insecure man’ he had ever known – that is, he had no thought for security, but was inclined to repeat confidential information in the wrong places, and to do whatever came into his head. He demonstrated this last propensity when they arrived in Aden, by walking off the aeroplane and disappearing through the perimeter fence of the airfield without going near customs.

  Horniblow, somewhat baffled, booked into a hotel and awaited further instructions. Stirling went to stay with the Governor, Sir Charles Johnston, an old friend. That night, pleading exhaustion, Johnston went to bed early and left Stirling in the care of his young ADC, Flight Lieutenant Tony Boyle (then twenty-eight), a former fast-jet pilot on secondment from the RAF.

  Over a whisky-and-soda, as they sat on the terrace in the warm tropical night, watching the lights of ships easing their way in and out of the harbour, Stirling told Boyle that, with the authority of two Government ministers (Amery and Sandys) and the knowledge of the Prime Minister (Macmillan), a group of former SAS soldiers was about to be infiltrated into the Yemen. Should the operation go wrong, it would be denied by the British Government. Stirling asked Tony to see the men through Aden airport without any documentation, and to arrange their onward journey.

  The conversation left the ADC in a dilemma: was his boss, the Governor, aware of this secret mission – or had Stirling deliberately not mentioned it to him, on the grounds that the less he knew about it, the easier it would be for him to deny it? Whichever way, next morning Tony decided to say nothing, but to do as he had been asked; and in due course it became obvious that Johnston knew exactly what was happening.24 When the mercenary operation expanded, Tony kept the MI6 resident in Aden informed of developments – and as the resident’s weekly meetings with the Governor passed off without provoking any explosion, the ADC knew he had made the right decision.

  Next day Stirling and Horniblow went on to Bahrain, where Horniblow met Johnny Cooper, but told him only that he was to lead an operation in a Middle Eastern country ‘to obtain military information of vital interest’.25 The project had been initiated in England, but Frenchmen were also being recruited into the team as a smokescreen.

  Reaching London on 3 June 1963, Johnny went straight to meet Jim Johnson, who briefed him with his plans, such as they were. His most urgent need was to find more Arabic-speakers, and on the same evening he, Johnny and Stirling flew to Paris. At a meeting on the rue de la Fronquenelle in the home of Prince Michel Bourbon de Parme,26 they sat round a table into the early hours of the morning with senior Government officials from both Britain and France. Also present was Colonel Roger Faulques, then thirty-nine, a former Legionnaire who had fought in Indochina, been imprisoned by the Vietminh and handed back to the French so seriously wounded that his captors thought he was about to die. Cooper was briefed to lead a reconnaissance party of two French and four British soldiers into the north Yemen, to establish the strength of the Royalist resistance.27

  Jim quickly set about finding more men. Through Colonel John Woodhouse, then commanding 22 SAS at Hereford, he recruited Sergeant Geordie Dorman, a veteran of the campaign in Malaya and a skilled mortar expert; Corporal Chigey, an experienced medical orderly; and a firearms expert, Trooper Richardson – all of whom were, in Woodhouse’s own words, ‘permitted to be absent without leave’. Secrecy cloaked the proceedings from the start. Because this was a clandestine operation, the men were released from the regiment unofficially; and when Johnny went to pick them up, he collected them after dark from various places around Hereford, in a hire-car that Jim had laid on. That same evening they were joined in London by two Arabic-speaking volunteers from the Deuxième Bureau – the French intelligence service – who, because Air France flights had been grounded by a strike, were driven from Paris in an official staff car. Jim had meanwhile begun badgering friendly armourers for weapons, ammunition and explosives – including plastic explosive and Schmeisser sub-machine guns – which he stored temporarily in the basement of his London house in Sloane Avenue.

  Then on 5 June (Johnny’s birthday) a political bombshell exploded in Westminster. In the Commons, Profumo admitted that he had lied to the House, and resigned from the Government and from politics. His revelation not only finished his own public career: it also severely damaged the reputation of Harold Macmillan, who was judged to have handled the matter ineffectually, and it made other leading Conservative politicians exceedingly nervous.

