by Roger Cole
The A-side was called ‘The Price of Pussy Has Gone Up’ – a harsh reality check from a prostitute telling her client that the inflation in his pants was matched by the inflation in the cost of living. Hence the completely justifiable increase in her prices. The B-side was called ‘I Wan’ Me Dollar Back’ – a sad refrain from a young man who did not feel that he had got his money’s worth.
That’s not to say there wasn’t real romance to be had in The Grapes. That New Year’s Eve was a life-changing moment for Roger Cole. Through the clouds of cigarette smoke, he spotted a leggy brunette, Pauline. It was love at first sight. A highly trained man on a mission, he moved skilfully across the pub, manoeuvring his way past tables laden with ashtrays and beer glasses. An upset table would have meant endless apologies and buying new drinks, and by then she could be gone. A silken twist of the hips here, a body swerve there, and he was across the room. Even before he had spoken to her, he knew she was the one for him.
Very early on in their courtship, Roger discovered that Pauline was a keen football fan, who as a young girl had sneaked in under the fence to watch Hereford United. So on their third date Roger took Pauline to the football, along with some of his mates from B Squadron. Together, they all went down to the Edgar Street ground. At half time, she went off to fetch him a drink of Bovril and a steak and kidney pie. One of them looked at him, quizzically, just to confirm what he had just seen. One eyebrow raised, he asked, ‘Has she actually gone to get you a Bovril and a pie?’
Roger nodded with a smile. ‘Yeah, she has.’
His other mate asked him the most important question any SAS soldier would ever ask at this stage of a romance, ‘Can she cook as well?’
‘I think so.’
‘Well, you’d better marry her then, hadn’t you?’
Six months later, on 4 July, they walked down the aisle together and are still each other’s best friend.
For Roger it’s simple. ‘She’s the best woman I have ever known.’
When he says it, she just smiles.
2
A Little War in the Middle East
In the spring of 1970, the SAS men started to get their first briefings. The location for Johnny Watts’ ‘little war in the Middle East’ was Dhofar, a province in the south of Oman, itself just a tiny pimple of a country at the bottom of the Arabian Peninsula. One of its fishing ports, Sohar, is a short-odds contender to be the birthplace of the legendary fictional character Sinbad the Sailor. For Christians, it is a country with great significance, being the world’s main source of frankincense, one of the three gifts from the wise men at the birth of Christ.
Oman was surrounded by two very powerful countries, both of which had traditionally been enemies. To the north was Saudi Arabia, the world’s richest oil exporter, and to the west was the freshly named People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, a fledgling state that had only recently come under Marxist control.
The Dhofar rebellion kicked off in the early 1960s. Dhofar was a province in the south and west of Oman, amounting to about half the country. Oman was vital to everyone on the planet as it controls access to the Straits of Hormuz, through which over half the world’s oil is shipped.
Historically, there had always been a low-level grumbling of the tectonic plates of political power here, a tradition of tribes feuding with their neighbours over the only three things that mattered in life: land, water and cattle. There were no formal boundaries so the tribes on the mountainous regions known as the djebel, periodically stole each other’s animals.
Cows, sheep and goats are nomadic by nature and will go wherever they think there is food and water – which meant that there were always grounds for disputes. This was a world built on centuries of mistrust and mutual hatred, reinforced by old-fashioned mafia-style vendettas an everyday story of life throughout the Middle East.
Transcending these violent squabbles there was a much bigger political divide, between the Sultan in the capital and the Imam, who traditionally controlled the djebel.
Sitting with their hands on the levers of power were the British, in a position they had maintained for more than two centuries. As was often the case, it started with a colonial spat with the French.
Napoleon seized Egypt for the French in 1798, sending a shock wave through the English establishment. The British Empire was built on trade and the really big money was in India. The international shipping lanes, the global arteries of international commerce that pumped millions of pounds every day into the British economy, had to be protected at any cost. Nelson quickly thrashed the French Navy in the Battle of the Nile, but there was great anxiety in London. Order had to be restored.
