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

by James Philip

  No man knew this as keenly as Michael Carver.

  “Entreaties will be made to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; more than that I do not know. What I do know is that the assumption in England is that the Americans will stand on the sidelines.” His expression became apologetic. “Forgive me, Hasan, I have not inquired after your wife and daughter. Are they safe in Isfahan?”

  Al-Mamaleki nodded.

  “Yes, the garrison has restored order in the city and re-opened the roads to the south and the east. The Russians have as yet made no attempt to probe south of Tehran. As we anticipated they continue to use the line of the Alborz Mountains to cover their southern flank. I have received reports that the Air Force is attempting to harry the enemy’s supply lines,” he shrugged, “but the Soviets have MiG-21s and our handful of Yankee Super Sabres are greatly outmatched. And in any event we only have a handful of aircraft available at any one time, and to attack the Russian columns they must operate at the extreme limits of their endurance.”

  What remained of the Iranian High Command had begun demanding V-Bomber strikes – using conventional iron bombs – against the Soviet forces streaming through the mountains and investing Tabriz; but without fighter cover and at least the semblance of local air superiority nothing would persuade the RAF to risk its few remaining strategic assets just to ‘block a few roads in the hills’. Whatever Michael Carver privately thought of his RAF colleagues the last thing he wanted to do was to dissipate any of the ‘assets’ he possessed ahead of the coming crisis. Besides, like any sensible hangman he wanted his enemy to put his head in the noose before he kicked away the ground beneath his feet.

  “For the time being we do what we can,” he sympathised. “What of your 3rd Brigade?”

  Al-Mamaleki grinned roguishly.

  His pre-war ‘brigade’ of some eighty tanks and six thousand men had swelled into a widely dispersed force of approximately two hundred British-supplied Centurions and US Army cast off M-48s, supported by some thirteen thousand men. The tanks and men under his command now equated to a large armoured ‘division’ supported by elements of two mechanised infantry brigades. It had been the 3rd Brigade that had – granted with timely British support - hurled back the Iraqi thrust into the holy soil of Persia a few miles north of where they now stood; and increasingly, it was a magnet for every man in the Iranian Army who actually wanted to fight. Other units in the south were suffering a death by a thousand cuts, afflicted by desertion and plummeting morale. Al-Mamaleki had become a rallying point.

  “Give me the signal and I’ll drive all the way to Baghdad, my friend.”

  The Englishman smiled and shook his head. They both knew that it was exactly this sort of reckless bravura that Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian was counting on to hammer home his current tactical and strategic advantage.

  “But then we’d be at war with Iraq as well,” he observed. “Perhaps, if we could fight one war at a time, Hasan?”

  Al-Mamaleki vented a laugh straight from the pit of his belly.

  “True. The Russians will roll over them anyway!”

  “Quite so.” Michael Carver agreed, quietly hoping that the Iraqis would fight hard enough to blunt the Soviet spearheads rather than just surrendering en masse, gifting the invaders fleets of tanks and other vehicles to replace its own wastage. “I don’t think the Red Army will linger long in the north once it breaks out of the mountains. If I was in command of the Iraqi Army, Heaven forefend, I would draw the invaders into a battle of attrition for control of Sulaymaniyah. Sulaymaniyah is the key to the north; the place to bleed the Soviets dry.”

  “It will never happen!” The Iranian Brigadier grunted. “The Sunnis will leave the Kurds to their fate and the Shias of the south will watch and wait, and see what happens. That is the Iraqi way. Of course, if I drove towards Baghdad somebody in Iran would put a knife in my back for going to help the Sunnis.” This he said philosophically, half in mordant jest; but only half in jest. “For all its troubles Iran is a real country, the old Persian bonds bind us together even though we don’t all talk a common language and we’ve been ruled over by usurpers and pretenders for most of the last forty years. The blood of Cyrus the great, Darius and Xerxes runs through my veins, the history of a mighty empire is in my soul in the way the ghosts of Babylon ought to but never will run in the veins of those people across the Zagros Mountains!”

