The War that Never Was

by Duff Hart-Davis

  He soon started to do well in the City, but missed the army – so he went to see Lieutenant Colonel Brian Franks, a wartime commander of the SAS, who was starting up the territorial regiment, 21 SAS, and applied to join. Franks said he was besieged by experienced Special Forces officers and didn’t need any more: only if Johnson was prepared to come in as an other-rank, on a year’s probation, would he be accepted. Jim therefore joined as a trooper, did a parachute course, went on to command a squadron, and from January 1960 to December 1962 commanded the regiment as a Territorial Army officer. Then he retired and returned to Lloyd’s full-time.

  Men who served with him or under him conceived the highest admiration for his qualities as a leader. One young officer described Jim as being ‘of no mean originality and wit’; all praised his unfailingly even temper, his sense of humour and, above all, his easy authority. Naturally ebullient, he had a wonderful talent for cheering people up. But he also had a tough streak: a colleague once overheard Judy tell a potential recruit, not entirely in jest, ‘Don’t join 21 SAS. The Colonel’s a bastard. Take the soft option – join the Marine Commandos.’ Another former colleague remembered that ‘he could make blistering remarks’ if someone had transgressed; but he had an exceptional ability to delegate and to trust his subordinates – and then, if they made mistakes, to back them up and shoulder responsibility. He also had a very clear vision of how things ought to be done, and hence the ability to take decisions quickly.

  One of his recruits for the Yemen operation found Jim’s passion for taking on seemingly impossible tasks infectious. In the middle of the campaign, when the man asked, ‘Why, against international laws and Queen’s Regulations, are we involved?’, Jim replied, ‘It’s not in spite of the rules. It’s because of the bloody rules. When it’s over, we’ll write a new page for Regimental SOPs [Standard Operating Procedures].’2 Many of the mercenaries felt that they were members of Beni Johnson – Family Johnson; a few, when they wrote, addressed him as ‘Colonel’, but to most he was simply Jim; and so few people were involved that Christian names, or cover names, were used throughout. Just as the men conceived a fierce loyalty to their commander, so he returned their commitment, always doing his best to make sure they were well looked after and not let down.

  Throughout the campaign Judy gave him unstinting support. Not only was she intelligent and well read, but being herself a colonel’s daughter, she understood the pressure under which Jim was working, and moreover she was always forthright, telling him not what she imagined he wanted to hear, but what she herself thought. In the words of their daughter Lottie, ‘They really were soulmates.’3 Judy might pretend that she did not dare go down to the basement of their house in Sloane Avenue, for fear of what she might find there, but in fact she knew exactly what was going on. Strange men were constantly coming and going at all hours of the day and night – once a mercenary who was suffering from malaria borrowed her fur coat to contain his shuddering. Another time a man arrived at the front door and announced that he had brought some equipment: taking him for a mercenary, Judy directed him to the basement, where he was disconcerted to find several men servicing sub-machine guns. His alarm was not surprising, for he was a Hoover salesman.

  For more than eight centuries the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of the Yemen, stretching from the eastern shore of the Red Sea to the borders of Saudi Arabia, had been ruled by a succession of Imams, or priest-kings, belonging to the Hamid ud Din family; but in September 1962 a coup d’état had driven the last of them, Imam Mohamed al-Badr, from his palace in the capital, and he had taken refuge in the mountains. The revolution had been precipitated by the intrigues of Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt, who was being strongly backed by the Soviet Union in his attempt to gain control of the Arabian peninsula.

  Nasser, at that stage, was eager to throw his weight behind revolution wherever it happened, in his attempt to unify a socialist Arab world against the forces of reaction. Principal among these, in his eyes, was Britain. Relations between Britain and Egypt had never recovered since the Suez conflict of 1956, which left Nasser virulently opposed to British influence in South Arabia.4 Now his aim was to take over the Yemen, and then the port and city of Aden, one of the last bastions of imperialism in the Arab world.

