by Roger Cole
Just to make sure that there was no insurrection, it was illegal for anyone to spend more than fifteen minutes talking to anyone else. The Sultan banned women from leaving the country – the same went for all his government officials. Like an ancient fortress city, Muscat, the capital, was locked at night and the locals were only allowed to move around by lantern, torches being considered too bright. Shiny lights might attract plotting, conspiracy and revolution.
The prisons were bursting and justice was harsh. Life imprisonment was nasty, brutish and short. Once convicted, the prisoner was tossed down a thirty-foot hole. The Sultan described this as ‘enlightened’, as the prisoner did not live for very long and therefore did not suffer too much.
Meanwhile, the Sultan’s own personal life was one of pampered luxury. He could have anything he wanted. A single whispered command was all that was needed.
The Sultan was hated by his people, his greatest crime being to destroy some of the aflaj, the ancient irrigation system cut into the desert rock thousands of years before by the Persians. The aflaj was one of the great wonders of the Middle East, a complex piece of ancient engineering, tapping underground water and then delivering it by man-made underground channels to villages. The locals had lived here in small tribal groupings for thousands of years, all sharing a spiritual view of the desert. It was to be loved and feared, cherished and respected. Above all, it must be handed over to the next generation in at least as good a state as it was inherited. No aflaj meant a slow and lingering genocide so damaging it was a major war crime, as serious as any in their history.
In 1958, the old Sultan retired to his palace in Salalah, the capital of Dhofar, surrounded by British advisors, waited on by black slaves from East Africa and protected by mercenary soldiers from Baluchistan.
British advisors had looked after every Sultan for the previous 200 years. The slaves were a legacy from the time in the eighteenth century when Oman had constructed a small empire down the East Coast of Africa, controlling the spice island of Zanzibar and the Kenyan port of Mombasa. The Sultan’s Armed Forces had also been staffed with Baluchi mercenaries for the best part of two centuries. All this meant that the Sultan imposed his rule using outsiders. A cuckoo in the nest, he had few Omanis in his government and no national power base of any substance.
Despots who survive rule on the love of their people, not just on their fear. Fear alone will not sustain an unpopular ruler forever. The Sultan was out of touch, out of date and out of favour with his allies. The world was moving on and he was about to get left behind.
Oman was effectively two countries and always had been.
The capital, Muscat, was in the north. It was predominantly Arab, with its own culture and history. The south was called Dhofar. It had its own capital city, Salalah, populated by different tribes to the north and each of these had their own discrete traditions, customs and dialects.
The Sultan’s palace was magnificent, but it was a daily affront to the local Dhofaris, who clung to life on the edge of the desert. They lived in caves. He lived a scented existence, as far removed from his subjects as any ruler in history.
The inevitable insurrection and war started in the early 1960s and right from the start the British were infuriated by his bone-headed stubbornness. In the words of one SAS soldier, ‘He was as much use as lips on a chicken.’
Aside from the capital, Salalah and a couple of small fishing villages, Taqah and Mirbat, the rebels now controlled the country, all 44,000 square miles. Apart from his closest retinue (and even these were only with him for what they could get out of the relationship), the Sultan had no friends and no support, ruling on fear alone. He had a standing army, but the majority of his soldiers were mercenaries from Baluchistan, a tough mountainous area west of Pakistan. His neighbours were Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, which meant he had to be as tough as anyone on the planet. The Baluchi mercenaries who made up his standing army were good soldiers, but they were poorly led and unmotivated.
The rebels, known collectively as the Adoo, were united by two things: a visceral hatred of the Sultan and a desire for change. They might have been illiterate and desperately poor, but they all knew that there was oil and figured that should mean a better life for everyone.
Traditionally, route one to power in the Middle East had always been assassination. When all power was focused on one person, then that person was incredibly vulnerable. Usually it was a relative who took matters into their own hands – an ambitious brother, one of the wives who was a better schemer than the others, or a furious mother. Until the twentieth century, the weapon of choice was a dagger for a man and poison for a woman. The arrival of the easily concealed handgun made all the difference, which was why many guards were – and still are – ceremonial. Their guns are for show. Only the very trusted are ever allowed real bullets.
In 1966, the dissidents almost managed to kill the Sultan at a military parade, but as often happens on these occasions, the assassin lost his nerve. His hands shook so badly that even though he managed to fire a couple of times, he failed to hit the Sultan. It was an extraordinary miss, as he was close enough to take a few steps forward and beat his mark to death with the butt of his gun. The Sultan’s bodyguards jumped on him, slicing his throat with a khanjar (a curved dagger), splattering the Sultan with his would-be killer’s blood. The Sultan survived, using up one of his many lives. It was not the first attempt on his life and it would not be the last.
