The War that Never Was

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Many of the details in the ‘British Plan’ drafted in Aden merely confirmed what was already happening. Johnny, for one, was already at Gara. Supported by the two French mercenaries, he was rapidly increasing his score of enemy victims. By then his staff included one first lieutenant and one soldier from the Yemeni Army, ‘plus a gang of criminals now nine strong who will do anything for money’.

  An amnesty called by the Republicans in August 1963 had had little effect. The Egyptians had retreated from their FDLs (forward defence locations) towards Sana’a, but the Royalists had carried on attacking them regardless. A more sinister development was that Sheikh Nagi al-Ghadr – head of the Bakil federation of tribes, and one of the few Royalist commanders who did not belong to the Hamid ud Din family – had been approached by the Egyptians asking him to become President of the entire country: they bribed him with 800,000 MTDs and 2,000 rifles to switch his men to the Republican side. ‘Nagi is brave and clever,’ Johnny reported, ‘but he can be dangerous to our cause.’ The flirtation evidently did not last long, for a month later Ghadr was up to his usual tricks, ambushing two Egyptian convoys, with murderous results.

  Johnny saw that the relationship between Ghadr and Prince Abdullah was a close one: that ‘of an older man over a younger, keener perhaps, but still strong soldier’. Their personal friendship derived from fighting alongside each other, and their admiration was mutual. Johnny thought that Abdullah was slightly wary of Ghadr because of his dealings with the Egyptians; but since the Prince could not deal with the Egyptians himself, he relied on Ghadr for contact with the enemy.

  Peter de la Billière was much cheered by a visit from David Stirling. ‘It is the first time I have met him,’ he told Johnny, ‘and I must say he is a most exhilarating man and one would do anything for him.’ Peter had been equally pleased to meet Tony Boyle, and praised his gift for diplomacy: ‘He has a most enviable line of patter.’ But Peter was nervous about the possibility that his own role might come into the open. ‘It is vital that no-one finds out that I am out here,’ he told Johnny, ‘as there is a security leak, but it does not as yet involve me, so I am free to carry on operating.’

  The last [Rhodesian] aircraft arrived on 10/9 had 600 Mausers and 100,000 rounds of ammo. Inevitably this aircraft was bubbled [noticed] by the highest authority, and they are not too pleased. However this may be a blessing in disguise as it will force the hand as far as parachuting goes. This bubble has not improved this end as you can well imagine – hence our concentration on security.

  Other news was that the BFLF had recruited a friend of his, Jack Miller, in London – he was not only a skilled radio operator, but also a spare-time medic and a military parachutist.

  Well Johnny [the letter concluded] we all feel very proud of ‘our man on the spot’, and I certainly am delighted to have the privilege of being part of your rear link. I only hope that we can get the support you deserve organised as soon as possible.

  With or without support, Johnny was flourishing. On 12 September he told Tony that fighting had broken out near Jihannah, a town deep in the central mountains, garrisoned by the Egyptians and connected with Sana’a by a long, winding, single-track dirt road. ‘Our mining has got the Wogs angry with the tribes south of the Jihannah–Sana’a road,’ he wrote:

  I am pushing Abdullah to keep up these pinpricks. The mines and siasi [intelligence-gathering]9 work have been handed over to me, or should I say I have started it off, and Abdullah is only too happy to let me run the show, so all success down to Brits and French. I feel we are doing our share, it is full time, what with doctor work as well.

  On 24 September he was even more ebullient. ‘Our mining/sabotage efforts have now expanded to alarming proportions!’ he told Jim:

  Confirmed NOW 32 [Egyptians] killed, 18 wounded, 4 vehicles destroyed, one road demolished . . . It takes [them] two days to clear the road Sana’a–Jihannah using two tanks with prong-type diggers out front.

  A few days later he wrote again, to say: ‘Mining has thrown both the Wogs and the Repubs into complete confusion. They simply have no idea what to do.’

  On the same day, however, in another long missive he gave vent to various vexations: he had been sending out frequent reports, but in the past forty-seven days only one letter had reached him. He was so dissatisfied with the lack of information that he threatened to walk out to Beihan, ‘to find out what the British position is’.