  The immediate result was a telephone call from Sandys (described by Jim as ‘that shit’), telling Stirling to cancel the Yemen expedition. Stirling rang Jim and said, ‘I’m sorry. We’re going to have to call it off. There’s heavy pressure from the Minister, who’s worried about his own reputation.’

  Far from standing his men down and going to bed, Jim had what he described as ‘a rather restless night’. Reckoning that no one in the Colonial Office or the White House (SIS headquarters) would take action before the day-shift came on at 0900 the next morning, and without telling anybody in authority what he was doing, he telephoned one airline after another in search of seats on overnight flights to Aden. He booked the Frenchmen onto the direct Comet flight, which staged through Rome and Tripoli, and found places for three of the British on an Alitalia departure. Johnny he booked onto another flight to Tripoli, which also went via Rome. He himself drove the volunteers to the terminal (then in the Cromwell Road, west London) and saw them off.

  The plan was that all members of the team would unite in Tripoli and carry on to Aden together aboard the Comet – and this they did, but not before the British contingent had had a narrow escape at Tripoli airport. As they collected their luggage to check in for the next leg, one of their bulging suitcases burst open, releasing rolls of plastic explosive done up in paper: luckily the substance had a smell like that of almonds, and as the Libyan security guards helped to repack it, Johnny explained that he was a marzipan salesman, taking samples to various Arab potentates.

  In London, after breakfast, Jim rang Stirling and said, ‘I’m most frightfully sorry, but I can’t stop them. They’ve already gone.’

  When the Comet landed in Aden and the other passengers disembarked, the mercenaries sat tight. Tony Boyle had arranged for a DC3 of Aden Airways to pull up alongside the stand on which the jet came to a stop. He himself was absent on duty in the Federation, but he had asked James Nash, a senior Political Officer, to meet the team. Nash prudently kept away, but deputed a local assistant, Mohamed Affara, who signalled the newcomers to dash across to the Dakota when it came alongside. In a few seconds they were on board for the forty-minute flight to Beihan.

  There they changed into Arab dress – a shirt, a calf-length skirt or kilt called a futa, with a large, curved, two-sided dagger known as a jambiya carried in a sheath in the middle of a broad belt,28 and a mar-arraga, or skull cap, on the head. Thus accoutred, they set off with a train of 150 camels carrying weapons and ammu
nition to the Royalist strongholds in the mountains. As an article in the Daily Telegraph later remarked, ‘Nothing had happened like this since Colonel Lawrence played hide-and-seek with the Turks on the Hejaz railway [in 1916–17].’29

  And so some nine months after Nasser’s invasion, the British Field Liaison Force, or BFLF, came into being. Thus – in utterly unorthodox fashion – was launched an operation, directed for the most part by two men and a girl from a civilian office in London, which ran for four years, caused Nasser immense aggravation and had a profound effect on the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel inflicted a humiliating defeat on Egypt after less than a week’s combat.

  Jim Johnson soon became so heavily involved that he had to step down temporarily from Lloyd’s. As the pressure built up, he got Paul Paulson, MI6 Controller for the Middle East and Africa, to ask his chairman to grant him leave of absence. ‘When do you want him?’ asked the chairman. ‘Tomorrow,’ was the answer – and that was that. Jim cleared his desk and vanished, but on his frequent trips abroad he still masqueraded as an insurance broker, and if anyone remarked on his suntan, he simply said that he had been on holiday.

  Nasser lost more than 20,000 men in the Yemen, and came to look on the campaign there as his Vietnam. At one stage he claimed that 800 mercenaries were at large in the mountains, whereas the true figure was more like forty, and of these the majority were French or Belgian, and Jim’s men on the ground numbered no more than twelve at any one time. His private army was so small that its members were known and addressed by their Christian names (Johnny, Chris, Rupert) or by their cover pseudonyms (Abdullah, Mansoor, Franco).

