The War that Never Was

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Returning from a trip to Aden, he was lucky to get away with his life, for his Yemeni driver insisted on stopping in Harib, which was fiercely Republican. The pair were immediately surrounded by the local militia, and only when the driver managed to persuade them that Kerry was an American did they let them go.

  Even if nothing particular was happening at Sirwah, the days seemed to pass quickly. Sleep, whether at night or by day, was punctuated by frequent alarms. The team, consisting of Kerry, Jimmy Catterall (Jingo) and Punchy McNeil (Nocturne), had three skeds (radio schedules) a day, sending signals to Bosom at 9 a.m., noon and 6 p.m., and all messages had to be encoded using OTPs (one-time pads) and a dictionary – a process so laborious that a long message could take several hours to complete. The team were always on the lookout, because they never knew what might happen next, whether it was an air-raid or just tribesmen constantly coming and going.

  Food (akl) was a constant preoccupation. The men had no set meal-times, but ate whenever they could. The Arabs provided khubs – unleavened bread baked in great rounds the size of bicycle wheels, best eaten fresh, but lasting for a fortnight, by which time it would be green with mould, but still edible if dipped in tea. General supplies came in on trucks travelling at night up from Beihan or down from Najran, and the mercenaries were allowed one luxury a month. Kerry once asked for a sack of potatoes, but by the time it arrived the contents were rotten: nevertheless, he squeezed out some intact kernels and managed a small but very welcome plate of pea-sized chips. He could also get many things from the dukka (a little shop in the camp), including basel (onions, essentials for that staple of SAS diet, curry) and tinned pineapple. The Brits cooked over primus stoves in battered saucepans or rectangular mess-tins; the Yemenis also had paraffin stoves, but often lit small wood fires.

  Hygiene was not the name of the local game. Defecation took place in the open desert, and no one made any attempt to bury the day’s production. The sand was littered with turds which, within minutes, had been baked as dry as biscuits and crackled like cornflakes when walked over. Water was too scarce for any washing to take place: the best anyone could manage was to scrub sweat and dust off with a rag.

  Water for drinking and cooking was brought up in a jerrican by Gaid, a lively lad of about twelve whose burning ambition was to own a rifle. Presently he was given one, but soon afterwards Kerry was dismayed to hear a great clanking, and to see the boy staggering along under the weight of a collar, shackles and heavy chains. Evidently he had threatened someone with his new toy – but it turned out that he was in no great need of sympathy. When MiGs suddenly put in an attack, spraying the camp with bullets and cannon shells, and everyone dived for cover, Kerry feared that Gaid had been caught in the open; but when he looked out, all he saw was a pile of chains, lying on the ground. The lad had slipped his shackles and popped into a funk-hole.

  One night Kerry was asleep in a cave when he woke suddenly with the feeling that something was about to happen. It was a quiet, moonlit night, and although he heard nothing, the premonition made him reach for his automatic and tap his companion on the shoulder. Then a shadow fell across the mouth of the cave and a rather refined, low voice said in English, ‘Good evening. May I come in?’ The visitor was the explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who was spending five months in the Yemen as a guest of the Royalists. As usual he was on the prowl, partly for his own edification – he claimed, unconvincingly, that he was studying local dialects – but he was also acting as a messenger between the Yemeni leaders and giving a hand to MI6, for whom he was picking up information.4

  Thesiger – who had served with the SAS in the Western Desert during the Second World War – spent some time with the little group, and Kerry was moved to find that ‘while this great Arabist and historian was with us, he was quite happy to accept orders and do as I told him’. He once delighted Kerry by remarking, out of the blue, ‘The only thing my grandfather ever did was to lose the battle of Isandlwana’.5

  Other mercenaries were amused, but also irritated, by Thesiger’s affectations. ‘Gentlemen do not travel by automobile in Arabia,’ he would announce as he declined a lift – only to appear a few days later with a gash on his forehead, sustained when the jeep in which he had been a passenger ran into a French vehicle. Radio messages kept coming back to Jim in London saying, ‘He’s eating all our food . . . He’s pinched my li-lo to sleep on . . . How do we get rid of him?’ ‘Try pop music,’ Jim answered – and within two days Thesiger was on his way.