  A British Crown colony since 1838, Aden in 1962 had a rapidly growing population of 220,000, a large proportion of which comprised immigrant labour. The third-busiest port in the world, blessed with the best natural harbour in southern Arabia, it was an important deep-water bunkering station for ships on their way to and from India, the Far East and Australasia, and was handling more than 5,000 vessels a year. It was also an important strategic military and naval base, housing a busy RAF airfield at Khormaksar and the headquarters of British Middle East Command, with defence responsibilities from Kuwait to East Africa, and was a vital link in the military chain to Singapore and Hong Kong. Nasser naturally wanted to secure this rich prize; yet his further ambitions were even more alarming: to infiltrate Saudi Arabia from its western and southern underbelly, seize the oilfields, gain control of the entire Persian Gulf and finally annihilate Israel. ‘The road to Tel Aviv,’ he was fond of pronouncing, ‘lies via the Gulf and Riyadh.’5

  Immediately after the Yemeni revolution of 1962, pressure not to recognise the new regime was put on the British Government from several quarters. Two days after the coup, the uncle of the deposed Imam, fifty-six year-old Prince Hassan bin Yahya, who had been in America serving as the Yemeni delegate to the United Nations, arrived in London and called on the Foreign Secretary, Lord Home,6 in search of help. With his piercing black eyes, fine white beard and pale-blue, ankle-length robe, he cut a striking figure: one observer described him as ‘wrinkled and gnarled as an old olive tree’.7 But he got no satisfaction. Another early visitor to London was King Hussein, the young ruler of Jordan, who met the Minister for Aviation, Julian Amery,8 and through him urged the British not to recognise the Republican regime.

  HMG dithered. On 23 October 1962 the Foreign Secretary reported to the Cabinet that ‘the general situation was disturbing’, and the Cabinet approved recognition of the Republican regime ‘in principle’.9 Then in November HMG was alarmed by reports that the regime intended to declare war on Saudi Arabia, and that recognition of it ‘might undermine our whole position in the area’.10 At the same time the Government was trying to dissuade the Americans from recognising the Republicans; but the United States Administration, under President Kennedy, was apparently unable to appreciate the depth of Nasser’s mendacity or the risks that he posed. Distracted as it was by the war in Vietnam, the White House failed to realise that he was cleverly playing East against West: the Americans naively hoped that if the West supported his policies, Nasser might be prised away from the Soviet Bloc (which was supplying him with weapons and technology) and become a bulwark against the spread of communism. The Americans therefore did recognise the revolutionary regime – and they also greatly increased the shipments of surplus wheat which they had been sending Egypt since 1954.

  With the London Government apparently in a state of paralysis on the issue, Jim Johnson quickly spotted the potential for some kind of covert intervention. One night in November 1962 he and Judy went to dinner with their friends Philip Horniblow and his wife Binnie. Horniblow – a doctor and former army officer – had been Chief Medical Officer to the Kuwait Army during the 1950s, and had later joined 21 SAS as a trooper. He thus had useful military experience and good knowledge of the Middle East; he also spoke some Arabic.11 During the evening Jim mentioned that he had been approached by ‘influential people’, inside and outside the Conservative Government, with the idea of starting a clandestine operation, and suggested to his host that, if anything developed, he might take part.

  One of the ‘influential people’ to whom Jim referred was Amery – a man of wide military and political experience, who had served in Albania, Egypt, Africa and China during the Second World War, was a passionate enthusiast for Empire and wa
s said, because of his aristocratic background, to have been born with a silver grenade in his mouth. He was also a key member of the Suez Group, the backbench coterie formed when Nasser was shaping to take control of the Canal in the 1950s, and was dedicated to the maintenance of British power in the Middle East. Another was Duncan Sandys,12 who in 1963 was Secretary of State for the Colonies.

  Yet by far the most articulate advocate of intervention in the Yemen was Lieutenant Colonel Neil McLean, DSO (always known as ‘Billy’), the Conservative Member of Parliament for Inverness and friend of many leading politicians.13 A big, tough Scottish Highlander, who slicked his hair back with pomade, he too had seen much irregular action during the Second World War, commanding a guerrilla unit in Abyssinia and organising partisan resistance in Albania. In the eyes of some friends he had a touch of Buchan’s Sandy Arbuthnot about him, for he frequented London clubs, had a habit of going off without warning to distant parts of the globe and tended to reappear with his face deeply tanned.14

  Now, at the age of forty-three, he was a well-known figure in British politics, had numerous friends in Whitehall and contacts at the highest level in the Middle East, and was exceptionally persuasive in diplomatic negotiation. One contemporary described him as ‘a master of deception, a consummate practitioner of Balkan politics’.15 With the Yemen in turmoil – but no one in London sure exactly what was happening there – he set off to find out, on the first of many reconnaissance visits, in October 1962.

