by Roger Cole
Under the codename INTRADON, a small group of SAS soldiers, fighting alongside Gurkhas, landed on the peninsula beaches after being inserted by sailors from the Royal Marine Special Boat Service, the SBS. Other SAS soldiers parachuted into Musandam, a province in the north of Oman. Musandam was a historical anomaly. It was not connected by land to Oman but was a protectorate, separated by the United Arab Emirates. For the most part, it was rocky and inhospitable. Measured by the square foot, it was – and still is – one of the world’s most important pieces of strategic real estate, a long thin finger of land poking out into the narrowest part of the Straits of Hormuz, directly opposite Iran.
Back in 1970, it was one of the strongholds for the rebels trying to depose the Sultan.
The SAS men were dropped in by HALO (high altitude, low opening), a regimental speciality. The soldiers jumped from the back of a C-130 Hercules at 11,000 feet, each carrying around 100 pounds of gear, including their weapons, ammunition and supplies.
The HALO technique is an amazing piece of military skill. Jumping from over 30,000 feet, soldiers can fly for up to seventy miles before finally opening their parachute at low altitude. As a means of inserting Special Forces into well-protected areas it’s brilliant, and, not surprisingly, has featured in three James Bond films.
INTRADON was an SAS operation in the great tradition, a story with everything. Good and reliable military intelligence is always hard to find and, not surprisingly, the men initially landed in the wrong village but, ever resourceful, they soon started operations. In no time, they were involved in a full-on, small-scale guerrilla war, moving their weapons on donkeys. They were soon engaging with the enemy at least half a dozen times a day. It quickly became apparent who was behind the rebellion, as the dead bodies they scooped up all wore Russian and Chinese uniforms. Within a few months, the SAS had crushed the rebellion but not before Paul ‘Rip’ Reddy, an SAS Trooper from G Squadron, fresh out of the Coldstream Guards, was killed when his parachute failed to open. He died after crashing into the side of a hill. He was just twenty-four years old. A local Arab found his back-up parachute and brought it in. It was unopened. As this was already a clandestine war, what little reporting there was described it as ‘an accident’.
Rip Reddy was carrying a light machine-gun and a substantial amount of bullets, a heavy weight. One of the problems with HALO jumps at this time was that the loads the soldiers were carrying could shift as they flew through the air, making it difficult to open their parachute. Pulling the rip cord was always done at the last minute when they were just 2,000 feet from the ground. If it got trapped, then there were only seconds to fix it.
The date was 22 December 1970 and Paul ‘Rip’ Reddy was the first SAS soldier to die in the war to save Oman from the Communists. By this time, Operation STORM was under way and the regiment was engaged in a much more substantial war going on in the south of Oman, in Dhofar.
The location was different, but the enemy was the same. A loose coalition of forces, united in their hatred of the government.
Collectively, the British and the Sultan’s forces they were fighting alongside referred to them as the Adoo, the Arabic word meaning ‘enemy’. The opposition, a fizzy cocktail of Nationalists, Internationalists, Communists and the generally disaffected, changed constantly throughout the war. Collectively, they were known as the Front, though their exact title changed, depending on what mix of insurgents was fighting against the government at what time. The length of their title grew as the war developed and was a rough barometer of their success. In the early stages of the war it was just three words: the DLF, the Dhofar Liberation Front. Then the various organisations merged and it became the PFLOAG, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf. By 1974, when the rebels were in retreat, their title shrunk to reflect their limited hopes and they became the PFLO, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman.
At the start of the war, in the late 1960s, the government forces supporting the Sultan consisted of some ragtag regiments, commanded by British officers. The great mass of soldiers were mercenaries from Baluchistan, a dry and unforgiving mountainous region between Pakistan and Iran. Over the centuries, successive Sultans had recruited mercenaries from Baluchistan and the trade in young men was one of their main export businesses, along with lapis lazuli and other semi-precious stones.
The reality was that this was a civil war, with two groups of the population fighting for control of their country. The British backed the government. The Russians and the Chinese were on the side of the rebels.