  Normally it was impossible to warn other stations of imminent attacks; but one morning, when Kerry saw two MiGs heading due north, he radioed his colleague Don Wright (Woodcutter) at Ketaf, in clear, ‘Two to you in two.’ Don got the message instantly and took cover, but the aircraft rocketed his store, and his precious tins of milk, which had recently arrived after a long wait, finished up the size and shape of half-crowns.

  For Jim the most galling feature of the situation was that, with the return of Sallal from Cairo to Sana’a in the middle of September 1966 and his appointment as Prime Minister of the Yemen, the Egyptians had resumed hostilities on a large scale. In the capital, doubtless on Nasser’s orders, Sallal purged the Yemeni administration of what he called ‘traitorous and criminal elements’. In the mountains the mercenaries’ outstations reported a sharp increase in Egyptian air-raids, beginning on 18 September, and the office in Jeddah coordinated a summary of attacks witnessed by Europeans:

  September October

  Il-28 sorties 21 59

  MiG 12 57

  HE [high-explosive] bombs 152 183

  Napalm Nil 61

  Earliest raid 0700 0530

  ‘Air activity has been very heavy,’ Tony Boyle confirmed from Jeddah. Besides all the attacks on Yemeni villages, the Egyptians had bombed Jizan and Najran, both inside Saudi territory; and although night-bombing of the Yemen had proved ineffective, a determined assault had been made against the Royalist staging posts along the Jauf supply route. On the afternoon of 18 October a deliberately murderous attack was made on Mahabsha by two Tupolevs, which dropped high-explosive bombs on the mosque when it was full of worshippers at prayer, killing eighty-one people. It is possible that this barbaric act was in revenge for the fact that the Imam had stopped for a while in the town during his escape in 1962.

  The new Egyptian offensive was not confined to the air. One of Sallal’s first actions on his return to Sana’a was to dismiss the Republican Prime Minister, General Hassan al-Amri, and his Cabinet, and place them all under house arrest. When Amri offered to go to Cairo, to see Nasser, he was forbidden to do so; and when he chartered an aircraft and tried to fly to America to appeal to the United Nations, he and his group were arrested again.

  A ‘Report on Yemen Situation’, produced by the mercenary team in Jeddah, stressed that the princes must go back to their areas and make strenuous efforts to open motor roads into the centre of the country, setting up motorised transport services from Jizan and Najran to their headquarters. The document urged them to increase guerrilla attacks on primary targets, such as the roads from Sana’a to Hodeidah and from Sana’a to Taiz, and to insist that food could be paid for only with gold and Maria Theresa dollars – which would make the Republican paper riyal almost worthless.

  12

  Fresh Blood

  During the summer and autumn of 1966 new recruits were still reinforcing the mercenary ranks. Among them was Mick Facer, a skilled mechanic who had known Jim for fifteen years in the territorial SAS and, as an MT sergeant, had specialised, among other things, in training people to drive across country. Summoned to appear at the office in Earls Court, he paraded outside and rang the bell – whereupon Jim appeared at the door of the basement below and demanded, ‘What are you doing, buggering about up there? Come on in!’

  As Mick had been earning £20 a week, and Jim offered him £80, he signed on at once and within a few days found himself in Jeddah, charged with the task of sorting out the group’s transport. This was in poor sh
ape – and when he looked underneath some Chevrolet trucks he found there were no split-pins securing the castellated nuts – only loose, bent nails, which could fall out at any moment.

  His first deployment was to Najran. By far the quickest and least uncomfortable method of getting there from Jeddah was to fly: a bumpy ride of about four hours in an aged Dakota. But for Mick it meant an overland transit – and that was something else: a 700-mile marathon through the desert, which took a whole week. He made the trip in the company of twenty-one Frenchmen, who wittily split his cover name, Fathom, into two, and called him ‘Fat Hom’. The drive was not for the faint-hearted:

  Every time we came to a new tribal territory we had to hand in a warraqa to the Sheikh, and he had to find someone he trusted to escort us on to the next area. Whenever we found good going, we didn’t run as a convoy at all: we just spread out in a cavalry charge across the desert – and if anyone got stuck, you didn’t stop or go back. Everyone had to get themselves out.

  From his base in Najran, Mick made numerous sorties into the Yemen, going out with his toolkit to service vehicles or cannibalise broken ones, and often staying in the caves of mercenary encampments, both French and English. He was amazed by the emptiness of the country – the lack of people or habitations – although ‘now and then a tribe would come out, with all the women singing and dancing on the mountain as a decoy’. He soon got the measure of enemy air-raids: if two Ilyushins appeared, one would circle round high up, while the other came in ‘along the deck’, and it was the high one that did the bombing, after its partner had carried out its low-level reconnaissance. As for the MiGs, by then they had heat-seeking weapons, ‘so if you were in a vehicle with a hot engine, you’d jump out and run like blazes’. Years later Mick reckoned that from his time in the Yemen he learned ‘not to make harsh judgements of anybody, and to look at both sides of the coin. Not “Who is being difficult?” but “What is the problem?”’1

  Another mercenary who had a struggle to accomplish the journey from Jeddah to Najran was Frank Smith. Returning from leave, he set off in one of the trusty old Dakotas, only for the plane to turn back with engine trouble fifteen minutes into the flight. The problem was diagnosed as a lack of power in the port engine, and after half an hour the pilot took off again. The second and third departures both ended in the same way: a return after twenty minutes. That finished the day’s manoeuvres. The fourth departure took place at 5.30 a.m. the next morning, and the fifth (after yet another about-turn) at 7 a.m.

  The sixth and final departure appeared to augur well: both engines functioned normally for two hours – but then the port engine again began to falter, and because the pilot had passed the point of no return, he headed for Khamis Mushayt, the Saudi airfield some 150 miles short of their destination. There the plane was grounded until spares could be assembled, and Frank was hanging around, waiting for some alternative form of transport, when a well-dressed Arab approached him.

  The stranger had also been stranded, but had procured a Chevrolet pickup truck and driver, and offered Frank a lift to Najran. Frank jumped at the offer and threw his kit into the back of the truck, whereupon the Arab asked him to give a hand with two extraordinarily heavy, bound and sealed wooden boxes. These, he insisted, were not to go in the back of the truck, but must travel in the cab. He then let on that he was a Yemeni official and was transporting the entire annual budget, in the form of gold sovereigns, for one of the Royalist armies.

  The rest of the journey would have taken less than two hours in the Dakota; but by road, over the mountains, it lasted two days, and during that time, with £2 million beneath his feet, Frank’s honesty was seriously tested. Miles away from civilisation, with a Russian automatic pistol on his belt and only the driver and official in the cab, he kept thinking how easy it would be to shoot them both, bury the gold and reclaim it later. But, being basically an honest fellow, he did not succumb to his fantasy.

  Later, he was shocked to hear that while his pickup was crawling over the mountains, the repaired aircraft had flown to Najran and then taken off on the return journey to Jeddah, only to crash in the same mountains, killing everybody on board except one Red Cross doctor, whose back and legs were broken, but who managed nevertheless to crawl into the shelter of a rock. There he was found by some Bedouin, who stole his money, but rigged up a shelter to protect him from the sun, and left him bread and water. He survived, and Frank met him later. By a miraculous stroke of luck, a colleague of Frank’s, Peter Bullivant, who was supposed to have been on that flight, missed it because he overslept.

  No such disasters greeted Duncan Pearson, a Highland laird with a passion for deer-stalking, who had also served in 21 SAS. He had been working in the City, but, feeling he needed a break, had resigned and decided to go round the world, making Africa his first stop. In the hope that he might wangle a free flight to Nairobi, he rang Richard Marriott, then commanding 21 SAS, and asked if he had any RAF contacts. Marriott, however, immediately spotted another ideal candidate for Jim Johnson’s private army and deflected him in that direction.

  So it was that on 19 October 1966, after vague preliminary briefings, Duncan flew to Jeddah, having told family and friends that he had landed a wonderful photographic assignment in Saudi Arabia. That, in fact, was where he had been led to believe he was going to work, but the picture came sharply into focus when, at a more specific briefing, Tony Boyle told him he was bound for the Khowlan, and that if his team leader told him to take charge of a Yemeni ambush party, he would do so without asking any questions. Five days later, having changed his escape money into gold, Duncan and two colleagues, Neil and Jimmy, flew down to Najran, taking twenty new German 7.62 automatic rifles and 4,000 rounds of ammunition as ‘personal baggage’.

  After a tedious wait at Sirwah, and now code-named ‘Gassim’, Duncan set off with a train of thirteen camels, trekking up into the Khowlan to revive Fluke, the radio station first established by Johnny Cooper, which had been closed down two months earlier. He found everything in good order, and settled in to what turned out to be a surprisingly peaceful existence. His stay perfectly illustrated how compartmentalised the war had become. Not far to the north-west battles were raging, as the Royalists put in attacks and the Egyptians retaliated; but at Fluke there was no military activity of any kind. The team’s main functions were to make daily radio contact with Bosom in Jeddah and to treat the sick and wounded, who came to them in droves. Once the daily sick parade was over, or visits to nearby villages had been made, recreational hiking, diary-writing and sunbathing were often the order of the day

  A true Scot, Duncan was soon referring to their home wadi as ‘the glen’, and lamenting the fact that they had ‘nae whisky or haggis or neaps’ with which to celebrate Robbie Burns’ Night. But his medical expertise increased rapidly. Breakfast one morning, he recorded:

  was disturbed by a young boy, with his mother and sister in tow, waving around his John Thomas which he had just cut in a fall down the jebel. Everyone including the patient was highly amused. Jimmy put a bandage round it, and with peals of laughter the boy walked off down the hill, showing it to all passers-by.

  Another patient easily dealt with was a small girl who asked for a pill because she was frightened of aeroplanes. A placebo sent her away happy; but congenital deformities and indescribable internal problems were more difficult:

  I met for the first time a case of the ‘evil eye’ – a poor little lad with both legs wasted away and a horrid sore all down the right haunch to the back of his knee. The Arabs are so primitive in some things, yet so civilised in many others. Any disease that is unexplainable to them they feel is min Allah – from God – and they get into their minds that they are doomed, and nothing will change this view. The poor lad will probably die, but we did what we could – and it is no use us trying to make them think otherwise: we are unbelievers, and lower than the low.

  Isolated though they were, high on a mountainside, the Fluke team were by no means cut off from
outside events, which they could follow by radio. On Boxing Day they heard that their fellow stations Onion and Mustang were involved in a major battle in the Hamdan area, where Prince Ali bin Ibrahim was apparently the only Royalist commander doing any fighting. On 28 December they learnt that at lunchtime the day before the British cave at Amara had been burnt by incendiary bullets and rockets from a MiG; luckily none of the inhabitants had been present, but the attack had wrecked all their stores, wireless set, beds and other kit.

  By 30 December the war seemed to have stopped for the time being, and at 0001 hours on 1 January 1967 the Fluke boys saw in the New Year with a glass of Gordon’s gin, while over the radio Big Ben managed only nine chimes (because they were three hours in front of GMT) and the staff of Aden Forces’ Network sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ rather weakly. As Duncan observed, ‘There can be few stranger places to see in the New Year.’

  The big event to which the team looked forward was the return of their Prince, Abdullah bin Hassan, to his command. He had been away for months, dallying in Beirut, and now, although he was back on the border of the Yemen, he never came any nearer. Rumour had it that he was becalmed in Najran with forty lorry-loads of arms and ammunition, but that he could not move the consignment any further because the sheikhs of the Jacham tribe were demanding exorbitant amounts of money to allow the convoy through their territory. ‘This situation is ridiculous,’ wrote Duncan in his journal: