The War that Never Was

by Duff Hart-Davis

  The rebels announced that the Imam had been killed, but in fact he managed to slip out of the palace and lie low for most of the next day in a nearby house, where he changed into borrowed army uniform; then, at nightfall, he made away on foot, and after a gruelling journey through his kingdom towards the north-west, gathering tribesmen as he went, and with many skirmishes fought on the way, reached Jizan, the Saudi town on the coast of the Red Sea, just outside the Yemen border, which had electric light, internal telephones, a telegraph link to Jeddah and an air-strip on the sea shore. There he gave a press conference at which he forecast, with some accuracy, that his country would become ‘the graveyard of the Egyptian army’.

  On the run again, the Imam crossed back into the Yemen and took refuge in the high, harsh mountains of the north. His enemies later claimed that he had evaded capture in Sana’a by enveloping himself in a woman’s burqa, but this may have been an invention designed to discredit him. Many of his relations and former government ministers were less fortunate: almost fifty people were shot or knifed to death in the square at Sana’a, and their bodies dragged through the streets or hung in chains from buildings, before being left for the stray dogs that infested the city. It is thought that altogether more than 500 tribal and national leaders were slaughtered in the aftermath of the coup.

  When it became clear that the Imam was alive, his uncle, Prince Hassan bin Yahya, who had been declared King, formally relinquished the throne and was made Crown Prince and Prime Minister. Armed with a radio telephone, money and weapons supplied by the Saudi Army, he set up a makeshift headquarters in a mountain cave near Sa’ada, the most northerly town in the Yemen.

  Landing in their thousands at Hodeidah, the Egyptian soldiers quickly took control of the flat coastal plain, 40 miles wide, known as the Tihamah (literally ‘hot lands’). They then had to wind their way through the 90-odd miles of the Western Highlands, along the country’s one metalled road (atrociously built by the Chinese), which twisted for much of the way though narrow wadis (valleys or canyons), offering ideal points for ambushes or the creation of avalanches. To the east of those first mountain ranges the invaders occupied Sana’a, an ancient city of tower-houses, lying in an oblong plateau more than 6,000 feet above sea-level. From there the troops spread out, establishing separate garrisons a short distance to the north, and further to the south; but they scarcely ventured into the country’s tremendous central massif, where the jagged peaks and ridges rose to 12,000 feet – and it was from these mountains that the Royalists mounted their most effective resistance.

  In Aden, on the morning after the attack, four smartly dressed Arabs appeared in Tony Boyle’s office, announcing themselves as members of the Yemeni royal family. Their leader, wearing a black suit and tie, introduced himself in good English as Prince Abdurrahman bin Yahya, the Deputy Prime Minister of the Yemen. The group, six strong in all, had been on their way to Sana’a, but, finding there were only three seats on the first plane that morning, had decided to wait for the next flight and repaired to the Crescent Hotel. There they had heard of the coup over the radio, and swiftly changed their plans. Had they caught the plane and landed in the capital, they would almost certainly have been shot out of hand. As it was, they spent the morning in Government House, telephoning the heir to the throne in New York and planning to launch a counter-attack on the rebels from Saudi Arabia.

  The Yemen Airlines aircraft that would have taken the royal party to their doom in Sana’a had never left Aden. Boyle tried again and again to persuade the pilot to fly the royal party to Jeddah; but the man was so frightened about what might happen to his family that he refused. The royals then cabled King Saud in Riyadh, asking him to send a private aircraft to collect them; back came the answer that no plane was available, and that they must wait for the next scheduled flight in two days’ time. The Yemenis also asked for support from London, in the form of arms and ammunition, but after consultation between Charles Johnston and the Foreign Office their request was rejected – in Boyle’s view, a disastrous mistake by HMG. It seemed to him that if the British had acted swiftly, at that critical moment, they could have snuffed out the rebellion in short order. But Whitehall’s policy was a passive one of non-intervention: when the Royalists captured four Russians and handed them over, far from calling a press conference and exhibiting the prisoners, as they might have done to advantage, the British put an embargo on their appearance in Aden and sent them back to Moscow.