As soon as the Special Intelligence Service (better known as MI6) officers in the country told Whitehall what had happened, the British Army mounted a huge operation from Cyprus. Eight Britannia aircraft full of soldiers from the First Battalion of the Scots Guards landed in Bahrain. Meanwhile, the Second Battalion of the Parachute Regiment (2 Para) was put on stand-by. One of the soldiers involved, ironically, was Private Roger Cole of 16 Para Heavy Drop Company. The soldiers were originally told this was a practice exercise, but the men became suspicious when they were issued with live ammunition, extra rounds and mortars. The Wombat anti-tank Land Rovers had extra rounds put on their dropping platforms. The final clue that they were going to war was when they were all issued with just one parachute, no reserve. On exercises they always had a back-up parachute, but never for the real thing. They all sat on the runway for the rest of the day and then in the evening the operation was cancelled. The plan had been for 2 Para to drop into RAF Salalah, secure the airfield ready for the Scots Guards to come in and then crush the rebellion. But the Sultan survived and they were all stood down.
This time it was different.
Assassinations are often the final expression of a huge shift in the balance of power in a country. Whoever pulls the trigger, plunges the dagger or delivers the poison is not really relevant. The killers know their time has come – and so does the victim.
In Oman, there was now a climate of inevitability. The opposition knew they would get the Sultan, sooner or later.
He now carried an invisible target on his back with a number written on it, the number being the days he had left. The figure was not high. The only question was which of his many enemies, inside and outside of his country, would strike first.
For the previous twenty years, the Sultan’s internal security had been provided by the Trucial Oman Scouts, a British-run regiment of local Omanis plus non-commissioned officers from Jordan and mercenaries from Baluchistan, Iran, India and Pakistan. The Scouts were well equipped, mobile and properly trained. But as the situation began to deteriorate, so their loyalty evaporated. Many began to defect to the Front, undermining the Sultan’s position. Where he once had a battalion capable of crushing rebellions, he now had an army in collapse. He also had a well-funded opposition, their ranks now swelled by some of the best-trained soldiers in the country.
The late 1960s was the height of the Cold War and the Communists invested heavily in the Omani uprising, making it their test bed for expansion into the Middle East. Their big problem was religion. The Dhofaris w
ere devoutly religious, believing in the will of Allah. The Communists believed in the transcendental power of the revolution. Allah and all the trappings of religion were nothing more than a futile diversion from the class struggle. The solution dictated from Moscow and Beijing was to remove Islam from everyday life.
The local Dhofaris were no match for the Communists, who were well trained and very focused. They set up cells all over Dhofar. As soon as they were in command, the Communists sent the young tribesmen recruits to Beijing in China and to the revolutionary warfare school at Odessa in the Ukraine for training in guerrilla warfare and Marxist ideology. They returned to their homeland transformed, ruthless in everything they did. Once the Communists had control, they killed those tribal leaders who opposed them, in one case throwing five elderly sheikhs over a 450-foot cliff. The message quickly resonated across the djebel and the other tribal leaders learned to toe the communist line. The lesson was clear. Join the revolution or sign up for impromptu flying lessons.
From the start, the British knew they were defending the indefensible. Their natural sense of fair play meant that many senior British Army officers were sympathetic to the insurgents, fully accepting the validity of their grievances. The British knew they could, at best, contain the rebellion but only for a short time. Political change was needed and it needed to be instant and very visible. If Oman’s oil wealth was not spread, then the conditions for revolution would remain – and the Russians and the Chinese would always find willing followers to attack the state.
In 1970, after years of propping up the Sultan, the British finally lost patience.
A top-secret plan was formulated: a coup d’état followed by a war. As always, preparation was everything, and so the SAS were sent off for specialist training – and where better to send Roger Cole and the other men to train for a war in the Middle East? A British army camp in Otterburn, in the north-east of England – ninety square miles of desolate, rolling moorland. Even in summer, it was cold. The thick driving rain always found a way of sneaking into the very best waterproof clothes and the wind sliced through the men’s skin, ripping the flesh from their cheekbones. All in all, it was the perfect preparation for the sand, dust and flies of the Middle East.
Actually, it wasn’t so crazy. Bizarrely, in many crucial ways, Dhofar turned out to be a lot like the North-East. The British bases in Oman were dotted along the coast. Inland was a long undulating desert, running up to a series of mountain ranges, the djebel. During the monsoon, which ran for three months over the British summer, Dhofar was cold and wet. On the djebel, the khaki of the sand turned a sumptuous emerald green. The everyday fog and mist was heavy, pinned to the ground by relentless drizzle – and there it stayed from before dawn until around lunchtime. Otterburn, with its long undulating valleys, low cloud base and limited visibility, was in fact the perfect training ground for fighting the Battle of Mirbat.
It was time well spent. The Sultan’s days were running out.
The old man was Britain’s closest ally in the Middle East but after decades of slavish support, the Sultan betrayed them by getting too close to the American oil companies. The managers of British foreign interests in SIS and the Foreign Office were incandescent with rage. He had to go. At the same time, the insurgents launched an abortive attack on a government garrison based at Izki in central Oman. They almost succeeded in defeating the Sultan’s forces and it was now only a matter of time before they secured the sort of victory that would seriously undermine his power.