When the SAS was first officially deployed, the insurgents controlled almost all the region, nearly 40,000 square miles, with the slogan ‘Dhofar for the Dhofaris’. This was the localised variation of the standard rallying call of nationalist movements everywhere, a pithy slogan with instant appeal in every country in the world. Many of the Front’s young officers were professionally trained in revolutionary warfare by the Russians and the Chinese. At the time, they were the best guerrilla army in the world, highly expert in everything they did. They were also the most effective group of insurgents that this generation of SAS soldiers would face.
In 1970 and well into 1971, the Front were winning the war. What was more, they knew it and so did the Omani government.
No one in Oman was in any doubt about the Chinese commitment to the war. In September 1971, they announced that this war was second only in importance to Vietnam.
Alongside the first nineteen SAS men were three soldiers from the Intelligence Corps. Though Oman had been a long-term ally of the British for the best part of two centuries, neither the SAS headquarters in Hereford nor the Intelligence Corps at Ashford had much in the way of useful intelligence on the rebels. They had some good quality topographical maps, courtesy of the Royal Engineers, but the place names did not match the ones used by the locals.
All counter-insurgency wars are intelligence-led, and if either side doesn’t know the place names of the country where they are fighting, then they’ll lose.
There was another, much more intractable problem.
The local Dhofari accent was so thick that even the best Arabic speakers in the British Army struggled to understand a word they said. As Mr Spock would have remarked, ‘They speak Arabic, Captain, but not as we know it,’ an observation requiring a full eyebrow raise at the very least. One of the Intelligence Corps experts was much pithier, complaining, ‘It’s worse than trying to understand drunken Geordies on a Saturday night out in Newcastle.’ For the first few months, the intelligence team wandered round the town talking to everyone, tuning their ears to the local tongue, trying to pick up Dhofari and the regional vocabulary.
The rebels were very well armed. In every area they had better equipment than the SAS. Their Chinese weapons were new and effective, especially their 82mm mortars, which easily outranged the British equivalent used by the SAS and the Omani government forces. It was a cunning piece of design, first made by the Russians and then copied by the Chinese. The British mortar was 81mm, meaning that the Chinese model would fire any British rounds that the rebels could steal or acquire, but the reverse was not true. As well as mortars, they had Russian Katyusha rockets (known as Stalin Organs because of the terrifying sound they make), and Carl Gustav 84mm recoilless anti-tank weapons, designed to be operated by two men, one who loads and one who fires. These had most likely come from British stocks in Aden. The rebels also had heavy-duty 12.7mm Russian Shpagin machine-guns, medium and light machine-guns, thousands of Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles and what seemed like an endless conveyor belt of landmines, both Chinese and Russian, as well as other improvised explosives.
The Chinese landmines, described as ‘absolute bastards’ by one senior British officer, were designed to maim, rather than kill. They generally just removed the foot or the leg up to the knee. The insurgents knew that when a man went down, the British-led Omani forces would do everything they could to rescue that soldier. A successful mine took three men ou
t of the contact and then provided relatively easy targets for their Kalashnikovs.
The SAS responded with their own cocktail of improvised explosives, using different combinations of mortars. At night-time, if they wanted to put on a big show, it was a Knickerbocker Casablanca, three mortar rounds in quick succession. The first was a power luminen, a round that would come down by parachute and light the area. This was followed by white phosphorus, which would flush the rebels out of their sangars (small stone-built fortifications) and the wadis (the dry valley bottoms that criss-cross Dhofar). White phosphorus burns instantly and can ignite virtually anything that is combustible, clothing, leather and human skin. As soon as they were hit, they would run round desperately trying to extinguish the flames. This was followed by a high explosive round, which would then kill everyone visible in the area. A Mixed Fruit Pudding was a high explosive sandwich with white phosphorus in the middle. The first round of high explosive would kill some of the enemy. The second round of white phosphorus would burn the skin of the survivors, who would then start running round trying to stop the chemical eating away into their flesh. This made them a very easy visual target for the third round, which was another high explosive round.