Then, as now, Oman was crucial to the stability of the Middle East – not because of its size but because of its strategic location. Long before oil became important, Oman was geographically crucial. From here, the Royal Navy controlled access to Persia, India and East Africa, all major imperial markets.
The British signed a defence treaty with the Sultan in 1798, the basic principles of which still underpin the relationship between London and Muscat, the capital of Oman. The deal epitomises ‘soft power’, which is still the guiding principle of the countries’ relationship today. Essentially, Oman has always remained an independent country with the Sultan as the undisputed ruler of his kingdom, though working closely with key British advisors. The British provided external security, based their fleet in Oman and if there was a serious challenge to the Sultan’s authority, then the British would use their military expertise, come in and smash the rebels.
Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Oman became rich on the slave trade in and out of East Africa but, once this ended, the country went into sharp decline. As poverty began to really bite, tensions grew between the Sultan and the tribes of the interior. Periodically, the British had to intervene to keep the two sides apart and enforce a fragile stability. Eventually, the British got both sides to sign a peace treaty in 1920, a classic power-sharing fudge. The Sultan ran the country, while the Imam ran the interior. This just about held up until 1954 when a new Imam, Ghalib bin Ali, came to power. Terrified of this challenge to his authority, the Sultan closed the borders to the outside world and turned Oman into a hermetically sealed pressure cooker. All eyes turned inward as increasing poverty, disease and decline simmered ever hotter, with no valve to release the tension. The Sultan became increasingly remote and, as he did so, the Imam became ever more popular.
None of this would have mattered that much. A few tribes killing each other over local fishing rights or sheep-rustling was never going to ruffle anyone in London. But then one little word changed everything: oil. During the second half of the 1960s there was a huge increase in global demand for oil. Oman did not have large reserves of oil, like Saudi Arabia or Iraq, but square mile by square mile, it suddenly became one of the most important pieces of desert anywhere in the world. At the time, well over three-quarters of the world’s oil went through the Straits of Hormuz, within a few miles of the Oman coast and right past the country’s capital, Muscat.
And it wasn’t only that. Once more oil was discovered all over the Middle East, then the national borders between Oman, Saudi Arabia and Yemen became very important overnight. What had previously been inhospitable land suddenly held great value for what might be beneath the surface. Saudi Arabia backed the Imam against the Sultan and then declared the interior of Oman to be an independent state. The Sultan’s Armed Forces, with substantial British help, broke the resistance and drove the invaders back to Saudi Arabia, but they returned two years later, occupying the Djebel Akhdar, a vast range of mountains north of Muscat. The Djebel Akhdar was the highest spot anywhere in the eastern Arabian Peninsula and generally believed to be impregnable.
What happened next was extraordinary, even by SAS standards. Soldiers from A and D squadron climbed the 8,000-foot rock face at night, carrying their weapons and enough water to sustain themselves once they got to the top. They wiped out t
he rebel force in one of the greatest military operations of recent times, but the leaders fled back to Saudi Arabia to work out a new plan.
The prize they wanted was Oman.
There was now a new world order in the Arabian Peninsula and seizing Oman suddenly looked achievable. In 1967, the British were kicked out of Yemen, after a squalid war in Radfan and Aden. In Radfan, some British Army officers practised what was seen by some as ethnic cleansing. This provoked a near rebellion from the ranks, who threatened to revolt when the local peasants were routinely bombed and had their wells poisoned.
Backed by Russia, China and Egypt, Yemen was now a neighbouring powerhouse. Flush with victory and fired up by a rampant branch of Arab Marxism, it was now a local firecracker with ambitions far beyond its borders.
