Heat

by Ranulph Fiennes

  The Sultan’s Army attacked and routed the forces of Imam Ghalib. Both Ghalib and Suleiman yielded and retired to their villages, but Talib escaped to Saudi Arabia.

  The Sultan left his Salalah palace with a small convoy and drove 900 kilometres to Nizwa to accept the rebels’ surrender and to abolish the ever troublesome office of the Imamate. Satisfied, he then headed back to Salalah.

  In Saudi Arabia, Talib trained an army of Omani expatriates and in 1957 he re-entered Oman, reinstated his brother Ghalib as Imam and was joined by Suleiman, which meant rebellion by all the tribes of the Green Mountain.

  The Sultan’s Army, consisting of only six hundred men in total and led by its British officers and by Tariq, the Sultan’s half-brother, set out to deal with the problem. They were ambushed and only made it back to Muscat with heavy casualties.

  The Sultan used the long-standing Anglo-Omani Treaty to appeal for military assistance, and he received instant help in the form of Shackleton bombers from Aden to strike rebel targets on the plateau of the Green Mountain plus units of the Trucial Oman Scouts (formerly the TOL) and 300 infantry soldiers from the British Army.

  This was a risky action, being highly provocative to the Soviet Union’s regional interests and those of the powerful coalition of Egypt, Syria and the Yemen. These dangers were offset by Britain’s need to retain Sultanate friendship, RAF Masirah facilities and oil prospecting favours.

  Venom fighters from Sharjah took over from the ancient Shackletons and strafed the Imam’s great fortress in Nizwa, but even their rockets did little damage to the solid rock walls.

  Another problem for the pilots was that the Imam’s flag, which flew on many rebel buildings and hideouts, was all white, and this often delayed or even prevented attacks since white flags were internationally accepted as indicating surrender.

  The combined units of the Trucial Scouts, the British and Tariq’s Muscat force eventually retook Nizwa and the Akhdar foothills, but the rebels held the seemingly impregnable heights of the mountain itself. Attempts to ascend by any of the known routes were easily thwarted by Imamate machine gun nests. Saudi Arabia dropped arms and supplies to the rebels, as well as landmines to lay all over Oman. Over 150 Sultanate vehicles were blown up between March and November 1958 by mines provided to the Saudis by their American allies who ignored British requests to cease the supply. The US authorities’ reply was that the mines were part of an agreed assistance programme, and how they were used was of no concern to the USA.

  Things did not look good, and when the Sultan appealed for more British support, the Foreign Office objected due to ructions at the United Nations.

  A compromise was suggested in the shape of an SAS squadron of eighty men who would be flown secretly from Malaysia to Masirah and thence to Muscat. A carefully coordinated attack in January 1959 involved a daring nine-and-a-half-hour rope ascent of a near vertical series of cliff faces by SAS soldiers, including John Cooper, at Kamah to the west of the Wadi Maydan. Only three SAS men were killed and the war was over. The SAS melted away and Sultanate troops thereafter garrisoned the high plateau.

  Securing the Akhdar ensured that, when the Dhofar rebellion began in the 1960s, supported by China and the Soviet Union, the Sultan could focus on that front without fear of serious trouble up north.

  On return to camp from the relative ‘cool’ of the high Akhdar plateau, a number of my platoon, including Abdullah and Murad, went on home leave, and John Cooper, after receiving my verbal report of our jebel patrol, suggested that I too take some time off. So I went to the coast with an officer back from Dhofar who had a girlfriend at the oil prospectors’ camp a few miles south of Muscat town.

  ‘There are plenty of spare beds there,’ he told me, ‘and the swimming is great. PDO have their own beach.’

  PDO stood for Petroleum Development Oman, a dedicated exploration arm of Shell. I packed a bag and joined my host in his Toyota pick-up.

  The PDO ‘village’ was another world. Every building was air-conditioned, the food was four star, and there was immediate access to a keyhole cove with soft sand and a beach club-hut.

  PDO secretaries in the briefest of bikinis stretched their long legs on lilos, and I recognized a tanned Briton chatting to a blonde beauty as one of the fighter pilots from Salalah.

