SAS Operation Storm

by Roger Cole

  The war started well with the SAS Commander Johnny Watts setting the strategy. He was one of the heroes of the Djebel Akhdar, a man who knew and loved Oman. In 1959, as a young Major, Watts led his men in one of the great SAS operations, climbing 8,000 feet up the Djebel Akhdar to remove a Saudi-backed force trying to depose the then Sultan of Oman. It was one of the greatest military operations in military history, even more remarkable for Johnny Watts, as he had malaria at the time.

  Fast-forward just over a decade, and when he returned to Oman it was as the Colonel in charge of the whole SAS. He took the whole hearts and minds strategy, which had worked well across South-East Asia, and adapted it for Dhofar. Most importantly, he took the war to the insurgents with a ferocity they had never experienced before. Where the Sultan’s forces had previously engaged with them and then gone home after twenty-four hours, he drove hard and deep into their territory, establishing SAS bases across the djebel, from which they never retreated.

  Johnny Watts set the tone right from the start when he received a cable from the MOD in London reminding him that his orders were strict. His men were there on a limited mission – to train local Omani soldiers and nothing more. The cable reminded him that the SAS was in Oman as the BATT, the British Army Training Team. Under no circumstances were his men to fight. As soon as he finished reading it, he immediately started whooping and doing a war dance round the Ops room. Within days the SAS were up on the djebel. Together with some Baluchi troops and firqat they marched for eight hours up the wadis, climbing up 5,000 feet along goat tracks to establish their first position. Having dug out a base on the djebel, the SAS never once stepped backwards. Unsurprisingly, Brigadier John Graham described Johnny Watts as ‘a great, tough little warrior’ in his diary. From day one, he and his team started to engage with the rebels, usually half a dozen contacts a day, shooting and killing the enemy.

  As well as the SAS soldiers who first arrived in 1970, there was a small handful of soldiers from the Intelligence Corps, a regiment even more secretive than the SAS. The Intelligence Corps have a long history of fighting in the Middle East. They speak the languages and understand the culture. Their role was both analytical and offensive. They debriefed the SEPs, put together working maps of the battlefields and took the propaganda war to the insurgents. At the beginning of the conflict, the insurgents had command of the airwaves, through Radio Aden, which kept up a daily diatribe against the Sultan, condemning his rule. The propaganda worked because it matched the reality of people’s everyday lives. Food was short, babies were dying and all the Djebalis knew that their lives had not improved in living memory. The insurgents played up the poverty of the people, comparing it to the sybaritic and spoiled life of the Sultan, something they could check out for themselves. The Intelligence Corps PsyOps machine went to war, using the Sultan effectively.

  He had three messages for his people. He was a devout Muslim in the great Omani tradition so they did not need to give up their tribal loyalties or their religion. The second message was that reform was happening and that he asked for their patience – a touch of humility that helped endear him to his people.

  His third message was tough love.

  On 3 April 1971, the Sultan gave a speech on Radio Dhofar. It was a turning point in the propaganda war.

  He pointed out that when he came to power there were only three primary schools in the country with less than 900 pupils. Now there were 7,000 young Dhofari children in school. He announced plans to open primary and secondary schools for girls as well. And that was just part of the good news.

  But the rest of his message was stark. There would be no homeland, no security, no stability and no prestige without an army. He pointed out that the army was largely non-Omani and encouraged young men to join up and fight for their country.

  The Sultan’s forces handed out free radios but the Communists smashed them. One of the SAS soldiers came up with a very canny solution. They sold the radios cheaply in the souk. Having paid for them, there was no way the Dhofaris were going to give up what were now their prized possessions.

  The Intelligence Corps put together a detailed description of the insurgency command structure. Once they had the names of their top commanders they put out rewards of 10,000 rials on some and 5,000 rials for others. This was a wonderfully divisive piece of psychology – with those who were only worth 5,000 rials furious that they did not command a higher reward.

  It worked.

  This was the Wild West. There were no rules of engagement and the reward posters were clear. All that was wanted was the rebels’ capture, dead or alive. The commander of B Company of the Dhofar Brigade, Angus Ramsey from the Royal Highland Fusiliers, captured one of them. He then split the money equally round his company, which worked out at £150 for each of his men. The SAS men at the time were on £25 a week, so this was a huge sum of money for each of his men and an inspired piece of leadership.

  Word travelled fast across the djebel, and within a year at least two senior insurgents were dead and two had come across, both of them accomplished army commanders who then took the fight back to their former comrades.

  The Omani/British forces kept their campaign and their soldiers fresh, using the roulement system of troop rotation. The SAS fought at squadron strength of around seventy men and they did four-month tours before returning to the UK. Many SAS soldiers therefore completed at least three tours. They returned with experience and knowledge of the country, but revitalised by their time away. The Sultan’s forces did nine month tours before going up to Northern Oman for some R&R – rest and recreation.

  The Front – in all its various guises – had no such breaks. They took heavy casualties in the first year of the war, on one estimate losing ten soldiers for every one on the government side. It took its toll and many SEPs came over, tired, hungry, disillusioned and battle weary.

  Above all, this was a young man’s war. Most of the British and contract soldiers were in their mid-twenties, a generation brought up on adrenaline-fuelled comics like the Eagle, with its boyhood adventures of great derring-do. Once in Oman they made their own culture, their own esprit de corps, ignoring the instructions from Whitehall.

  Though this was a young man’s war, there were still culture clashes between the old guard, who expected British soldiers to be short haired, neat and tidy, and the newer recruits. But the daily reality of life in Dhofar was that many SAS soldiers and British officers in the Sultan’s Armed Forces grew great beards and shoulder-length hair.

  In the week before the battle of Mirbat, the temperature at army headquarters in Salalah was 113 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. In the week after, it was 132 degrees in the shade at Khasab, in Northern Oman. Only the toughest fight in these conditions.

  Despite the heat, coiffure standards still mattered to some. Some complained to Brigadier Graham that the SAS ‘do an admirable job in the field but in dress and behaviour they act as though they are above all local rules and codes of conduct.’ This was noted and it was agreed that it be brought up with the SAS Commanding Officer, Johnny Watts.

  For the gripers, hope must have trumped reason. Watts was notoriously scruffy, one of the scruffiest officers in the British Army. The idea that he would admonish his men for their hair and clothes was ridiculous. Besides which, Watts knew something they did not. Many of the SAS in Dhofar would soon be touring Northern Ireland. Having long hair and a beard meant his men would blend in to the 1970s Belfast scene, which could mean the difference between life and death.

  The pilots – many on secondment from the RAF, with their numbers supplemented by contractors – joined in with gusto. The RAF rule book, which has traditionally irritated soldiers, was thrown away. The pilots met the same soldiers day after day and they all drank together in the evening. If soldiers had a few days off they would often spend it in the RAF bar, which was much better equipped for serious drinking. Many pilots did what otherwise would be unthinkable and spent the night on the djebel with the soldiers in
order to understand what was actually involved.

  Right at the start of the war, the pilots made an astonishing commitment, promising to be airborne in seven minutes, and they nearly always bettered their target. This meant that the twenty minute rule for casualty evacuation applied. The morale of men on the front line was high as they knew the casevac crews would fly into the middle of a firefight to rescue a downed soldier and get him onto the operating table within twenty to thirty minutes – a luxury not shared by the insurgency. Those who fought on the rebel side knew that if they were injured on the djebel the likelihood was that this was where they would die.

  The Front always tried to remove their wounded from the battlefield and recover their dead to give them a proper burial, though this was not always possible as their basic attack strategy was hit and run. While every SAS soldier had received quite sophisticated medical training and carried a reasonably well-equipped medical pack, the same was not true of the Front.

  The doctors in the FST at Salalah recovered a typical pack in 1972. Its basicness shocked them. The pack contained a dirty cloth with some tea; a clear polythene bag; a small bottle of capsules; a vial like those used to carry penicillin; a couple of unlabelled ampoules of drugs; some dirty cotton wool, which would do more harm than good; a British first field dressing, which had probably been recycled from Aden; and an unsterile syringe, manufactured in Lebanon.

  While the Sultan’s forces had a full field surgical team at Salalah, with operating tables and a fast delivery service by casevac helicopter, the Front were on foot. If a soldier could survive their wounds, the best they could hope for was a visit from a ‘doctor’ – in reality, these were often no more than medical orderlies, who wandered round the djebel on short tours of two or three months at a time, carrying few medical skills and even fewer supplies.

  The mortality rates for injured soldiers fighting for the Sultan who got to the FST were less than five per cent. In contrast, the survival rates for the rebels injured on the djebel were probably about the same. At the time, all the soldiers fighting for the Front knew was that the vast majority of their wounded died, whereas most soldiers fighting for the Sultan lived. Despite all the protestations from their commanders, when it came to it, the British cared more for their soldiers than the PFLOAG did. The rebels had better weapons, but they did not have planes or helicopters and their medical care was – quite literally – not a patch on that provided by the Sultan.

  This was a civil war. Something the British understood and worked with. There was constant contact between the firqat and soldiers fighting for the Front. They often came from the same tribe, even the same family. This intimacy led to many surreal incidents, but the British and the local Omanis they fought alongside understood this and managed it where they could.

  On one occasion, Lofty Wiseman, the B Squadron SQMS, had to watch as his collection of water tins was stolen and given to the other side. Water re-supply was crucial, and for every SQMS clean containers, often big cans, were priceless. After one trip to White City, Lofty came back out to the airstrip to return to Um-el-Ghawarif to discover that exactly half his cans had been stolen and were disappearing over the horizon on the backs of donkeys. When he remonstrated with the firqat who was supposed to be guarding them, he was told that the other side had run out so it was only fair that they were shared.

  From day one of the war, the SAS drove the hearts and minds strategy. When the BATT teams opened their first clinics, they met the local competition – bush doctors who made primitive medicines out of whatever plants were available locally. These, and the use of a branding iron, were the main sources of medical help. As soon as survival rates went up, the news spread across the djebel. The pilots, as much as anyone, understood the importance of the whole hearts and minds push. In five years of flying missions almost every day, there was not a single example of civilians ever being strafed or bombed – a huge contrast to Iraq and Afghanistan where such errors were routine. What makes this even more impressive was that the pilots flew with rudimentary instruments compared to pilots flying now.

  From the start, the Omani forces and their British advisors had a clear and coherent plan.

  Stage one. Hit the insurgents hard and establish bases all the way across the djebel. In modern military parlance these are called lily pads, bases from which soldiers can operate. Crucial to Watts’ thinking was an assessment of the shaky loyalty of the bedu. The SAS believed that if they could establish bases across the djebel, then one in two locals would defect and come across to the Sultan’s side. It was a pretty good prediction of what actually happened.

  Stage two. Build defensive lines from north to south across the djebel to limit the rebels’ movements. Within months of the start of the war, the government forces began to restrict the supply of arms, men and most importantly food, and slowly squeezed the life out of the enemy. The tactic of food deprivation was brutal, ruthless and very effective. From 1971, the SAF and the SAS literally put the bite on the insurgents. As food became scarcer, the Front had to rely on the generosity of the local tribes. In places where the locals were not sympathetic to their cause, they stole food from people who were already hungry, something which made them deeply unpopular. Once they had stolen food from a tribe, they could never operate in that area ever again.

  Throughout the war, Omani and British forces were consistent in their thinking, where the insurgents were conflicted and argued constantly amongst themselves. As the war developed, the insurgents were forced on to the back foot and had to change their strategy and tactics to meet the changing circumstances. They had no alternative. The SAS and the SAF never allowed them on to the front foot.

  With each reverse the Front argued increasingly amongst themselves. Where the Omanis and the British were united, the insurgents were split. Right from the start, they were divided between the Nationalists and the Communists, the Muslims and the Communists, and the Nationalists (‘Free Oman!’) and the Internationalists (‘Free the Gulf!’). Add to that the undercurrent of two millennia of conflicts between Oman’s 450 tribes, and the insurgency cocktail was always going to be combustible.

  Where the Omani government forces got it generally right, the Front got it wrong. The Communists gave out copies of the Little Red Book, but forgot the teachings of Mao Tse Tung. Rather than be a genuinely revolutionary force, fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with the people, they tried to impose their will on them. They coerced rather than inspired the local people. They made one huge error of judgement, a mistake that was highly corrosive to their cause. They assumed that because the tribes were opposed to the Sultan, they were in favour of communism. In reality, many Djebalis were deeply conservative and had no sense of the collective beyond their family and tribe. They fought for blood and their tribal heartland, not ideology.

  This was confirmed by one SEP, Ahmed Said Deblaan Bait Masheni, who came over to the government side in August 1972. He was described as ‘very intelligent, quick-witted and amusing’ by one of the British officers who handled him. The Front had spotted him as a man of talent and he was scooped up and taken to the People’s Anti-Imperialist School in Beijing, where they tried to fill his head with the Thoughts of Chairman Mao and taught him some rudimentary military tactics. Not that the Djebalis needed much help in that regard. In fact, they were natural warriors who had been fighting enemy tribes, using ambush and hit and run tactics for centuries.

  For as long as anyone could remember, the Djebalis had lived on very little, and so humour was a vital part of the contracts of everyday living. But while laughing and joking about was key to life on the djebel, it was in very short supply in Beijing. Ahmed was already doubtful about them before he left, and then day after day of humourless propaganda killed his enthusiasm for the communist cause.

  When he returned home, Ahmed scooped up everything the Chinese had given him and put them all in one of the plastic shoulder bags that airlines used to give out as part of their brand marketing. Here were his course pr
ogrammes, lecture notes, range tables for the Chinese weapons they used and the souvenirs his guides gave him when they visited communist shrines and showpiece developments. The Chinese were brilliant at propaganda and every place he visited his hosts gave him bright, exotic-looking stamps, almost dayglo in their intensity, where the predominant colour was pillar-box crimson. The Chinese also gave him many copies of Mao’s Little Red Book, translated into Arabic. As the SAS soldiers examined the dead after Mirbat, they found copies of Mao’s thoughts on the bodies, maxims transplanted from one struggle to another but, in the end, just clichés which sent young men to their deaths when a negotiated settlement was possible.

  With his airline bag over one shoulder and his gun over the other, held by the barrel in true firqat style, Ahmed Said Deblaan Bait Masheni set off early one morning from the Eastern Area and walked in. If the British had any doubts about where he had been he showed them his course photograph. It was one of those pictures taken at military courses all over the world, with the course members and their instructors all looking attentively towards camera. The British interrogated him at length before he joined the firqat, where he became one of the very best of the irregulars. He was shot in the shoulder during a skirmish against the men he had previously fought alongside, but survived and returned to fight alongside the SAS and the Sultan’s forces.

  When he was interrogated, Ahmed provided little of immediate value in terms of understanding the Front’s daily tactics, but the background he provided was immensely useful, as it confirmed the fault lines in the Front. These were the ones which had divided the Djebalis since the middle 1960s. There was a crevasse between the nationalist and essentially Islamic Djebalis and those who had embraced the internationalist firebrand Marxism, which had intoxicated so many young Yemenis next door.