The War that Never Was

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Tony added that Sudairi had spoken ‘rather freely’ about the Yemeni royal family, and had left him in no doubt that the aim of the Saudis was to rule the Yemen through the tribal sheikhs, without the benefit of the Hamid ud Din dynasty to assist them. A few weeks later, in another conversation with Boyle, Sudairi reiterated his remark. ‘He made it quite clear the Saudis are interested only in ruling Yemen through the sheikhs direct. The Royalists merely provide a rallying point for the purpose of expelling the Egyptians. After that they are expendable.’

  Even as Tony was composing his broadside to Jim, the talks at Haradh were failing. A communiqué signed by Shami stated that the Royalists were unable to persuade the Republican delegates to accept the terms of the Jeddah Agreement, and that there would be no further discussions between the two delegations. The conference ended inconclusively on 21 December 1965.

  The close of the year found Tony Boyle back in the Yemen, and invited by the French to a celebration dinner on Christmas Eve. When he passed through their base at Ida’a, between Amara and Najran, at lunchtime, he found ‘a fever of activity – chickens, goats and sheep were being slaughtered in every direction, and many cauldrons were bubbling over open fires’, in preparation for a feast that night. Returning at 11.30 p.m. (his driver having lost the way), Tony thoroughly enjoyed the party, at which nine nationalities were present:

  Christmas day was heralded with bursts from every gun on the establishment [he told Jim]. It was rather difficult, later, in Jeddah, explaining away the reports of a large Republican attack on Ida’a on the night of 24th December!

  His description of the festivities did not quite square with an account on which Jim dined out for the rest of his life. In this version the French chefs told Tony that they had caught and fattened up five desert partridges – and he ate the rich casserole that they gave him with great enjoyment. Only when he remarked that Yemeni partridges tasted rather stronger than English birds did his hosts let on that there had been an unfortunate accident: a week earlier the partridges had been killed by a feral cat. With a sinking feeling Tony asked, ‘So what have I just eaten?’ – and back came the answer, ‘The cat.’

  The leaders of the rival factions both left the field for the time being: Sallal was called to Cairo, where Nasser put him under house arrest for almost a whole year, and the Imam went to Taif in Saudi Arabia for treatment of kidney trouble. The Egyptians did start to withdraw troops, and from a high point of 70,000, numbers steadily dropped. For a few weeks it seemed that real progress had been made towards ending the war.

  But then – for the mercenaries – everything changed, and this time it was Smiley who swung things round. ‘News that Grin has pulled off four-month contract from 1st January,’ Tony scribbled in his diary. ‘So much for predictions, the most unexpected always happens.’ Writing to Jim on 29 December, on board a Saudi Airlines flight from Jeddah to Riyadh, Grin triumphantly announced, ‘Have got a cheque for £10,000.’ Shami, he reported, had become ‘very confident’, and had said that although the Haradh talks might appear to have failed, they had given him the opportunity to see all the important Republican sheikhs, and he had boasted, ‘I have them all in my hand.’ He had added that the Saudis’ attitude was very good, that he expected the mercenaries to be needed for at least a year, and that he wanted to discuss an increase in numbers with Jim on his return, the following week.

  At the beginning of January 1966 the Royalist princes seized the opportunity of leaving their flea-infested caves for a while, and met in strength in Riyadh for a conference about the future of their relationship with the Saudis. ‘After that,’ Tony told Jim, ‘if they are unable to find further excuses for delaying, the Princes will probably return to Yemen, but their excuse-finding ability is legendary.’ In their absence the Royalist army dispersed to its homes with its guns; to rebuild it would require new guns, full payment of back-pay and the opportunity of loot. Unable to imagine these three essentials becoming available in the near future, Tony feared that if Nasser renewed his attacks, he could ‘walk through the country’.

  While the princes were meeting, Jim visited Jeddah three times. At the third attempt he persuaded the Saudis to agree: they restarted the flow of funds and, with the arrival of the first cheque in the middle of the month, the mercenary operation got going again. Jim wrote:

  We now have people back with the Imam and Uncle Stan at Amara, and two parties on their way into the Khowlan, all having gone through Saudi Arabia . . . The moment Mac has got his radio installed happily with Abdullah [bin Hassan], he will go down alone through Nuqub to re-open the Aden flat.

  Also in January, under cover of the British Yemen Relief Committee, Jim sent out a doctor called Williams to make a survey of the equipment left behind by the International Red Cross in the hospital at Uqd, which had been abandoned in November. He found the mobile hospital still intact and containing medical equipment ‘of definite value’. In the surgical field there were more than 300 operating instruments and about 600 packets of suture material. For dressing wounds there were 20,000 gauze squares, 8,000 cotton bandages, 100 large packets of cotton wool and more than 1,000 dressing packs of Swiss Army design, as well as considerable quantities of intravenous fluids, infusion sets, intramuscular penicillin, ophthalmic ointment and Terramycin ointment.

  All surplus medical material had been taken to Najran and placed under guard in the care of Mohamed bin Hussein – who, however, had no means of administering the medicines. Dr Williams had also been briefed to make a ‘medical reconnaissance’ of north-east Yemen, but in mentioning all the prevalent diseases – leprosy, trachoma, bilharzia, malaria, to say nothing of war wounds – he appeared to be daunted by the problems of terrain and language. His report struck a rather despondent note, saying that if any doctor was sent out, the most suitable person would be someone who had just completed a short-term army commission. He would have to be young and fit, and would probably have experience of ‘living under difficult conditions’.

  Early in February Jim told Franco how worried he and McLean were by the prospect of the Defence White Paper that HMG was about to produce. ‘It may require some realignment in our position,’ he wrote. ‘Personally I am very depressed and think there may easily be a firm date given in the Paper as to when we are to withdraw from Aden.’

  His forecast proved all too accurate. The Defence White Paper, published on 22 February 1966, announced not merely that the Aden base was to be closed, but that no military support would be provided for the new Federation of South Arabia. The closure of the base was of no great concern to the Federal Government, but the denial of defence support after independence certainly was, as it gave the Egyptians the scent of a swift victory in the region and put paid to their declared intention of withdrawing from the Yemen.

  Senior British officials had all strongly advised against HMG announcing the decision on the base at that moment, arguing that it was a breach of British undertakings, that it would fatally weaken the Federation, and that it would impair Britain’s ability to honour other commitments in the Gulf – but the warnings were ignored. The American Consul in Aden reported to Washington that the decision and announcement ‘amounted to throwing the Federation to the wolves’ and to losing South Arabia for the West in the Cold War.17

  In Aden and the Federation the news was greeted with rage and dismay, succinctly expressed by Sultan Saleh al-Qu’aiti in the Federal Supreme Council:

  For many years we have borne the abuse and vilification of most of the Arab world because we believed that the British Government was our true friend and that, until we were able to defend ourselves, it would protect us against the consequences of our unwavering support . . . we cannot believe it is your wish that we shall be sacrificed just because, after many years of repeated promises to the contrary, the British government finds that it suits its own self interest to desert its friends and leave them in the lurch.18

  Two days after the White Paper’s publication, Jim wrote to tell Sm
iley that Shami had been very hurt and annoyed by the announcement, and now realised it really was ‘a race against time’ to get Nasser out. The Yemeni Foreign Minister suddenly flew to Riyadh, having said that he might be away for any period between ten days and twelve weeks – the length of his stay depending on whether or not he could get the war started again.

  Less than six months after the Jeddah Agreement, Nasser again demonstrated his mendacity by reopening his Yemen campaign, sending aircraft to bomb and strafe the mountain villages – and this, naturally, reactivated the Saudis’ support for the Royalists and their allies. MI6 agents reported that they had resumed the delivery of arms and ammunition to their border towns of Jizan and Najran.

  The Saudi leaders were concerned not merely about the Yemen: they feared also for their own safety, alarmed by the possibility that they, too, might be attacked, especially as their army was so weak (it had been deliberately kept that way to minimise any chance of a military insurrection against the regime). The Wilson Government sought to allay their anxiety by agreeing to speed up the programme for equipping the Royal Saudi Air Force with thirty-five supersonic F.53 Lightning fighters, six T.55 Lightning trainers (all built by the British Aircraft Corporation, BAC), and twenty-five Strike-master trainers, and for installing Thunderbird surface-to-air missiles on airfields.

  The sale of the aircraft and the entire defence system – the biggest arms deal ever achieved by British firms, worth £1 billion, known as ‘Magic Carpet’– had been engineered largely by Geoffrey Edwards, a wartime RAF pilot now acting as a freelance agent, who had been working all-out to secure the contract for the past three years, and had won it in the teeth of intense competition from the Americans. The Government had given him minimal support, except to promise the Saudis that, if the contract was awarded to BAC, the British would stay on in Aden for two more years – a promise that they had neither the intention nor the ability to fulfil. One certain fact was that the mercenaries’ efforts to block Nasser’s conquest of the Yemen had helped Edwards win time to clinch the deal.

  In Stirling’s view, Edwards was ‘far [and] away the most knowledgeable individual on Saudi Arabian affairs’ and had ‘a vast range of genuine friends at all levels’. A big man – a larger-than-life entrepreneur – he was backed by money from the takeover of a family steel business, and made prodigious efforts to secure his deal, flying back and forth from London to Jeddah more than ninety times. A single Lightning, taken out from England by BAC’s chief test pilot, had created a powerful impression, especially when the aircraft, with its silvery, unpainted skin of bare metal, went through the sound barrier during a demonstration.19

  Early in 1966, however, there were only two of the fighters in Saudi, and, in the absence of native pilots, the aircraft were being flown from Khamis Mushayt by former RAF pilots now employed by Airwork Services, another commercial firm involved in the deal. These civilian pilots were authorised to fly only within Saudi air-space, and the vital question of whether the early Lightnings could be used for combat missions had yet to be resolved. (Later, in 1967, when five Lightnings and five Hunters had arrived on the airfield, a Foreign Office memorandum said that HMG had ‘raised no objection to their being employed in operations’, but characteristically added, ‘We made it clear to the Saudis that we could not publicly acquiesce in any such arrangements.’)20

  In a letter to Judy from Jeddah, Jim wrote:

  Got here to find that Big David [Stirling] and Geoffrey Edwards had gone quite a way down the line with Tourist [Prince Sultan, the Defence Minister]. The big deal obviously being that Tourist would sign their enormous deal if we could guarantee to hold everything together long enough for their bits to get here.

  This, being interpreted, meant that the Saudis hoped that mercenary activity in the Yemen could continue to distract the Egyptians sufficiently to prevent them launching any attack on Saudi Arabia before the Kingdom’s new aircraft and defence systems were functioning fully. Nasser inadvertently encouraged this hope when, the day after publication of the White Paper, he proclaimed that he would stay in the Yemen for twenty years, if that proved necessary to preserve the republic. Presented with a new chance of seizing Aden, he soon began rebuilding the strength of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. In May 1966 the EEF had shrunk to 20,000 men, concentrated in the triangle between Sana’a, Hodeihah and Taiz; but in the second half of the year it rapidly built back to a total of 60,000 and Nasser threatened that if foreign troops invaded the Yemen, he would ‘destroy the bases of aggression’ – the Saudi towns of Jizan and Najran.

  11

  In the Balance

  The war resembled a moorland fire, which can smoulder away underground in the roots of the peat for weeks, without any visible sign of life, and then suddenly flare up in a different place. The Egyptians would mount an attack, and the Royalists would retaliate; the Royalists would lay more mines, and when these were detonated by tanks or trucks, the Egyptians would strike back. Then everything would go quiet for a while as both sides withdrew to lick their wounds – only for hostilities to break out abruptly somewhere else.

  By January 1966 Bernard Mills had become bored and went off to Jordan and the Lebanon in an attempt to improve his Arabic, having told Jim that he would come back if really needed. Yet far from being stood down, the other mercenaries – who by now had been rebranded the ‘European Advisory Group’ – were suddenly back in action, and the first months of the year brought an increase of activity on all sides. ‘We stretched absolute limit on ground urgently need at least two reinforcements,’ Johnny Cooper cabled Jim, ‘as war seems imminent.’

  On 25 February a telegram from Bosom, the mercenaries’ network control station in Jeddah, reported that Roger Faulques had secured a new contract for his French team: ‘Business looking up all round.’ But both sides in the war were under strain. On the 26th a newsflash revealed that ninety-five members of Sallal’s bodyguard, including four named officers, had deserted with their rifles, all from the Beni Matar tribe – but that same day Franco cabled from Nuqub, reporting that after several heavy actions during the past three weeks Royalist supplies of ammunition had run very low, and that every day brought Egyptian air and artillery attacks. Roger Faulques had arrived in Nuqub that morning, armed with a three-month contract for six men and plans to move back into his original cave. ‘He has completely fallen for Fiona [who had returned to the London office],’ Franco told Jim, ‘but is too polite to say so.’

  Jim, meanwhile, had being lobbying in Westminster, and on 4 March he sent out a message, to be dropped to the ‘the Khowlan teams’, which showed that for once he was being positively encouraged (albeit covertly) by MI6 and the Government:.

  Dear Shareholders,

  Our Friends have let it be known that the Government would like any difficulties which could be put in the way of the Egyptians inside the Yemen during the next eighteen months, as this would take the heat off the Federation, and the British Army during its withdrawal.

  The Saudi Government appears at last to have come face to face with the truth and realise that their only chance is also to make trouble for the Egyptians in the Yemen immediately. The Mango Production Co. naturally are keen to stir things up as soon as possible . . . It is essential that we get the war going again, as soon as possible . . .

  I realise that you personally will probably be taking quite a lot of the brunt of the anger and disillusionment from our Arab friends [because of the White Paper], and it will be very difficult to reassure them of Great Britain’s good intentions. There are however a lot of people in the country here, who carry great weight, who heartily disagree with the Government’s policy and will continue to bring pressure . . . to have the decision reversed. This I think is the best I can offer you to help explain away a bitterly embarrassing position.

  This message in effect gave the mercenaries carte blanche to do whatever they liked. Once again the Saudis welcomed, and were prepared to pay for, any action that would retard hostile
moves by Nasser and reduce his chances of attacking the Kingdom.

  At the same time, however, George Brown, Harold Wilson’s erratic Foreign Secretary, had taken to telephoning Nasser and asking him for advice on what to do about Aden. Nasser would feign ignorance, saying that he had no agents in the colony, and suggesting that Britain’s best policy would be to get out as quickly as possible. In the view of some Arab observers, Britain now had a government that was not loyal to the country.1

  Because Aden was becoming ever more dangerous, and the future of the colony was clearly limited, Jim decided to move his Middle East headquarters to Jeddah. To explain why the organisation would no longer need the Aden flat, he put out a fictitious report saying that Mac McSweeney had unfortunately been killed in a car crash while on leave in England.

  Meanwhile Stirling, having met Prince Sultan twice early in March, sent him suggestions for the future in a letter from London, launching a bold attempt to bring the regular SAS into action, initially to train selected Saudi recruits for a Special Force that would carry out raids and harassing sorties. Sultan did not rise to this bait; but Jim also wrote to him with detailed suggestions for increasing the efficiency of his existing operation:

  Your Royal Highness – Greetings and respects.

  In view of the changed situation in the Yemen and on the Saudi/Yemen border, with the probability of greatly increased activity in the near future, and even a possible escalation leading to open war between Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the following are our recommendations: