The War that Never Was

by Duff Hart-Davis

  So accustomed were the people to woosam – cure by burning – that they believed any remedy, to do good, must be accompanied by pain. This meant that every patient had to be injected, no matter what was wrong with him or her, even if it was only a headache; fortunately young Ahmed soon became adept at driving a needle into arms, legs or backsides. The Frenchmen were doing similar work in nearby villages, and between them, by the middle of August, the mercenaries had treated more than 100 patients. As the American author Dana Adams Schmidt remarked of the Yemenis, ‘Much as they were given to shouting for every other reason, they accepted physical affliction with little protest.’1

  The mercenaries found that some of the tribesmen had a genetic quirk that caused an extra thumb to grow out of the joint where a normal thumb joins the wrist. Each appendage had a nail, skin and two knuckles, but no muscles or tendons, so that it resembled a claw. Men with the deformities were interested in the idea of having them removed, and said that although there was some feeling in them, they were not as sensitive as their normal thumbs and fingers.

  The halcyon days at Gara did not last long. Some informer probably told the Republicans that Europeans had arrived on the scene, for early one morning two Russian-built transport planes banked over their caves and dropped silvery cylinders, which burst open as they hit the ground, releasing a white cloud that filled the bottom of the wadi. Johnny, who had gone down lower to answer a call of nature, ran back up, to find dozens of tribesmen staggering out of the first cave, holding their eyes and shouting for help. Half an hour later he discovered Philippe up at the radio station, sitting beside the radio shack saying quietly that he was blind. Around the spot where one of the bombs had landed the ground was coated with a black, gooey substance that was still giving off vapour:

  Helping Philippe back down to where Tony was waiting, we tried to do our best for him, but the only thing we had in the first-aid pack was a bottle of Optrex. This was of no use whatsoever, and slowly his eyelids closed, leaving him totally blind . . . There were dozens of tribesmen in the same predicament, and we could do little to relieve their agony. Abdullah arranged for them to be evacuated, and I asked him for a caravan to take Philippe and Tony down to Nuqub so that he could be given treatment in a hospital in France . . . His courage in sitting backwards astride a camel for two weeks, blind and not knowing what was going on around him, was a great tribute to the Deuxième Bureau.2

  The departure of the Frenchmen left Johnny on his own – and so he remained for months, an exceptionally resilient survivor in an exceptionally uncomfortable environment. During the day, to avoid the Egyptian bombing and strafing raids, he would leave his flea-ridden cave and walk out into the mountains to watch the air activity from afar. His food consisted mainly of khubs (unleavened bread baked round hot stones and issued to all every morning), sometimes accompanied by a ration of ‘vile-tasting tough meat stew’, made from a recently slaughtered cow or goat.

  Later he discovered one of the strange anomalies that prevailed in the civil war: once a week a tradesman came up with his donkey from enemy-occupied Sana’a, bringing goods that had been ordered, and presumably paying Egyptians or Republicans some tribute to let him through. He brought material for clothes, petrol for the generator, flour and dried fruit. Johnny’s regular order was for golden syrup, which always seemed to be available, and he laced his khubs with that, or with a mixture of honey and olive oil. There was always a danger that food might have been poisoned – but presumably the tradesman wanted to preserve his own livelihood, and the risk seemed small.

  Radio contact with Aden was intermittent and tediously slow (all messages being transmitted in Morse and in code) and whenever Johnny found a reliable courier, he made tape-recordings or scribbled long situation reports in pencil. Far from feeling depressed by his solitary existence, he wrote in his diary on 19 August, ‘Feeling fit and well now and more settled to my lonely life of no English speakers. Shaved and fed well today.’

