by Roger Cole
At the time, all messages were encrypted using one-time pads, an encryption system that was theoretically unbreakable as each message used a random key, which was only used once. The key was known to both sender and receiver but not to anyone who intercepted the message. Before computers, this was easily the best way of sending secret messages as all it needed was two sets of pads, one kept by the soldiers in the field and the other back at base. And then it was very high tech: paper and pencil. Though safe, it was time-consuming as each letter needed to be encrypted before the whole message was sent. The SAS had a built-in fail-safe. If the soldiers were captured, there was a tab on the side of the books that, when pulled, released a chemical destroying the book.
There are wrinkles which mean that one-time pads can be broken. In fact, the British did just that against the Russians in Afghanistan when some penny-pinching Soviet bureaucrat decided to save money and rather than produce genuinely random number pads, decided to make them in batches. Once they had enough messages, it was relatively easy for the British intelligence to break the code, using the brute force of the Cray supercomputers at Government Communication HQ at Cheltenham in England and the NSA at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland, USA.
But the Battle of Mirbat took place in the days before supercomputers, and provided no one had stolen the code book, all SAS communications were safe.
During the Dhofar War, the security of one-time pads for the SAS was crucial, as the Russians intercepted all government communications from their not-so-secret base on the island of Socotra. If they could break them and pass on the intelligence to the rebel commanders in the field then they would do so.
So that morning at 0600 Pete Warne sat down, breathed in deeply and started to compose the message. The 316 radio set was perched on a makeshift table, surrounded by pads and code books. The night before, just before he went to bed, he had carefully tuned the set so he would not be hunting for the frequency the next day. He switched it on and as he fine-tuned it, the room was filled with the mush and fuzz of the radio set having a good old morning cough, ready to greet the day.
In Morse code, he tapped out the same message he had sent every morning for the previous four months:
Zero Alpha. Zero Alpha. This is 82. Radio check. Over.
The relief from sitting down and catching his breath took over. A huge blob of dirt black, grimy sweat rolled down his forehead before going into freefall off the end of his nose and landing splat on the code book.
Back at Um-el-Ghawarif, the BATT radio shack and the Ops room were now even more crowded. There were the two most senior SAS officers in Dhofar, Major Richard Pirie, the boss of B Squadron, and Major Alistair Morrison, the Commanding Officer of G Squadron. Duke Pirie was the ranking officer until the handover and so it was still his show. It was also personal for him. It was his men under attack. A few soldiers from G Squadron were sticking their heads round the door, asking what was going on. There wasn’t much anyone could tell them. Everyone had dry mouths, and there was enough stomach acid in the room to dissolve a bucket of nails.
Suddenly, the static ceased.
No one breathed in or out.
The loudspeakers on the radio set crashed into life. The men all knew their Morse code and heard the message that Pete Warne was now tapping out.
Zero Alpha.
Everyone jumped. The speakers were at full volume as the message continued.
Zero Alpha. This is 82. Radio check. Over.
Suddenly the carbon dioxide in the room increased as everyone breathed out a communal sigh of relief. The guys at Mirbat were alive – well, one of them at least. The khareef sometimes made radio traffic very difficult, but it often worked better early in the morning. Trevor Brooks checked the signal strength and then tapped back:
82. 82. This is Zero Alpha. QRK 5.
QRK was the measure of signal strength, from five down to one, five being the strongest signal. So, good news, so far. The Mirbat radio was transmitting loud and clear. Finally. It had been forty-five minutes since Captain Venn had first eased his lanky frame round the BATT radio shack door to tell them something bad was going on at their base at Mirbat.
Back in Mirbat, Pete Warne reached for the code book, now heavily stained with a mix of grease, sweat, dust, dirt and grime.
‘Fuck it!’ he thought. ‘I guess they know we’re here, so not much point encoding this.’
It was one of those moments of total clarity that happens to good soldiers in battle. Encoding the message would take a good five minutes, by which point it could all be over. One well-targeted mortar on to the roof of the BATT house and it would be Goodnight Vienna.
‘Bugger the rule book’, Pete decided. Even though he knew that what he was about to do was a serious breach of SAS standard operating procedures, he figured that there was a good chance they would all be killed, so it wouldn’t matter. No one can be RTUd, returned to unit, if they’re already dead. And if, by some miracle, they survived, no one would reprimand him for a flash of common sense.
Pete Warne didn’t know that nearly an hour earlier one of the gendarmes in the fort just 700 yards away had already sent a signal in clear.
As he started to tap out his message, a room full of SAS men back at Um-el-Ghawarif all stopped breathing.
14
Caught in the Net
The radio network set up in the Dhofar War was bizarre, a patchwork quilt of different services, which meant that all the power brokers had their own discrete radio system. In reality, this meant that a small number of senior officers could keep control, but when it came to running a battle it was next to useless.
The SAS had their own radio network, the BATT net. Every SAS detachment could talk to base but they could not talk to each other. Separate from the SAS, each different part of the Sultan’s Armed Forces had their own net, all of which could communicate with headquarters at Um-el-Ghawarif, but none of them could talk to each other. At Um-el-Ghawarif, the SAS could listen to everyone else’s signals but no one else could listen in on theirs. Just to further complicate matters, the pilots and the ground troops used completely discrete radio systems. The pilots used HF FM radios to talk to each other, whereas the army used HF AM. This meant the pilots could talk to their own HQ at RAF Salalah, but could not listen to the army without changing frequency, not always the easiest thing to do when they were trying to land or take off in a firefight. Just to further pollute what was already a murky pond, air traffic control was on VHF.
Out in the field, the soldiers also had two sets of radios, called SARBEs (search and rescue beacon equipment), which transmitted on two channels. The SAS called their two channels white and blue. Each channel transmitted on different frequencies and was used for different operations, one channel for jets and one for helicopters. The pilots used the same frequencies but called theirs red and blue. Just to further complicate matters, what was blue for one was red for the other and what was white for the SAS was blue for the pilots.
Even if they both managed to get their colour co-ordination right, SARBEs were only as good as their batteries. Battery life was notoriously short, so they were only used in emergency and often not switched on.
This was a continual headache for the pilots, but no doubt very good for the salesmen of military equipment, all of whom had sold the British and Omani forces different pieces of kit. Each radio net came with its own manuals and spare parts, all of which drained money from front-line operations.
Poor communications plagued the Omani and British forces. The Front had simple Russian and then Chinese radio sets, which their commanders used to efficiently co-ordinate attacks, but otherwise their communications were face to face.
Now trapped in this tangled web of radio nets, Pete Warne did what he had done every morning. He breathed in deeply, composed himself and then did what he had trained for and what now came naturally. For an experienced radio operator, Morse code is just like typing, a simple alphabet of dots and dashes.
Taking th
e key in his hand, he tapped out:
Zero Alpha. Zero Alpha. This is 82. Contact. Under heavy fire. Wait. Out.
There were three crucial words here, ‘under heavy fire’. The normal message was just: ‘Contact. Wait. Out.’ ‘Under heavy fire’ was a signal very rarely used in this war. It meant this was really serious, especially as it followed on from the gendarmerie radio call nearly an hour before, something the BATT Operations room had now known about for forty-five minutes. Everyone in the SAS high command at Um-el-Ghawarif now knew there was a major battle going on just forty miles away at Mirbat.
It was just minutes after 0600.
If Pete Warne had thought about waiting for a response from Um-el-Ghawarif, that moment passed instantly. The soldiers at the gates made up his mind for him.
‘Fuck it! No point in talking to base, there’s a battle going on outside!’ he thought as he ran from the room, taking the steps outside two at a time before he got back on to the roof. Looking down, he could see the red tracer from Roger Cole’s GPMG strafing the battlefield.
By now, the men had been fighting for just thirty minutes. Their nostrils and throats were already clogged with the smell of cordite, burning carbon, grease, dust and the detritus of mortars landing all round them. Through this cloud of grime came the occasional sharp salty smells from the Indian Ocean, where the morning waves were hitting the beach less than 300 yards away.
‘Well, at least they’ve got their heads down!’ he reckoned as he ran back across the wall of death. PFLOAG guerrillas shouted excitedly as soon as they saw him and everyone put down rounds as Pete dived for cover behind the sandbags. As soon as he got back behind his gun, he pointed it down to the battlefield, followed the path of Roger Cole’s tracer and put a couple of rounds down, hitting the tops of the wadis where he hoped the enemy would pop up.
Back at Um-el-Ghawarif, there were now two separate operations going on. For the next two hours there would be no communication between them. As the SAF Operations Officer, David Venn controlled all the key assets, the planes and the helicopters. The SAS had themselves and their weapons but no means of going to war without the help of the Sultan’s forces.
David Venn was organising the helicopter pilots, while Duke Pirie and Lofty Wiseman were putting together a plan to get the soldiers from G Squadron SAS down to Mirbat. It all depended on what intelligence they had, and at 0600 all they knew was that the soldiers at Mirbat were under heavy fire.
It was only three words, ‘under heavy fire’, but they meant the world to the men back at Um-el-Ghawarif. They answered the question they had been asking for the last forty-five minutes. At least they now knew why there was silence from Mirbat.
Meanwhile, the helicopter pilots were still on the ground a few miles south at RAF Salalah.
By the time the BATT room received Warne’s message, David Venn knew nothing of Pete Warne’s signal at 0600. He had already started the rescue operation and briefed the pilots by radio. As the pilots looked out at the landing-strip in front of them, they saw that the weather was truly awful, with very poor visibility sideways or upwards.
Under normal RAF regulations, the pilots would not fly. It was simply too dangerous.
Though they were flying from an RAF airstrip, the pilots were either seconded to the Sultan’s Air Force or technically working for a company called Airwork Services Limited, based in Bournemouth. Normal rules did not therefore apply.
Neville Baker and his crew climbed into the helicopter and set off to fly to Mirbat, forty miles down the coast.
It was now shortly after 0600.
From the RAF airstrip at Salalah, they went south, just clearing the roofs of the houses outside the base, and then flew out over the sea.