The Oman revolt started with many small organisations – the Dhofar Charitable Association, the Dhofar Liberation Front, the Dhofar Benevolent Society, the Dhofar Soldiers Association – all representing pockets of dissatisfaction. Providing some of the glue was the Arab Nationalist Movement, sponsored by President Nasser of Egypt. They all agreed on the same target: the British imperialists, whom they all blamed for propping up a wicked puppet ruler, Sultan bin Taimur.
The various groups all came together in the First Congress in 1965. Their complaints were clear and easy for anyone to see. The Dhofaris suffered from desperate poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and disease – and had done so for far too long. The Marxists drove the uprising and their predictable communist rhetoric was already there from the start. The revolution would be lead by ‘the poor classes’, listed as farmers, workers, soldiers and revolutionary intellectuals, who together ‘will destroy the imperialist presence in all its forms, military, economic and political’. The language sounded compelling, but it had no more reality than the mirages that glimmered in the desert. This was a pre-feudal society and none of these social groups actually existed at the time. Oman was a time capsule, sealed at the time of Christ. There were few workers, soldiers or revolutionary intellectuals, just a country of the desperately poor, humbled by extreme deprivation, disease, malnutrition and one of the highest rates of infant mortality anywhere in the world.
The fault lines in the Oman revolution were there, right from the start. The tribes just wanted liberation from the Sultan’s oppressive and hateful regime. The Communists, who were fanning the flames, had another agenda. They wanted revolution, which would spread across the Arabian Peninsula and then throughout the Middle East.
The Arab–Israeli War in 1967 turned up the heat. In Moscow, they could already smell the wind of change blowing through the Middle East. After being defeated by the Israelis, the Egyptians pulled back from supporting the Oman revolution. Then, in September 1967 the Dhofari opposition held a Second Congress and the leftists seized control. The groups came together under one organisation, The Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf, the PFLOAG. Money and weapons poured in from Russia, Iraq and China and the Communists opened up a transmission belt taking the smartest of the young revolutionary leaders from their base in Yemen to Russia and Beijing for training.
Overnight, it all suddenly started to look like Vietnam – another country with a nationalist uprising, supported by a communist country next door. Once again you could see the domino theory in action. In South-East Asia, Laos fell to the Communists, with Vietnam looking likely to topple next. In the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen had already fallen to the Communists, so Oman looked like the next domino to take a tumble. For the Russians and the Chinese, Vietnam and Oman were two huge battlegrounds in their proxy war against the Americans and the British.
The Sultan played his hand very badly. As the rebels became ever more popular, he turned up the screw of oppression, even tighter than before. He cut off food supplies to the interior of the country, stopping all traffic going inland from the coast. He removed Dhofaris from the army, one of the few ways of earning a living, and then made it very difficult for anyone to move round the country, leaving people to starve in their own homes. The Communists could not have written a better script. While they attacked him in their propaganda as a feudal tyrant, his behaviour became ever worse.
The Communists started a mass indoctrination programme, setting up schools in Yemen where the curriculum was Marx, Lenin, Mao Tse Tung and Che Guevara. Soon they had enrolled nearly 1,000 young students in school, a huge number in a small country with a low literacy rate. The Communists were smart. They brought in doctors, who started to work alongside the local population, and in the most revolutionary move of all, they preached equality for women.
The Communists were very focused and their indoctrination programme was brutal. The Front recruited child soldiers, starving them until they renounced Allah and then gave them food. Once their bellies were full, their heads were then filled with Marxist zeal and their hands with guns, ammunition and explosives.
The SAS arrived in Oman in 1970 and immediately stepped up the war against the rebels. Previously, the Sultan’s forces had gone up on to the djebel and engaged with the rebels for a couple of days before retreating back to base. Now the SAS raised the stakes. They recruited widely from amongst the local population, raising and training militia, called firqats.
The American motto from Vietnam was: ‘Grab them by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.’ The SAS variation was much more subtle: ‘Grab them by their hearts and their minds will follow.’ It worked.
The SAS men quickly became very popular. They set up a medical surgery and ran weekly clinics, fixing teeth and delivering babies. The intelligence take was great. Small boys and old men took them to the rebels’ arms dumps.
The key difference between the SAS approach and that of the Russian-backed rebels was religion. After their indoctrination trips to Moscow and Beijing, the young rebel commanders tried to eradicate religion from everyday life – an impossible task as Oman had adopted Islam within fifty years of the Prophet’s death, its people becoming strong adherents to their own school of Muslim teaching. Omanis were Ibadis, a gentle form of Islam. The key tenets were love and loyalty towards fellow believers and a cautious distance towards non-believers, but the overriding principle was live and let live. The Omanis were not hostile to non-believers, but this did not apply to those who opposed them by force. As the guardians of both religion and the state, the Imams wielded huge collective power in this war, an invisible hand that the Communists foolishly ignored.
The locals quickly warmed to the SAS who not only respected their beliefs, but then went further. When they were out on patrol with the firqat, the SAS always stopped for prayers and gave them a full armed guard while they prayed. Knowing that there were heavily armed SAS men, usually four, with their guns pointing outwards while they were at one with their god made all the difference. The firqat reciprocated. At Christmas, they offered to provide an armed guard for the SAS men in the BATT (British Army Training Team) house at Mirbat. Knowing that the Front liked to attack on anniversaries, the SAS declined, but had their small party and rest the day after.
This mutual respect was shared by the local Imams, who became suitably flexible in their interpretation of the Quran. The big theological question was whether the firqat could break their fast during Ramadan. The Imams decided that the rebels were an atheist army, even though many were close relatives of the firqat – and that provided the theological wiggle room they needed. The Qadhi, the senior judge in the Sharia Court, was very obliging. He ruled that as they were at war and fighting for their country, a good Muslim could therefore break his fast during Ramadan. He concluded that fasting weakens the body and fighting was a duty so, ‘let our Muslim fighter break his fast and let him fight in the name of God and if he dies he will be a martyr’.
Warming to his theme, he added, ‘If he lives, he can make up his fast from the other days of the year and he lives in peace, and we ask God to assist the Muslims in upholding the Holy Word.’
Communications were never good in
Dhofar and many firqat still insisted on fasting during Ramadan, but the sentiment of mutual support towards the SAS was what really mattered. It gave a theological foundation to everything the British soldiers did as part of their daily contracts for living with the locals.
3
From the North-East to the Middle East
Over the weeks, the SAS soldiers were given a very clear picture of the massive task ahead of them in Dhofar. The SAS relishes being the underdog, fighting against what look like insurmountable odds, but there was crazy and then there was this war. Initially, there were just nineteen SAS soldiers deployed on Operation Storm. They were to fight a much bigger army, which was well trained and better equipped, a rebel force of many thousands stretched out across an area bigger than Scotland, Holland or Belgium.
Even before Operation STORM, the SAS were already sniffing round the fringes of this war.
In September 1970, B Squadron SAS was deployed to Northern Oman to give extra training to the Sultan’s Army, specifically the Northern Frontier Regiment’s reconnaissance (‘recce’) platoons. Two of the soldiers who would end up playing key roles in the Battle of Mirbat, Roger Cole and Pete Warne, were up at a place called Bid Bid, under the shadow of the Djebel Akhdar. As this was a secret operation, they had no rank as such and dined in the Officers’ Mess every night. Their cover was blown by one of the SAS soldiers when he tried to put butter on the wafer-thin toast that was served with the soup. The bread smashed into crumbs all over the table. There were raised eyebrows from the officers, public school boys who had all been brought up properly. As the SAS left the Officers’ Mess that night, one of the men said, ‘Our cover’s blown. I think we’ve been rumbled!’
Even while they were training the Northern Frontier Regiment, there was already a second TOP SECRET SAS operation under way, so clandestine that to this day few SAS soldiers know about it, not even those who were in the regiment at the time.