  His daily tasks consisted of checking local armament stores, cleaning, servicing and repairing weapons, forming a team to collect reliable intelligence, and training men to lay mines at key points on the roads that the Egyptians used for supplying their outposts. Had the roads been asphalted, the task would have been much harder; but the dusty, sandy surfaces of the tracks were ideal for the purpose – easily dug up, and easily restored to their normal appearance after a mine had been laid. Knowing his Arabs, Johnny would display five gold sovereigns in front of a prospective mine-layer, give him two of them, and tell him that he would have the other three if he laid the mine and it went off satisfactorily. He would also pay a second crew to monitor the results. Most of the mines were of American origin, left over from the Second World War and still in boxes bearing the hand-shake symbol of the Lend-Lease programme.

  His other main occupation was ministering to the sick and wounded. The fact that he had adequate medical supplies was due to the energy of the redoubtable Lady Birdwood, who, under the auspices of the Yemen Relief Committee, assembled a large consignment and had it sent to Aden. Later in her life she became notorious for her strident campaign against the ‘blasphemy and filth’ being shown on stage and television, and for her hatred of foreigners in general: as the Daily Telegraph put it, ‘she disliked all foreigners equally’.3 But above all she hated communism, and it was perhaps this – combined with the fact that her late husband had served in the International Red Cross – that made her send succour to the Royalists. Genuine gratitude certainly seemed to infuse a letter to Johnny. ‘That we have succeeded even in such small measure to bring help to these suffering people is wonderful satisfaction,’ she wrote in September 1963. ‘What you yourself are doing is marvellous, and we are very grateful . . . One day I hope your courage and fine work will be recognised.’

  When bureaucratic obstruction grounded her supplies in Aden, she herself flew out from England and, with Tony Boyle, and at some risk to themselves, broke into the store where the material had been impounded, so that the most valuable drugs could be sent up country by camel-train.

  Under Lady Birdwood’s auspices, a doctor, John Shepherd, made what was probably the first-ever medical tour of the Khowlan, taking with him eight camel-loads of equipment and supplies. He was on the mercenaries’ payroll, at £300 a month; it was Jim Johnson who managed to extricate him from the Red Cross, and in a letter he warned Boyle to keep her ladyship in the dark as far as possible: ‘She need not know too much about our set-up, so be discreet when you see her.’

  Shepherd described his flight to Aden as ‘uneventful, although I was unable to do any homework as I sat next to the Assistant Commissioner of police of Sarawak’. It took the doctor twenty-eight days to reach the Khowlan – seventeen of them waiting for a caravan. He had decided that he should take instruments ‘for any reasonable operations’, but that as no skilled help would be available, he would perform all surgery ‘under local anaesthetic or nerve block’.

  ‘It was interesting working among these people, most of whom had never seen a doctor before,’ he wrote afterwards:

  Nearly all are resigned to fate, and death holds no terrors for most adults. To the other members of a family [the] death of a relative is of only momentary significance. It is difficult, therefore, to persuade them that early calling of the doctor is sometimes a good thing.

  The Khowlani is pleasant, hospitable, polite, cheerful, in some ways childlike. He likes guns and knives. The women are talkative. Although physically subject to their husbands, they do not appear to be mentally so. Although purdah is not strict in the mountains, and most women do not keep their veils up, it is difficult to examine any part of the trunk of a female, and impossible unless her husband is present and orders her to undress.

  Travelling from village to village, Shepherd saw a total of 1,286 patients. Forty had wounds (only five of which were new and seen within three days; thirty-five were old); other patients were suffering from abscesses, hernias, and one from a large bowel obstruct
ion (‘refused operation – died’). There was also much conjunctivitis and trachoma, malaria, dysentery and a ‘desire for aphrodisiacs – many’. Eye disease showed marked variation from village to village: in some places as many as 10 per cent of the people were blind in one or both eyes.

  While the doctor was on his rounds, Johnny Cooper sent in an estimate of the military situation. ‘Our build-up is still slow,’ he reported:

  In the seventy-four days I have been here we have received enough to skirmish with, but not to produce an all-out, supported attack on Sana’a and the Wog army concentrated there. My Int [Intelligence] has so far located fifty-eight tanks in Sana’a district. Therefore a stockpile of 75mm, 81mm and bazooka ammo is fast becoming the second priority after the small-arms position is settled.

