by Roger Cole
The new Sultan had an immediate and refreshing impact. As the Commander of the Sultan’s forces, Brigadier John Graham noted in his papers that his boss was ‘universally popular and a symbol of hope for justice, reform and prosperity.’ The brigadier wrote elsewhere in his journal, ‘I genuinely like him very much indeed.’ The Sultan and his British advisers were very close and they were very mindful of the sanctity of this relationship. Graham wrote, ‘to ill-advise him or let him down would be a fearful thing. I believe that on this intimate and rather Victorian basis we British and he can, over the next few months, together provide adequate direction to the military affairs of Dhofar.’
Right from the off, the British gave the Sultan a policy checklist. The political prisoners were to be released, the expatriates invited back home and, crucially, an amnesty had to be offered for any rebels who wanted to come in off the djebel and join the government forces.
And that was just the start of the reforms.
For nearly half a century the Sultan’s father had kept Oman locked in an Old Testament past. It was now going to be hit with the unstoppable juggernaut of twentieth-century life.
And the SAS were behind the wheel.
They arrived just in time.
As the British soldiers were pitching the first tents, their commanders received a two-page TOP SECRET cable from a British intelligence officer secreted up in the North of Oman, in the province of Musandham.
He described the situation as ‘politically grave’. The last school was fast emptying and now had less than 100 pupils remaining out of a total school population of 300. The teachers expected it to be completely empty within a fortnight.
His report made grim reading. He observed that the credibility gap between the government and the people was ‘a mile wide’ and that the opposition were ‘winning by political methods’. He reported that other national interests were also involved but unless the government moved fast then they would be faced with either a ghost town, a lost peninsular or would have to enforce a police regime over the local tribe, the Shihuh.
His warning was stark: ‘the Communist political and military grip of the Western and Central area is now firm. We are about to lose control over southern side of gateway to the Gulf.’
In early 1970, the Front’s dominance of Dhofar was almost total. Though they lacked radios, their communication systems were extremely effective. As Brigadier Graham noted in an internal briefing, ‘information reaches the enemy rapidly, consistently and accurately from enemy agents and sympathisers on the plains.’
At the Sultan’s bases in Salalah, government forces mixed with the locals twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Secrecy was therefore paramount. It was standard operating procedure that only the most senior officers knew what the daily plans were to be. All local officers, soldiers and even junior British officers were kept in ignorance until just a few hours before any operation.
From the start, the soldiers in the Intelligence Corps suspected that the Sultan’s household was a nest of informers. They were right. They were later to discover that the enemy penetration of the Sultan’s side was far greater than even their worst-case scenario. His entire intelligence operation, apart from its com-mander, was working for the other side.
A coup d’état is always traumatic. It shatters the body politic, especially when it is against someone who has been in power for decades. In the early months after the coup, the young Sultan clung to power by his fingertips. Initially, he was hated by his people, who saw him as yet another pampered cuckoo in the nest. The rebels were desperate to kill him and put a full stop on the end of a dynastic chain going back 1,300 years. The SAS’s first task was to establish an effective bodyguard for him and then to train up a local Omani guard, close personal protection having long been a core SAS skill.
Around the end of August, three troops from B Squadron were sent to Northern Oman to train a battalion of the Sultan’s forces who were then going to deploy to Dhofar. A fourth troop, plus three intelligence officers, were sent to Salalah. Small teams were then sent out to the key seaside villages of Mirbat and Taqah. Though there were only nineteen SAS soldiers in total. They were a force generator, punching above their weight right from the start. Their first moves were to start training local militia, called firqat and to set up medical clinics, and in a creative move, they arranged the first ever public showing of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
By the end of the year, the SAS were at Squadron strength. D Squadron was now under the command of a brilliant young Major, Tony Jeapes. The idea in Whitehall that the SAS could be dropped into a war with weapons and restrict themselves to a strictly training role was a fantasy and soon the regiment’s role was blurred. While the SAS operation was covert, other British support was not. The Royal Corps of Transport kept a motorised raft at Raysut while a port was being built and the units from the RAF regiment and the Royal Artillery arrived to strengthen the defences at RAF Salalah.
After decades of experience, the British knew how to fight a civil war.
The Sultan’s forces were small, not yet ready for war, and the SAS were few in number. They had a tiny budget and needed to leverage what little power they had by recruiting firqat, to fight the rebels.
Very early on there was some harsh lessons to be learnt. The SAS quickly discovered that the firqat would not carry weights. As Tony Jeapes noted in an internal report, ‘the myth of the bedu able to live on a pint of water a day has been completely demolished. The firqat needed as much water as we did and most have no water discipline at all.’
Handling the firqat was all about psychology. When they grew tired, the SAS learned to say, ‘Come on!’ not ‘Go on!’ As T. E. Lawrence had discovered many decades earlier, these men could be led but not driven.
Right from the start, the SAS recognised that relations with the locals were crucial. Tony Jeapes wrote that ‘the side which controls the bedu has an immense advantage. It means they are the force onside and the country strongly favours the defence.’
