by Roger Cole
For any young surgeon wanting to really practise their craft, this was now the place to be. Here was every type of gunshot wound – many more than most surgeons would see in a lifetime of civilian work. For the next thirty hours, the surgeons pulled bullets, shell and mortar fragments from stomachs, chests, thighs, shins, head, arms, feet, shoulders, heads, backs, hands and, the most extraordinary wound of all, one of the enemy soldiers, who had been shot all the way along the length of his penis.
One of the wounded was the PFLOAG Political Commissar for Eastern Dhofar, who insisted that they had just won a great victory. He had a complex fracture of the femur, which was going to need traction. Proper traction equipment was one of the many items of surgical equipment that the FST did not have, but this war was all about improvisation. The doctors called the camp carpenter, explained to him what they needed, and a few minutes later he returned with planks and his toolbag and started to make a wooden frame to fit over the Commissar’s bed. Suddenly all the man’s bravado went and he became openly agitated. The medics called one of the interpreters over who talked to him, and then explained to the doctors that the Commissar thought they were building a gallows to hang him in his bed.
While the doctors chopped, cut and sewed through the afternoon, the heroes of Mirbat began to return to Um-el-Ghawarif.
Roger Cole and Bob Bennett went back to Salalah that afternoon, at around 1600. Duke Pirie got Roger settled in a room with a decent camp bed and got him half a chicken and half a bottle of Bacardi, his favourite tipple.
He drank and ate and then curled up on the concrete floor, thinking, ‘My mum said big boys don’t cry. Well, they do!’
Some of his mates came in later and found him lying on the concrete, but he had a bad back after a parachute fall years before and right now that was what he wanted.
Fuzz Hussey, Mike Kealy and Pete Warne stayed on the Mirbat radio till midnight, sending out reports and answering an endless stream of cables asking for more information.
The next day, Roger Cole and Bob Bennett were debriefed at Salalah by Colonel Bryan Ray, the boss in charge of the Northern Frontier Regiment. Then he debriefed Captain Kealy. As they were being debriefed, Laba’s body was flown back to the UK.
Roger Cole visited Tak in the FST, where he was recovering after being shot five times. He was covered in bandages, with tubes coming in and going out of all parts of his body. Tak motioned to Roger to lean over so he could whisper in his ear. The speech was short, just three words: ‘Burn the books.’
The books were the ones they kept of their little business, moving rocks to buy fresh food so they were well fed enough to fight.
At the end of one of the greatest marathons of battlefield surgery, one of the SAS men walked past the operating block and through the open door, watched as one of the medical orderlies swilled out the room with buckets of water, creating a river of blood, which he then swept out on to the desert floor outside.
Their eyes bleary and aching all over, the surgeons finished work on the evening of the day after the battle. They then slept through till the following afternoon, waking up just as the plane arrived to take the injured SAS men to the RAF hospital in Cyprus.
Meanwhile the soldiers from G Squadron made a complete sweep of the battlefield. They approached the bodies of the gendarmes in the picket with great care. It was common practice to booby-trap the dead with plastic explosive.
The blood trails from the day before were now dried black by an afternoon of sunshine. Everywhere there were shell casings and unexploded ordnance, but no weapons. These were valuable commodities to be traded in to the British, and the locals had done their best impression of carrion crows and stripped the battlefield already.
As well as the thirty-nine dead from the battle, who had been shipped back to Salalah and put on public display, the SAS men from G Squadron then found another thirteen bodies, men who had been missed the day before. Some had tried to escape, but had succumbed to their wounds overnight. Knowing what had happened to the other bodies, the soldiers decided on a more civilised solution. For these rebels there was going to be no heroes’ burial, but no ritual public humiliation either. Instead the bodies were loaded in to the back of one of the Skyvans and dumped out at sea, a late breakfast for the sharks.
For months afterwards, the intelligence officers handling the interrogations of the SEPs tried to get a handle on how bad a defeat this had been. They knew of fifty-two dead in all (thirty-nine on display at Salalah and a further thirteen bodies found the next day), but over the weeks it slowly became clear that this defeat had been catastrophic. The final best estimate was 200 dead and wounded. Given the appalling level of battlefield medical care offered to the Front soldiers, the vast majority of the wounded would have died in the months afterwards. If the estimates were correct, half the soldiers who had attacked Mirbat that morning had died. As the news filtered across the djebel, many had had enough. If they had been thinking about crossing over to the government side, this now confirmed that it was the right thing to do.
After the battle the prisoners were moved to Salalah, where they were put on trial, charged with a whole series of criminal offences. The prosecution argued that they had attacked both the state and its citizens. They had fired machine-guns, assault rifles and mortars at everyday Omanis in the town, killing and injuring many of them. Had they succeeded they would have beheaded the Wali, the local representative of the Sultan and his government, and then executed his men. Under Sharia law, they were found guilty of treason and murder. The Sultan demanded the death penalty but the British persuaded him out of this course of action.
Major Alistair Morrison, the most senior SAS officer in Dhofar, argued persuasively that this was not the right way to win the war. Although it would reinforce the ‘Don’t fuck with us!’ message, it would be a potential public relations catastrophe. The headline ‘SAS SOLDIERS KILL PRISONERS’ would have destroyed months of careful hearts and minds campaigning. His fears were well founded. Though this was a secret war, the Gulf Committee, a small group of activists based in London, had excellent sources in Yemen and their pamphlets describing what was going on in Dhofar were right on the money. They would have picked up the story, the propagandists in the Arab League would have spun it and the whole SAS operation would have been set back two years.
The Sultan acquiesced and the prisoners were given life sentences instead.
When Kealy returned to Um-el-Ghawarif the day after the battle, he was given a hero’s reception in the SAF Officers’ Mess. He was elated and talked at length, his hosts lapping up his every word. His was an epic achievement. He had led his men in the greatest battle since Rorke’s Drift and everyone wanted to shake his hand.
Given the mess and carnage his troop had left behind, he would also always have an even greater honour in the regiment: being known as the officer responsible for ‘the worst handover in regimental history’. And there can be no higher accolade than that.
On 6 August 1971, Radio Aden announced that the Popular Front had won a major victory at Mirbat. Such propaganda is always counter-productive. The survivors of the battle were the Front’s best fighters in East Dhofar. They all knew that they were not on the winning side. Relations between the Chinese-indoctrinated commanders and the men were already becoming strained and this kind of lie did not help. The obvious question was: if they lie about this, what else are they lying to us about? Defections soon reached record levels.
As usual, Brigadier John Graham got it right. After the battle, he noted tersely that ‘this was the bloodiest nose suffered so far by the Adoo.’
Throughout the battle, the key moments of winning and losing, living or dying, were measured in seconds and minutes. In the celebrations afterwards, the actions of one man were forgotten. It was the lightning quick reactions of David Venn, the SAF Operations Officer who ran the rescue response from the start, which made the difference. From receiving the first call from the gendarmerie just after 0500 he was ahead of th
e game. He was the invisible hero of this battle. He sent Neville Baker to find out what was happening and then scrambled the Strikemasters when it was not really safe enough to fly. They arrived when the rebels were minutes from turning the battle and saved the day. But for him, the outcome would have been very different and the men at Mirbat would not have survived.
23
Follow the Yellow Shoes
It is the first rule of espionage tradecraft that when operating undercover you should try and blend into the background, a fish just like all the others in the shoal.
In 1972, it was no big secret that virtually everyone in Oman wore open-toed leather sandals and had done for the previous 3,000 years. To wander through a souk in 1972, less than two miles from the capital Muscat, wearing bright yellow plastic shoes was therefore not very smart.
When you were the senior Political Commissar in the Eastern Area unit of the PFLOAG, codenamed the ‘Lenin unit’, and you were masterminding the biggest intelligence-led coup of your career, it was suicidal.
Conspiracy and cock-up folded into one.
Shortly after the Battle of Mirbat, the trickle of rebels coming across to the government side and bringing weapons with them became a steady stream.
By August 1972, the Sultan’s forces had killed, captured or injured over 1,000 of the Front, and 570 SEPs had defected, most bringing their weapons with them. It was an attrition rate the rebels could not sustain and stay in the game.
After Mirbat, morale collapsed, especially in the east of Dhofar. August and September were exceptional months for the Intelligence Corps as they collated the avalanche of intelligence now pouring in. The SEPs, Surrendered Enemy Personnel, were well treated, given tea and a cigarette and – whenever possible – greeted by someone from their own tribe.
The SEPs were then questioned over several days and the information collated. Some had little to say, but many talked at length.
In the first two years of the war, the intelligence taken from them had been substantial. The Intelligence Corps quickly built up a detailed map of Oman, broken down by tribe, all useful background to triangulate each new SEP and ensure that they were returned to the right place. Those SEPs with good quality information were moved up the chain for further debriefs.
The story may well be apocryphal, but when Marshall Ney, the best and brightest of France’s young generals, was recommended to Napoleon, the Emperor asked, ‘Yes I am sure he is brilliant but is he lucky?’ It is a question that has been asked by many other senior officers before and since. Regardless of all military theory, training and manuals, the fact is that chance and luck together play a huge role in armed conflict.
Throughout the Dhofar War, the rebels were plagued with bad luck – and what happened next was one of the many million-to-one chances that went against them.
Just a few months after the Battle of Mirbat, one of the SEPs was being driven to the capital, Muscat, for a more detailed debrief. As they were driving through Muttrah, a small seaport just north of the capital, they stopped to get something to eat in the souk. As they wandered through the town the SEP’s gaze was captured by a pair of bright yellow plastic shoes. Muttrah was an area theoretically under the Sultan’s control, so the SEP remarked to the intelligence officers who were escorting him, ‘I didn’t know Muhammad Talib had surrendered as well.’
The soldiers in the escort were immediately all over him, like flies on a camel.
‘Who’s Muhammad Talib?’
‘He is a senior Political Commissar in the PFLOAG.’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘Up on the djebel.’
Using the extensive database of the PFLOAG – which the Intelligence Corps had carefully put together over the previous two years, using maps, local landmarks and their own intimate knowledge of the terrain – they got a good triangulation on Talib. They were able to then place him deep in what the PFLOAG described as their Eastern Area, which they had codenamed Lenin. Once the intelligence officers were certain they had the right man, they checked their records and confirmed that Talib had not surrendered. He was, in fact, one of the most senior commanders in the PFLOAG.
In intelligence terms, this man was a very big catch.
They had two choices: they could arrest him immediately or they could do what every good counter-intelligence officer would do in these circumstances. They put Talib under deep 24/7 surveillance and let his operation run to see what intelligence they could gather about him, his network and the strength of the Front’s underground operation.
Right from the start, this had been a leaky war. The British and the Sultan’s forces were fighting alongside local militia, whose loyalties were always split. Family and tribe always came before country or religion. The young Sultan did what his predecessors had always done. He recruited from among people he knew. They in turn did the same, which meant that many of his key intelligence staff were recruited from a small base of people. This can be a good thing, as in the early days of the Italian mafia, when omertà, the code of silence, prevailed.
Loyalty is contagious, but so too is treachery. Once one defects it becomes very infectious and that is what happened with the Sultan’s intelligence apparatus.
The surveillance of Muhammed Talib was known to a very small number of people. It was given a code name, JASON, and kept very tight. The only ones in the know were the Intelligence Corps officers intimately involved in the operation, Timothy Creasey, the new Major General who had arrived as the Commander of the Sultan’s Armed Forces, and the Sultan himself, who gave carte blanche to do whatever it took to uncover the plot.
It was a pivotal moment in the conflict. After a short time in the post, Creasey made his assessment of the state of war. There was still heavy fighting in Dhofar and the Front were proving to be remarkably resilient. In his view, the outlook was ‘bleak’. It was difficult to see how the Front could win, but it was still possible they could. As for the Sultan’s forces, his view was that it was difficult to see how they could lose, but that was also possible. Everything hung in the balance.
The Front had pretty much reached the same conclusion and the operation being run by Muhammed Talib was a game-changing move. It was brilliant, and if they could now pull it off it would deliver them victory.
The problem for the government forces was that though they guessed that whatever Talib was planning was big, they still had no idea what it was.
For the next five months the team worked night and day, tracking Talib, slowly piecing together a three-dimensional matrix of his accomplices. It soon became clear that this was no small operation by the rebels. As the circle of conspirators widened, the intelligence officers watched in horror as they saw that it reached right into the heart of the Omani war machine. By early December they had identified forty conspirators all in on the plot. These included the driver, the bearer and the military assistant to Colonel Dennison, the head of the Sultan’s intelligence service. They also suspected that the plot went far wider. The big fear was just how deep into the Sultan’s intelligence machine the rebels had burrowed.
By early December, the Intelligence Corps knew from the vast numbers of people involved that the Front were planning something huge. Yet they still had no idea what they were all plotting to do. But then, in late December, with just a few days to spare, they finally put the last piece in place.
The Front always liked special days and anniversaries and their target date was 25 December, Christmas Day, 1972.
Their plan was to take out the entire British and intelligence operation in Muscat and assassinate the Sultan. They had suffered a major reverse six months earlier at Mirbat and they now desperately needed a breakthrough. The plan had the same swagger and audacity as the attack on Mirbat, a staggering coup de main which could deliver victory in the war. It was really simple. The Sultan was the key to the war effort. Without him, there would be no one with the spine or the political will to successfully prosecute the war.
Amazing
ly Talib never realised that he was the subject of the single biggest counter-intelligence operation going on at that time anywhere in the Middle East.
The JASON team were determined there would be no last-minute hitches. It was now all in the planning. A simple three-stage implementation: arrests, detention, interrogation – and then, almost certainly, many more arrests. An arrest plan was put in place and arrangements were made for forty prisoners.
Given the fluid loyalties of the locals, the arrest parties were selected from Baluchi tribesmen in the Omani Army, contract soldiers not conflicted by family or tribal ties. Their loyalty was to the Sultan and the Sultan alone.
In preparation for the mass interrogation, the British built a holding camp with an interrogation facility at the end of the Bait al Falaj airstrip. They had no cells so they commandeered forty new Land Rovers to house the prisoners. A platoon of soldiers from the Omani Guard was drafted in to provide twenty-four guards.
Three Arabic-speaking linguists, all sergeants in the Intelligence Corps, were moved to Muscat, along with a Captain, Salim Ghazali from Omani intelligence.
And then the Baluchis struck, lifting forty members of the rebels, including every single member of Colonel Dennison’s staff. They got all the key plotters but one. The leader of this attempted coup de main was Zaher Ali, who escaped only to die four years later at a vehicle check point in Northern Oman, when the war was officially over.
The first – and biggest – breakthrough in the interrogations was the discovery of a stash of weapons: ten tons of AK-47 assault rifles, SKS Russian-built semi-automatic carbines, 60mm mortars, anti-personnel and anti-tank mines, slabbed plastic explosives and detonators, as well as thousands of rounds of ammunition for all weapons.
For the Sultan’s forces the capture of this huge arms cache was a propaganda coup of major proportions. Photographs were taken of the weapons and the pictures were dropped from planes and sprayed around the djebel. It was a visceral reaffirmation of the message defined by the PsyOps team right at the beginning of the war: ‘Don’t fuck with us! You will lose!’