  Acknowledging that he would probably get no leave over Christmas, he said he did not regret it, ‘as it is obvious to everybody that things should be humming round these dates, and I do not intend to miss the finale’.

  Changes were taking place in the BFLF’s small team. Because of his persistent migraines, Tony Boyle was about to be invalided out of the RAF, and needed a new job. Luckily he had impressed David Stirling during the Colonel’s visit to Aden earlier in the year, and now Stirling and Jim Johnson decided to bring him into their London office, to act as Jim’s second-in-command. Ostensibly, he would join Stirling’s firm Television International Enterprises (TIE), a legitimate company distributing films and television programmes, but in fact he would be working with Jim. ‘Some really good news,’ Boyle wrote in a letter home:

  I have the job with Television International Enterprises and start work as soon as I get back to England. The salary seems fantastic. I will be based in London and will travel extensively in the Middle East, all expenses paid. The attraction is that I am to be groomed as No. 2 in the set-up.

  Clearly he was thrilled by the prospect of joining TIE and by the promised remuneration of £300 a month. He must have known that talk of films and television would be no more than a cover – but he prudently said nothing that might alarm his parents, and for the time being he remained in Aden, where he was able to train his unofficial successor. This was an exceptionally energetic and resourceful young officer, Peter de la Billière,4 who had already, aged nineteen, fought in the Korean War, and distinguished himself as a member of the SAS in the Malayan jungle and in the assault on the 8,000-foot Jebel Akhdar plateau in Oman. Now, at twenty-six, he was on loan service, attached to the headquarters of the Federal Regular Army as a junior Intelligence Officer – and it was a godsend to Jim Johnson, under whom he had served as Adjutant of 21 SAS, to find him stationed there.

  Stretched though he was by his official duties, Peter was delighted to become an unpaid secret agent in his spare time, and he took over from Boyle the task of meeting the BFLF’s emissaries as they came off the London Comet and posting them on to Beihan or directing them to hotel rooms booked in Aden itself. Newcomers were often surprised by the sight of a scruffy-looking young man in civilian clothes roaring up on a scooter and handing over a typewritten note, often concealed in a book, telling them what address to head for. These undercover arrivals sometimes led to ridiculous clashes: Peter’s up country agents in the Federation would send back word that mysterious strangers had appeared in the rest-house at Beihan, and he would solemnly include these reports – of his own people’s movements – in his regular intelligence summaries. He was in an excellent position to make sure that information about the mercenaries’ activities went no further than his own desk.

  In the middle of June 1963 the Royalists had gained an influential reinforcement in the form of Colonel David Smiley,5 a widely experienced soldier and an Arab-speaker, former commander of the Sultan of Muscat’s army, but now, in his late forties, recently retired and working unhappily as an inspector for the Good Food Guide. When Billy McLean was about to set off for the Yemen yet again, he suggested that his old comrade-in-arms Smiley should drop his restaurant-hunting and go with him to write a report on the military situation for Prince Feisal.

  The two started out together, but their trip had hardly begun, in Jeddah, when McLean was summoned back to London – ironically, to vote in a debate on Profumo – and Smiley carried on alone. He was not yet working for the BFLF, but for cover he carried a press card accrediting him to the Daily Telegraph (arranged for him by Julian Amery), and adopted the pseudonym ‘Grin’.

  He went in from the north, via Jizan, on the first of thirteen journeys on which he criss-crossed the Yemen during the next four years, all paid for by the Saudis, who valued his advice highly. A fearless traveller, impervious to heat, fleas, scorpions, snakes and barely edible food, and capable of endurance marches that would have finished most middle-aged men, he was frequently bombed and strafed as he went from one Royalist commander to another, trying to correlate their efforts and encouraging them to continue the fight. Living largely off khubs, tinned tuna and tinned pineapple, he grew a beard and tried chewing qat6 but soon gave it up. During the summer he was sustained by his transistor radio broadcasting commentaries on the Test cricket series between England and the West Indies, and because he habitually photographed the tribesmen with his Leica, he was usually taken for a newspaper cameraman.

