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

by James Philip

  “That was because their surrogates keep trying to murder the Queen, Bill,” Lord Franks reminded his guest. His tone was briefly that of a man who really did not believe that he was actually having to tell the US Secretary of State any of this. “In any event Mrs Thatcher will come to America. Unless you shoot down her aircraft, that is.”

  Fulbright sighed.

  “Your Prime Minister told the Russians that there would be ‘consequences’ if they failed to prove – God knows how they are going to do that – that they aren’t about to go nuclear again in Iran or Iraq?”

  Lord Franks did not respond to this because he did not think he had been asked a serious question. It seemed to him that the Secretary of State had simply restated Margaret Thatcher’s statement to the House of Commons of the previous day. He remained silent.

  “What consequences?” Fulbright pressed.

  “Oh, consequences,” the Ambassador murmured. “Well, I think at the last count we had thirty or forty operational V-Bombers left. In the event of the use of nuclear weapons against our forces or our allies in the Middle East I should imagine we would drop every bomb we could lay our hands on,” he went on resignedly, “on the, er, rump of what is left of the Soviet Union.”

  Chapter 35

  Sunday 24th May 1964

  Corpus Christi College, Oxford

  The Prime Minister and her Secretaries of State for Defence, Foreign Affairs and Supply and Transportation had walked over from Christ Church Cathedral where they had attended the morning service. Field Marshall Sir Richard Hull, the Chief of the Defence Staff had been driven straight to the meeting on the first floor of Corpus Christie College from Brize Norton, having flown back from Abadan in the small hours.

  Upon the arrival of the Prime Minister the earlier attendees fell silent and rose to their feet. Margaret Thatcher acknowledged her Minister for National Security, the Director General of Security and the woman at his side with a terse nod.

  “Let’s get down to business,” she demanded, settling at the head of the table which dominated the modestly proportioned former lecture room. To her front some twenty feet away a curtain had been drawn across the blackboard. Four days ago she had come within a dozen votes of being ousted from the premiership; had that happened the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom might have fallen, and an election of some kind would have had to have been called. Not for the first time in the last few weeks she suspected she understood something of what must have gone through Winston Churchill’s mind in the darkest days of the Second World War; after Dunkirk, the fall of Singapore or Tobruk, or the news of yet another Atlantic convoy decimated by U-boats. However, like her he too had been reading the innermost conversations of the enemy High Command, he too had known of his enemy’s weaknesses, that he was not alone in confronting seemingly impossible dilemmas and that all was not yet lost. Like her he had known that to speak of such things publicly, specifically in his own defence was impossible, and that some things were so secret that they could never, ever be confessed.

  Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister several months before her people had trusted her with Churchill’s secrets; and only then had she learned the unwritten, real history of Winston Churchill’s eventually triumphant crusade against the Nazis. Thus, on Wednesday afternoon she had been forced to sit and take her medicine, compelled to be the object of the House of Commons’ anger and mistrust, contempt and in some cases, undiluted scorn, totally unable to state in her own defence the one thing that would have instantly silenced nine-tenths of her detractors.

  Jericho was still in play.

  While the Red Navy had changed its codes at the end of April the Red Army, Air Force and the Political Bureau of the Soviet Ministry of Defence, which was now known to operate out of a bunker complex several miles east of Chelyabinsk, were still using the ‘J416 Variant 03’ code which had come into use as long ago as 16th January. This and the fact that an increasingly large number – literally scores – of formations in Iraq and Iran were routinely transmitting, and expecting to receive in return only plain text communications, meant that on some days the code breakers at the Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham were sometimes reading messages before, or at around the same time as Soviet commanders in the field.

  The only real problem with Jericho was that there was so much of it. The code breakers were overwhelmed by the sheer volume, unable to prioritise what was gold dust and what was housekeeping as literally thousands of encrypted intercepts piled up waiting to be ‘looked at’. GCHQ at Cheltenham had been drowned in paperwork, neglected and run down after the October War, and it had been in no condition to suddenly up its game. Maddeningly, even though they were criminally short-staffed and incapable of managing the deluge of intercepts – thus far GCHQ had decoded significantly less than one percent of the traffic intercepted by listening stations in the Middle East and the Mediterranean – the code breakers were serving up a daily stream of critical intelligence jewels.