  Writing home prophetically, Boyle told his parents how Aden had suddenly changed from the ‘happy-go-lucky’ place they had seen when visiting earlier in the year:

  At first sight it is the same, but under the surface nationalism, intrigue and intimidation are boiling up into a situation which could well become explosive – and disastrous to our interests in this part of the world.

  Tony Boyle was no run-of-the mill airman. Not only had his father, Sir Dermot Boyle, been Marshal of the Royal Air Force, but he himself had won the sword of honour at Cranwell, and had flown Hunter jets in Britain and delta-winged Javelin all-weather fighter-bombers in Britain and Germany. A thoughtful and efficient man, he also had a keen sense of humour and was naturally gregarious. One of his attractions among fellow expatriates was that he had with him in Aden his father’s yacht, Chuff, a 26-foot Fairey Marine Atalanta.3 Someone had persuaded the RAF to fly the boat out, and short voyages to beaches along the coast were much enjoyed. Tony also harboured a streak of eccentricity, manifest in later life when he became a farmer and at one stage took a deep interest in the manufacture of a friend’s trebuchet – a medieval siege-engine – with which he managed to throw a dead sow 340 yards.

  In the RAF his appetite for adventure had once led him to fly a Javelin beyond recommended limits in a privately arranged and highly illegal twenty-minute dogfight with a friend in a Hunter. During the contest he found he could outmanoeuvre the Hunter easily enough, but only by ignoring the bleeper which warned that his aircraft’s speed was dangerously low, and by not easing his turns until the klaxon warned of an imminent stall. As he walked away from the aircraft after landing, his navigator told him that if that ever happened again, he would ask for a change of pilot – to which Tony replied that, as a result of the experiment, the navigator would be much safer in his hands, should they ever come up against a real foe.4

  Tony had naturally hoped to make his whole career in the RAF, and it was a severe blow to him when persistent migraine headaches curtailed his flying career; but through his posting to Aden he found a challenging new form of employment.

  In October 1962, a month after the revolution, Billy McLean went off on a fact-finding tour at the suggestion of King Hussein of Jordan, who paid for his trip. He called first at Amman, the Jordanian capital, where he discussed the situation with several ambassadors, most usefully the Italian diplomat Amandeo Ghia, who had worked in the Yemen earlier and had been in Sana’a on the day of the coup. From Ghia came the news that the Yemeni Air Force consisted of only three old DC3 Dakotas, two six-seater Air Commanders, two helicopters and twenty-nine Russian Yak 28s (piston-engined fighter-bombers), which had been grounded for years and were covered in tarpaulins (as one Yemeni remarked, if you looked under the tarpaulins, ‘mouses jumped out’).

  It was a striking illustration of McLean’s personal standing that he spent the night of 22 October in Riyadh as a guest of King Saud. After the Suez debacle in 1956, Saudi Arabia had broken off diplomatic relations with Britain; but now the King felt strongly that Britain should help the Imam – if possible, openly with air support, but, failing that, clandestinely. Saud suggested that aircraft could be painted with the Imam’s insignia and Yemeni markings, and flown by volunteer pilots from Turkey and elsewhere.

  On the night of 25 October Tony Boyle was just going to bed in Aden when he got a call from air-traffic control saying that an aircraft purporting to be King Hussein’s private jet was only 20 miles out and asking permission to land. What were they to do? Forced to make an immediat
e decision, Tony said, ‘Allow it in’ – and it was lucky he did, for, having driven rapidly to the airport, he found that the plane was being flown by King Saud’s air adviser, Squadron Leader Erik Bennett5, and on board was Billy McLean.