  His first call, in July 1963, was on the Imam at El Qara, 7,000 feet up in the mountains. In his memoir, Arabian Assignment, he left a fine picture of the call to evening prayer among the ruler’s followers:

  All around me, on cliff top, ledge and terrace, wherever there was a piece of level ground, hundreds of tribesmen were standing in silence. As the sun fell behind the western mountains, the priest raised his voice in the traditional chant: Allah akbar, Allah akbar. Ashad an la ilah illallah we – Mohamed rasul Allah. [God is greatest. I testify that there is no god save God and that Mohamed is the apostle of God.] The tribesmen, either singly or in small groups, turned to face north, towards Mecca, laid their rifles on the ground and prostrated themselves in prayer. It stirred me deeply to see these savage, bearded men, bathed in the crimson glow of sunset, bearing witness to their faith among the cliffs and crags of the High Yemen.7

  Smiley found the Imam sitting on a carpet in the furthest of a labyrinth of caves, with only 3 feet of headroom, surrounded by piles of letters, a Thermos and a spittoon:

  He was taller and more heavily built than most of his countrymen, with a fleshy face, full lips and large, staring eyes; his moustache and beard were well trimmed, his hair long, thick and very curly. But although well groomed and carefully dressed, he had the puffy cheeks and sallow complexion of someone who has led for too long a confined and sedentary existence.8

  That was the first of Smiley’s numerous meetings with the Imam. In the course of his journeys he came to know many of the Yemeni princes, and his travels also brought him into ever-closer cooperation with the mercenaries, both British and French, until he himself became an ancillary member of their organisation and later was designated their Field Commander. From the start some members of the BFLF found his visits uncomfortable, as his rapid movements threatened to blow the organisation’s cover. ‘David came and went in a whirlwind,’ Tony Boyle reported to Jim from Aden:

  The situation here is becoming so well known that it is really likely that people who we do not want to know about it will soon start probing a little more deeply . . . It only needs one concrete piece of evidence, and the scheme is blown to the world, and the Government are going to be very hard pressed to explain it all away.

  In a report to Prince Feisal, Smiley pinpointed the greatest weakness in the Royalist command structure:

  There is no wireless/telegraphy contact between the Imam and his commanders; a message may take several days to reach them by courier. This results in the Imam having little control over his commanders; consequently he cannot coordinate his plans. From talking to the various commanders I gained the impression that each was fighting his own private war . . . though they would obey any instructions sent by the Imam.


  His analysis confirmed that the Royalists were in control of the mountainous regions, ‘where the warlike Zeidi tribes are strong supporters of the Imam’ (the Zeidis had ruled the country for a thousand years). The Egyptians and Republicans were firmly established in the coastal area and the plains of the west, and in the southern part of the Yemen populated by the Shaffei tribes. The Egyptians also had garrisons in the main towns in the valleys between the Royalist-held mountains; but the troops there were frequently cut off by Royalist attacks, and generally dared not venture out from their encampments. The invaders were highly unpopular: if they withdrew their troops in accord with a recent agreement (‘Grin’ wrote), ‘the Royalist forces would occupy Sana’a within a week’.

  Grin also confirmed that the tactics already encouraged by Johnny – ambushes, mining and road-cutting – were the Royalists’ best bet. He deplored ‘the tendency, no doubt for prestige and propaganda purposes, for Royalist commanders to make frontal attacks with the object of capturing towns and villages’, since such assaults almost always proved futile and wasted lives and ammunition. As for the Egyptians, on the plains they had the advantage of tanks, artillery and motor transport, but they were not trained to fight in the mountains, and were usually ‘reluctant to do so’. Their greatest superiority was in the air, and their ‘ability to bomb villages at will without any effective opposition has a marked effect on the morale of the villagers’.