  Notwithstanding the difficulties, on the basis of traffic analysis alone Cheltenham had built up a comprehensive table of organisation for, established the dispositions of, and calculated the approximate fighting strength of Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s Army Group South. Each day as Red Army spearheads penetrated deeper into Iraq the picture was updated, often down to the level of how many serviceable T-62 main battle tanks a given unit had and whether it had sufficient fuel in hand to continue motoring the next day.

  The leading echelons of the 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army and the 3rd Caucasus Tank Army had left half their tanks and sixty percent of their supporting vehicles in the mountains of Iran or parked, broken down alongside the roads west, east and south of Sulaymaniyah. The Red Army’s logistics system had broken down to such an extent that the entire Soviet invasion had briefly stalled with the 10th Guards Tank Division sitting, completely isolated and cut off from the rest of the invasion force, in the ruins of Jalawla a hundred miles north-north-east of Baghdad, and 3rd Siberian Mechanised Division investing the city of Kirkuk. Given that there were known to be Iraqi forces present in brigade, possibly divisional strength on the right flank of the chaotic Soviet line of advance around Erbil, Army Group South’s position ought to have been if not untenable, then precarious. That the Red Army could get away with, as the Chief of the Defence Staff guffawed ‘such a dog’s breakfast of an advance’ in spite of its ‘comical logistical situation’ was solely down to the ‘disgraceful’ inability of the Iraqi Army to ‘get its act together’.

  Margaret Thatcher looked around the table at today’s membership of the War Cabinet. The regular members of the War Cabinet present were: Secretary of State for Defence, William ‘Willie’ Whitelaw, Field Marshall Sir Richard Hull, speaking for the Chiefs of Staff of the three armed services, and Airey Neave, the man her enemies now called her ‘Security Supremo’, or more unkindly Beria to her Iron Lady. Customarily, Iain Macleod, Minister of Information, Leader of the House of Commons and the Chairman of what was left of the Conservative and Unionist Party would have been present but he was currently hospitalised. He had been struck down by a mystery fever, collapsing in his office the previous evening. The Foreign Secretary, who tended to report to the War Cabinet on an ‘at need’ basis, had flown to Saudi Arabia yesterday. Today the Prime Minister had requested the attendance of Alison Munro, an increasingly familiar contributor to the War Cabinet’s deliberations in her key position at Supply and Transportation, from where she was efficiently masterminding the ongoing ‘build up’ in the Middle East.

  Airey Neave was flanked by the Director General of the Security Services, Sir Richard ‘Dick’ White and his protégé Rachel Piotrowska, who had just got back from Philadelphia. The woman was due to fly out to America again with the Prime Minister on Tuesday to take up the post of Head of Station of the Security Services in the United States. Margaret Thatcher had raised an eyebrow when Airey Neave had briefed her on this appointment but othe
rwise let the appointment go unremarked.

  Margaret Thatcher’s gaze hesitated on Rachel Piotrowska’s face.

  The other woman was the same age as her; more obviously attractive despite being careless, a little languid in her manner and irritatingly elegant in whatever she wore. Tom Harding-Grayson had only given the Prime Minister the edited highlights of the other woman’s extraordinary life and career; Rachel had survived the Lodz ghetto as a child, Ravensbrück concentration camp as a teenager, and worked for British Intelligence practically all her adult life. Then there had been that bizarre, incredible Kalashnikov-wielding rampage through the Citadel of Mdina in which she had single-handedly taken on practically the whole Red Army! The Prime Minister could not forget, nor would she ever forgive – even though she knew her resentment was irrational and unworthy – the fact that it had been in Rachel Piotrowska’s arms that the man she had loved, Julian Christopher had died.

  The Prime Minister’s stare shifted onto Airey Neave’s ruddy face.

  “Presumably, since Miss Piotrowska is being redeployed to Philadelphia we may infer that Comrade Ceaușescu’s debriefing has been concluded, Airey?”

  Her friend nodded.

  “Yes. Most satisfactorily, Prime Minister. There are always loose ends to be tied up at a later date but Ceaușescu has filled in a lot of what we had only previously surmised in very general terms, and provided a wealth of other high-level intelligence. Previous damage assessment analyses of the USSR have been thoroughly reviewed and amended as a result. Ceaușescu was less helpful as to the true extent and capabilities of the ‘rump’ surviving Soviet Union, but again,” the Secretary of State for National Security shrugged, “he has provided us with any number of revealing insights. Our working assumption that perhaps two-thirds of the USSR was effectively destroyed or badly damaged was broadly correct; where we were completely wrong was in assuming that there would be very few ‘joined up’ or large contiguous areas of territory completely untouched, other than by fallout. In retrospect, we and the Americans hugely underestimated the extent to which Soviet industry beyond the Ural Mountains remains intact.”

  The Prime Minister considered this for a moment. Before the October War Soviet industry had become so centralised that a dozen, or perhaps a score of nuclear strikes taking out the cities which produced most of the tanks, ballistic missiles, jet aircraft, railway locomotives and so forth would have crippled the Russians’ ability to wage offensive war every bit as effectively as laying waste the vast areas that had actually been destroyed. Sometimes, she wondered if the people who had been in charge before the war had had any idea what they were doing? All that destruction, all those lives wasted...

  “What do we do with Ceaușescu now?” She asked, unable to wash the anger from her voice.

  “We’ll squirrel him away,” Airey Neave reported. “We’ll dust him off from time to time; if nothing else he’ll be damnably useful as a spotter.”

  “A spotter?”

  Rachel Piotrowska cleared her throat.

  “Nicolae was heavily involved with the Romanian Securitate, in fact he virtually owned the Secret Police in Bucharest. He is a walking ‘reference book’ that we can turn to whenever we want to identify a suspected Soviet or Eastern Bloc agent or former senior Eastern Block Communist official, Prime Minister.”

  Margaret Thatcher was struck by the lilting, very Polish accent the other woman now affected. It was as if she was searching for the person she had once been before her life became a lie. According to Airey Neave she had been a courtesan and an assassin, once briefly been the favourite mistress of the dead Shah of Iran. The Prime Minister took herself to task, realising she was losing focus again.

  “There was a woman with him?”

  “Yes, Eleni. A Greek-Cypriot woman,” Rachel confirmed. “She is very attached to him. I feel sorry for her. She and Nicolae are being held in Scotland with several other ‘defectors’ and ‘persons of interest’ whose survival we wish to keep secret for as long as possible.”

  “Thank you,” Margaret Thatcher said. “That will be all, Miss Piotrowska.”

  The men in the room half-stood as Rachel departed.

  Everybody settled anew and the curtain was withdrawn from the blackboard revealing a composite map of the Persian Gulf and the surrounding countries assembled from several different sheets.

  The Chief of the Defence Staff rose to his feet.

  Sir Richard Hull’s demeanour was that of an old soldier, calm and measured, and uncomfortably aware that everything he was about to say was hedged around with so many qualifications that if he tried to explain one-tenth of them they would still be here tomorrow afternoon before he got half-way through.

  “Frankly, if we go looking for the holes in this scheme of ours,” he smiled wryly, “we will worry ourselves to death and die asking ourselves why we didn’t at least try to do something in the first place!”

  “Quite so, Sir Richard,” Margaret Thatcher observed tartly.

  “However, I will,” the Chief of the Defence Staff reminded her, “reiterate the point that regardless of whether the Egyptians fulfil their part of the bargain, we shall be in a fine old fix if the Saudis don’t open up the war stores depots on their territory. If they wait and see much longer then they are going to end up facing the Red Army across their indefensible northern land borders on their own.”