The new Conservative government in Britain headed by Prime Minister Edward Heath was only a week into its stride. Despite his public appearance as a ditherer, Heath had a good track record for acting against foreign leaders who blocked British commercial interests.
Ten years earlier, as Lord Privy Seal, he had signed the assassination orders to get rid of Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected leader of the Congo, when he threatened to nationalise part of the copper mines in his country.
The Heath victory was a complete surprise. The political soothsayers were wrongfooted by the great British public who, not for the first or last time, told the pollsters one thing and then did the opposite when they walked in to the polling booth. However, regardless of who was in power in Number Ten, it was business as usual for the mandarins in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the intelligence officers in SIS. They already had a plan to remove the old Sultan, which they had been discussing with the previous Labour government of Harold Wilson. As soon as they got in front of Heath, they outlined the rapidly deteriorating situation in Oman.
Just as he had with Lumumba, Heath once again agreed to decisive action. He immediately gave the Foreign Office the green light to remove the Sultan and replace him with his son.
The senior British Army officers in Oman loathed the Sultan, their natural sense of fair play and decency meant their sympathies were all with the other side. They had tried to persuade him to drag his country out of its stagnation, but he was not for turning. His ancestors had screwed the peasants for generations, treating the country like a huge cash machine, and he did not understand why he should change a way of life going back hundreds of years.
So on 19 July 1970, an Argosy transport plane, fitted out for personnel transport, quietly flew in to RAF Salalah, just a short drive from the Sultan’s palace. The crew were vague about their exact orders, other than they had been told to wait around. So while they enjoyed the delights of the mess at RAF Salalah, actually the best drinking hole in Dhofar, the British plotters finalised their plans. The man who led the coup was Timothy Landon, a young British officer who had become one of the closest confidants of the Sultan’s son, when they were both junior officers at Sandhurst.
On 23 July 1970, all the key British advisors to the old Sultan were sent away for the day, and after a short exchange of shots his days as ruler were over. He surrendered and the British offered him a choice: silver or lead, a suite in the Dorchester or a 9mm bullet in the back of the head. That afternoon he was on the Argosy bound for England. Where once he had enjoyed the close attention of 300 slaves, all he had now was room service and a handful of retainers.
Back in London, the British had already guessed correctly that this was how the Sultan would react. The secret Foreign Office memo outlining the arrangements (RAF hospital in Britain for private check up, cars to meet him at RAF Brize Norton, appropriate UK government figures to greet him off the plane, suite booked at the Dorchester) was sent twenty-four hours before the coup took place.
Whoever wrote the script for the Sultan to come to Britain had a keen sense of irony.
The mandarins in charge of protocol at the Foreign Office arranged for him to make a short stopover at a secret RAF hospital where he was treated for minor gunshot wounds. During the coup d’état he had managed to shoot himself in the foot, a fitting epitaph for his final days when he lost his kingdom through a corrosive cocktail of political myopia, stubbornness and arrogance.
The irony did not end with a bullet in the foot.
Whoever chose his hotel had a sharp sense of satire. There were several major hotels they could have chosen: the Savoy, the Waldorf, the Ritz or Claridges. Instead, they chose the Dorchester, where the suites look out over Hyde Park and Speaker’s Corner, the geographical centre point for global democracy. Since 1872, anyone from anywhere in the world has had the right to come here and speak on the subject of their choice. Over the 100 years before the arrival of the Sultan, this right had been exercised by many, including Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and George Orwell, the author of 1984, one of the great attacks on the totalitarian state. All of which added up to a wonderful irony, given that the Dorchester’s newest guest had presided over a country where the right of free speech was restricted to just one man, himself. This was a tyrant so deaf to any dissenting voices that he had even kept his own son under house arrest.
Even before his father had rung for room service, the new Sultan was installed. He was just thirty years old, a y
oung man in a hurry. He knew exactly what he had to do: spend the oil money on his people or join his father in the Dorchester.
It was now a breathless race against time.
5
Batts and Cats
As the old Sultan slipped between the Egyptian cotton sheets for his first night in his new home, his son was already at work.
The new Sultan was thirty years old when he was suddenly thrust into power. His relationship with his father was cold and distant. Growing up in Oman, he had been denied access to any of the corrupting influences of the West, though his mother did sneak his much-loved Gilbert and Sullivan records in to him.
Just ten years before, he had been a young officer at Sandhurst when Sir Maurice Oldfield, Britain’s greatest post-war spy chief, spotted him, adopted him and gave him all the support and tutelage he needed to become a good king. Young British officers with an interest in Arab affairs were encouraged to get close to him. After a year at Sandhurst, the Sultan joined a Scottish regiment, the Cameronians, on a tour of Germany. He spent the next three years studying local government in England and was then taken on a world tour to learn how to run a country, a crash course in how to be a modern ruler.
By the time he seized power in 1970, Sultan Qaboos was the complete article, ready to take the throne as an enlightened ruler with a twentieth-century agenda. He looked to the British and they gave him the best military brains available. He was lucky. The Sultan got the best commanders of this generation.