  One of al-Mamaleki’s great uncles had been Prime Minister of Iran over fifty years ago, his brother, one of the Shah’s ministers had gone missing in the capital at the start of the invasion; assassinated or simply consumed in the nuclear strike which had obliterated seven-tenths of Tehran. He was of the ruling class and everything he did, and every attitude he held reflected as much.

  Michael Carver understood that if the day came when his friend’s tanks stood astride the Basra to Baghdad road then nothing short of a new bloodbath was going to remove them. If their grand strategy came to fruition they would be re-drawing the map of the Middle East for a generation or more. Whether their political masters understood this was a moot point; in any event, it was hard to think of any likely consequence being remotely as bad as leaving Red Army tanks in command of the northern shores of the Persian Gulf threatening the whole of Arabia.

  They could talk about ‘Cannae’, double envelopment and a crushing victory for ever and a day but nothing could actually obscure the reality of their situation. They were outnumbered ten to one and al-Mamaleki’s ‘brigade’ supported by the Commonwealth garrison of Abadan was presently the only significant ‘allied’ force between Suez and Hong Kong. The huge war stores depots in Saudi Arabia were in the wrong place and it did not matter how many infantrymen could be flown into the Middle East from the British Isles, the Mediterranean and Australasia, without another armoured force at least as large as Mirza Hasan Mostofi al-Mamaleki’s command there could be no modern day Cannae anywhere, let alone somewhere on the flood plains of the Tigris and the Euphrates between Basra and Baghdad.

  “I think you’re wrong, Hasan,” Michael Carver offered cautiously. “Some of the Iraqi Army units will fight. Maybe not in the north but around Baghdad, possibly, and certainly before Najaf and Nasiriyah; moreover, above Basra in the marshlands the Soviet’s lines of advance will hit any number of pinch points. Even local insurgencies will take their toll.”

  “Ah, ever the strategist, Michael!”

  The older man smiled.

  “For my sins. But,” he sighed, “you and I both know that the ground is the ground. Mesopotamia was the death of a British army not so many decades ago; it may well be again for another invader. The mere mention of places like Kut and Amarah and Basra still make old soldiers blanch. What has been will be again. If I had honestly believed I wouldn’t have been laughed out of court, I might have had the courage to suggest to my masters that,” he shrugged, “a solid case could be made for letting the Russians have Iraq and letting them stew in their own juices. Give it five or ten years and they’ll choke on Iraq; just like everybody else has from time immemorial!”

  His Iranian friend gave him a quizzical look.

  “If that happened the whole region would be on fire in the end.”

  “Perhaps,” Michael Carver conceded. It was academic, anyway. There was nothing he could do to stop the Red Army swallowing the poisoned fruit of Iraq whole, except, for the time being, initiating the process of erosion. “But everything will be different, even if we win, Hasan.”

  The other man guffawed and patted his shoulder.

  “Different is a lot better than defeat, my friend.”

  Chapter 22

  Wednesday 22nd April 1964

  Christ Church College, Oxford, England

  The Right Honourable Airey Middleton Sheffield Neave, the Member of Parliament for Abingdon and the recently appointed Secretary of State for National Security in the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom, invariably paused for thought when he came across his former protégé,
Margaret Thatcher in her full war paint; especially, on those days when it was readily apparent that the lady had got out of bed that morning with a bee in her bonnet. He knew his friend the Prime Minister must still be in discomfort – sometimes excruciating pain in fact – from the back injury she had suffered at Brize Norton but nobody who did not know her well would have noticed anything amiss. She was quite simply, magnificent. Today she was positively glowing and the light of battle glistened in her steely blue eyes.

  “Why Airey, this is a pleasant surprise!”

  It was said with a brisk, businesslike curtness that a stranger would have interpreted as dismissive. However, Airey Neave knew the Angry Widow too well to make that mistake.

  They were alone in the Cabinet Room where Margaret Thatcher was rifling through a red dispatch box, eager not to waste a single moment before her day became totally subsumed by the twice delayed celebration for the deliverance of the Battle of Malta.

  Airey Neave approached and was invited to pull up a chair.

  “I thought you’d like to know that the boys back in Cheltenham are beginning to ‘read’ Jericho,” he announced very, very quietly. “They’re still working on selected older intercepts, obviously,” he went on, smugly, “but we’re also reading stuff that’s less than thirty-six hours old now.”

  Margaret Thatcher had looked up in the middle of a document.

  She nodded, returned briefly to the page in her hands.

  Presently, she smoothed the sheet on the table before her and gave her friend her full and undivided attention. GCHQ – the Government Communications Headquarters – at Cheltenham would have been ‘into’ Jericho even sooner but for two unfortunate happenstances. Firstly, MI5 had locked up four key directors of that organisation – including the legendary Chief Cryptanalyst Hugh Alexander – because they had had the temerity to attempt to communicate to her that GCHQ was, due to mismanagement, lack of prioritisation and resources, in a dangerously parlous state. And secondly, because the aircraft carrying the priceless cache of cipher books and manuals seized by HMS Alliance’s boarding party from the captured Turkish destroyer Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak, had been shot down by an Irish Republican Army terrorist using an XM41 Redeye Block I shoulder launched surface-to-air missile as it attempted to land at RAF Cheltenham on Monday 6th April.

  Until the weekend before that atrocity and the heinous outrage at Brize Norton, when the aircraft bringing the Allied Supreme Commander Mediterranean (Designate), General Keith ‘Johnny’ Johnson and his staff to Europe, had also been shot down by a Redeye missile smuggled to the IRA from a supposedly ‘secure US Army facility in Virginia’, and very nearly killed herself and the Queen, Margaret Thatcher had in hindsight been almost completely in the dark about the United Kingdom’s proud history of code breaking. She had known nothing about the ‘secret’ lineage of GCHQ, or remotely comprehended the magnitude of the unspeakably bad things that happened to a country in the modern world, if it lowered or neglected its cryptographic guard for a single second.

  Jericho was the only thing that gave her hope for the future.

  It had been the existence of Jericho – not her incandescent rage that the IRA had been permitted to perpetrate two such atrocities on English soil and very nearly kill the Queen – which had moved her to sack the Director General of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, and to create Airey Neave’s Ministry of National Security. It was very simple, Hollis had put several of the kingdom’s finest code breakers in prison so as to sidestep embarrassing questions about the shortcomings of the security services; therefore, he had had to go.

  Jericho had almost been lost because of the failings of MI5; and even after the precious cargo of cryptographic gold dust had been recovered, because of MI5’s actions there had been a wholly unnecessary delay in ‘getting into it’.

  Sir Roger Hollis was lucky he was only under house arrest.

  It had been Airey Neave and Tom Harding-Grayson who had accompanied the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, to her rooms at King’s College on the night before the abominations at Brize Norton and Cheltenham to acquaint her with the ‘affair of the Cheltenham four’ - who had been incarcerated at Her Majesty’s Prison Gloucester by MI5 - and the true story of Great Britain’s glorious past age of cryptographic pre-eminence. Even now two-and-a-half weeks later every time she thought about that evening her mind turned somersaults of astonishment and bewilderment at the secret history that incredibly, nobody had thought to tell her about until that moment.

  Nobody, that was, apart from four GCHQ departmental heads whose warning letter had been intercepted by MI5! Airey Neave had handed her the letter with the words ‘you will have a lot of questions you need to ask after you have read this, Margaret’.

  That had proved to be something of an understatement much along the lines of ‘the cataclysm of the October War was a little bit unfortunate’.

  ‘Why on earth have I never heard about Bill Welchman and Alan Turing?’ She had demanded. Thereafter, the story had emerged at a rush. To her surprise Airey Neave – whom she had always known had never really detached himself from his wartime, 1939-45, Special Operations Executive and MI6 ‘friends’ – had deferred to the Foreign Secretary, whom she had never realised had had any kind of past history with the intelligence services.

  Tom Harding-Grayson had started talking about the people who had broken the German codes and practically won the war!

  ‘Sit down, Margaret,’ he had suggested. ‘This will all come as a bit of a shock to you and yes, we ought to have had this little chat before now but well, so much has been going on and the sort of secrets we’re about to discuss are not really the sort of thing any of us ever thought we’d ever divulge to anybody.’

  Airey Neave had chuckled at this point.

  ‘Not without somebody holding a gun at our heads,’ he remarked.

  Completely flummoxed and somewhat vexed she had scowled at the two men.

  ‘Well, if it would help I’ll call in my AWPs so that they can hold guns to both your heads!”

  Neither of her visitors had been entirely convinced that she was joking; and neither man doubted that if she asked her Royal Marine bodyguards – who took immense pride in styling themselves the Angry Widow’s Praetorians - to put guns to their heads that they would hesitate for a single moment.

  Tom Harding-Grayson had tried to paint a picture.

  ‘There were four wicked uncles,’ he had explained. ‘Bill Welchman and Alan Turing, and Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry; together they formed what one might call the brains trust that broke Enigma.’

  ‘Enigma?’ She had asked impatiently, not in any kind of mood to be subjected to a pointless history lesson about a war long won.

  ‘Enigma,’ the Foreign Secretary had echoed. ‘The Germans used a electro-mechanical cipher machine called Enigma which was so fiendishly proficient at encoding their communications that they, the Germans, never once during the war considered the possibility that anybody could break it. You see, a message enciphered using an Enigma machine could be converted into a plain text in which every character of every message could be encoded in billions of different ways. To cut a long story short the four Wicked Uncles first broke the Wehrmacht Enigma, then they broke the even more fiendishly complicated Kriegsmarine U-boat Enigma, and then they helped the Americans to break the Japanese equivalent to Enigma, the supposedly unbreakable JN-25 code. In so doing, the Wicked Uncles practically invented two entirely new sciences; the science of Traffic Analysis and the science of Electrical Computing. Alan Turing was also interest in a thing call AI, that’s Artificial Intelligence to simpletons like you. But that’s a whole story in itself.’

  First Airey Neave had spoken of ‘Bill Welchman’. William Gordon ‘Bill’ Welchman had been thirty-three in 1939. He was a Marlborough schooled Trinity College mathematician who had been Dean of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Alan Mathison Turing was twenty-seven at the start of Hitler’s war, an old boy of Sherbourne College who had at the tende
r age of twenty-two been elected a fellow of King’s College Cambridge for his proof of something called the ‘Central Limit Theorem’. Thirty-two year old Stuart Milner-Barry had become a city stockbroker after winning Firsts in Classics and Moral Sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge. As long ago as 1923 he had won the first British Boys’ Chess Championship and from 1932 onwards he had represented England at chess. The fourth Wicked Uncle was Irish-born Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander, aged thirty in 1939, who like his friend Stuart Milner-Barry was a former Trinity College man and an international class chess player. Before the war he had taught mathematics at Winchester College. Earlier that year that idiot Hollis and his blundering underlings had arrested Hugh Alexander – one of the men who won the Second World War – for having had the courage to attempt to inform her that all was not well at GCHQ!

  ‘Bill Welchman ran Hut Six,’ Tom Harding-Grayson had explained. ‘Hut Six was in the business of attacking the German Army’s Enigma and Traffic Analysis.’

  The Prime Minister had looked blank.

  ‘Traffic Analysis is what you do with the plain language part of every transmission,’ Airey Neave had offered, trying and failing to be helpful.

  Tom Harding-Grayson had given him a look which asked: ‘Who is telling this story? You or me?’

  Having settled this issue the Foreign Secretary had ploughed on regardless.

  ‘The only plain language parts of any given Enigma message – or of practically any intercept – are the FROM and the TO components, although to a casual observer these also will seem like apparently meaningless codes. However, once Bill Welchman and his people had worked out, for example that WA58Z was the Third Panzer Grenadier Regiment of the Second Panzer Division, and simple signal triangulation exercise established that it was mostly broadcasting from the vicinity of say, Amiens, Bill’s people owned WA58Z forever. For example, by the time of the Dunkirk fiasco at the end of May 1940 Hut Six had deduced the complete – and I do mean complete – German order of battle in the West. So, before we had actually broken a single Enigma message, Bill Welchman was able to pick up the phone and tell the powers that be not to worry about carrying on fighting the Battle of France because we had already lost it. Fortunately, that was just in the nick of time for the Navy to start pulling what was left of the British Expeditionary Force off the beaches of Dunkirk. Consequently, Winston Churchill did not get thrown out of Downing Street in early June 1940 and, eventually, we won the war.’