The rebels also used Russian PMN mines, which were small and round, as well as POMZ stake-mounted anti-personnel mines. They hid them in all the obvious places – cave entrances, old sangars, as well as patrol routes next to fences. There were tracks across the desert but these too were heavily mined and so it became a war of rock-hoppers. Soldiers on both sides often behaved like children at the seaside, leaping from boulder to boulder whenever possible. Both sides avoided walking along any route that had been used before. The Omani government forces all knew the regular hiding places, but even after months of conflict it was easy for soldiers to forget when they were tired and dehydrated. The mines continued to take their toll right until the end of the war – and beyond.
The rebels also deployed Russian-made TM-46 anti-tank mines, which they buried on those sandy roads and tracks that they knew were used frequently by vehicles from the Sultan’s Armed Forces. These were big powerful mines, able to blow a Land Rover to small pieces or demolish a three-ton truck. As the engineers started to build tarmac roads, these bombs became less lethal, but the convoys moving along the roads in daylight then became easy targets for the long-range Shpagin machine-guns.
When the SAS first arrived, there were no helicopters. Land Rovers were rare and anyway presented an easy target, so the SAS – and the other forces – had to move their weapons by donkey or carry them. Operations were severely limited by the amount of food and water they could carry. This slowly improved with the arrival of some operational Wessex helicopters and pilots on secondment from the RAF.
From day one, the chopper pilots under Squadron Leader Neville Baker threw away the rule book. The pilots were employed through a front company, Airwork Services Limited, and Baker personally vetted and chose them. He only selected those pilots who got it, those men who came alive the moment they climbed into the cockpit and who would do whatever was necessary to get the job done. The pilots came from all ranks and many different backgrounds. The only thing that united them was a can-do, will-do attitude.
The same was true of the fixed-wing pilots. There were some pilots seconded from the RAF and others who were contracted directly by the Sultan. They soon made up their own rules and their own culture, flying in conditions where no sane man would even get out of bed – let alone get into a plane and fly at fifty feet across the desert, when the cloud base was lower than London’s St Paul’s Cathedral.
Once a small air force was established, the SAS travelled by helicopter or Skyvan, strange box-shaped planes which sat nineteen and could take off and land on a cocoa tin. They were made by Shorts in Belfast and looked like a sea container with small wings welded on top. The wings did not look big enough to lift a milk crate, let alone the fat fuselage underneath, so the enduring mystery was how they took off in the first place – but they did, landing on improvised airstrips all over the desert. Throughout the war, the key logistical consideration underpinning everything was clean and safe drinking water, at least a gallon per man per day, so the Skyvans flew continuously, re-supplying the troops stretched out across Dhofar. The other main cargo was goats, which were moved about in sacks tied up to their necks. The goats were jammed in like sardines, making the Skyvans the future model for budget airlines.
However, the Shpagin machine-guns had an extra-tall tripod which meant they could easily be pointed skyward and were powerful enough to bring down a helicopter or a low-flying plane – making all aerial movement very hazardous. The planes and helicopters were vulnerable whenever they were on the ground, taking off or landing. The only time the pilots could really relax was when they were over 8,000 feet.
As the war started, the Sultan of Oman remembered his Sandhurst training and re-organised his four regiments, bringing in British officers to command them and train his soldiers. As the war progressed, they played an ever more important role, slowly squeezing the life out of the Front.
Historically, the Djebalis were a network of warrior clans. This was their terrain and had been for centuries. They knew every dip and fold of the land intimately and moved about it easily and fluently. In sporting terms, they had the home advantage, with a large and very partisan crowd cheering them on – and, as this was their backyard, they had the advantage of being able to anticipate where the SAS would go.
By early 1970, the Front controlled the whole of Dhofar apart from the capital, Salalah, and a couple of tiny fishing villages, Taqah and Mirbat, where the SAS had set up small bases. Just before Easter, Lieutenant Colonel Johnny Watts went on an incognito spying mission round Oman and Dhofar. It was a country he knew well.