  Not knowing that his own letters were failing to get through, Peter sought to encourage him:

  How’s yourself? No doubt well and causing chaos as usual. Your last letters were a tonic, especially the accounts of the mining . . . Your info is being used as ammunition to convince the right people that there should be more official help, and so you can see it may well be the key to final victory.

  Even though such messages were designed mainly to keep up Johnny’s morale, they did not exaggerate the importance of his information, for at that stage he was the only Briton in the whole of the Yemen with a front-line view of the war. GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters, the listening station at Cheltenham), was able to glean some intelligence about Nasser’s order of battle from intercepts of radio messages, because the Egyptians were still using technology based on the wartime German Enigma machine, which they believed to be perfectly secure. But MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, though well established in Aden and the Protectorate, where its agents were officially ‘Political Officers’, had nobody inside the Yemen, and no source of intelligence from the interior except the sporadic reports of the itinerant McLean and Smiley.3 Nor, when they did fortuitously acquire a valuable piece of kit, did they know what to do with it. When Johnny once sent a captured Soviet radio to the SIS in Aden for evaluation, he was dismayed to have it returned to him, months later, bearing a note: ‘Hoping that this will be of great use to you.’4

  At the end of March 1963 Sir Dick White, head of the SIS, had told Rab Butler, the new Foreign Secretary, that even if men of the right training and calibre became available, it would take six months before they could be effectively deployed up country, ‘and even then they might not have the required talent for the operation’.5 But White did at least allow the SIS officers in Aden to help the mercenaries by giving them information and the use of their facilities. The MI6 men were known to members of the BFLF as ‘the Friends’.

  Johnny eventually got his mail on 28 September, after ‘a great hold-up’ in Beihan. Some of the correspondence was six weeks old, but he responded with immense taped messages to Tony and Jim, ending one:

  All for now. But you have given me much to do. Not that I am idle: last day off seems months ago, but being alone one must work. I talk too much, Jim, but only because I speak Arabic all day long, bad Arabic at that! Yours aye, Johnny.

  The arrival of outside news seemed to revive his spirits, and within a week he was reporting that, in accord with the amnesty agreement made in August, the Egyptians were withdrawing to Sana’a in trucks, helicopters and transport aircraft, and that El Argoub, their strongest outpost in the Khowlan, was ‘heavily mined’; also that he had spent five days doing medical work. One morning he walked out to the nearest front line, only about one and a half hours’ trek from the capital, and looked down on the only route by which Egyptian tanks might seek to approach and attack the Second National Army’s forward defences. ‘The wadi is now well mined, with large US anti-tank mines, twenty-four in number,’ he reported, ‘and I can’t see the Wogs catching us napping. Also, the Sheikh here, Abdullah bin Ali, Paramount Sheikh of the Beni Balool tribe, is a fine chap, very anti-Wog!’

  House of [Republican] Sheikh Ali bin Hassan al Hamza blown up by mine ploy . . . Sheikh in Sana’a but house demolished, plus all animals, camels etc. Details to follow, but fear wife killed, this unfortunate, but whole area against this fellow . . . The home front is throbbing with rumour and counter-rumour of Wogs leaving for good.

  At 1200 on 9 September another mine went off close to Sana’a. Ten
troop carriers fully loaded with Egyptians had just set off for Jihannah when the sixth vehicle in the convoy set the mine off under its rear wheels. Like all the Russian vehicles, the truck had a wooden floor, which gave no protection from the blast, and nine Egyptians were killed and at least nine more wounded.

  In spite of such losses, Egyptian morale seems to have been moderately good at that stage of the campaign. Units of the Expeditionary Force came and went regularly, and the first troops, on returning home, were greeted as conquerors: articles in the Cairo newspapers described how the country’s heroic soldiers were supporting the Yemeni revolution and winning the war – but imaginative propaganda was always high on Nasser’s agenda.

  Early in August 1963 Tony Boyle had returned to London for a medical board, at which he was downgraded to A2 G1, and so effectively invalided out of the services. Although he did not formally retire from the RAF for another three months, he began working with Jim in the Sloane Street office on 1 October and quickly became the indispensable second-in-command of the British Field Liaison Force, not only briefing the men who went out to the Yemen and arranging their journeys, but also working to establish radio communication with the mountain bases. Within a week of his joining, Stirling wrote to Johnny Cooper to say that ‘We are camouflaging his ‘kini mini’ activities with a respectable front as a representative of TIE Ltd, and he is becoming quite a dab hand already on our television activities!’ Over the next four years Tony travelled indefatigably, visiting Israel more than a dozen times, making numerous visits to Saudi Arabia and several to Aden, besides going into the Yemen on four occasions.

  Peter de la Billière took over from him as the BFLF’s man in Aden, and soon wrote to Boyle, ‘Am finding that pressure has increased considerably since you left and am in danger of having to give up the army altogether as it gets in the way.’

  By now Peter was getting so many letters from Fiona that people began to assume she was his girlfriend. Yet always on his mind was the risk that his involvement in the covert campaign would be discovered, and he told Boyle, ‘I feel the less I know about what you are up to in London, unless it concerns me, the better.’ Once Fiona spent a sleepless night, after she had somehow forgotten to encode a message and sent it to him in clear. When she confessed to Jim in the morning, he, with his usual urbanity, just said, ‘Oh well – don’t worry – it’s one signal in a million, and the chances are no one will notice it.’ Nevertheless, she wrote a letter of abject apology to Peter, saying, ‘I can’t get over the horror of sending you that cable . . . Do please forgive me.’ He forgave her – but the memory of her mistake, which could have brought Peter’s army career to a premature end, still torments her almost fifty years later.

  As London reported that recruitment was going well, and more mercenaries came through Aden, the pressure on Peter increased still further, and he asked if the office could find ‘some form of relief’. ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘my grandmother is dying and it is possible I may come home for a week to see her in a month or so.’

  Remembering the ruse by which they had extricated Johnny Cooper from Muscat, London suspected that this last statement was a joke. ‘I’m so sorry to hear about your grandmother,’ Tony wrote. ‘Is she really ill, or dying like John’s mother was?’ To which Peter replied indignantly: ‘Is my grandmother really dying, indeed? In fact, believe it or not, she is. I can see you have gone past the stage where you will ever be able to think straight and honest again!’

  Such was the demand for weapons from the interior that he conceived the grandiose idea of bringing in a whole shipload. ‘I don’t see why it should not work,’ he wrote in a letter to London. ‘We must watch that they do not put too much on the first load. I think 100 tons would be enough to start with.’ He suggested that the vessel should be a dhow, which could be beached at high tide, unloaded and floated off at the next tide. The timing would have to coincide with a high tide at about 1800 hours, so that the ship could come in as dark was falling and be away before dawn. He reported that Whiskers, the Sherif, was quite happy about the security side, but he insisted that there must be a European on board the boat, and that the arrival and reception must be carefully planned ‘to avoid a cock-up’. This ambitious plan came to fruition in November, when a French ship landed some 75 tons of military stores.

  One curious feature of the civil war was that, for much of the Yemeni population, life went on as usual. In the narrow streets of Sana’a people walked around normally among the high tower-houses elegantly façaded with white-framed windows – of great fascination to architects and historians – and in the mountains the tribesmen continued to cultivate their crops and orchards. Newly arrived mercenaries were often astonished by the fertility of a land that appeared at first sight to consist of nothing but jagged rock mountains with precipitous flanks or, in the east, deserts of sand and gravel.

  On the sides of the hills, over the centuries, people had laboured to build thousands of walled terraces, piling stone on stone to enclose strips of fertile ground, some only a foot or two wide, in which they were growing corn, vegetables and fruit. Wadis watered by streams were also productive, and there was an abundance of grapes: dried raisins and almonds were often on sale in the villages. The one major difference in the life of Royalist areas was that many people had forsaken their mountain villages, for fear of being bombed, and had taken to living in caves. Others cooked and slept in their houses at night, but before first light moved out with their animals and spent the day in caves or under rock overhangs, well away from their normal habitations.

  In the Khowlan Johnny Cooper was, as usual, in pugnacious form, and when not plotting to kill or maim the opposition, he was working hard as an amateur doctor. In his diary he noted that during the period from 21 September to 21 October he saw 1,059 patients, administering 238 injections and treating nine cases of VD – which brought his total for the past two months to 1,859 patients and 388 injections.

  On fine days, from his vantage-point 10,000 feet above sea-level, which he called ‘a perfect grandstand’, he could enjoy ‘a complete panorama of the front line’, with a view over Sana’a to the north-west and El Argoub to the east. But glorious landscapes were not everything. Looking ahead, he asked Peter de la Billière if he could somehow send ‘six bottles of any good brandy, VO, not Martell, and any Christmas goodies you can pick up’ – for even he was feeling the strain. ‘I keep on having to borrow money,’ he wrote, ‘and it’s not a nice thing, because they keep coming and asking, “Well, has your money arrived?”’

  I do need it for paying these crooks, and you know what type they’re like. They certainly demand the money before the event. In fact I don’t pay them the full amount before: I give them about a third, jingle the remaining two-thirds in front of their eyes and say, ‘Right – when your cookie goes off and you return, you get the balance.’

  Mining – I am having difficulty now in getting mines on the Jihannah–Sana’a road because of the guarding. Every morning it is swept now by foot parties before any transport uses it. It is completely unused at night now, so we have slowed things down there. To change tactics, I am now going to lay anti-personnel mines on the road to have a crack at the people clearing the antitank mines.

  In this he was so successful that soon Republican drivers refused to use the road at all, and the Egyptians were obliged to supply the large garrison in Jihannah with helicopters, which flew high in transit to avoid small-arms fire and then descended in rapid spirals as they reached their destination. The necessity for making four flights a day put a useful strain on the aircraft, their pilots and the fuel supply.

  On 30 October 1963 another BFLF recruit arrived in Aden to man the radio links, up into the interior and back to London. This was Rupert France, a large and ebullient bachelor known as ‘Franco’, who proved one of the organisation’s most valuable and long-lasting members. After distinguished wartime service with the Special Boat Service and the Greek Sacred Squadron, he had become a signals
officer with 21 SAS, and then a contract officer in the Muscat Regiment. Now he was middle-aged and portly, with a neatly trimmed moustache and receding hair, much liked, but mildly mocked for his fastidious habits. He was addicted to dietary supplements (black molasses being a favourite), and maintained a daily routine of physical jerks, during which he stood thrusting his stomach hard against the wall of a passage, in the belief that it kept his muscles in trim. One colleague described him as ‘very soft-spoken and considerate – a textbook gentleman, always spotlessly turned out’, and to another he was ‘very like Jim, in that, when something went wrong, he wouldn’t blame anyone. He’d just say, “OK. How do we get out of this?”6 He was also an inveterate gambler, and taught another of the mercenaries, David Bailey, his allegedly infallible system for winning at roulette.

  For a while Rupert stayed in Aden, reinforced by Major Stan Symons of the Royal Corps of Signals, a skilled radio ham who was on a regular posting to the colony, working in the Middle East Command headquarters. Soon, at de la Billière’s invitation, Stan became a covert and much-valued member of the BFLF. The radios of those days were bulky and delicate, and long camel journeys often left them in need of repair, so there was always work to be done getting spare parts and replacements, and fitting them into place. One of Stan’s first tasks was to visit Israel, to work out the signals procedures for the parachute-drops that Tony Boyle was planning – when (or if) they began. He quickly discovered that he needed two passports, one for Israel and one for the Arab countries, as the Arabs would not admit people with any stamp of Israel in their documents.7

  Stan was already friends with another radio ham, David Harrington, who was living with his wife in a flat in Aden; but Harrington soon came to suspect that Stan was involved in more than amateur radio traffic: when he went into his room one day, he found him engrossed in deciphering a message with a one-time code pad. Then Harrington himself was drawn into the network, first allowing Rupert France to use his equipment, then taking him in as a lodger in the flat.