SAS Operation Storm

by Roger Cole

  This message to the rebels, their supporters and the undecided was instant and slammed in their face. The Front’s plans for a military takeover were in ruins. As a revolutionary army, they were next to useless, and the wise would therefore join the Sultan’s forces and be in the inevitable victory train when it rolled across the djebel.

  Each day, the detainees were taken from their Land Rovers and questioned further. Inevitably, more names came up as the interrogators moved into the outer reaches of the matrix. They took over a nearby building and the less dangerous prisoners were decanted there.

  But then they discovered something terrifying. They had not scooped up all the weapons. Somewhere near Muscat were Czech-made Skorpion machine pistols, each one capable of firing 1,000 rounds a minute. These weapons would escalate the war to a whole new level. Small and relatively easy to conceal, they were the perfect weapon for an assassination team. With just one of these pistols, a determined assassin could take out the Sultan and tilt the war back in the Front’s favour.

  It was now a race to find them and take them out of the game before any soldiers on the government side were slaughtered. They only had one lead. One of the prisoners alleged that one of the officers from the Sultan’s Armed Forces knew where they were hidden. There was no appetite for torture among the British intelligence officers. They were all experienced interrogators and, as such, highly doubtful about its use, believing it to be largely ineffective and certainly counterproductive in a civil war. This war was all about hearts and minds, and the reputation the British had among the Omanis was tough but fair, while the Communists were increasingly seen as brutal and flaky. But the big worry was that these guns were out there and there was no time to waste, so they used stress positions to try and break the prisoner’s resolve.

  Being kept in one uncomfortable position is excruciating and many crack under the pain. However, this officer did not crack and did not reveal the hiding place, so they tried Plan B. The weather was miserable so they left him outside in the driving rain and the cold to see if that would break him. All that happened was that he moaned and complained until one of the Baluchi guards got fed up and hit him with his rifle butt. The British officers were horrified and immediately brought the prisoner in to the administrative tent, where he was dried out and given a restorative cup of tea. There was nothing broken so they put him back in a Land Rover to dry out.

  He never talked and the interrogators did not discover whether a consignment of Skorpion machine pistols had ever made their way to Oman.

  The interrogators had better luck elsewhere, continually discovering more arms dumps. Many of the weapons were old and in poor condition, but that did not matter. The propaganda value was immense. The relentless drip, drip, drip of more bad news for the Front sapped morale up on the djebel.

  Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics suddenly kicked in. To each reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction. As morale began to collapse among the Front, so it rose commensurately in Muscat, where many British officers and troops now believed that they were close to tipping the war inexorably in their favour. As well as knowing they were hurting the enemy, there were moments of great humour and low farce. From the interrogations came one of those stories that goes round the mess, is endlessly repeated and provides a great tonic for men a long way from home.

  One detainee gave his interrogators the details of a large cache of arms, but when the British arrived they found other weapons there as well. When they told him, he was outraged, furious that someone else was trespassing on his property.

  Above all, the Sultan’s forces ran Dhofar as a war of attrition, and slowly squeezed the life out of the rebels. By late 1972, the Sultan’s Armed Forces had started to stem the flow of weapons coming in from Yemen but many were still getting through.

  The big questions for the Intelligence Corps interrogators were how, when and where? They now had well over 100 members of the Front under interrogation. All those being interrogated knew the Sultan was an enthusiastic advocate of firing squads and so all but the hardliners wanted to deal. The British kept probing and eventually one of the plotters revealed that the Front were using an ocean-going dhow called the Al Muwaafaq. Along with dozens of other dhows, it tracked up and down the coast, carrying the normal range of cargo. It also carried weapons from the Yemeni port of Al Ghaidah up the coast to re-supply the rebels. The Intelligence Corps interrogators immediately tipped off the Sultan’s Navy, who went to look for it. The initial intelligence suggested it was anchored off Ras Al Hadd, but once again the rebels were out of luck. The dhow was an easy target, quietly anchored with the crew onshore, so they seized the boat without a struggle.

  In the great tradition of Indian Ocean piracy, the Sultan’s Navy then converted the dhow for their own use. They fitted it out with MG machine-guns, awesome pieces of kit first designed by the Nazis, and also supplied rifles to the new crew so they could take the naval war to the Front.

  The Front High Command was now on the back foot and did what they had always done before. They raised the stakes. They had no choice.

  The year 1972 had started so well for the Front. The Nationalist and Communist wings of the revolt had united and started to fight alongside each other, but then it had started to unravel. They had hoped to seize Habrut, a major SAF fort on the border with Yemen. Even with the help of regular troops from the Yemeni Army, the rebels had been hammered. Instead of seizing the town and establishing a base inside Dhofar, they had not been able to stop Strikemasters laying a 540-pound bomb up against the wall of their own fort and reducing it to dust and rubble. In the battle for Habrut, their commander for the western region was killed, his deputy having already defected a few days earlier.

  Less than a month later, in July, they had tried to seize Mirbat, raise the flag and then march west against the capital, Salalah. The plan was for the Mirbat victors to march west and meet the mass of the rebel forces, holed up over the border in Yemen, who would then surge east. Together they would form a pincer and seize the capital, Salalah – and then the country would be theirs. This would have brought them close to endgame in the war.

  Instead, they had lost around 200 of their best soldiers and now their next great operation, to wipe out the Sultan and his entire intelligence apparatus, was also in tatters.

  Desperate measures for desperate times were needed.

  The Communists posted a reward of 1,000 rials on the head of any Intelligence Corps officer dead or alive – a substantial amount, as any Dhofari who surrendered only got 150 rials, and that included the money for the weapon he surrendered.

  If the ploy had been successful, this would have been a disaster for the British. The involvement of the SAS in the war, for example, was a closely guarded secret. Although there were some press leaks during the war, these were downplayed when they were described as part of the team helping train the Sultan’s forces. The Intelligence Corps was also shrouded in even greater secrecy. Few knew who they were, what they were doing or where they were stationed.

  Many of the Intelligence Corps soldiers had been on previous TOP SECRET British Cold War operations all over the world, mostly directed against the Soviets. If the Front had managed to catch one of them, the intelligence officer would have been given a one-way ticket on an early flight out of Yemen. First stop would have been a KGB interrogation centre, somewhere deep in the Soviet Union. Russian techniques were crude but effective. His brain would have been emptied of everything he knew and, if he had ever emerged, he would never have been the same again.

  Despite the reward on their heads, the interrogators continued, delving ever deeper into what was now a wide-ranging conspiracy. They quickly discovered that they were the next target for the rebels, who were now planning a major attack on the airstrip to free their captured comrades.

  The British and Omani armies moved very quickly. They built a holding facility on the parade ground of a new purpose-built fort, just over ninety miles away down the coast, outs
ide the port of Sur. They moved the prisoners and then disappeared back into the shadows.

  Throughout the war, the Sultan was ruthless and single-minded. The key test for him now was balancing local traditions with more modern liberal thinking. He needed to be tough but merciful, but assassination was up close and far too personal for the Sultan.

  It was time for him to reinforce some very clear messages out on the djebel.

  All the accused were put on trial for treason and other offences. Twenty of those closest to the Sultan, those working in the government or serving in the Armed Forces, received the death penalty and this was clearly announced. This was then commuted to life imprisonment for half of them.

  One of the plotters was already in prison when he was found guilty. The judges added another sentence to his existing one, but as he was led away he screamed that he would come back and get them as soon as he was released. The judges immediately had him hauled back in to the dock and changed his sentence to the death penalty, which the Sultan subsequently commuted to life imprisonment.

  The firing squads that followed were grisly affairs. The prisoners were tied and masked in the great tradition. A three-man firing squad was set up with 7.62 FN rifles, some hundred yards away from the prisoners. The officer shouted, ‘Ready, aim, fire.’

  The men in the firing squad all closed their eyes, pulled their triggers, fired and missed.

  The officer in charge had to move them ever closer but even when they were only ten yards away they still refused to shoot to kill. By this time the victims were in turmoil, constantly hearing bullets whistle past them while they were tethered and helpless. Once again in this war, blood, land, family and tribe transcended everything else.

  The soldiers in the firing squad knew that when the war was over, life on the djebel would return to the norms set over the previous 2,000 years. In reality, that meant that all those who took part, whether they fired the fatal bullet or not, would be the subject of a vendetta by the victim’s family. In the end, the officers had to carry out the executions.

  As well as specific intelligence about the assassination plot, the interrogators also learned something that was bad news for the Sultan. Despite the impact of two years of reforms, the opposition to his rule was wide-ranging. The detainees came from every area of Omani society and reflected the hardcore, long-term dissent in the country. Clearly, the hearts and minds campaign needed to be stepped up. That meant more civil aid programmes, schools, roads, clinics and all the other amenities of modern life.

  Diagnosing the problem was one thing. Fixing it was something else. The war was costing half the country’s total income and the Sultan was running out of money.

  But then he got a huge boost. Once the Sultan began to take the fight to the Communists in Yemen, and once they thought they’d be backing a winner, three other Middle East countries all delivered serious support. Jordan sent engineers to build roads and help the civil development programme, followed by heavy artillery pieces, troops and then thirty-five Hawker Hunter jets in 1975. The Saudis gave the Sultan guns, mortars and ammunition and started to negotiate with Yemen, finally agreeing the ceasefire in 1976. The biggest donor was the Shah of Iran, who suddenly showered the young Sultan with enormous amounts of money, men and materials. In August 1972, C-130 Hercules transport planes made sixty trips delivering supplies. Three Augusta Bell 205 helicopters with crews arrived, followed by another six a year later.

  After Mirbat, the insurgents were in retreat. The war changed substantially. What had been a guerrilla conflict was now all about numbers. The Sultan’s plan was to continually cut off the enemy supply lines and slowly push them back to Yemen. As the Sultan’s forces cleared the rebels out of each tribal area they needed large numbers of soldiers to hold each position. It was now all about boots in the ground, increasing the civil development programmes and protecting what they had.

  The Iranian brigades arrived in 1974, a huge political statement across the Middle East. Their flight crews and the soldiers were American-trained. They looked good in their neatly pressed uniforms and shiny new weapons, and as they arrived with many of the accoutrements of modern life, like fridges, they were instantly popular.

  It was all show. In reality, they were unfit, undisciplined and spectacularly incompetent. In their first week, the Dhofar Brigade took them on a short night march to give them a flavour of what life was like on the djebel. In short order, they were stretched out further than the eye could see, seriously out of breath and unwilling to walk any distance at all. At the slightest noise or disturbance they would drop to their knees and shoot randomly. This was a source of amusement to the firqat and the Omani forces who wondered whether they would kill more of each other than the enemy. But the firqat soon became very wary of them, as returning at dusk from patrol to a camp guarded by Iranians was often the most dangerous thing they would do.

  But the important thing was that they were there. The PFLOAG was in retreat. It was now all about numbers and the mathematics were against the Front.

  From the beginning of 1973, Dhofar became a much more traditional war. It was now about bulk. The SAF slowly pushed the Front all the way back to Yemen, the firqat and the Iranian troops then successfully held the ground that had been taken.

  After Mirbat, the Front largely retreated from the east of Dhofar. The incoming tour of G Squadron had a very quiet time, and even though they went out looking for contacts, these were thin on the ground.

  As in every war, there is always a back channel of negotiations, and after 1973 the Sultan and his closest intelligence officers were involved in some secret and highly effective operations to capture some of the Front leaders. These consisted of secret flights to remote locations in the north Yemeni desert. On one trip, the Sultan’s men took some wooden boxes of gold and returned with some very unwilling prisoners. In another, they paid money to buy back some Omani soldiers who had been captured. A BAC-111 plane was sent to Yemen to collect them, returning with bleeding men in shackles. Evidently the prisoners had been kept in very poor conditions.

  It was a smart move by the Sultan, as it showed that he did genuinely care about his men.

  Over the next three years, the Sultan’s Armed Forces, along with the SAS and the firqat, fought a brilliant campaign. They cut off the Front’s supply lines from Yemen, all the time driving them back. There was one last major battle at Shershitti Caves, where, in the words of one of the SAS officers involved, ‘they gave us a right fucking spanking,’ but this was the last spasm of active rebellion and after that it was largely over.

  At his birthday party celebrations on 18 November 1975, the Sultan of Oman asked Brigadier John Akehurst, the commander of the Dhofar Brigade, ‘How is the war going?’

  ‘I reckon you’ve won it,’ replied the Brigadier.

  Two weeks later, on 1 December, the Omani government forces seized Dalkut, the last village occupied by the rebels. Two days later, Akehurst told a very happy Sultan, ‘Your Majesty, the war is over.’

  The Sultan and his British advisors then began building the peace. They started by bringing the best and the brightest over from the Front. One key advisor and one government minister had both fought at Mirbat, but by 1975 that all seemed a long time ago.

  After winning the victory, the Omani government pulled off the even harder trick of delivering a secure and enduring peace.

  Since 1976, Oman, the country which controls access to the Straits of Hormuz through which over half the oil flows from the Middle East to the rest of the world, has been stable, increasingly prosperous and, for a Middle East country, remarkably progressive. Without this victory in Dhofar, the world we have all lived in since the mid 1970s would have been a much more dangerous place.

  24

  Compare the Mirbat . . .

  Back in England, the most significant battle of the post-war years passed by unnoticed and virtually unreported by the media. Few in Britain had ever heard of Dhofar and even the coup d’état itself only
attracted passing interest.

  A few specialist traders and scholars were aware of Oman as the world’s major source of frankincense, but even fewer people knew about the war. Only a tiny number of politicians, civil servants and diplomats were in the loop. This was the most secret of secret wars. The only people watching were the world’s intelligence services, who knew that whoever won in Oman would then be a long way to winning the Cold War.

  The general public were not the only people to ignore the event. The then Colonel in charge of the SAS, Peter de la Billière, wrote two secret reports. He gave the men at Mirbat limp praise, saying ‘they did what was expected of them,’ but never spoke to any of them to congratulate them on their achievements that day. He condemned the local gendarmerie, accusing them of cowardice. This was deeply unfair. In all, five out of the twelve gendarmes were killed. Three survived the battle and four were trapped in their rooms. Had they left and tried to join the battle, they would have died in minutes. As one SAS survivor says now, ‘I would have done the same as they did. Anything else would have been suicide.’

  Sekonaia Takavesi and Tommy Tobin were taken to a British Army hospital in Cyprus, where they were just two severely wounded casualties in a sealed-off ward on the top floor. They were all labelled RTAs – road traffic accidents. The irony was not lost on anyone. Dhofar was a country with few cars and only a few miles of roads, but to look at the casualty ward a casual passerby would conclude that those roads were the most dangerous on the planet.

  Tak survived, but Tommy Tobin died three months later from a punctured lung caused by a shard of tooth he swallowed during the battle.