Being close to the locals meant the SAS could depend on the bedu for food, water and information, and that these would all be denied to the enemy. As the war progressed, relations between the SAS, the Sultan’s forces and the local bedu improved. In contrast, relations between the locals and the Popular Front slowly worsened. With two opposing forces fighting a civil war in their backyard, the locals judged each side by their deeds, not their proclamations. The SAS and the Sultan’s forces behaved well. The Front did not.
Many of the best SAS brains, like Johnny Watts and Tony Jeapes, knew their recent history. In an internal document, Jeapes pointed out the lessons from Malaya in the mid 1950s.
Here, the SAS had driven the Communists into the jungle. Now they were to drive them back up on to the djebel. As in Malaya, the SAS was fighting alongside an indigenous people who did not really mind who won. They just wanted to be left in peace. In Malaya it was all about hearts and minds – and that meant being visible and making your presence felt. The SAS built camps deep in the jungle and now they were going to do the same in Dhofar, constructing bases right in the heart of enemy territory, deep into the djebel.
These were not bases as they are seen now in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rather they were landing strips build round a well-known waterhole and kept open to all the locals. The SAS and the Sultan’s Armed Forces provided health services for the locals and veterinary care for their animals. In each fort, the local police (the gendarmes) and the ‘askaris were ‘stiffened’ by soldiers from the SAS.
In return for delivering security and safety, the SAS received a steady flow of information. From these bases they trained local guerrillas, exactly as they had done in Malaya. In Malaya they were called the Senoi Praak. In Oman, it was the firqat. The names were different but the rules of engagement were the same.
From the start, recruiting from among the locals proved very tricky. The SAS needed to train as many Omanis as possible in the shortest possible time. Few
had any education. After generations of government neglect, their standards of health and fitness were also very poor. Two out of five potential recruits failed to reach even the very low levels of medical fitness required.
Even after the locals had joined up, nothing was simple. As part of their standing orders, Major Tony Jeapes told his SAS men that they had to hold a daily parade for the local militia, who were supposed to turn up with their weapons. Each SAS unit was told to take a daily roll-call. Absentees were to be noted and fined a day’s pay. His written orders said that ‘muster parade was to be followed by half an hour physical training and/or pokey drill’ to help build strength. This was sheer fantasy. In the summer months it was often over 115 degrees in the shade and so basic patrolling was all that could be asked of the firqat.
The SAS operated in Oman under the thinnest of covers, a pseudonym. They were called the BATT, the British Army Training Team. Without any trace of comic awareness, their base in Mirbat was called the BATT house. The Dynamic Duo of Bruce Wayne and Robin the Boy Wonder would have been so proud.
Underpinning the SAS campaign was a charm offensive to win over the mass of the people. Life on the djebel was cheap, and for the locals the health of their animals was paramount. Before he flew to Oman, Watts had put in a requisition for some specialists from the Royal Army Veterinary Corps. The local Dhofaris were nomadic desert people and their health and wealth depended on their animals. After years of deprivation and a poor diet, their animals were universally in bad condition. The arrival of the vets alongside the SAS was truly inspirational and they had a huge impact on the war. The health of the goats, sheep and cattle began to improve overnight and the locals started to think very differently about the British soldiers in their midst – though not everything went according to plan.
The British veterinary surgeons were appalled by the poor state of the local cattle breeding stock and imported some Hereford bulls in to Oman to try and improve matters. Sigmund Freud wrote about the two great drivers, sex and death being linked. In this case, one was guaranteed to lead to the other. The British bulls were far too heavy for the undernourished local cows, which could neither carry the weight of a bull on their backs nor cope with the energetic thrusting which would follow. But ever resourceful, the British army engineers built some mounting blocks to take the weight of the bulls and ‘smooth the copulatory process’, to use Brigadier Graham’s choice phrase.
The smell of love and romance in the air was far too much for one English officer in the Oman Oil Police. A few days later, Brigadier Graham had to dismiss him after he was found taking pictures of his erect penis and sending them to a woman.
Ah, the tribulations of high command.
The SAS started to make big inroads into the community, by setting up small clinics and there was soon a queue of locals wanting the best that the Western pharmaceutical industry could deliver. The SAS medics were instantly popular, the widespread dispensing of Vitamin D shots putting a bounce in everyone’s step. Overnight, the SAS medics became an attractive alternative to the local bush doctor, who used a branding iron as a cure-all for most illnesses, a procedure that at least guaranteed there was never a queue in the waiting room. Delivering babies, fixing teeth and mending sick children instantly changed relationships with the locals for the better.
One SAS medic stayed awake for two days nursing a small child with cholera. Cholera was highly contagious and he must have known that his chances of getting it were very high and that he could then expect to be very ill himself. By any measure, it was an act of extraordinary courage. Against the odds, the child survived and the word went round the djebel. The British soldiers were good people. Every Djebali had seen cholera and every parent knew that, given the generally poor health of their children, most sufferers would die.
As every SAS platoon medic knows, when it comes to winning wars, the syringe is a more potent weapon than the rifle.
The SAS started their campaign by making all the right moves, but the emotional terrain was against them. More than ninety-nine per cent of the population was hostile and the remaining one per cent was at best neutral. It was going to be a long campaign, but it got off to a good start. Throughout the war, the Front would suffer from poor discipline and immediately after the SAS arrived they were given a huge gift by the Front.
In early September 1970, just shortly after the new Sultan had started to settle on his throne, the Communists ordered the Dhofari Nationalists to surrender and all fight together under one flag, against the common enemy. Many refused and there was a bloody battle, with both sides taking casualties and planting the sort of resentments that would last for generations to come.
A small split had become a crevasse.
After this, twenty-four of the most high-profile rebels defected to the government side. The amnesty for anyone who wanted to come across was now delivering. Suddenly presented with the possibility of being part of something better, many Dhofaris simply changed sides. Better still, it drove a big wedge into the rebel community and, from day one, they started to fight amongst themselves, something they would continue to do throughout the war. As the conflict progressed, the British, especially the officers in the Intelligence Corps, were very adept at sowing dissension in the enemy ranks. A whisper here, a rumour there was often all it took and this was something that British intelligence had been doing for centuries.
Ever opportunistic, the Intelligence Corps soldiers were brilliant at sowing doubt in the minds of the enemy. Just before Christmas 1971, three members of a four-man Front operation were killed when the bomb they were setting exploded prematurely, almost certainly because of their poor training. The survivor soiled himself and the Intelligence Corps quickly spread the rumour that the Russian-made ordnance was defective – a rumour the survivor was only too happy to confirm.
Among the defectors was one of their finest leaders, Salim Mubarak, fresh from his training in China. In the first six months of the conflict, just over 200 Dhofaris crossed over to the government side and began to form the basis of civilian militia, the firqat, who were then trained by the SAS. Each firqat was named after a great Islamic warrior, and the first one was based at Mirbat and named after Salah al-Din, known as Saladin, one of the greatest soldiers of any age. Naming them after great Islamic commanders was pure genius. It set them in their own history, marching in the shadow of their own greats.
Salim Mubarak worked closely with the British, helping the SAS and the Sultan’s forces fine-tune their everyday tactics.
One of the first SAS Commanders in Dhofar, Major Tony Jeapes, the Boss of D Squadron, told his men to respect the rebels, saying that if they were Dhofaris they would be fighting on the other side. This respect went through every aspect of SAS behaviour, particularly towards those who defected from the rebels. They were called SEPs for short, Surrendered Enemy Personnel. In public, they did not use the word surrender for the insurgents who crossed the desert floor. Those who ‘came across’ or ‘returned’ were given tea, food and a cigarette and, wherever possible, talked to by members of their own tribe. Right from the start, the British knew they had a lot to learn from the locals. They asked good questions and they listened.
Tony Jeapes was desert smart, just like his boss, Johnny Watts. He listened to Salim Mubarak and they formulated all sorts of plans. They worked out what they could do jointly and what could only be done by the locals. Jeapes handed over several operations to the local firqat, all of which were hugely successful.
Salim Mubarak and his men cleaned out the communist intelligence cells in Mirbat and Taqah. Salim Mubarak had a brilliant tactic, which only he could deliver. He called the townspeople together and offered them a deal.
‘We will return at 10 o’clock tomorrow morning. Those who wish to switch sides should do so at that time. Anyone who does not come over can expect to be hunted down and killed.’
Forty men turned up and Salim Mubarak used all the political skills he had been taught in Beijing to win th
em over with a spectacular display of oratory. It was a brilliant bluff. He had no idea who was a member of the Front and who was not.
Salim Mubarak also worked closely with the Sultan’s Armed Forces (SAF). Again, his desert-wise understanding of his own people saved lives. The SAF went up on to the djebel to take the fight to the insurgency. They secured their position, but this was very early on in the war and there was no air support. Though the Sultan’s forces occupied the high ground, they could only stay there for twenty-four hours before their water would run out. The Communists knew this and sealed off the wadis so that they could ambush the government forces as they left. The commander of the SAF, Captain David Venn, asked Salim Mubarak for advice. Normally the SAF would have slipped away when the rebels were at prayer but these men were now Communists, so no prayer break. They were surrounded and whatever they did they could expect heavy casualties as soon as they tried to get back to base. Salim Mubarak told David Venn that although the rebels no longer prayed they did like a siesta in the heat of high noon. He called the time right and the government forces sneaked off the djebel in silence, leaving the rebels to sleep.
Training quickly became full-on warfare. There were battles every day on the djebel, many SAS patrols having four or more contacts a day. The Sultan’s forces (SAF) were engaging with the enemy with the same frequency. The skirmishes were now so frequent that the SAS did not bother to record anything of less than ten minutes’ duration.
Operationally, the rebels were smart, setting ambushes and hitting the patrols, then disappearing and reappearing elsewhere. The big question for the Intelligence Corps was how many of them were there? Were they relatively few highly mobile guerrillas or a huge army stretched across the desert? The best estimates were somewhere between one and two thousand hard core, with several thousand more coming in as occasional fighters. Even the Front leaders themselves did not know, as their forces were split into divisions, covering different areas of the country. Whatever the answer, there was now a full-scale war on, all over Dhofar.