  The swimming alone was worth the visit – although the water was on the warm side of cool and alive with tiny algae and spawn, it was nonetheless the best feeling I had experienced since arrival in Oman.

  That evening, with a brandy and ginger on a cool leather sofa, I read a story by a Royal Navy officer, Captain Loch, about life in the 1820s on a pirate-hunting ship along the Omani Coast.

  ‘There are sharks, stinging rays, saw fish and poisonous jellyfish,’ the captain wrote. ‘Also sea snakes which appear, when swimming, to be from 12 to 16 feet long, and are venomous.’ According to Loch, ‘The wind was as if it had passed through an oven, causing inordinate thirst and, as the crew were on an allowance of water, it created a most uncomfortable situation.’

  In mid July, Loch noted, ‘The weather at Muscat was at its worst, the temperature at sunrise being 101°. The south-east wind, known as the “Ghoos”, was blowing which caused a distressingly suffocated feeling.’ Loch expressed great delight when his vessel, the Eden, finally left Muscat, ‘to the inexpressible joy of all on board, for the weather had been more oppressively sultry than can be conceived, never at the coolest time of day under 96° in the shade’.

  ‘At Muscat,’ he wrote, ‘unlike other Gulf ports, there is no cool season. The climate combined with the mental depression caused by the huge, forbidding black mountains which encircle the town, has taken toll of many British lives.’ And again: ‘Judge of our surprise when, on immersing ourselves in the sea, we found the water much hotter than the atmosphere. In hot weather the sea in the Gulf near the shore often reaches a temperature of 90° Fahrenheit.’

  Bored with the total lack of action at the oil camp, I put on my coolest civilian shirt and slacks and ambled very slowly along the coastal road to Muscat soon after breakfast. The whole town was walled off with three main gates as entry points, all closed three hours after sunset. After that time nobody could walk about the town without a lighted lamp, apparently due to a street murder back in 1948.

  The town squats in as claustrophobic a setting as can be imagined, in a tiny cliff-locked bay with no visible landward gap and where the black mountains fall straight down into the sea. In fact, the name ‘Muscat’ means ‘the place of falling’. To emphasize the prison-like character of the bay, the entire harbour is dominated by two dark wizards’ castles which overlook every last nook and cranny in the town. These castles were built in 1588 by the most brutal of all Muscat’s many evil oppressors down the centuries, its Portuguese rulers.

  The larger of these two forts, named Mirani, perched on a steep crag, was clearly built to command the town as well as to protect it, and the lesser fort, Jelali, was still being used as the town’s prison. Iron and brass cannon, still in ceremonial use, nosed from the castles’ parapets dating from Portuguese days.

  From a smelly dockside littered with baskets full of sardines, I looked across the brilliant glare of Muscat Bay, past the drooping flags of the beachfront British consulate and US embassy, to a sloping grey rock face emerging from the far side of Muscat Harbour like some huge beached whale on which were painted the names of ships, some new and legible, others mere faded scribbles. I was told that it was customary for the crews of ships moored in the bay to produce these graffiti paintings, and one of the nineteenth-century artists was a young midshipman named Horatio Nelson.

  In a nearby market I searched for a colourful seashell for Ginny who had a collection, being herself a keen scuba diver, and I was entertained by the Baluchi shopkeeper who waved his arms around his remarkable shell collection and in the direction of the bay.

  All Oman, he told me, once lay under the Indian Ocean and the black rocks of the mountains all about us resulted
from great submarine volcanic eruptions which in time, running north and west from Ras al Hadd at the very toe of south-east Arabia, had burst out of the sea to form Oman. Burning sun and violent storms had sculpted the final touches, the crown of Oman being the 10,000-foot-high Jebel Shams (Mountain of the Sun) up in the Akhdar.

  ‘I often think of this when I polish my shells,’ said the shopkeeper as I paid him. ‘God is indeed great.’

  On leaving his shop, clutching my shells, I noticed an electric fan on a table in the middle of the room, although clearly the shop had no electricity. It seemed just a case of wishful thinking.