In 1959, as a young Major, Johnny Watts had led his men in one of the great SAS operations. Overnight, they climbed 8,000 feet up the sheer rock face of the Djebel Akhdar to remove a Saudi-backed force trying to depose the then Sultan of Oman. It remains one of the greatest military operations in modern military history, even more remarkable as Watts had malaria at the time.
On his way back from his spying mission he stopped off in Bahrain to brief Sir Stewart Crawford, the political resident for the Persian Gulf, one of the most senior British diplomats in the Middle East. Crawford, who would later become the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was hard-wired into the British intelligence network, both in terms of the SIS and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
Both men knew the strategic importance of Oman. Watts was a man of action. As far as he was concerned, there was little point discussing the problem. He arrived with a five-part solution, the plan for what would become Operation STORM.
It started with the standard package refined by the British in all their counter-revolutionary warfare during the 1960s. Johnny Watts then tweaked it to fit the special circumstances of Dhofar. Short-term, the regiment would literally draw a line in the sand and say, this far and no further. In the medium-term, they would then drive the rebels back to their bases over the border in Yemen. Long-term, the British would establish a lasting peace.
The first section of his five-part plan was to create an effective and countrywide intelligence system. At the time, it consisted of a young British officer, Timothy Landon, and a few clerks. Second, much as the British had done against the Mau Mau in Kenya, they would encourage dissidents to come across to the government side, then rearm and train them to fight alongside the SAS against their former comrades. Third, the SAS, who were better at hearts and minds nation-building than any other regiment in the world, would work closely with the local Dhofaris, providing medical clinics, especially in the coastal towns which the Front did not completely control. Fourth, deeper into the djebel, they would work closely with veterinary surgeons brought in from Britain to improve the health of the local animals. The Djebalis were desert people whose survival depended on their goats, sheep and cows. Both the people and their
animals were in poor health and Watts knew that the SAS and the vets could make a huge qualitative difference to all their lives in a matter of weeks. Fifth, to reinforce the message, the SAS would work with the Intelligence Corps and the Sultan’s forces to run PsyOps, a propaganda operation with leaflets, pictures and radio.
The plan was to turn the rebels from supporting the uprising towards being in favour of the government. Ultimately this would crush the insurgency.
There was only one problem with the plan. The Sultan of Oman was opposed to it.
4
Room Service?
For decades, Oman had been ruled by a tyrannical and feudal Sultan, Said bin Taimur, who had been on the throne since 1932. Capricious and paranoid, he had created the perfect conditions for insurrection. In a display of arrogance that made Louis XIV look restrained, he flaunted his riches but refused to part with any of the fabulous new wealth provided by the oil bursting out between the rocks of the Omani deserts.
If you lived in 1969 and wondered what the world was like when Jesus and the Apostles wandered the Middle East, then Oman was the place to be – that was, if you could get a visa. Foreigners were only allowed to visit with the express permission of the Sultan, who handled all visa applications personally. A busy man, he processed them only rarely and then with a very slow hand. Casual visitors had no better joy. If a ship docked in Muscat harbour, the sailors had to stay on board. There were no printing presses in the country, no newspapers and no radio stations. When challenged on this by a British diplomat, the Sultan snapped back, ‘That’s why you lost India, because you educated the people.’
Locked in the long distant past, Oman was a country with just four schools, little health care, no public transport and no modern water-management resources. This was a joyless place, especially for young people. Beating a drum in public was banned, as was playing football, along with the wearing of spectacles. No one was allowed to build a new house or repair an old one. Even if an Omani had money – and very few did – then it was against the law to own a car or a gas stove or to cultivate new land. Apart from the Sultan, only one person had a car – the British Ambassador, who drove a stately old Austin, one of those great saloons with walnut panelling and sofas rather than modern body-shaped seats. The Ambassador had little opportunity to use the gears, steering wheel or indicators as there were only three miles of tarmac road, from the Sultan’s palace in Muscat to the airport.