  Jim’s motives were purely patriotic. His aim was not to earn a fortune, but to remove a hostile power – the Soviet-backed Egyptians – from the Yemen: like Julian Amery, he strongly believed that Britain should safeguard its interests in the Middle East and keep communist influence out. He himself never fought in the war that he ran. He travelled immense distances, flying repeatedly to Saudi Arabia and Aden (usually with a pistol in a shoulder-holster under his jacket), sometimes to Israel and Iran, and he made one foray into the Yemen itself. Yet although he never fired a shot in anger, he directed the operation with such skill, cunning, patience and tenacity that Nasser, becoming exasperated, recognised Jim as his principal adversary in London, and told a diplomat visiting Cairo that if ever the Colonel felt like coming to Egypt, he would be granted seven years’ free accommodation in any one of the Government’s special institutions.

  2

  Nasser’s Wiles

  The revolution in the Yemen, provoked by Egyptian intrigues, took place on 20 September 1962. Some Egyptian historians have suggested that the uprising was spontaneous, but the extraordinary ‘Confession’ obtained by Billy McLean from Imam al-Badr, during the course of conversations in his cave headquarters, reveals that Nasser had been manoeuvring to undermine the ancient regime for at least four years before that.1 Had the Americans realised how treacherous he was, and how accomplished a liar, they would surely never have backed his puppet government in Sana’a.

  Nasser was actively planning to disrupt the Yemen as early as 1958, when he summoned Crown Prince al-Badr, son of the ruler, to a meeting in Damascus. There Nasser and other prominent Egyptians spent twenty-four hours discussing with the Crown Prince plans for disrupting Saudi Arabia and gaining control of the Arab world. The first stage of this plan was to be a coup against al-Badr’s father, Imam Ahmed, after which Nasser would use the Yemen as a base for further subversive operations in Arabia and the Persian Gulf. In Cairo, on his way home, al-Badr was intercepted by Nasser, who offered him £50,000 in sterling, 25,000 Egyptian pounds and two cases of pistols if he would overthrow his father in a coup d’état.

  Al-Badr appeared to accept the offer, but was either unable or unwilling to carry out his side of the bargain; yet Nasser was relentless in his efforts to take over the Yemen. Later in 1958 he summoned the Crown Prince to Baghdad for further plotting, then invited him to Alexandria and had him driven to a house four hours out in the desert. When al-Badr arrived, Nasser was waiting, and they spent the whole night discussing plans for the fomentation of revolution in Saudi Arabia. In Cairo, Nasser introduced him to some Algerians, who offered him commandos and saboteurs, to be placed under his orders in the Yemen if he would implement plans for the conquest of Arabia.

  Deeply involved though he was with the Russians – whose principal aim was to open up commercial opportunities in East Africa – Nasser slyly advised al-Badr to improve his relations with Britain and the Americans so that he should not be branded a Soviet agent. At the same time, he told al-Badr to invite the Russian Navy to visit the Yemen. The old Imam Ahmed, meanwhile, had become suspicious about the number of Chinese workers who had been admitted to the country and forbade his son to have any more dealings with communist countries.

  All the while Nasser was inciting the people of the Yemen and other Arab countries to rise against their rulers and band together in a United Arab Republic (UAR). Exploiting the millions of small, battery-operated transistor radios that had flooded the Arab world, he broadcast interminable speeches over Cairo radio (Sawt al Arab – Voice of the Arabs), exhorting the citizens to unite and regain their lost pride and glory. From every shop, house and taxi in Arabia, from every camel-driver in the Yemen, his ceaseless, ranting propaganda urged the people to rebel. To the tribesmen he was a great popular hero; but he was a nightmare figure to their leaders, for they knew that if he managed to sweep the Yemen into the UAR, they would lose their power and position.

  With the old Imam absent in Rome for medical treatment, Nasser again ordered al-Badr to engineer a revolution against his father, and arranged for large, unmarked crates of Chinese weapons to be sent into the Yemen. He told al-Badr that the boxes (alleged to contain material for the construction of the road between Sana’a and the Red Sea port of Hodeidah, on which the Chinese were working) should be allowed through customs without examination, but that, if their contents were discovered, it should be put about that the weapons were for use against the British in Aden.