  By then the situation in the Yemen was becoming extremely dangerous and unpleasant. Nasser was pouring troops, tanks and artillery into the country, and pilots of the Egyptian Air Force, flying Russian MiG 17 fighters and Ilyushin Il-28 jet bombers (known as Beagles), were indiscriminately bombing and strafing the mountain villages around which the tribes loyal to the Imam were holding out.16 The Royalists were not only disorganised, and desperately short of weapons and ammunition: they had no form of communication beyond human runners, and lacked medical facilities of any kind – the standard remedy for injuries and illnesses, even a persistent headache, being branding on the stomach, chest, legs or arms with a red-hot iron, a treatment known as woosam, which was thought to let the evil out.

  Pressure was growing not only on the Yemeni Royalists, but also on the independent states along the country’s southern border, which Britain, in 1959, had begun to combine into the South Arabian Federation. MiG fighter-bombers flying from Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, had started to launch raids on Beihan, the Sultanate some 200 miles north-east of Aden. Trouble was brewing also in the Radfan – the mountainous region due north of Aden, and much closer than Beihan. Tribesmen were crossing into the Yemen, joining the Republican forces for a few months and being given rifles and ammunition, which they then brought home. This meant that dissidents in the Radfan were becoming steadily better armed – and at the same time leaders trained by the Egyptians were infiltrating the country from the Yemen, to organise subversion more effectively – developments that threatened the British aim of keeping the Federation a coherent and secure entity.

  The British were uncomfortably divided in their views about how to tackle the problem. The newly declared Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) had broken off diplomatic relations with HMG. The Foreign Office, heavily influenced by America, wished to recognise the Republican regime. On the other hand, the Colonial Office, alarmed by the number of insurgents filtering into Aden from the Yemen, vigorously opposed Foreign Office policy for the region, and was supported in its views by the Prime Minister (Harold Macmillan), the Colonial Secretary (Duncan Sandys), the Aviation Minister (Julian Amery) and even the Foreign Secretary, Lord Home (in direct opposition to the Foreign Office, of which he was the head).

  What could be done to bolster the Imam? MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, would have liked to mount some undercover campaign, but after the Second World War the organisation had been stripped of its special operations capability and was powerless to start anything of that kind. Macmillan’s attitude was defeatist: he told one visiting diplomat that he was ‘reminded of the Bonny Prince Charlie conflict in the Scotland of 1745; the Highlanders were more attractive, but one knew that the Lowlanders would win in the end’.17

  It so happened that the Conservative Government was falling into a state of disarray and indecision, shaken by two major political scandals. The first had been provoked by John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, who had had an association with Christine Keeler, a London showgirl whom he met at Cliveden, the Astor family’s grand house above the Thames in Buckinghamshire. Fuel was added to the flames of gossip by the fact that Keeler had also been involved with Yevgeny Ivanov, a naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London. In March 1963, after months of rumours, Profumo told the House of Commons that there had been ‘no impropriety whatever’ in his relationship with Keeler, threatening to sue anyone who repeated allegations outside the House; but the press and television remained agog.

  The second scandal threatened another prominent member of the Government: Duncan Sandys. When the 11th Duke of Argyll sued his wife Margaret for divorce on the grounds of rampant infidelity, claiming that she had slept with eighty-two men, he produced, as part of his evidence, Polaroid photographs of her, naked except for a three-strand pearl necklace, fellating a man whose head had been cut out of the picture. The identity of the ‘headless man’ had not been certainly established, but persistent rumour claimed that it was Sandys.

