A Line in the Sand: The Gulf War of 1964 - Part 1 (Timeline 10/27/62)

by James Philip

  “The Prime Minister has instructed me to form a Ministry of National Security,” he explained briskly for a thing like this was always best done quickly.

  Edward Heath had toyed with the idea of bringing the entire ‘Intelligence Community’ under a single umbrella last year but one or other of the competing Director Generals had talked him out of it every time the matter rose anywhere near to the top of the agenda. However, the fiasco of the march to near war with the Americans in November and early December last year, the whole ghastly Red Dawn imbroglio, the knowledge that but for the suicidal heroics of the Royal Navy Malta would have fallen to a Soviet invasion, the shooting down of two jetliners by IRA terrorists over England which had very nearly resulted in the assassination of both the Prime Minister and the Queen, and finally, the news that the Red Army had over run northern Iran and was now threatening to sweep all the way south to the Persian Gulf, without so much as a forewarning whimper from the code breakers in Cheltenham, or a vaguest suggestion of a problem from MI6 or MI5 had been the final straw!

  Sir Roger Hollis, the MI5 man under whose watch the atrocities at Brize Norton and Cheltenham had occurred had been sacked, as had the Director of the Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham, along with his deputy and the head of security at that place. Hollis and his ‘collaborators’ - the Prime Minister’s own word - had had several of GCHQ’s most senior code breakers locked up in Gloucester Prison at the time Malta was under attack, two Soviet tank armies had been parked on the northern borders of Iran and three IRA assassins had been running loose in the land. They and Hollis ‘had had to go’ and Margaret Thatcher had not just ‘sacked’ them but had them placed them under house arrest at Government House outside Cheltenham in case they were of a mood to ‘make trouble’ among their ‘old friends’.

  It was now Airey Neave’s job to persuade GCHQ, the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) to work ‘nicely’ together for the good of the country. This was easier said than done; these institutions was by its nature terribly concerned with the ‘good of the country’; traditionally each had sheltered elements significantly more exercised by their own status and influence than any lightweight, ephemeral populist concept of a common understanding of patriotism.

  “Bringing all the organs of the Intelligence Community under one umbrella is not a thing that can be done overnight,” the former escapee from Oflag - an abbreviation of Offizierslager; ‘Officers Camp’ - IV-C, or as the man in the street would know it ‘Colditz’ Castle explained, allowing himself a rueful smile. “However, I believe we have made a damned good start. After consultation with the Prime Minister I have appointed Sir Dick White as the first Director General of the National Security Service, of which GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 have now become the primary subordinate branches. Dick White has got his best people interrogating the Soviet military personnel taken prisoner on Malta, and, of course, the three IRA men in our custody. A raft of other initiatives are under the most urgent consideration, others have been implemented or are being implemented at this time. I regret that it would be inappropriate to discuss these in detail even in this august forum and I make no apology for this.”

  The Soviet-Turkish code books and cipher equipment captured when the Turkish destroyer Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak had surrendered to HMS Alliance in the aftermath of the Battle of Malta, feared lost when the Comet airliner carrying them back to England was shot down while coming in the land at RAF Cheltenham a week ago, had been discovered late on Saturday afternoon. The code books were intact, the cipher equipment mangled beyond repair. No matter, the cryptologists at Cheltenham had pulled out all the stops and been working non-stop on ‘breaking’ previously ‘unbreakable’ intercept material for the last forty hours.

  This endeavour, being conducted under the codename ‘Jericho’ was so secret that only nine people in Oxford even knew that there was a classified project called Jericho.

  That morning a messenger from GCHQ had reported that the ‘experts are already into routine housekeeping traffic’ and that ‘the coding books in our hands are live for at least the next fifty-three days’, with the caveat, ‘unless, of course, the Soviets change their encryption protocols before then.’ Unfortunately this latter possibility was ‘very likely’, since no code book was routinely employed until the end of its originally scheduled ‘life span’.

  Airey Neave did not care about that. If the Soviets changed their codes, so be it, there was nothing he or anybody else could do about that. The important thing was that GCHQ was reading the Soviet High Command’s chit-chat NOW...