Baker now had to balance two needs. He had to get there as soon as possible. The most important thing, though, was to get there and back in one piece – and not lose a helicopter along the way.
For most of the Dhofar War, there were only ever two or three choppers flying at any one time. The rest were either at their limit for flying hours for that month or in the repair shop having the bullet holes patched up. Helicopters routinely returned with shafts of sunlight pouring in through the fuselage, either small bullet holes from AK-47s or much larger ones from the Shpagin machine-guns dotted around the djebel. Within a few weeks, the Airwork Services mechanics had become very adept at fixing holes, even though in the summer the heat in the hangars blew the mercury through the top of the thermometer. In this war, a fifth of all the mortalities in the Sultan’s forces were pilots. Every pilot who survived had lived through at least one near miss and experienced the close-up thrill of having a bullet crash round his cockpit. Everyone had landed with smoke billowing from a vital part of their aircraft after managing to manoeuvre back down to earth.
All the fixed-wing pilots were now highly skilled at making practice forced landings, where they would get to whatever height they could manage and then, if their engine cut out, they could glide back to base. It was a nerve jangling manoeuvre as they had to fly parallel to the air strip, then turn round once they reached the end to glide the length of the runway once again. They would repeat this until they were almost at ground level, then they would come into land. Ideally they liked to start from a few thousand feet with the runway in sight. If the cloud base was low, then they had to come in on their instruments and that was when their flying skills were really tested to the limit.
With all this in mind, the three-man crew flew on to Mirbat, hugging the waves from a flying height of about ten feet. Any higher and they would have been flying blind in the cloud. Any lower and they would have been swimming to the battleground. As they all peered into the gloom, smells became more important. The cabin was a strange aromatic cocktail – aeronautic fuel, oil, ozone, salt and sea spray.
In the few days before the battle, all over the djebel, soldiers from G Squadron were already out, one or two men at each base, preparing for the handover later that day. The plan was that everyone from G Squadron would be deployed within the next twenty-four hours.
It was early and even though many were jet-lagged, they were up and wandering round. After they had sorted out their kit, a few of the men strolled down to the signals room, just for a chat and to get a bit of basic background from the radio ops man – always a good source of gossip. They quickly discovered that the Front had launched a heavy attack on Mirbat, taking advantage of the monsoon conditions.
Trevor Brooks told them, ‘From what I can gather, it looks like they want to take and hold Mirbat.’ Whatever the Front’s intentions, one thing was obvious: the lives of the B Squadron men were hanging by a thread.
As G Squadron looked around, all they could see was the monsoon cloud, still lying heavily on the ground. Getting to Mirbat was going to be a nightmare. Going by road would mean turning themselves in to flashing targets for the Front gunmen, who could be anywhere on the forty miles between Um-el-Ghawarif and Mirbat. The soldiers’ chances of getting there intact were somewhere between zero and nothing. That just left the choppers, but the cloud base was still very low, which would make a helicopter insertion equally dangerous.
The monsoon, known as the khareef, was the best time of year for the Front.
The first time the SAS went up on to the djebel, after the end of the monsoon, they were astonished to discover tunnels reaching out for many miles, often going from the high ground down to the plain. These tunnels were not like the underground ones in Vietnam, which completely spooked the Americans as they never knew where the Communists would appear from next. These tunnels were above the ground. The Front used to pollard the trees, knitting the branches together to form long corridors, each one a few hundred yards long, stretching right across the djebel. This meant they could safely move caravans of camels and donkeys carrying ammunition, weapons and food. They would lead the caravans to the end of the corridor, wait and listen. If there were no helicopters or planes then they would move across open ground to the entrance of t
he next tunnel.
When the SAS first found these over-ground tunnels, they were shocked. As they looked up they could see the branches loosely tied to look as if they had grown naturally together. After discovering these over-ground tunnels, two SAS soldiers went up in a chopper to see what they looked like from above. They were hugely impressed. There was no hint of a network. The thick emerald green vegetation just looked like the normal forest canopy that covered the hillsides. Underneath, the Front could move troops, equipment and supplies easily and so even up the technological imbalance between the two sides.
The monsoon also meant there was plenty of food about so the Front did not have to steal from the local tribes and their supply lines were less stretched and vulnerable. With a cloud base clinging to the ground somewhere below the palm trees, the planes of the Sultan’s Air Force could not move around as easily as the rest of the year. If the pilots did want to take a closer look at what was going on they had to come down to ground level and that put them well within range of the Russian Shpagin machine-guns.
It was the perfect time of year to launch a surprise attack. Throughout the war the Sultan’s forces had one big advantage. After a year of fighting they started to establish total aerial dominance, with their Strikemaster jets and Augusta Bell 205 helicopters, whereas the rebels only had anti-aircraft guns and rifles. Once the khareef cloud clung to the ground, the sides were much more even.
Back in Um-el-Ghawarif, both the SAF and the BATT officers knew there was a significant battle going on, but the conditions were horrendous. The sun might be rising elsewhere in the world but there was no sign of it in Salalah. The cloud base was still low enough to touch and visibility was very poor. The entire Front army could be gathered at the end of the runway having a meeting with their Chinese advisers and no one would have been any the wiser.