  Back then, and ever more so as Western advertising has crept over the globe, families in hot countries dreamed of an air conditioner or at least a fan, rating these items high on their must-have list. A potent form of status was, and still is, whether or not you can afford to keep cool.

  I remembered the words of an old military friend, Colonel Colin ‘Mad Mitch’ Mitchell, from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders who told me that there was one place even more hell-like than Muscat in terms of its climate, and that was the town of Aden where he had been stationed shortly before the British withdrew from the Yemen.

  With their town built inside and spilling over from the crater of an extinct volcano on the south-western tip of Arabia, the mostly Arab and Somali inhabitants of Aden were experts at exerting minimal effort at all times to survive the extreme energy loss due to the intense and exhausting heat, the scorching crater sand and infinite supply of lung-burning volcanic dust that sapped their desire for any action at all.

  I needed to buy an automatic rifle and a Browning pistol in London before heading out for the war zone, and in order to find out about a permit, I went into a cool reception room at the British consulate. I was told to wait an hour and, with coffee, I buried my head in my travel companion book by Captain Loch, who had spent time in this same building 148 years previously on returning from a successful pirate-hunt in 1820 with his Royal Navy armed frigate.

  His potted history of the Gulf stressed that Oman lay at the crossroads of the Arab maritime world. Ships had to pass by Muscat en route to anywhere of significance, whether to India, Africa or into the Gulf. Omani navies had once ruled the waves from Persia to halfway down East Africa.

  They had interacted commercially with their Persian neighbours and the Turks of the Ottoman Empire for centuries before the Europeans arrived for trade.

  In 1500 the first Portuguese arrived and ruled the Gulf from Hormuz and from Muscat for 150 years. Both the Dutch and the British helped rid the Gulf of the Portuguese, but their defeat came finally at the hands of the rulers of Muscat who, in 1660, were a dynasty of the Yariba tribe from the Yemen.

  By the 1720s, due to weak Persian leaders at the time, the Imams of Oman became the maritime power in the Gulf, with trading ports and a thriving slave trade based in Zanzibar. For seven years from 1743 Persians ruled in Muscat, but they were thrown out by Ahmed bin Said, the Governor of Sohar, who then became Sultan of all Oman and founded the Al bu Said dynasty that holds power to this day.

  Joasmi pirates from the Wahiba coast infested the Gulf for many years, but in the last years of the eighteenth century, at a time of great colonial and trade competition between the Dutch, the French and the British, the Al bu Said Sultan made the first of many Treaties with Britain and its Calcutta-based East India Company. Many other Gulf rulers were to follow. For a while Britain sent political advisers to live in Muscat on the Sultan’s doorstep so as to ensure that the French were kept at bay, but their mortality rate was such (three died within a month due to the climate and disease) that they were soon withdrawn.

  In 1809 the Sultan, fed up with constant pirate raids on Omani coastal villages and valuable slave-filled vessels from Zanzibar, requested that the Royal Navy put an end to their depredations.

  Commander Loch describes one pirate hunt in 1818 when the Eden chased seven pirate ships, each towing a captured goods dhow. The pursuit, often baffled by contrary winds, took all day but, by moonlight, three dhows were taken and one pirate ship sunk.

  Mariners from the Eden captured a dozen pirates. Loch wrote: ‘They crept, knelt and prostrated themselves and showed all the extravagant misery of people who expected a most cruel and protracted death. Their own love of cruelty was such that they considered it totally out of the question that they would meet with any other treatment than that which they themselves had inflicted on the crews of the vessels they had captured – who had been most cruelly mangled and murdered as all who fell into their hands.’

  Two years later, from their pirate-hunting base in Ras al Khaimah, Loch’s ships visited the pirate nest of Kharak Island, home to the Pirate Chief Mir Mehenna, who was described as ‘distinguished through the land for his vices and cruelty’. His catalogue of evil deeds included making his servants murder his own father in his presence because the old man preferred his other son. He killed his mother because she reproached him for his crimes, and he caused a brother and sixteen relations to be assassinated in order to gain the throne. He had two of his sisters drowned because neighbouring sheikhs had asked for their hands in marriage, which he considered an insult.