  It went without saying that he was not about to broadcast this to all and sundry; in this room the ‘Jericho approved list’ only included himself, the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, Willie Whitelaw and the three Chiefs of Staff. At this time there were just fourteen names on the ‘list’ outside the environs of GCHQ. Fortuitously, the provisions made to guard Enigma in the Second World War provided an excellent historical model on which to base the Draconian security arrangements put in place around the cryptographic gold mine that HMS Alliance had delivered to their cause.

  Several of the men and women who had broken that German Enigma code over twenty years ago were now at the coal face unravelling ‘FOOL’S GOLD’.

  Fool’s Gold was the coverall security ‘box’ within which Jericho lived. Or rather, the largest of the many boxes in which Jericho lived because most of the people at Cheltenham busily beavering away night and day to ‘get into’ Jericho had absolutely no idea what they were actually working on.

  The best security systems always worked that way.

  “I have already received representations on behalf of Sir Roger Hollis and others,” he went on, not troubling to hide precisely how unimpressed he was by such ‘representations’. “None of which I am prepared to entertain. The message needs to get out to fellow Honourable Members of Parliament that we are in the middle of a war and that I don’t give a fig what bloody school or club a fellow once went to or belonged to!”

  “Here! Here!” Margaret Thatcher said irritably. She met the eye of the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Richard Hull. “CDS,” she smiled, tight-lipped, using the title never formally adopted by the Army Chief’s predecessor, Sir David Luce. He had preferred simply to be acknowledged as ‘First Sea Lord’. “CDS, would you brief colleagues on the latest news from the Mediterranean and the Middle East please?”

  “Recovery and policing operations continue on Malta, Prime Minister.” Sir Richard flicked a thoughtful glance towards the Foreign Secretary, who indicated for him to continue. “Air operations in the theatre have been disrupted by what appears to be a unilateral declaration of a ‘no fly zone’ over much of what was pre-war, French sovereign territory. The declaration was issued by a body calling itself the Provisional Peoples’ Republic of the French. That said, there also appears to be Provisional Government of South France, which is also making similar declarations. This latter body is responsible for a declaration warning that any ‘ships of war’ entering a two hundred miles ‘exclusion zone’ from the French Mediterranean coast will be liable to attack. Frankly, we don’t know how seriously to take this but as colleagues will know we began routing all flights to and from Portugal and Malta so as to avoid contentious air space in the days before the Battle of Malta, thus adding over an hour to transit times. The French naval base at Toulon was pretty hard hit during the war so apart from a small squadron based in Corsica, which may or may not owe allegiance to one or both of the ‘Provisional Governments’ on the mainland we have only the most sketchy of feels for the naval, or for that matter, the aerial capabilities of those regimes.”

  Tom Harding-Grayson waved for him to go on.

  “I’ll pick up on this later, Sir Richard,” he grimaced.

  The soldier nodded.

  “As I say, recovery and policing operations continue across the Maltese Archipelago. After aircraft from the USS Independence attacked two presumed enemy
submarine contacts, one sixty nautical miles east and the other, seventy miles south of the Archipelago on Thursday last week the Central Mediterranean ‘threat board’ has been blank. Despite adverse political developments in Philadelphia, the US Sixth Fleet remains, effectively, at the operational disposal of the C-in-C Malta, Air Vice-Marshal French. That said, thus far none of the promised transport aircraft from the USA have materialised. Given that the US Air Force has not filed flight plans or requested clearances in this connection we are proceeding on the assumption that the onus to reinforce our garrisons in the Middle East will fall upon us. In any event, forces deployed during the Cyprus Operation have been warned for transfer to depots we hope to be permitted to set up in Southern Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman and Saudi Arabia. My staff is in conversation with the Saudi Arabian authorities about exploring the possibility of utilising war and other stores positioned in that country by the US Armed Forces prior to their withdrawal last year. I apologise it this sounds a tad woolly but I know Cabinet does not want to get bogged down in detail at this stage. I have sent a personal representative to the theatre to assess the situation on the ground and to report back to me at the earliest time.”

  Margaret Thatcher raised an eyebrow.

  “Major General Carver,” the Chief of the Defence Staff reported. “A damned fine officer, Prime Minister.”

  “He was in command of the 3rd Division in Germany at the time of the recent war,” Willie Whitelaw added. “He was out in Cyprus planning the move of his Division to that island when the, er, balloon went up.”

  The Prime Minister nodded for Sir Richard Hull to carry on.

  “It happens,” he announced, presaging a surprise morsel of news that was not uniformly grim, “that as a result of the minor rapprochement with the regime of the late Shah in the last few months – at least at a staff level – that we have men, and therefore potent intelligence ‘eyes and ears’ on the ground in Iran.”

  “Really,” Margaret Thatcher said in surprise.

  “Yes, Prime Minister. Our fellows were specifically instructed to keep away from Tehran so as to avoid inflaming sensibilities. Most of our people are in the south, in liaison and training roles with the Iranian Army. Their presence was what enabled us to co-ordinate the operations of the Abadan garrison with local Iranian armoured formations to repel the illegal incursion of the Iraqi 2nd Armoured Division.”

  “Yes,” the Prime Minister breathed unhappily. She had only been informed afterwards that a large force of Iraqi tanks had manoeuvred so as to threaten Khorramshahr and the northern refineries of the Abadan Island complex. She had stiffly informed the CDS that in future she wanted to be informed before rather than after British forces engaged in offensive operations against the forces of a country that was, nominally, still an ally. “But you are saying that we have other forces in Iran?”

  “Yes. A mixed detachment of SAS and SBS men under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Waters; its mission was schooling Imperial Iranian Army counterparts in north-western Iran. They were using the city of Rezaiyeh as their base.”

  Margaret Thatcher looked to her Foreign Secretary for help.

  “Old sweats from the days when our fathers campaigned in Mesopotamia,” Tom Harding-Grayson smiled whimsically, “would have call Rezaiyeh by its pre-Pahlavi Dynasty name of Urmia. It is situated close to the conjunction of the borders of the south eastern corner of the Anatolian littoral of Turkey and the north-east of Kurdish Iran. That places it pretty much right in the middle of where in olden days the ‘Great Game’ was played out between ourselves, the French and the Russians.” He looked to Sir Richard Hull. “Presumably, our boys were keeping an eye on things while they were playing soldiers with the locals?”

  The Chief of the Defence Staff laughed grimly.

  “Our boys,” he guffawed, “are always keeping an eye on things wherever they are, Tom!”

  “Quite so,” the other man concurred.

  The Chief of the Defence Staff sighed.

  “Colonel Waters has made contact with Abadan and reported the city of Rezaiyeh as being in the hands of Soviet airborne troops. His scouts also report columns of tanks and mechanised infantry on the road between Qoshachay, which is also known as Miandoab, to Mahabad, which would be entirely consistent with other intelligence to hand, that the Soviets plan to decamp onto the ground around the headwaters of the great rivers of Mesopotamia in north eastern Iraq via the passes through the Zagros Mountains in the vicinity of Piranshahr and Sardasht. Enemy combatants who have fallen into Colonel Waters’s hands talk about ‘driving on’ to Erbil and Mosul. We don’t know if the northern oilfields are the objective just of the first phase of the invasion, or just some ruse to draw the Iraqi Army and anybody stupid enough to follow suit, to the north of Baghdad.”

  “Why would it be bad to fight the invaders north of Baghdad, General?” Margaret Thatcher inquired.

  Sir Richard Hull sucked his teeth for a moment.

  “Fellows on my staff served in that part of the World during the Second War and just afterwards, Prime Minister. If anything goes wrong there is nowhere to anchor a secure defensive line between Kirkuk in the north and Basra in the South.”

  The Foreign Secretary coughed.

  “Iraq is not a cohesive entity in the sense that we in Europe would understand a nation state, Margaret,” he observed. “There are the Kurds in the north, the Sunnis in the middle surrounding Shia Baghdad, and the Shias in the south. Each religious and ethnic group detests and mistrusts all the others and these divisions run through the Iraqi Army like the cracks in a broken pane of glass, ready to shatter without warning. If the Soviets wanted to hold the north it would be hard, but not impossible to winkle them out, assuming we weren’t bothered about the blood and treasure we’d expend in outrageously copious quantities in the process. If the Soviets drive south they must reach the Persian Gulf, or sooner or later they will be embroiled in, and probably destroyed by the internecine civil war they will have unwittingly brokered by destroying the illusion of Iraqi statehood.”

  “That’s assuming the Iranians don’t get their act together first,” the Chief of the Defence Staff added. “The Soviets are sitting pretty at the moment because all the best Iranian armour is deployed in the south threatening Basra and surrounding Abadan.”

  Tom Harding-Grayson shook his head.

  “On the wrong side of the Shat-al-Arab,” he bemoaned.

  “And probably not under the command of somebody who actually knows how to use it!” Sir Richard Hull complained.

  Margaret Thatcher wearied of this digression.

  “Will the Red Army drive to the south like your man says, Airey?” She demanded, turning to her old friend.

  “Ah, my man,” her friend sighed.

  Airey Neave honestly and truly did not know what to make of the man who claimed to be, and seemed to be the former deputy of the former Rumanian leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Nicolae Ceaușescu. If the man was who he claimed to be he was a potential intelligence gold mine.

  “He’s adamant,” her Minister for National Security assured her. “But then he admits he didn’t know about the attack on Malta until the ship he was onboard started bombarding Valletta!” He paused, glanced to the Foreign Secretary. “Tom’s offered to have a chat with Ceaușescu this afternoon, Margaret,” he went on. “The fellow is due to be flying into Brize Norton about now. As you know, I’ve got my doubts about the fellow despite what Dick White’s lady friend says. I’ll feel a lot happier when Tom’s given this Ceaușescu and Miss Piotrowska his seal of approval.”

  Margaret Thatcher moved onto the next item on her agenda.

  “What’s actually going on in Philadelphia, Tom?”

  “Contrary to what we were given to understand on Friday,” he began, running a hand through his thinning hair, “Congress did not vote to immediately suspend all overseas military assistance and co-operation. That vote will actually happen later today. Regrettably, it looks like the motion will pass
both Houses of Representatives. A lot of ‘representatives’ seem to think the whole thing in Iran is just a ‘limey plot’ to draw them into ‘another foreign war’. Likewise, there is no foreseeable prospect of the Senate ratifying the US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement. This is important because it was the legal basis of the Kennedy Administration’s policy, vis-à-vis military, economic and diplomatic co-operation with us; and in less than a week’s time the period of grace of ninety days after the signing and formal exchange of initialled copies of the treaty, expires. After that date no American officer or official can operate under its terms without committing a criminally indictable offence within the jurisdiction of the United States Government.”

  President Kennedy had flown to England last week not to forestall this disaster but to dress it up as something it was not, and to publicly distance himself and his Administration from the latest colonial adventurism of perfidious Albion. Although the exercise had been frustrated by a new catastrophe, there had been indications that the Kennedy Administration had been back-sliding on the commitments made in January for several weeks. The Battle of Malta and the timely intervention of the US Sixth Fleet had created an impenetrable smokescreen of mutually congratulatory rhetoric which had shrouded the real picture for a few more days. It was now clear that the Administration, in league with the House of Representatives was opportunistically using the UAUK’s retaliatory and essentially defensive sanctions against the Irish Republic as a convenient excuse to ditch the US-UK Mutual Defense Treaty, and thus appease the deafening clamour of the America First movement. It now seemed as if this had probably been the Kennedy Administration’s plan from the outset; if there had been no atrocities at Brize Norton or Cheltenham the President would have had to have manufactured another provocation to justify storming out of the ‘Anglo-American Summit’. In the event the IRA had made it easy for him; he had hunkered down overnight and flown home the morning after he arrived in Britain. There had been no window for a meeting of minds; Margaret Thatcher had not been released from hospital until two hours after the President’s aircraft had taken off bound for Philadelphia. By the time SAM 26000 touched down in New York the UAUK’s ‘Irish Sanctions’ were already headline news on the East Coast.