Your passport and visa
Your cheque for August
£50 expenses for your journey etc
A letter for David – to be delivered personally, and a parcel.
During your stay in London today will you do the following:
a. Buy 4 field telephones and take them out with you.
b. Go to see Shami at 41 South Street at 11.30. He would much like to talk to you and has some letters for you to take out.
We were unable to book you a hotel room as the reservations office only takes bookings for the same day, so ring WEL 2555, tell them how much you want to spend and they will book you in f.o.c. [free of charge].
Khibsi has been informed what plane you are arriving on and should meet you, but you know the form if he doesn’t.
Mac wants 10 miles of assault cable – buy it in Jeddah and get Khibsi to pay. Mac has been ordered to go via Jauf to take the next operation (parachuting).2
David will remain i/c at El Qara. You must work very closely together, remember he is in charge, and do all you can to co-operate –
I’m sure you will.
Tony.
In the Yemen the usual bloody exchanges were continuing. On 26 June 1964 Royalist commandos had attacked an Egyptian outpost close to Jihannah, killing five men. That night the commandos attacked another outpost at El Misharakah. ‘Egyptian casualties are not known,’ said a report, ‘but dead bodies were seen coming on a lorry from the post in the morning.’ On the morning of the 28th the Egyptians shelled the town of Bashar in retaliation: fire was directed by a spotter helicopter and maintained throughout the morning, but there were no casualties.
Sporadic skirmishes continued relentlessly. On the night of 30 June–1 July Royalist artillery shelled the Egyptians outside Sana’a, maintaining their bombardment until dawn. In the early hours of 1 July the Egyptian/Republican headquarters at Jihannah was blown up by a bomb, and the explosion, seen and heard by Royalist outposts above the town, was described as ‘tremendous’. Egyptian vehicles converged from all around, and one set off a mine 100 yards from the walls of the town. The vehicle, a lorry, disintegrated. Later, the Royalists learnt that it had contained four Egyptian officers, who were coming to investigate. In retaliation, the Egyptians cut down all the fruit trees and grape vines outside Jihannah and offered a big reward for information about those responsible.
For the time being, the Egyptians were on a losing streak. On the morning of 3 July one of their patrol officers discovered a bomb outside the house of Abdul Wahab al-Gabri, but before the device could be tackled, it exploded, killing him and seven soldiers. On the morning of 7 July a message from Johnny to all stations reported that, after a dispute in the headquarters at Sana’a, an Egyptian officer had shot and killed four Egyptian and three Yemeni officers while resisting arrest, before he himself was gunned down.
The fragmented nature of the war, and its viciousness, were graphically illustrated by a single report from the mercenary front, relayed through Bosom, the mother radio station in Jeddah, and sent home on 31 July 1964:
1 In the Khowlan the following Egyptian casualties are reported: three killed in Sharasah gap by rifle-fire. Eight killed, four wounded at Bait Thubaht. One killed, three wounded at Bait al Hamshmii.
2 There is still no increase in air activity in Khowlan area. Only one daily Ilyushin transport plane to Harib.
3 Two mines exploded in Wadi Assir, destroying one staff car and one armoured car – no indication of casualties.
4 The Governor’s house in Bait Assaid was bombed, killing a Republican officer and wounding two soldiers.
5 A mine exploded in Wadi Maswar, destroying an armoured car.
6 Nine Egyptians were killed by a guerrilla group in Jihannah.
7 Three Egyptians were killed and a tank destroyed in Sayyan village by a guerrilla group.
8 In retaliation for the Egyptians raping a woman in the village of Al Jardah, the villagers killed four Egyptians and threw two of them down a well. They all refuse to work for the Egyptians.
9 An Egyptian was killed in a village three kilometres from Sana’a, and a Royalist while being interrogated had his eyes, ears, nose and mouth cut off (sic).
10 Ten Royalists ambushed an Egyptian staff car killing three passengers and the driver.
11 In Bait Assaid, near Sana’a, a tank was destroyed and four Egyptians killed.
12 There has been heavy fighting in the Hajjah area, with the following casualties reported: 150 Egyptians and Republicans killed, 250 wounded, forty prisoners. Some artillery and heavy machine guns and rifles captured.