  With the Government’s resolve weakened by these tremors, it became clear to McLean and other advocates of action that Britain would not back the Yemeni Royalists with any official or overt support; but moves to provide them with clandestine assistance were afoot. Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, had approached George Young, former deputy head of MI6, asking him to find someone who would run an unattributable guerrilla war against the Republicans, and Young had introduced McLean to Brigadier Dan Hiram, a former artillery officer and now the Israeli defence attaché, who agreed to supply weapons and money (Israel’s aim being to detain Nasser’s troops in the Yemen for as long as possible).

  In London, Jim Johnson had many friends in high places, military, political and social. Among them was Colonel David Stirling, at 6 feet 4 inches a legendary and literally towering figure in the SAS, which he himself had founded in 1942 during the war in the Western Desert.18 He had a disconcerting habit of talking out of one corner of his mouth, so that listeners often failed to catch what he had said; but he was also immensely determined, and if he thought that something ought to be done, he made sure that it was. Now forty-seven, he was, as always, full of ideas, and looking for people to translate them into action.

  When he saw that no official move would be made to help the Yemeni Royalists, he arranged (with the connivance of Home and Amery) for Billy McLean to meet Brian Franks (then Colonel Commandant of the SAS) at White’s Club in St James’s Street – and it was Franks who suggested that Jim Johnson might be the person to organise some deniable undercover operation.

  As Jim himself recalled, he and Judy were sitting in their drawing room at about nine o’clock one evening when the telephone rang. It was Franks, calling from White’s. He said, ‘May I come round and have a glass of brandy?’ – and Jim replied, ‘Of course.’ Round he came, and as he sat down he said that he had just come from a meeting with Alec Home, Julian Amery, David Stirling and Billy McLean at White’s. ‘Don’t believe the Americans about the Yemen,’ said Franks. ‘They don’t understand the Middle East. The resistance under the Imam is terrific.’

  He explained briefly how the Royalists had taken to the mountains, but were being bombed and strafed by Russian aircraft based on the air-strip at Sana’a. ‘Would you like to go in and burn all these aeroplanes?’ he suggested.

  ‘Well, yes,’ Jim replied nonchalantly. ‘I’ve nothing particular to do in the next few days. I might have a go.’19

  He never proposed to carry out the assignment himself – but he quickly got down to work. Through Amery h
e met Sayid Ahmed al-Shami, Foreign Minister of the Yemen and the most politically astute of the Royalist leaders, who was in London seeking help.20 Money seemed to be the least of the problems. Shami, who spoke English reasonably well, but could not write it, produced a cheque book and told Jim to make out a cheque for £5,000 (worth £150,000 in today’s values). Shami then signed the cheque, and they took it to the Hyde Park Hotel (where Franks was Chairman of the Board) and asked Salvatore, the Manager, to cash it for them. He was astonished. ‘What do you need all this money for?’ he demanded.

  ‘My daughter’s getting married,’ Jim told him (his daughter Lottie was then eight).

  ‘But you can’t possibly spend that amount on a wedding.’

  ‘Never mind!’

  Salvatore agreed to cash the cheque and keep the money in the hotel safe, handing it out as it was needed.

  In search of saboteurs who would blow up the aircraft at Sana’a, Jim was naturally inclined to look for recruits among former members of the SAS. The first man he approached – in characteristic fashion, by inviting him to have a drink at the Cadogan Hotel – was Major Bernard Mills, a professional soldier home on inter-tour leave from Oman, where he was commanding the first Arab company in the Muscat Regiment. Not only had Mills known Jim in the SAS: he also spoke Arabic – an essential requirement for the job being proposed.

  Much as he liked the sound of the Yemen operation, Mills declined to take it on, for the time being, at any rate: he was still in the process of forming the Arab company, and felt he must return to Oman to finish the job. But he suggested a man who would be ideal for the task: Lieutenant Colonel Johnny Cooper, a seasoned campaigner then in his early forties, tall and thin, almost as dark and wiry as an Arab, with a shock of black hair, described by the explorer Ranulph Fiennes as ‘a sinewy major with sun-blackened skin and the features of a Greek bandit’.21 As a corporal during the Second World War, Johnny had been Stirling’s driver, navigator and bodyguard in the desert,22 and was expert at blowing up aircraft, having spent months engaged in that agreeable occupation.