After a lull in the fighting, in February 1965 the Egyptians went back onto the offensive, both politically and militarily, dropping high-explosive bombs to destroy whole villages and terrorising the inhabitants with poison gas. Rival commanders threatened each other with rhetoric – as when Colonel Adal Abas, Commander of the Egyptian garrison at El Argoub, wrote to his ‘dear friend’, the Royalist Sheikh Nagi al-Ghadr:
Peace to my Arab brother. Why do you fight and kill your brother Muslims? You know in the past our reprisals have destroyed your homes and families when you have fought us. We must now make an arrangement for peace. I have received an order from the Vice-President, the Commander of all Egyptian forces, General Amer, that unless all fighting ceases, I must destroy you and your people.
To which al-Ghadr replied:
Before, at the beginning, when we were weak, you killed many of us. Now we are in command of the situation, you whine like a woman and beg for a peace we shall never agree to. We shall never cease fighting until all Egyptians have left the Yemen . . . I shall never stop fighting until I die. Tell Amer that in reality all Yemenis are Royalist at heart, and when the time comes even the Republicans will turn upon you. Beware, Colonel Abas: they shall join us when the time comes that the only Egyptians in the Yemen are those left on the roads and jebels.
The renewal of hostilities provoked Tony Boyle to draft a ‘Proposal for Further Action against the Egyptians in the Yemen’, which suggested that a successful attack on the aircraft at Sana’a and Hodeidah would deal a severe blow to Nasser’s prestige, not merely in the Yemen, but throughout the Middle East. The document, though couched in veiled terms, in essence recommended that the Israelis should carry out an air-strike, but that the Royalists should take credit for it ‘in a pre-planned, world-wide Press statement’. As he had recently returned from one of his many visits to Tel Aviv, it seems likely that the Israelis had shown interest in the idea, or even suggested it:
Experience has shown that very deep air penetration into the Yemen can be achieved with minimal risk, and the load carried on this operation [i.e. bombs] could be arranged so that it appeared to have been unprofessionally prepared, and so mislead the Egyptians into genuinely attributing the attack to a charter aircraft hired, modified and loaded by paid agents of the Royalists.
The proposal went on to claim that if the attack came off, and a number of Egyptian aircraft were destroyed on the ground, the other Arab countries bordering Israel would be ‘less inclined to accept Nasser’s assurances of effective and decisive help’, and thus ‘Israel’s interests would have been well served, and the Royalists would go to their conferences in a stronger position than ever before’. Tony, however, added a caveat:
I would also like to establish that we can take no part . . . if any of the deception plans suggest that the operation was performed by the RAF or emanated from the United Kingdom. If your discussions continue on the lines of those we have already had, this aspect should not arise.
That last sentence alone suggests that he had talked over the idea with the Israelis; but for reasons that are no longer clear, the plan never came to fruition. Yet to a former fighter-pilot like Tony, the planes on the airfield at Sana’a remained an irresistible target, and in his neat italic handwriting, on lined paper, he sketched out a ‘Proposal for Surprise Attack on Egyptian Aircraft in Yemen’. He suggested that a single Hunter fighter-bomber, flying from the Khamis Mushayt air-base in the south of Saudi Arabia, only 150 miles north of the border, could make ‘two or three successful attacks . . . and so destroy the entire Egyptian concept of air superiority in Yemen’. The pilot of the Hunter would be ‘standing by for immediate take off, with complete authority to select or reject offered targets’, and the British volunteers in the mountains would try to ensure that he had a clear run by reporting enemy aircraft movements.
The Hunter should be fitted with two 230-gallon overload fuel tanks, to give it extra endurance. The Egyptians ‘would not be expecting such action and would not have time to react against the attack’, but ‘the Saudi Arabian Government would obviously have to weigh the merits of the operation against the possibility of Egyptian countermeasures’. Tony used his own expertise to calculate, in some detail, the amounts of fuel that would be needed for various stages of the sortie, and he had no doubt that an attack would be feasible; but his ambitious project never came to fruition.
10
A High and a Low
In March 1965 a new political initiative briefly raised hopes that the confrontation in the Yemen might be resolved peacefully. Meeting in Jeddah, Royalists, Republicans and Saudis discussed the possibility of forming a Third Party, with the aim of producing a United Front that would rule the country and be capable of removing Sallal and the Egyptians. The Saudis appeared to favour the idea, but it foundered on the refusal of the Republicans to accept any member of the Hamid ud Din family in a new government. Another dissenter was Whiskers – Sherif Hussein of Beihan. Billy McLean, on yet another reconnaissance trip, found him highly critical of the Hamid ud Dins, but urged him to continue his support for them, since the tribes would not accept the leadership of any other family.
By then David Smiley was back in the Yemen on one of his freelance tours, still calling himself Grin, and on 18 March Jim Johnson himself went out, partly to get a taste of the prevailing atmosphere, but with the more important purpose of instilling some sense of urgency into the native commanders. On his way through Jeddah he received an ultimatum from King Feisal: Saudi Arabia (the monarch told him) had already supplied very large quantities of weapons and money, and yet the Royalist Yemenis had made no serious attempt to drive the Egyptians out. Unless they soon launched a major attack, he would cut off his assistance.
Once again Jim availed himself of the linguistic skills of Philip Horniblow, who was then living and working in Riyadh as technical director of a new hospital. Having seen the King, and stayed a night chez Horniblow, Jim flew with the doctor to Najran, where he himself lodged in comfort with the Governor, Prince Khaled Sudairi, while Philip was obliged to rough it in the clinic. Next day they drove across the frontier in a Land Rover and, after a stiff approach climb, reached the Imam’s redoubt at El Qara, where, to Jim’s distaste, they had to camp in a cave.
From there they proceeded to the Royalist headquarters at Amara, on the edge of the Rub’ al-Khali. The camp was established in a sandy valley among the foothills, tucked away in a labyrinth of caves, tents and bivouacs hidden from the air among huge boulders and interconnected with tunnels. Here the troglodytes lived in some style. Many of the caves had had their floors levelled and their walls smoothed out and lined with concrete; some even had wooden doors and carpets, and there were primitive wash-places and lavatories, with electric light from a generator. But still the place was in a chaotic state, with piles of rubbish and weapons lying in the open, and hundreds of empty fruit tins scattered about outside, offering a useful aiming mark for hostile aircraft.
At Amara the travellers found David Smiley suffering from a persistent sore throat and cough, for which Philip gave him some medicine. They joined forces also with Bernard Mills and his signaller, the small, dark and excellent Jimmy Knox,1 who in civilian life had been a miner, and was incredibly skilful at enlarging any cave in which the mercenaries proposed to take up residence. Armed with pick and shovel, he could excavate rock and earth three times faster than anybody else: as a colleague remarked, he was like a mole, and could burrow his way through anything.
The Royalists had been demoralised by recent gas attacks, and one of the princes appealed to Jim to send out gas-masks. When told that they were too expensive, the Yemeni announced that he had a much better and cheaper way of solving the problem. Having gathered his followers round him, he sat on a rock, took a large plastic bag, pulled it over his head and tied it round his neck. The onlookers watched in amazement as his head gradually disappeared in a haze of mist, until he toppled over unconscious and men rushed to release him.
&
nbsp; One afternoon Jim and his party set out for the French training camp at Khanjar, normally some four hours’ drive to the south, where they had arranged a rendezvous with Mohamed bin Hussein. They left Amara at 3.30 p.m., but their truck became stuck in the sand-dunes so often that they did not reach their destination until 10 p.m. Grin recalled:
From midnight until three in the morning Johnson, Mills and I harangued and brow-beat the unfortunate Mohamed Hussein, urging him to make an attack soon and justify the support King Feisal had given him over the last two years. Otherwise, Johnson warned him, all Saudi help would cease.2
Reporting the conversation to Mac in Aden, Tony Boyle said that when Jim waded into Hussein for not having taken the offensive, the Prince produced the usual excuses: that he would attack when money and weapons came through from Feisal, and so on. But Jim knew perfectly well that enough had already been sent for several attacks, and said that unless Hussein started something before he (Jim) left the country, he would report to Feisal that the Prince had no intention of doing anything, and the King would cut off his supplies.
After a couple of days Jim and Philip went further into the Jauf. One night they witnessed the latest Israeli air-drop – ‘Special Consignment No. 7’ – which included 24,000 rounds of .303 ammunition, 200 rifles and 148 mines, besides cans of corned beef, baked beans, pineapple and beer. They then headed north for the frontier, returned to the UK, and were back in London on 4 April, having been away for just over a fortnight. The image that Philip Horniblow retained from the trip was of the Boss, clad in a short-sleeved sports shirt and a futa, strolling about the camps with a sub-machine gun cradled in his right arm, smiling genially to one and all. Yet if his visit seemed brief and casual, it had a salutary effect, in that it galvanised Mohamed bin Hussein into action.
Soon after Jim had departed, he began moving up equipment for a major ambush on the main route from Marib to the north, at a point where the track ran through a gorge known as the Wadi Humeidat, overlooked by two massifs, the Jebel Aswad (Black Mountain) and the Jebel Ahmar (Red Mountain). The site of the ambush had been selected by Bernard and Louis, the French field commander of the GEV, after a reconnaissance two weeks earlier. Preparations for the attack were formidable, for weapons and ammunition had to be carried up steep slopes, and the Egyptians – who may have got wind of the plan – put in occasional air-raids during the days before the battle. These, however, did little damage, and as Grin recorded:
Our only casualties occurred when the European mercenaries, rushing out of the caves to shoot at the aircraft, would collide in the entrances with the tribesmen running inside to get away from them.3
Other foreigners on the scene included Billy McLean and the four Persian tiger cubs – the hapless Special Forces men sent from Iran to gain experience. Billy recalled how he and Mohamed bin Hussein took them up to the edge of the Jebel Ahmar escarpment, whence they had a grandstand view of the Egyptian positions. As they sat on the skyline, shells started whistling over their heads and exploding near them: although no one was hit, they all ran for cover, ‘the Persians running even faster than the Yemenis’. One of them dropped his field glasses and passport, but these were found by a tribesman, who handed them back with a smirk.
Then, during lunch, another of the cubs started boasting to Mohamed bin Hussein about his expert knowledge of explosives gained on a course in America. Billy was surprised to see the Prince listening intently, apparently impressed – but soon the real reason for his interest became obvious:
He said to the Persians that he was sure that with such expert knowledge they could easily mine the road below Jebel Ahmar, and that he would give them guides to take them down that very afternoon. The Persian officers were very taken aback and muttered that they were really part of a liaison mission sent to observe the war in the Yemen and not to take part in it.
They were further disquieted when they mentioned to the French volunteers that Prince Mohamed had asked them to go down to the road to lay the land-mines, and the French had replied: ‘You’ll be mad if you go down to the road, because the Dahm tribes will sell you to the Egyptians.’ Soon after this the Persians came to Prince Mohamed and informed him that they would be very willing to train any Yemenis to lay mines on the road, but they themselves would not be able . . . to do so because they had the strictest instructions from His Imperial Majesty the Shah that they were on no account to engage themselves directly in the fighting.4
Although Smiley gave Hussein advice on mounting the ambush, he had to leave more than a week before it took place – and when he departed, preparations had gone so far that it would hardly have been possible for Hussein to stop them. And yet, oddly enough, Grin’s absence from the scene did not prevent him contributing an eye-witness account of the battle to the London Sunday Telegraph, in which he described how he had observed the action from the headquarters of the Royalist forces on Red Mountain: ‘I watched . . . as Nasser’s Russian-built MiG jets and Ilyushin bombers counter-attacked with rockets and cannon fire to cover the retreat.’5 This article did nothing to improve his standing with those mercenaries who heard about it.
Fortunately the Prince did still have an experienced European adviser on hand, in the form of Bernard Mills, who planned the battle with him, siting heavy machine guns and 75mm recoilless rifles on high points, so that the Yemeni forces could use the flat plateau at the top of the escarpment as a killing ground. Useful allies were men of the notoriously fickle Dahm tribe, described by Billy McLean as ‘a lawless bunch of frontiersmen and freebooters whose main preoccupation was loot’. Normally the Dahm’s habit was to rob the convoys and caravans of either side; now, though, when Mohamed bin Hussein promised them whatever loot might be captured from the enemy, they managed to trick the Egyptians into believing that they had no need to station troops on the high ground, since they, the Dahm, would make sure it was clear.6
When preparing for the attack, Bernard had foreseen that one of the most difficult tasks would be to provide enough water for several thousand men; but, providentially, heavy rain began to fall, and storm after storm filled all the rockpools, removing a major worry. After carrying out several recces, he made a sand model of the area so that he could brief the local teams manning the heavy weapons – but it turned out that he was in for a long wait. Day after day it was announced that Hussein was about to arrive, and day after day he failed to show. When eventually he did appear, he asked why the mercenaries had not come to him. ‘Refrained from row,’ Bernard wrote in his diary. ‘We discussed operation.’
Planning was not easy, for the Prince habitually stayed up all night and slept through most of the day, and during a temporary stop at Matara tribesmen began to gather in droves, all clamouring for his attention. Bernard noted:
Thousands of people now living all around defecating, pissing, sleeping all day, and singing and talking and playing radios all night . . . Spent forty-five minutes stitching one of the Prince’s soldiers wounded in an argument . . . First day of Eid [the period of celebration after the end of Ramadan]. Morale bloody. Thousands of rounds fired in air . . . Roger [Faulques] arrives, on flying visit. Long talk with him . . . Big go at Mohamed about responsibilities etc . . .
14 April. Arrived Rahaba 0200 hours . . . Mohamed wants to stay another night here . . . alarming tales of thousands of Egyptians . . . Woke after sleeping well on three rocks suspended. New cave built. Two MiGs over this morning but no attack . . . Mohamed left recce too late – i.e. sun in his eyes. All sheikhs laying down law about where artillery [should be]. Got very angry . . . Bed 0500. Trained more mine-layers in the morning. Slept. Went to Mohamed 1530 but he still asleep. Woke him at 1600 . . . When I told him we were leaving he suddenly took notice.
At last, on the afternoon of 21 April 1965, the battle began with an artillery bombardment. Next day well-coordinated diversionary attacks distracted some of the Egyptians, as intended, and the main assault into the wadi, launched before first light, proved a resounding success. Mi
Gs made many low passes overhead, but held their fire because the Egyptian and Royalist positions were too close to each other for aerial gunnery to be safe. Caught in a bottleneck half a mile wide and a mile long, some of the enemy surrendered, while others fled, and the all-important road to the south was cut. More than 100 Egyptian soldiers were killed, and more than fifty were captured. The Egyptian press, needless to say, reported ‘a staggering victory’.
One sergeant, taken prisoner, described how his unit had been ordered forward to relieve a position cut off by the Royalists. After a four-hour approach march along the wadi bottom, his platoon had suddenly been attacked by tribesmen: he himself was wounded above the left ankle and in one buttock, and saw three of his comrades killed before the rest ran away.
Among the victors’ spoils were one T-34/75 tank, six armoured personnel carriers, four trucks and a jeep, besides numerous weapons and a great deal of machine-gun and mortar ammunition. The battle left 3 miles of the road, at the wadi’s narrowest point between Harf and Hazm, firmly in Royalist hands. Another 5 miles of the road were denied to the Egyptians by Royalist artillery.
Bernard’s schedule obliged him to leave before the fighting was over – but he had played a vital part in the Royalists’ preparation. In Najran he reported to Prince Mohamed Sudairi that the battle had taken place, and in Jeddah he briefed Kemal Adham, head of the Saudi intelligence agency and brother of King Feisal’s wife.
Adham was an important member of the Saudi hierarchy. A highly intelligent and crafty operator, of Turkish-Albanian descent and a graduate of Cambridge University, he looked like ‘a pensive mandarin’, with his ‘small, carefully-trimmed fair beard, his drooping moustache, melancholy eyes and withdrawn expression’.7 He was always extremely careful about his own safety. When a senior member of Mossad once said that he would like to meet Adham, Jim – who strongly believed that the heads of intelligence services should maintain contact with each other – arranged a rendezvous at the Dorchester Hotel in London. The Israeli awaited the encounter in his room; but at the last moment Adham became very nervous and said, ‘What if he attacks us?’ – whereupon Jim told him not to be ridiculous and assured him that his opposite number was a thoroughly civilised person.
The War that Never Was Page 20