In August the Egyptians launched an attempt to capture or kill the Imam. Had they managed to catch him, the Royalists would have suffered a catastrophic loss of morale and their whole effort might well have collapsed, leaving the Egyptian Army victorious.
For once the ruler was in acute danger. On 15 and 16 August the Egyptians made a determined effort to sever the motorable route from Jizan to the foot of the mountains at El Qara; fearing that he would be isolated and surrounded, the Imam slipped down out of his eyrie during the night of 16/17, leaving Mansoor (Sharma) to hold the fort, and went north to the area of Meschaf, almost on the Saudi border. There he made exceptional efforts to rally his troops, constantly moving on at night, never staying in one place for long. For day after day Republican and Royalist troops faced each other, holding the heights on either side of the road to the west, and expending prodigious amounts of small-arms ammunition. Jack Miller, with the Imam, feared that his party might be surrounded by Egyptian tanks sweeping round through the flat desert north of Meschaf. He thought they might even cross the border into Saudi Arabia. ‘They are not frightened of SA,’ he wrote in a report. ‘They bomb it now, and nothing will stop them in this open country.’ Trying to predict what might happen, he thought it unlikely that the Imam could return to his former hiding place ‘for a long time, if at all’:
What the political situation is, I don’t know. All I know is that at the present time HM thinks Her Majesty’s Government is a pack of liars who have stabbed him in the back by not keeping their promises of aid from the south – money, arms etc.
Another Egyptian push elicited an unusually agitated message from Johnny in Aden:
Imam position very bad indeed. Sharma [at El Qara] has my instructions to blow up all equipment and codes prior to getting out if necessary. Bailey is in Jeddah and is planning to return to Imam, but road is cut by Egyptians. Sharma will join me here if he has to evacuate.
Just as the situation was becoming desperate, the pressure eased. After taking heavy casualties, the Egyptians drew back – possibly (it was thought) in a deliberate move to lure the Imam into returning to El Qara, where he could be isolated. The Royalists issued a triumphant communiqué, claiming that ‘near-disaster’ faced the retreating Egyptian and Republican troops. A counter-attack, personally led by the ruler, had driven Nasser’s troops into a trap, and 1,200 of them had been killed. The fighting had evidently been confused: ‘Ill-defined battle lines in rugged mountain terrain with armour channelled in sandy wadi bottoms at right angles to the front.’ Two tanks and five armoured cars had been destroyed, and twenty-five more Republican soldiers had been accidentally killed in attacks by Egyptian aircraft.
Even allowing for the characteristic exaggeration of such announcements, it was clear that the Egyptians had suffered a serious reverse, when their advance became bogged down by mud and rain. Two more ambushes in ravines sent the raiding parties back to Haradh in confusion, losing half their armoured cars and ten tanks. A week later the Egyptians did nothing to increase their popularity by machine-gunning fleeing remnants of the Republican assault force and killing another 200 of them. The Royalists claimed that in all the enemy had lost 2,000 men.
In spite of these victories, the autumn of 1964 was a time of acute anxiety for the BFLF. For various reasons the flow of money from Saudi Arabia dried up: the Sherif of Beihan was owed £500, and the Royalist princes w
ere appealing urgently for new funds. With the Imam’s sudden departure from El Qara, contradictory messages, back and forth between Aden and the UK, had left everyone confused as to who was in command. A cable from Johnny told London that the Imam had left the country, but a message from London said that he was still in the Yemen. A letter from a Frenchman in EL Qara claimed that the ruler was in a small village close to the Saudi border, and ‘was not seeing anyone’. Next he was said to be inside Saudi, hiding by day and coming secretly by night to a village in the Yemen for talks with his principal commanders, Abdullah bin Hassan and Mohamed bin Hussein.
Further uncertainty was engendered by reports that Prince Feisal and Nasser had struck a deal to end hostilities, when the Saudi Prime Minister visited Cairo. The British were immediately sceptical about a most unlikely-sounding statement that Feisal was alleged to have put out: ‘I leave Egypt with my heart brimming with love for Nasser and the people of Egypt.’ As Tony pointed out, the remark had obviously been made ‘for the benefit of the UAR’. All the same, the future of the BFLF looked extremely uncertain.
Even though Johnny was in Aden for the time being, his mind was still very much in the Khowlan. From the unaccustomed comfort of an office, he eagerly passed on news from various fronts:
Two mine-layers placing plastic (Wog) mines caught at Bait Baruat (Sana’a). Wogs cut right arm and left leg off both prisoners! . . . Guerrilla group commanded by Col. Gassim Monassir attacked Wog forward defence location in Wadi Shaub, four minutes by vehicle from Sana’a, killing all eighteen Wogs (asleep). One armoured car set on fire. All Sana’a alerted, and Wogs still pooping off three hours after all Royalists miles away. Road to north closed all next day.
For all such successes, he was chagrined by the lack of adequate financial support. ‘It really is a bloody waste of all our time, this continued living on a shoe-string,’ he wrote to Tony on 13 September. Another of his bêtes noires was the Foreign Office. ‘About time the ostriches got their heads out of the bloody sand . . . The UK really are the END, Tony. Agree?’
Johnny felt that the war was not being pursued ‘correctly or eagerly’, and suggested that Jim should visit Prince Feisal so that he could explain the mercenaries’ predicament, the reluctance of the princes and their open lack of cooperation. If Jim went to Jeddah, he wrote, he might be able to obtain control of the money and supplies, ‘so that they are directed to the areas that justify them, instead of people stock-piling for after the war’. To have a grip of the money supply would be ‘wonderful’ for the advisers.
Johnny’s frustration was shared by Jim, and on 25 September he sent out a doom-laden cable:
In view reported deal between Burns [Feisal] and Christie [Nasser] over Dickens’ [the Imam’s] impending departure and total lack of knitting [money] your end stand by all to return next week stop your contracts cancelled 31/10 . . . Regret short of miracle this is the end jay.
Four days later, however, the warning order was overtaken by a more cheerful message: ‘miracle now possible meanwhile one thousand knitting pins sent airmail Monday your contracts reinstated stop letter follows.’
The miracle was being wrought by Johnny, who went to Saudi Arabia – no doubt at Jim’s request – and proved such a persuasive advocate that substantial funds immediately became available. His mission was almost aborted when, arriving in Jeddah, he found that his visa was out of date, and the authorities told him he must carry on to Beirut. But, as he reported, he ‘turned on the charm and although passport-less was allowed into here’ – and quickly obtained results. ‘So far things are going OK,’ he told Jim on the day after he arrived:
I see Shami again tomorrow and perhaps Feisal also, as he has asked to see me. I have had a promise of five thousand to take back on Sunday 25th. [Then, a day later] Well, it’s worked out fine and I have collected three months’ money for inside from Feisal . . . I feel very happy about this trip.
Later he told Jim that although he had secured £5,000, some of the Saudi authorities thought he had asked for too little. ‘The Imam does not want us or French,’ he added. ‘To quote: “I want men to fire the cannons, not advisers, radio operators etc.!”’
In the Khowlan, Johnny’s place had been taken by Bernard Mills, the powerfully built, Arabic-speaking officer now in his early thirties, formerly of the Royal Anglian Regiment and the SAS, who had been obliged to decline Jim’s original invitation to take part, and had recommended Johnny in the first place. Now, in May 1964, having completed his tour in Muscat, and propelled (like Jim) by patriotic fervour, Bernard flew to Aden and on to Beihan, where he collected a consignment of medical supplies from the Sherif’s house. Then, in company with a couple of Belgians and Philippe Camus – the Frenchman who had been blinded by gas during Johnny Cooper’s first foray, but had recovered his sight after treatment in France – he joined a long camel train carrying weapons.3 On their way in they were detained by a tribe demanding money – but when somebody paid off the aggressors, both sides settled down to what Bernard described as ‘a kind of team tea, as after a cricket match. We sat on one side, they on the other. Goats were killed and we all tucked in.’4 Thereafter the caravan proceeded to Gara, and Bernard soon established a good relationship with Prince Abdullah bin Hassan.
He also settled quickly into his strange new life. His first quarters were in a two-roomed house made of stone, but he preferred to sleep outside in the vineyard. Three of his bodyguard were stationed at the little post set up to stop people stealing the grapes, and one of them was supposed to be awake all the time – but Bernard could never be sure, so he moved around to a different spot every night to minimise the chance of being assassinated. His normal alarm call was the scream of a MiG overhead, for the Egyptian jets usually began their sorties at dawn, because the air was coolest then, and the airfield at Sana’a was 6,000 feet above sea-level – an altitude that made take-off difficult in very high temperatures.
He trusted his men absolutely, because they were his travelling companions – and Yemenis traditionally did not betray the people with whom they journeyed. Some of them he inherited from Johnny, and some he got from another tribe, always trying to have different tribes represented. Because he spoke some Arabic, and could communicate, he got on well with them – even though his Arabic was Omani, and quite different from theirs. Hearing his strange accent and archaic expressions, and seeing how tall he was, people often took him for an Egyptian, and in particular for an Egyptian Intelligence Officer, which came in very useful whenever he had to pass through Egyptian lines or spend a night in a Republican village.
Bernard’s people were grateful to him for giving them employment, and for being the nearest thing they knew to a doctor – although, hating the sight of blood, he was reluctant to stitch up the wounds caused by jambiya fights. The villagers were desperately poor, and (apart from their transistor radios) were living in the sixteenth century. Driven from their houses by the Egyptian bombing, many had taken refuge in caves; but as he moved around the mountain country, on foot or by donkey, Bernard was struck by the beauty of the landscape, and by the amount of fruit growing in the valleys: going through villages, he used to fill his pockets with dried almonds and raisins bought from stalls at the side of the track. He soon became exceedingly fit, often covering 20 miles and climbing or descending 8,000 feet in a day – and his endurance was much better than that of his bodyguards, who liked to stop for a rest at frequent intervals and were not used to sustained walking.
He established an easy relationship with Abdullah bin Hassan, but realised that his own powers were limited: although he could advise and try to help, he could not give orders or tell the Prince what to do. His tact and good sense were evidently much appreciated, and Hassan was eager for him to stay on. But his first tour in the Khowlan was short, for he was given the urgent task of taking photographs of a new DZ and the surrounding mountains, and conveying them, together with plans of the ground, to Israel.
Having trekked back to Aden, he flew
to London and thence to Athens, where he changed to an El Al flight for Israel. In Tel Aviv he briefed senior air officers – and when they asked what would happen if the aircraft came down in the Yemen, Bernard replied that he would do exactly the same as if the plane was one of the RAF’s: he would make every possible effort to extract the crew safely from the country.
Returning to the Yemen in September 1964, he again walked out to the Khowlan, to a new station some forty minutes’ walk west of Abdullah bin Hassan’s own base. There was a clear advantage in being separated from the royal encampment, for it meant that the British team was not beset by the hundreds of tribesmen who constantly milled around outside the Prince’s cave.
On 3 October the mercenaries’ financial crisis was eased by the arrival in Aden of 5,000 gold sovereigns destined for Hassan; but the confidence of the BFLF team had been shaken, and on 8 October Johnny Cooper, David Bailey and Mac McSweeney held a meeting in Room 41 of the Rock Hotel in Aden. They agreed that their field organisation was running ‘on a shoe-string’, and that they were not giving of their best. One operator, Roy, had just been sacked for a variety of failings (‘mental instability, “Walter Mitty” outlook, very bad physical condition, security risk appalling – talks too much’), which left only six men on the ground: Abdullah bin Nasser [Johnny] Bernard, David Bailey, Mac, Mansoor [Sharma] and Cyril Weavers, with Franco (Rupert France) as their base controller. They reckoned that if the organisation was to function effectively, they needed to recruit two new teams of three. ‘It is apparent to all of us,’ said the minutes of their meeting, ‘that at the moment field work is nil, and local leaders (Arab) are becoming increasingly angry at our continual trips in and out and lack of continuity.’
After the fiasco with Roy, the impromptu committee directed some sharp remarks at the London office. ‘All recruits must be thoroughly vetted on their self appraisal by going to root sources,’ said the minutes:
The War that Never Was Page 18