  From Government House in Aden on 26 October McLean despatched a secret telegram to Duncan Sandys, Secretary of State for the Colonies, reporting his conversations in Riyadh:

  King Saud said that the Egyptian military intervention in the Yemen was the first phase of a wider plot by Nasser in which the Russians were also involved. The aim is to disrupt Saudi Arabia, the Aden Protectorate6 and the Gulf Sheikhdoms, and later Jordan and Syria. Unless the Egyptians are checked, there will be an immediate and serious threat to security in the whole of the Arabian Peninsula. HMG should therefore not recognise the rebel government of [Colonel Abdullah al-Sallal] [Nasser’s puppet in Sana’a], but give all possible support to the Imam.7

  In a separate report McLean confirmed that Prince Feisal (King Saud’s half-brother and Prime Minister) could not understand why HMG did nothing to support the Royalists in the Yemen or to oppose the Egyptian intervention there:

  HMG must know that Nasser intends to push the British out of Aden and the Persian Gulf and that he would probably be helped in this by both the Russians and the Americans. Prince Feisal said he himself had been under the strongest American pressure to discontinue his efforts to oppose Sallal and the Egyptians in the Yemen but he had not yet given in and did not intend to do so.8

  In Aden, McLean planned a trip through the Yemen, travelling by Land Rover, camel and on foot from south-east to north-west. As one friend and colleague remarked, in wildest Arabia ‘he turned himself into a brigand with the London sleekness stripped away’.9 At Harib, a village of only about twenty houses, surrounded by a 12-foot mud wall to keep out the ever-drifting desert sand, he met the Yemeni Royalist Deputy Prime Minister, Ahmed al-Siyaghi, who ‘talked well and convincingly’ and impressed his visitor with his ‘intelligence, toughness and his skill in dealing with the tribes’. McLean described how he was taken to the house in the middle of the village where Siyaghi had set up his headquarters:

  It was surrounded by hundreds of soldiers all armed to the teeth, some with machine guns as well as rifles, lounging around, many of them chewing qat.10 I was taken up to the guest room of the house where Siyaghi was holding court. The room soon filled up with chiefs and notables, some of whom had come in that day to offer their allegiance to the Imam. Their tribesmen fired several hundred rounds of ammunition into the air to stress the importance of the occasion.11

  Siyaghi explained that although there was heavy fighting in the west, close to Sana’a, the east of the country was still in the hands of the tribes, and the various Royalist armies were commanded by uncles or cousins of the Imam. McLean saw plenty of evidence of foreign intervention, including identity cards taken from thirty-five dead Egyptian parachutists killed in airborne attacks (many of them picked off by sharpshooters before they reached the ground, others knifed as they struggled to release their harnesses); he also met a wounded Egyptian paratrooper who said that Nasser had told him and his companions that they were being sent to the Yemen to fight the British.

  At the end of his tour McLean crossed into Saudi Arabia at Najran – a prosperous oasis of date palms, with impressive, well-spaced mud-built houses – and immediately despatched a cable to Duncan Sandys, via Riyadh. There the message was decoded and translated from English to Arabic; it was then encoded again and sent to Amman, where King Hussein himself rendered it back into English and passed it to the British Ambassador. Notwithstanding all these switches, the cable reached Sandys in time for the Cabinet meeting of 31 October.

  Meanwhile McLean had returned by air to Riyadh, where he had another audience with the monarch on 30 October. In a record of his conversation with the King, he left a memorable picture of Saud, then sixty, who sat on a leopard-skin chair wearing dark glasses and talking slowly in a deep voice. His ‘huge yellow hands hung relaxed over the arms of his chair’, but when he talked they shook strongly, as if he was in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease. He had ‘a nervous gesture of adjusting his head-dress when discussing a tricky point’ and frequently took off his glasses to reveal pale, watery eyes. ‘Strangely enough, he has a strong and deep laugh.’

