The War that Never Was
Page 32
Rogan, Eugene, The Arabs: A History, Allen Lane, 2009
Schmidt, Dana Adams, Yemen: The Unknown War, Bodley Head, 1968
Smiley, David, with Peter Kemp, Arabian Assignment, Leo Cooper, 1975
Von Horn, Major General Carl C., Soldiering for Peace, Cassell, 1966
Walker, Jonathan, Aden Insurgency: The Savage War in South Arabia 1962–67, Spellmount, 2005
Notes
1 Clubmen Unite
1 Later in life, when sufficiently well primed, Jim would sometimes break into fluent Italian – or something that sounded like it.
2 Personal interview, Mick Facer, January 2010.
3 Personal interview, 25 March 2010.
4 In July 1956 Nasser seized control of the Suez Canal. In November a combined force of British, French and Israeli ships, aircraft and troops recaptured the canal, but financial pressure from the United States and threats from the Soviet Union compelled the allies to make a humiliating retreat, leaving the canal in Nasser’s hands.
5 Altareeq ila Tel Aviv Yamur abr Al Khaleej wa Al Riyadh – ‘The road to Tel Aviv lies via the Gulf and Al Riyadh’. Personal communication, Sultan Ghalibn al-Quaiti, May 2010.
6 Lord Home of the Hirsel (1903–95) disclaimed his peerage for life on 23 October 1963, when he succeeded Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister, and was thenceforth known as Sir Alec Douglas-Home.
7 Dana Adams Schmidt, Yemen: The Unknown War, p. 119.
8 Julian Amery (1919–96) was Secretary of State for Air 1960–2 and Minister of Aviation 1962–4. In 1950 he had married Harold Macmillan’s daughter, Catherine.
9 CAB 128/36.
10 Ibid.
11 It was claimed that in 1956 Horniblow had half-poisoned the entire SAS contingent by injecting them with the wrong combination of viruses when they were waiting to go to Suez – a charge that he does not altogether refute.
12 Duncan Sandys (1908–87), Minister of Aviation 1959–60, Secretary of State for the Colonies 1962–4.
13 Lieutenant Colonel Neil McLean (1918–86). During the Second World War he twice parachuted into Albania in attempts to bolster resistance to the Nazi occupiers, winning a DSO.
14 In Greenmantle Buchan wrote of Sandy: ‘He rode through Yemen, which no white man ever did before. The Arabs let him pass, for they thought him stark mad and argued that the hand of Allah was heavy enough on him without their efforts.’
15 Interview with Bernard Mills, 10 May 2009.
16 Many observers, including General Carl von Horn, head of the United Nations Mission to the Yemen, believed that some of the pilots were Russian. Scott Gibbons, The Conspirators, p.111. Intercepts obtained by the United States National Security Agency revealed that Soviet pilots were flying Tupolev TU-16 jet bombers to the Yemen from Cairo, where the aircraft’s markings were being overpainted at night with Egyptian insignia. Tom Bower, The Perfect English Spy, p.250.
17 Ibid., p.248.
18 Colonel Sir David Stirling (1915–90) created in 1942 the Long Range Desert Group, out of which developed the SAS. He was knighted only in 1990.
19 Personal conversation, August 2006.
20 Al-Shami had at one stage opposed the Imamate, and had been incarcerated in one of the notorious gaols at Hajjah; but he had been released on the orders of Crown Prince al-Badr, and in 1961 became his personal adviser, before being appointed head of the Yemeni delegation in London, and then Foreign Minister.
21 Ranulph Fiennes, Living Dangerously, p.79.
22 Cooper much resented this description, but it was accurate.
23 Stirling later sent Oldman another cable, in Cooper’s name, saying that his mother’s health had ‘further deteriorated’.
24 Johnston, whose rather aloof manner tended to conceal his high intelligence and sense of humour, was married to the Georgian princess Natasha Bagration, and as a hobby translated Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin into English verse. Tony Boyle got on well with him, but once undermined his own façade of respect when, as he left a meeting, he failed to close the door and was heard by those still in the room shouting down the hall to the Arab gatekeeper, ‘Ya, Abdul. God wants his chariot at the front door in ten minutes.’ In June 1963 Johnston was succeeded as Governor of Aden by the more aggressive Sir Kennedy Trevaskis.
25 Johnny Cooper, One of the Originals, p.157.
26 Described by Jim as ‘a fly-by-night character’, the Prince had been a wartime member of the Special Operations Executive, and had parachuted into the South of France on D-Day. A few months into the Yemen campaign, he disappeared with all his organisation’s funds.
27 Faulques had so many bullet holes in his body that he claimed they made him sink while swimming. He later opened an agency in Paris, recruiting mercenaries for the Yemen. The French supported Jim’s effort because they, too, wanted to deny Nasser access to the country, to prevent him threatening their enclave in Djibouti, on the African coast.
28 Much store was set on the handle or hilt of a jambiya, which proclaimed the status of its owner. Most were made of ordinary horn or wood, but the most highly prized were those carved from rhinoceros horn or studded with jewels.
29 Daily Telegraph, 4 February 1970.
2 Nasser’s Wiles
1 An account of this confession is among Billy McLean’s Yemen papers, stored in the Imperial War Museum (IWM) at Duxford, near Cambridge. Because the collection has not yet been catalogued or numbered, it had not been possible to identify the precise sources of quotations in this narrative.
2 In an undated memorandum McLean wrote: ‘Apart from a great deal of circumstantial evidence that Nasser in fact both prepared and organised the coup, the arrival in the Yemen by sea of the advanced elements of the Egyptian army with their heavy equipment on the day following the coup d’état provided further proof of this.’ IWM, Duxford.
3 Fairey Marine Atalanta yachts, designed by Uffa Fox, were first built in 1956, and remain in demand to this day.
4 The Javelin that he flew is preserved in the museum at Cosgrove in Shropshire.
5 Bennett had been King Hussein’s best man at his marriage to Antoinette Gardiner, who became Princess Muna. He was later knighted and promoted to Air Marshal as the head of the Sultan of Muscat’s Air Force.
6 This consisted of twenty-five feudal sheikhdoms and sultanates, Which had treaties of protection with the British. With a total population of about three-quarters of a million, they were known collectively as the Aden Protectorate, which stretched for 900 miles from Aden itself in the west to Muscat in the east, and bordered with the Yemen and Saudi Arabia to the north. In January 1963 the Federation and the Crown Colony of Aden formally became a Single unit.
7 McLean Papers, IWM, Duxford.
8 Ibid.
9 Personal communication, Bernard Mills, 24 June 2009.
10 Qat is the dark-green, narcotic leaf of a bush, containing caffeine and Cocaine. Among Yemeni tribesmen it takes the place of alcohol and Tobacco, and is reckoned less harmful than either.
11 McLean Papers, IWM, Duxford.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 The point of cutting off prisoners’ lips was to send them ‘smiling back to Nasser’.
16 McLean papers, IWM, Duxford.
17 Xan Fielding, One Man in His Time, pp.135–6.
18 McLean Papers, IWM, Duxford.
19 Ibrahim al-Khibsi had still been a student in Beirut at the time of the coup. Short and wiry, he spoke excellent English and had vowed not to shave or cut his hair till the last Egyptian had been killed or driven out of the Yemen.
20 McLean Papers, IWM, Duxford.
21 Ibid. The precise nature of the gas was never determined.
22 Yahya al-Hirsi’s powerful influence over the Imam was revealed by a report that the ruler had banked $22 million overseas in his secretary’s name, so that his enemies could not accuse him of misusing state funds.
23 Lecture to the Royal United Services Institution, 20 October 1965.
25 Ibid.
26 Feisal probably did not know that McLean had no authority to send the regular SAS into action.
27 The Conspirators, p. 38.
28 The garrison at Marib was housed in the old Turkish fort, and resupplied by two Dakota flights every morning. The aircraft took forty minutes to fly from Sana’a to a sand runway 2½ miles from the town, whereas a journey by the tracks took four days.
29 General Sir Peter de la Billière, Looking for Trouble, p.106.
30 In November 1962, trying to reinforce their garrison in Sirwah, the Egyptians had staged a disastrous paratrooper drop, in which Royalist marksmen had a field day, killing numerous parachutists, most of them in mid-air before they reached the ground.
31 Frankincense derives from the reddish-brown resin of a shrub-like tree, Boswellia sacra, and myrrh from the sap of another small tree, Commiphora myrrha.
32 McLean, who had met Hassan earlier, described his English as ‘a language in which he was almost totally incomprehensible’.
33 New York Herald Tribune, 5 August 1964. Sanche de Gramont, of aristocratic French descent, later changed his name to Ted Morgan and became a naturalised American.
34 Ibid.
35 The Conspirators, p.26.
36 From his service in Muscat, Johnny spoke some Arabic, but of a different kind from the hill dialect of the Yemeni locals.
37 ‘Wog’, short for Wily Oriental Gentleman, was a term commonly used to mean foreigners, principally those of Middle, Far Eastern or African origin; but it might be applied to almost any non-British person – hence the catch-phrase ‘Wogs begin at Calais’.
38 This account of the ambush is taken from Vol. 6, Issue 61, of The Elite magazine, 1986. The bodies lay in the open for more than two years, until some of them were recovered by the Red Cross.
39 One of the Originals, p.165.
40 The American Central Intelligence Agency also obtained an Egyptian order of battle, through their agent James Fees, whom they had infiltrated into Taiz, the Yemen’s second city, under the guise of a consular official.
3 Mountain Warriors
1 Yemen: The Unknown War, p 169.
2 One of the Originals, p.170. In his account Cooper disguised the identity of the Frenchmen by giving them different names – Peter for Philippe and Paul for Tony. Here their real names are restored. Tony de St Paul was killed in March 1965, the mercenaries’ first casualty. His remains were brought to Mohamed bin Hussein’s cave on 1 April by his comrade-in-arms, Amiral.
3 Obituary, Daily Telegraph, 29 June 2000.
4 Later General Sir Peter de la Billière (1934– ), Commander of British Forces in the Gulf War of 1990–1.
5 David Smiley (1916–2009). In April 1943, as a member of Special Operations Executive, he parachuted into northern Greece in company with Billy McLean, and walked into Albania, where his service with the Partisans won him an MC and bar; but when, after the war, he was seconded to MI6, his attempts to infiltrate agents into the country were frustrated by the treachery of Kim Philby, who passed details of his plans to the communists.
6 McLean described how in the evenings all the personnel at one Royalist camp chewed qat whenever it was available. ‘They then became zombies and moved around with one cheek bulging hugely, like cows chewing the cud, with glazed vacant eyes.’
7 David Smiley, Arabian Assignment, pp.129–30.
8 Ibid., p.130.
9 Carl C. von Horn, Soldiering for Peace, p.351.
10 Ibid., pp.344–5.
11 Ibid., p.353.
4 Beni Johnson
1 Franks soon dropped out of the organisation, because his daughter, who was working as a secretary for the Deputy Director of the Security Service, found his name constantly cropping up in intelligence reports.
2 Personal interview, 4 March 2010.
3 The Political Officers were Colonial Office advisers to the Sultans, amirs and sheikhs in the various states of the Federation. Later they were supported by young army officers seconded to MI6.
4 Arabian Assignment, p.171.
5 Stephen Dorril, MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations, p.684.
6 Rupert France’s regime served him well: he took great pride in his physical fitness, and continued swimming in the public pool at Ipswich well into his eighties. Friends remembered him as exceptionally punctilious, and he always took pride in refusing to discuss his Yemen days, in spite of much gentle teasing.
7 In 1966, after he had left the army, Symons twice went to Jeddah on the BFLF’s behalf.
8 Personal interview, 20 August 2009.
9 The term siasi derived from the SAS’s deployment against the Mau Mau in Kenya during the 1950s, the Swahili word denoting the movement of a snake through grass.
10 The Maria Theresa dollar, or thaler, has been in continuous use since it was first minted in 1741. Since 1780, the coin has always borne that date: 1780.
11 The gold content of the Beirut sovereigns was said to be superior to that of British coins.
12 The oasis famous in Arab legend as the capital of Queen Bilqis, the Queen of Sheba. In ancient times the land round Marib was extremely fertile, thanks to irrigation from the colossal dam built on the river Adhanat in the 9th century BC. The dam was destroyed, probably by an earthquake, in about AD 570.
13 Many Egyptians feared that the tribesmen were cannibals, and ate prisoners.
14 It was on this day that terrorists tried to murder Sir Kennedy Trevaskis, the recently arrived High Commissioner Aden. They struck at Aden airport when Trevaskis was about to fly out for a conference in London, dropping a hand-grenade among a group of officials on the tarmac. George Henderson, a Political Officer, seeing what was happening, thrust Trevaskis aside, thus saving him, but was fatally wounded himself, and was awarded a posthumous George Cross for his bravery.
15 The letter which included these instructions, but never reached Cooper, was one of the five intercepted and published in The Sunday Times. See pp.175–83.
16 The Conspirators, p.66.
17 Personal interview, 20 August 2009.
5 Digging In
1 Bob Denard 1929–2007. Already, at thirty-four, he had served in the French navy in the Far East and in the colonial police in North Africa, and served a fourteen-month prison sentence for his alleged participation in a plot to assassinate the French Prime Minister, Pierre Mendes-France. A vehement anti-communist, he was married seven times and eventually succumbed to Alzheimer’s. The French at Khanjar had been having trouble – their former Commander, the Prince Bourbon de Parme, had run off with some months of their operational money.
2 The French and Belgian mercenaries, recruited and oganised by Roger Faulques, always outnumbered the British, and frequently cooperated with them.
3 Arabian Assignment, p.189.
4 From November 1963 to May 1964 Jack Miller kept a wonderfully detailed diary, which he sent back to base in instalments. When typed, it ran to ninety-nine foolscap pages – some 50,000 words. The Yemenis saw him scribbling so often that some of them thought he was a writer, and an old woman once addressed him as ‘Ya Sáhafi’, ‘O Writer’.
5 CAB 130/189 Gen 776.
6 Later Jack Miller remarked: ‘HM will have to be informed that a sense of urgency is of use in wartime.’
7 Sunday Telegraph, 15 December 1963.
8 Jack was impressed by the doctor’s skill and willingness to go anywhere, and suggested to Jim that his pay should be increased from £250 to £300 a month.
9 In his report Johnny gave the date of the attack as the 30th; but his first, staccato radio message – ‘Attacked Jihannah. Seven hits out of ten. Many Egyptians killed. Panic. No counter-fire’ – reached Nuqub on the 27th.
10 FO 371 174627 (BM 1022/59).
6 Manna from Heaven
1 In January 1965 Feisal told McLean that there was a secret agreement between Golda Meir (then Israeli Foreign Minister, later Prime Minister) and Nasser, whe
reby Nasser agreed not to attack Israel, in exchange for money from America and secret help from Israel. McLean Papers, IWM, Duxford.
2 Weizmann became President of the State of Israel, 1993–2000.
3 Personal communication, May 2009.
4 Johnny himself reported that the Israelis had ‘muffled the engines’, but this was physically impossible.
5 Nearly fifty years later Arieh Oz still reckoned that ‘for daring, planning and execution, it was a masterpiece of a military operation’. Personal communication, 21 May 2010.
6 The Israelis gave Tony Boyle a backgammon set made of olive wood.
7 Shortage of Gold
1 John Harding, Roads to Nowhere, p.239.
2 Personal interview, 5 March 2010.
3 Ibid. Somebody else – probably John Woodhouse – had a similar idea, suggesting in a memorandum in the BFLF files that an SAS commando raid on the ships at Hodeidah could be carried out ‘without undue difficulty’.
4 DEFE 25/129.
5 Ibid.
6 Victoria Clark, Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes, p.95.
7 This included a request for 10,000 .303 rifles, three million rounds of ammunition, twenty light anti-aircraft guns, 500 anti-tank mines, 1,000 hand-grenades and 2.8 million Maria Theresa dollars (approximately £1 million) for pay.
8 Hansard, 14 May 1964, Vol. 695, cc. 604–5.
9 Ibid.
8 Breach of Security
1 One of the Originals, pp.179–80.
2 Hansard, 21 July 1964, Vol. 699, cc. 267–9.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 One of the Originals, p.179.
6 Clive Jones, Britain and the Yemen Civil War, p.105. DEFE 13/570 77705. Top Secret telegram No. 472.
7 DEFE 13/570 77705.
9 Business as Usual
1 Personal correspondence. Admoni frequently visited the Johnsons’ house in Chelsea, and became very fond of Judy – so much so that after her death he organised the planting of a grove of pine trees on the western hills of Jerusalem, in her memory.
2 McSweeney suffered a grievous loss when, on leave, he took out his back-pay in cash and stored it, for safety’s sake, in his mother’s oven. Failing to notice that the oven contained a package, she lit the gas, with disastrous results.