  The Eden stayed for three days in Muscat Bay, during which time two of the crew died and several others went sick. Loch describes Muscat as the most unhealthy place in the Persian Gulf, ‘and no wonder, for the surrounding hills, absorbing the rays of the tropical sun by day, emit at night the absorbed heat, raising the temperature even higher than it is at midday’.

  According to a passenger on HMS Liverpool in 1825, three lieutenants of the ship died in a single day ‘of sunstroke in Muscat harbour.

  I walked very slowly back to the PDO camp, passing en route by the site of the old slave market, where at the time of Loch’s first visit some four thousand slaves of all ages were sold each year. They were paraded in groups to suit the tastes and the wealth of prospective buyers. Girls from Dongola in the Sudan and copper-coloured beauties from Ethiopia sold for about 150 dollars and black women from Central Africa for just 80 dollars. It was not until 1822 that the Omani Sultan signed an agreement with the British to ban the slave trade in Muscat. And it was many British sailors’ lives later that the Royal Navy eventually put a stop to most piracy and slavery in the Gulf.

  Leaving the consulate and my mercenary friend with his PDO blonde, I hitched a lift back to Bidbid. I would like to recall that I was suitably refreshed by my visit to seaside Muscat, but, in reality, I was still hot and sweating.

  As we left the coast and entered the rocky gap of the Wadi Samail I counted the years since Loch and his sailors had helped Oman and the Gulf rid itself of pirates and slaves. The Truce that followed between the British and the pirate chiefs was the origin of the term Trucial States, which became the title of the territories of the pirate tribes of the region. That was 146 years ago, and yet we post-colonial Brits were still, in 1968, meddling in Omani affairs. This time the target was Marxism, not pirates.

  Back in Bidbid I studied the daily reports from Salalah. The monsoon clouds had dispersed in September and the bloodshed had then begun in earnest. Infiltration routes from the Yemen crawled with camel-borne supplies of heavy weapons and new bands of well-trained guerrillas from Russia and China, who infiltrated all the tribal zones of the Qara.

  After various fatal clashes, SAF headquarters decreed that no unit of less than sixty men should operate in the mountains. None of SAF’s three Recce Platoons mustered over thirty fighting men, and mine at the time was a mere dozen.

  The colonel called me to his office and fingered his wall map of the Qara where a rocky gulley allowed a motorable track just north of the mountains and beyond the normal adoo-infested zone.

  ‘Yesterday,’ he said, ‘NFR’s Recce Platoon was ambushed somewhere here between three cleverly sited machine gun groups. Their leading two Land Rovers were shredded, as were their crews, and God knows how any of the platoon survived. However, the result is that NFR has
no desert patrol ability along the northern rim of the mountains, and adoo camel groups are known to bring in supplies that way. So . . . our Recce, your Recce must get down there soonest. When can you get your guys shipshape?’

  I told him the truth. ‘Only two of the vehicles are on the road. The equipment state is abysmal, and I need to recruit more and better men.’

  ‘Can you do so in eight weeks?’ The colonel explained why we must head south before December when the Muslim month of abstinence would begin.

  I assured him that I would do my level best, and left the relative cool of his office to be hit by the roasting heat of the parade ground.

  Back in my room with a warm Coca-Cola, I made detailed plans as to how to turn the platoon into a viable fighting force for the Dhofar conditions that I had witnessed and faced with Bill Prince’s men.

  I wrote down key rules as taught me by the SAS, and where these did not translate well with the men and weaponry at my disposal, I modified them as seemed best.

  I summoned the men in our block’s main dormitory and told them that the next eight weeks of training, all day and every day, would be hell and that, from now on, Recce soldiers would use their feet and not their vehicles wherever an adoo presence might lurk.

  One of the bedu interrupted me. ‘This is magnoon [mad],’ he cried. ‘We all joined Recce because we are vehicle-trained. We are no longer foot coolies like the other geysh [army] people. Wallahi! [To hell with this!]’ The two bedu both spat on the floor.

  Many of the Baluchis and even a few of the Omanis were nodding at the bedu’s words. I had definitely put the cat among the pigeons.