  Also present at the audience was the King’s younger brother, Prince Feisal, the Prime Minister. He, too, had a striking appearance, ‘like a rather elderly peregrine or some desert bird of prey’; but McLean thought his eyes and face, with his dark eyebrows and pointed beard, ‘very intelligent and expressive’, and found that he grasped ideas quickly. Compared with the King, Feisal seemed ‘very modern’. He also knew the Yemen well, for he had led forces into the country in the 1930s.12

  Both Saudi leaders favoured the idea of providing air support for the Imam. Their own air force was grounded, because the King did not trust the pilots or mechanics, or any officer trained in Egypt; but Feisal made practical suggestions for deploying Jordanian Hunter fighter-bombers from the air-base at Taif, the Saudi summer capital in the mountains behind Jeddah. Ideally, he would like them to bomb Sana’a’s radio and airfield.

  McLean returned to London heartened by these exchanges – and found that his telegram from Najran had proved timely, for at a critical moment it had persuaded Lord Home, the Foreign Secretary, to hold out against American demands that Britain should back the Republican rebels. The fact that HMG held firm cleared the way for Britain and Saudi Arabia to resume diplomatic relations, and in November the Saudis showed their increasing disgust with Nasser by breaking off relations with Egypt.

  McLean’s reports from the front line had a powerful effect on the debate, because he bypassed the Foreign Office and took them straight to the Prime Minister, Macmillan. Moreover, he received support from the previous Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, who was still recuperating in the West Indies from the illness that had precipitated his departure from office after the fiasco of Suez. ‘You are, of course, absolutely right,’ Eden told McLean in a letter from Friendship Bay, on St Vincent, ‘and I am glad that Alec Home and FO are standing firm against recognition . . . To follow US in appeasement this time would finally put paid to our position in Arabia and the Gulf.’13

  On 6 December the Imam sent a dignified letter to President Kennedy, protesting ‘with the utmost vigour’ against American support for the rebels. ‘Shortly after the mutiny,’ he wrote:

  Egyptian arms and equipment arrived by ship which must have left Egypt before its outbreak. This confirms other evidence we have that the mutiny was plotted by Egypt . . . The pretext used to justify this aggression was that the Egyptian forces were to defend the Yemen against the armies of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Britain. This is completely false. No foreign troops other than Egyptian have entered my country, and none are here now.14

  In spite of this appeal, the United States formally recognised Sallal’s regime on 19 December 1962. During that month Duncan Sandys flew to Aden, but his visit seemed merely to emphasise the futility of HMG’s policy. ‘He is a so-and-so,’ Tony Boyle reported in a letter home. ‘We had thirty-six hours of chaos while he went round probing and suggesting.’ News of the war was more cheerful: ‘The Egyptians are getting short shrift from the Royalists. When they are caught they have their noses, ears and lips removed, and are then sent back to the Republican rebel leader naked!’15 Nasser, by now, was well aware of the identity of his opponents in Britain, and at the end of December he sent Billy a printed official card, extending his ‘best wishes for the New Year’.

  More and more the Royalists were looking to Britain for help. Early in April 1963 Prince Abdullah wrote an impassioned letter to Macmillan, addressing him as ‘His Highness the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom’, and beginning ‘May God prolong your days’. He described how the Egyptians were strengthening their position in the Khowlan, and planning to attack both Jizan (in Saudi Arabia) in the north and Beihan, outside the Yemen’s southe
rn frontier. Several times he pleaded for military help, now that Nasser had ‘opened the gates of the Middle East to the evils of red Communism’.16

  In April McLean was back in the Yemen, this time going in by Land Rover from the north. From the Red Sea port of Jizan, with its ancient Turkish fort standing out on a prominent hill, he was driven to Mabta, a day’s march short of the Imam’s latest headquarters on Jebel El Qara, some 80 miles to the north of Sana’a, in the north-west of the country (jebel means ‘mountain’).

  Having travelled until midnight, he awoke in the morning to find himself in a tented camp at the foot of mountains crowned with medieval castles and fortified villages:

  Kilted and turbaned tribesmen, festooned with bandoliers, pistols and hand grenades, and with enormous curved daggers stuck in their belts, swarmed round the Imam’s tent, chanting battle songs and firing salvoes from their rifles, while a couple of anti-aircraft guns fired occasional bursts into the air.17

  In another secret report he edescribed his arrival: