In the middle of the day Woodhouse sent out a radio message to Aden and London saying that five MiGs were lined up side by side, and asking for the exact length of the runway, so that he could fix the range to the target. Back came the answer: ‘the runway measured 3,330 yards’. At 1530 hours he enjoyed a ‘delicious meat stew’ eaten communally with Gassim and his forward soldiers:
Respect and affectionate humour mingled. He left to go to a wedding. We stayed in a section bunker, heavily scored all around by mortar craters, scarred by guns, rockets. How alike soldiers all are. Inside, a friendly, crowded muddle of kit, weapons hang on the stone walls. These soldiers laughed and talked like any others. Chewing qat, offering their sleeping spaces to us.
After nightfall he viewed the lights of Sana’a, identifying the prison, the radio station, Sallal’s headquarters and vehicle park. As the party walked back in the dark, the guide lost the track and Woodhouse took refuge in a hut, where he shivered until the moon rose at 0200. Then he walked on to Gassim’s headquarters, arriving at 0400 hours, and after a sleep and breakfast of a ‘delicious broken omelette with tomatoes’, he bade farewell to the Yemeni commander, promising to send him a radio, a medical man and a Stirling sub-machine gun.
In a handwritten message, which took two weeks to reach Mac in Aden, Woodhouse hinted to Jim how eager he was to get his hands on some 120mm mortars, which had long been promised, and which alone of all the weapons available to the Royalists had the range to bombard the Sana’a airfield. He asked for periodic reports on the progress of the heavy weapons, asking to know exactly when they, and ammunition for them, might arrive. Back in the Prince’s headquarters on 22 August, he sent signals destined ultimately for Potato (London), saying that his initial reconnaissance had been successful, that the airfield was within range, and that the possibilities of sabotage and arson in Sana’a were great.
Clearly he was hoping to carry out an immediate attack; but his hopes were frustrated by external political developments. A few days earlier Nasser had crossed the Red Sea on his yacht al Horriya to hold peace talks with King Feisal, and President and monarch had together made a short pilgrimage to Mecca, to pray for the success of their meetings. The result was an immediate ceasefire and the ‘Jeddah Agreement’, announced on 22 August 1965 – the very day that Woodhouse signalled London.
By the terms of the agreement, which amounted almost to a surrender, the Egyptians would withdraw their troops from the Yemen within ten months of 23 November 1965; the Saudis would cut off all military aid to the Royalists and deny them the use of Saudi territory. Further, a national conference of Yemenis would assemble in the north-western town of Haradh, to agree a new system of government for the Yemen, and a joint peace commission would be formed by both sides.
Nasser appeared to have been humiliated: after innumerable boasts over Cairo radio that he would annihilate the Royalists – that he would never withdraw from the Yemen, even if the Nile ran dry13 – he was about to start creeping away. The Egyptian Army had already lost nearly 20,000 dead and Royalist casualties were also appalling: 5,000 military dead and 30,000 civilians.
The ceasefire created a crisis for the BFLF, since the Saudis were naturally reluctant to continue paying the mercenaries. On 26 August, faced with the possibility that the war might suddenly be ending, Jay and Grin, in London, sent out a radio message to all stations warning of imminent closure:
CEASE FIRE ALL HOSTILE ACTS PARACHUTING ENTRY OF CUBS AND FURTHER REINFORCEMENTS HEREBY STOPPED. YOUR SALARIES PAID TILL END OF OCT . . . MEANWHILE NO FURTHER OPERATIONAL AREA MONIES WILL BE PAID ME OR YOU SO CEASE IMMEDIATELY ALL GUARDS CARAVAN KINI MINI PAYMENTS AS FUNDS YOU HAVE ARE ALL REPEAT ALL AVAILABLE YOUR OWN EXFILTRATION INCLUDING LOCAL AIR FARES HOTELS EXCESS BAGGAGE TO LONDON . . . CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL AND WILL DO OUR BEST HERE REGRETS JAY GRIN.