  “I’m sure the Foreign Secretary will be communicating that to Crown Prince Faisal in Riyadh, Sir Richard.” Margaret Thatcher could hardly credit that the Saudi Arabian government was still haggling over the terms of its only possible salvation. The way the Saudis were behaving it was as if they honestly believed that the Red Army would stop at the Kuwaiti border! Ever since the USS Kitty Hawk had arrived in the Arabian Sea the Crown Prince had been trying to play off the two old trans-Atlantic allies against each other!

  “Provisional plans,” Willie Whitelaw, the Defence Minister sighed, “are being made to land Egyptian forces directly on Kuwaiti territory. The port facilities at Damman are better, obviously, but if the Saudis are going to make difficulties, well,” he opened his hands, “we shall just have to get on with it.”

  The Saudi government - a conglomeration of feuding members of the nobility who had more in common with medieval satraps in a Byzantine court than any kind of modern twentieth century administration – was schizophrenic about the presence of foreign troops on its soil. For some reason the presence of the USS Kitty Hawk and her escorts in the Arabian Sea had convinced a substantial faction within the ruling elite that the United States – against all the evidence - had not actually abandoned the Kingdom. At one level this naively wishful thinking ignored the fact that presently, the US did not actually need Saudi oil; and on another level, flew in the face of the equally persuasive consideration that if it lost Abadan, the United Kingdom did need that oil. Who did the Saudis think was more likely to fight to stop the oil tap being turned off?

  Tom Harding-Grayson advised that the Saudis be allowed to play out their internal contradictions. The first priority was the use of air bases, port facilities and transit areas in and around the Damman-Dhahran area; and the question of the American war stores depots should not be permitted to muddy the waters. Other than the thousands of free fall bombs – of every imaginable non-nuclear type and size – stored in the war stores depots, little else in those great ‘weapon dumps’ in the desert was actually usable by the British or the ANZAC – Australian and New Zealand – forces currently being built up in the region. The US military used different calibre naval shells, tank rounds and small arms bullets, and the one hundred and fifty tanks – mainly M-48 Pattons – ‘parked’ in Jeddah and outside Riyadh had been partially disabled by the US Army prior to its pull out the previous autumn. Likewise, many of the artillery pieces and armoured personnel carriers required ‘reactivation’ before they could be deployed. It seemed that American planners had assumed a sixty to ninety day ‘de-mothballing’ window ahead of any future emergency, and
de-commissioned equipment accordingly.

  Tom Harding-Grayson was probably right in asserting that the Saudis still had not worked out that the reason the Americans had left mostly old, obsolete, disabled equipment and thousands of tons of World War II-type ordnance – bombs and shells – in Arabia was that they never intended coming back. Or rather, if they ever came back it would be with modern, state of the art weaponry.

  “Well,” Margaret Thatcher sighed, “I’m sure that Tom will eventually persuade the Saudis that this is their fight, too. In the meantime we should focus on the positives. In this connection I spoke again to both the Australian and New Zealand High Commissioners yesterday evening. No words of praise are sufficient to express my personal gratitude for the sacrifices they are making to help us.”

  Everybody around the table was astonished that their Australasian Commonwealth friends had dug so deep so quickly. Within days of the first tentative inquiry the Australian Navy had started strengthening HMAS Sydney’s flight and hangar decks to carry forty-one ton Centurion tanks, begun mobilizing reserve units and marching small airborne and special forces formations onto transport aircraft bound for the Middle East. New Zealand had raised two rifle battalions, and hurriedly found enough men to crew and fight the old cruiser Royalist – for many years relegated to the role of a training ship – and dispatched them to the Indian Ocean. When the Australian government was asked if it was prepared to release HMS Centaur, the aircraft carrier that Julian Christopher had left at Sydney to ensure that the Australian Navy always had at least one aircraft carrier available for operations, the Australian government had taken less than twenty-four hours to confer and agree to the Admiralty’s plea.

  At the last count there were thirty-nine Australian Centurion tanks and nearly six thousand ANZAC fighting men ashore at Damman in the Persian Gulf. In addition to the Australian Navy destroyers Anzac, Tobruk and Voyager, some twenty Westland Wessex helicopters were to be operated from the deck of HMAS Sydney as soon as she had finished unloading her cargo of Centurions.