  When the boxes arrived in the spring of 1962 and were taken from Hodeidah to Sana’a in ten lorries, the Egyptians spread rumours that a revolution was impending, and Nasser sent al-Badr a telegram telling him to kill his father. Defying the great bully once again, the Crown Prince confessed all the intrigues to his father, who forgave him, but ordered him to give a full account of Nasser’s chicanery to King Saud of Saudi Arabia and King Hussein of Jordan. This convinced the Saudis that, if Nasser managed to take over the Yemen, they would be next in line.

  Nasser’s most active pawns in the Yemen were two army officers, the first of whom was the short, swarthy and blue-jowled Colonel Abdullah al-Sallal, who had spent seven years in gaol, much of the time chained to the wall, accused of plotting against the old Imam. Once he had been an urban charcoal-seller, but now he was the recently appointed Commander of the Royal Guard. The second conspirator was a young lieutenant, Ali Abdul al-Moghny. Each had been preparing separate plots, but in the event both merged into one.

  On 18 September 1962 Imam Ahmed died, having survived twelve attempts on his life. A grotesque figure, as a boy he had deliberately made his eyeballs bulge by tightening a cord around his neck in order to render his appearance more formidable. On Fridays he had personally supervised the public decapitation of enemies in the main square of Sana’a; he kept 100 slaves in his three palaces, was reputed to have eaten a whole sheep at a sitting, and through his gluttony had, by the end, increased his weight to some 350 pounds.

  Many citizens were surprised to hear that he had died in his bed – but on the day after his death, at a great ceremony in Sana’a, his son was elected the sixty-sixth Imam of the Yemen. On that same day Nasser sent al-Badr an ultimatum ordering him to declare immediate union with Egypt, and to make a speech attacking the British in Aden. Al-Badr refused, saying that he wanted to remain neutral, like Switzerland.

  In neither Eastern n
or Western eyes did the new Imam cut a distinguished figure. From the British point of view, it was unfortunate that when he visited England in 1957 he had been received so coolly that he turned for support to other patrons, principally Egypt, Russia and China.

  A big, heavy man, taller (at six feet) than most of his subjects, he was now in his late thirties; travels in Europe and America had given him a taste for drink and drugs, and he had undergone cures for alcohol and morphine addiction. On his accession, however, he began to show some spirit: in a speech from the throne he announced an amnesty for political prisoners and exiles, promised economic development and outlined the creation of a forty-strong advisory council.

  His initiatives proved futile, for Nasser’s agents were poised to strike, and an army of occupation was already on the move. The day after the new Imam’s accession – and four days before the coup – four Egyptian ships, the Nile, the al-Wadi, the Cleopatra and the Sudan, sailed from Egypt and headed down the Gulf of Suez towards the Red Sea. The 3,000 soldiers on board had been told they were going to Algeria, but in fact they were bound for Yemen’s main port, Hodeidah.2

  On the evening of 26 September, after a Cabinet meeting, the new Imam was walking along a corridor towards his private apartments on the third floor of the Dar el Basha’ir Palace – ‘the House of Good Omen’ – in Sana’a when he heard a click behind him. Turning, he saw Hussein al-Sukairi, the Guard Commander, holding a sub-machine gun. Either the weapon had misfired or his assailant had deliberately given him a warning. With a yell, he dived through the door into his private rooms.

  Outside, the rebels had surrounded the palace with tanks. Now, through loudspeakers, they broadcast a demand that the royal bodyguard surrender the ruler. At midnight all the lights went out and the telephone wires were cut. The bodyguard opened fire, as did the Imam himself, with a machine gun through a window – whereupon the attackers responded with the tanks’ main armament and blew the top floor of the palace to pieces; but because the tanks could not depress their guns sufficiently, the lower storeys remained relatively intact. The Imam’s men then doused some sacks of sand with petrol, crept out into the garden, put the sacks on the tanks and set them on fire. Within seconds the crews were flushed into the open, and the Imam, his father-in-law, Yahya al-Hirsi, and their retainers gunned them down with rifles and sub-machine guns.