Two days later Jim asked Mac, in Aden, to inform Bernard that the Israeli drop planned for next month had been cancelled. The drops would be subject to review in two months’ time, Jim wrote, and might be reinstated if Nasser had not fulfilled his part of the agreement. He and Grin had just had two meetings with Shami, who was adamant that he would not give them a penny more than the salaries for September and October. Jim asked Mac to make it clear to the outstations that they must ‘live off their hump’, leaving themselves enough money to extract themselves from the country. In the worst-case scenario, Mac would be the final survivor in Aden: ‘After the last people have gone through you, if that becomes necessary, you will have to square your final bills by selling the car, wireless set, medical kit and secretary!’
For the rest of the month hopes continued to fluctuate. Jim was anxious about Woodhouse, still at large in the Yemen, and flew yet again to Jeddah, hoping to arrange further operational finance; but for once he failed in his mission, undermined by news from Cairo, where the newspaper Al-Ahram announced that Nasser was planning to withdraw 10,000 troops from the Yemen every month for the next seven months, beginning in December. The Saudis saw no need for further outlay, and Jim returned to Aden empty-handed. At 1130 on 7 October he put out a signal to all stations:
A. Regret announce financial death of Rally Films.
B. You all fired 31 Dec.
C. All stations close all personnel on leave 1 Dec. approx Aden/Jeddah.
D. Do utmost to save or evacuate stores/radio in case new firm starts in new year . . .
His gave as his reasons for closing down the facts that the men were due leave at the end of the year, and that it would be imperative that they were out of the country, should a Republican government be established. Further, his latest contract with Saudi Arabia would run out on 31 December, and at the moment there was no sign of it being renewed. All the same, he told everyone to stay put until the Haradh peace conference was well under way in November, so that premature departures did not undermine the Royalist-Saudi position. He finished the message in characteristic fashion: ‘Genuine congratulations from faceless chairman who invites you all to Christmas punch-up at Hyde Park Hotel. Jim.’
The mercenaries had already begun preparing to pull out – and the threat of losing them provoked Mohamed bin Hussein to compose a letter, written in English in red ink:
To Mr Jim,
I send you my best regards.
We all don’t agree to let Sayf [Sayf bin Abdullah was Bernard Mills] and friends to leave our area. This is final. Pleas respect our wishes because they must stay for many reson. Thank you.
There was still hope of a reprieve, and now it lay with Grin, who had recovered from his bilharzia and wrote to Jim from Jeddah on 19 October to say:
the fact that the British are leaving by December 12 is gradually beginning to dawn on the Yemenis, and it is throwing some of them into a state of alarm and despondency. Yesterday I heard that Mohamed bin Hussein is flying back from Beirut to raise the issue with the Saudis.
Smiley himself was preparing to go and beard Prince Sultan in Riyadh in an attempt to secure new financial arrangements; but first he saw Kemal Adham, and found that the intelligence chief had already got the King to agree that all the British operators should be taken on for another six months with effect from 1 January 1966.
On the subject of what our people are expected to do if they stay, and at what locations, I will get firm directions from Riyadh. They may well be paid for six months for doing nothing, and the chief enemy will be boredom, however good the pay. On the King’s side, we are a good insurance policy, in case the situation worsens. We can be used as eyes and ears on local affairs, and keeping up the W/T comms [wireless/telegraph communications] is invaluable.
While Grin’s letter was in transit, Shami and two other Royalist ministers had arrived in London, where they met George Thomson, the new Minister of State, at the Foreign Office. The Yemenis said that they had come to Britain to thank HMG for not recognising the Republican government and to seek assistance, especially medical aid and food, to counter the effect of the issue by the Republicans of new Yemeni p
aper currency. They also stressed that they sought self-determination for the Yemen. People (they said) ‘had to experience Nasser before they learned to distrust him’. They felt that even if Nasser did withdraw his army, he would try to continue exercising influence in Yemen. ‘The main danger now was not Egypt’s army, but rather their activities in the fields of propaganda, diplomacy and Yemeni politics.’14
While the mercenaries’ future hung in the balance, Woodhouse was still at large in the Yemen, and he remained there a good deal longer than he had intended, perhaps hoping that a renewal of hostilities would give him a chance, after all, to attack the Sana’a airfield. While waiting around, living in a cave, he passed the time playing Battleships with David Bailey, using scraps of paper to represent the rival fleets. In the event he did not start his camel journey down to the southern frontier until late in October. Then he made his way to Marib and Harib, where he met Abdullah bin Hassan, who warned him that famine was imminent, because the autumn rains had failed, and asked Britain to supply him with a large amount of money. Recognising Abdullah’s patriotism and powers of leadership, Woodhouse thought that ‘the expenditure of up to £20,000 for him might be a justifiable risk’.
His enforced wait must have borne in on him the disjointed nature of the war, and the difficulties under which the mercenaries were operating. On the first day of his exit trek, 21 October, five or six shots were fired at his party from a distance of some 400 yards, slightly wounding one of his guards. He did not regard this as a serious attempt at assassination, but saw it as ‘a joke in rather poor taste’. To his escorts, however, it was a clear sign of annoyance that tribesmen had not been paid, and they were keen to get Woodhouse safely out of the area.
He finally returned to the UK at the beginning of November, and in a manuscript note added to the end of his diary twenty years later he wrote:
Considerable feeling of relief [at being on the move] as very bored waiting from Aug 26 to Oct 21. Only consolation was my pay of £750 a month in cash. Jim Johnson organised this operation. It was overseen by the SIS.15 The Israelis carried out the air supply.
In an article entitled ‘Highly Irregular’, which he began but never finished, he hit a descriptive vein:
Silence, empty landscapes grand in their lonely, spiky mountain tops. The camel gives a sliding, backward-forwards motion as he pads slowly on. It can be soporific under the brilliant stars of the still Arabian nights. I find by day the camel rider can keep a sharper watch on the rocky, bare hillsides than he could if he was walking. My feelings, by now, were more prosaic and physical. My bottom was sore, very sore.
In a more substantial report he reiterated his belief that an attack on Sana’a airfield was entirely feasible, and that enemy positions would be easy to penetrate at night because of the wide dispersal and poor quality of Egyptian troops. In particular, the prospects of a successful ground raid on the northern airfield, ‘if British planned and led’, were very good – and even without British leadership, important results could probably be achieved by advice alone. He anticipated that a night raid by six men, ‘using a number of expedients to induce confusion and alarm’, would cause panic, enabling heavy damage to be inflicted on aircraft and installations.
He thought that in the Khowlan the tribes’ loyalty to the Imam had been strengthened by Egyptian intervention, and that even though the ruler himself might be expendable, no political solution would secure the support of the area unless the royal family retained a prominent position in the National Government. On a more positive note, he reckoned that the political advantages of providing medical assistance, as the mercenaries had been doing, were considerable and inexpensive to HMG. He considered that the recent introduction of modern medicine into the Khowlan had brought about a revolutionary change in the hitherto fatalistic attitude of the Yemenis to disease and injury: some at least of the tribesmen now saw that wounds could be healed and diseases cured. ‘The taste for medicine, once acquired, grows ever stronger.’
In November 1965, before the promised peace conference, the Imam emerged from hiding again and made a triumphal tour of the north. The meeting was duly held at Haradh, a town of 300 mud houses, without electricity, an eighteen-hour drive to the north-west of Sana’a. Grin, who had been asked to represent the Daily Telegraph and went along as a journalist, found to his disgust that the delegates were corralled in a large tented camp surrounded by barbed wire, with machine-gun posts at each corner, some 2 miles out of town. At first Royalists and Republicans were accommodated in the same quarters, but they quarrelled so much that they had to be separated. At film shows in the evening the Republicans applauded Nasser wildly, and the Royalists cheered Feisal.
The Royalist delegation was led by Shami, but the conference, which opened on 23 November, held only three formal sessions before it degenerated into chaos. After a week Prince Abdullah Sudairi, the Saudi who presided over the formal sessions, quietly warned Smiley that the Egyptians knew of his connection with the mercenaries; so he slipped out of the camp at dawn one morning and made away across the border to Jizan, deciding that the conference had been nothing more than a manoeuvre by Nasser to gain time.
The accuracy of his view was confirmed by a statement later given by Shami at a press conference in Riyadh:
The stubbornness, willingness to falsify things and obstinacy were shown by our brothers who came from Sana’a only during the official sessions, while outside these meetings our encounters were cordial, and they often confided to the Royalists that they could not express all their views – a fact that reinforces the news that they had signed a document in Sana’a before coming to the conference, pledging not to abandon the existing regime in their area.16
On 19 November – just before the conference opened – Jim had had a serious disagreement with Prince Sultan in Jeddah (the proceedings of the meeting were referred to by Tony as ‘fireworks’). Details of the row have not survived, but it was certainly about a future contract, and when Jim could not secure satisfactory answers, he threatened that he himself would pull out. In Grin’s view, Jim was tactless and rude; reports of his outburst sent shockwaves through his organisation, and dissension spread among the mercenary force. When Tony went out to Jeddah yet again, early in December, he was met by Franco and Grin, with whom he talked until 1.30 a.m., recording in his diary:
[Johnny] Cooper is apparently contacting people to ask them to join him with the Imam if all else fails. This is highly undesirable and could jeopardise the relationship with Saudis and HMG we have so carefully nurtured. The Jim/Sultan row was the main topic. I believe there is a solution if Jim backs down a little – the alternative, that he leaves the operation, would be a disaster. Jim must be persuaded accordingly.
Writing at length from Jeddah, Tony did not hesitate to tell his boss where he had gone wrong. Jim (he said) had overrated the importance of the mercenary organisation to the Saudis. His offer to withdraw the group had been a mistake. He could not expect the Saudis to make any long-term contract until the results of the Haradh conference had become clear. If he himself withdrew:
One of two things will happen: either the sharp-end boys will accept the Saudi terms direct, and the problem of finding a figure known, trusted and respected by everyone concerned to replace you will loom large and practically insoluble. Inevitably our organisation would be deeply divided, and for this reason alone this possibility is not acceptable.
Alternatively, and this is the second possibility, the boys will reject the Saudi terms and the organisation will disintegrate into small groups contracted to individual princes . . . This would be undesirable, as the princes are notorious for their inability or unwillingness to pay . . . Such a move would alienate the Saudis, who would be unlikely to provide a rear base . . . In short, our work over the last 2–3 years to improve Saudi and Yemen relations with Britain could be expunged overnight.
The final possibility is that you concede the Saudis’ point and accept monthly payment until the Haradh confer
ence results have been effected, on condition that they will then consider a longer term contract . . .
To summarise, the whole thing now depends on you, Jim. If you can bring yourself, albeit reluctantly, to shelve your personal feelings about Dracula [Sultan] and to dilute your demands on the Saudis by agreeing to this formula, I believe the situation can be retrieved; if you can not, I see no alternative to an awful shambles, and the harm that could be done within the next few months will probably eradicate all our previous achievements, and it would be better if we had never started. Anticipating this chaos, I want you to know that if you do drop out, I, for one, while disagreeing with your reasons for withdrawing, will drop out with you.
Now my second point is as important, but not quite so urgent, as the first. As you know, November 15th didn’t do your reputation here any good, I believe Billy then did it further harm. David, by not interrupting and disagreeing with you at the meeting, was loyally supporting you, yet in the eyes of the Saudis he is definitely closely associated with Billy, and Billy has apparently declared himself anti-you. So the Saudis have successfully driven two wedges to split the triumvirate.
I would think that the split between you and Billy, on a personal basis, must be nearly irreconcilable; even if that is so, you and Billy and David should at least meet and decide on a specific division of duties . . .
When I saw Zaid [Sudairi] last night I emphasised on your behalf that you had not meant any offence to Sultan and that if you had offended him you were sorry for it. He replied amicably, and said that it was not in Sultan’s nature to bear resentment. He added that he hoped when you meet again the matter could be treated as a joke, and that he (Zaid) hoped you would be able to attend the meeting on the fifteenth.
The War that Never Was Page 22