The War that Never Was

by Duff Hart-Davis

We were tired and hungry after travelling all night, and so greatly enjoyed our breakfast of tinned Egyptian beans, mixed with raw onions and submerged in olive oil and vinegar, into which we dipped huge flaps of toasted unleavened bread, followed by honey, washed down in unnumerable [sic] cups of very sweet tea.18

  The camp at Mabta turned out to be pleasant and comfortable. There were tents with electric light, a refrigerator and even an air-conditioner in McLean’s tent. Above the camp was a waterfall, with a pool for washing in, and the food was plain but plentiful. After a day’s delay, waiting for mules, he set out with escorts for EL Qara, climbing a steep escarpment for the first three hours and being stopped several times by villagers who insisted on bringing them coffee, tea, yoghurt and bread soaked in sesame oil. At the top of the escarpment they turned off the main track and made a detour to the village of Al-Kowma, which the Egyptians had bombed with poison gas.

  In the middle of March, Egyptian aircraft had dropped what the local people called two qunbula sahriya – magic bombs – on the village. One had exploded with a kind of soft pop; the other did not burst, but gave off blue-black fumes and smoke. Six children, aged three to eight, were killed, and twenty-two men, women and children injured. A secret report, drawn up by the Prime Minister’s secretary, Ibrahim al-Khibsi,19 gave gruesome details of the fatalities:

  1 Mohamed Ali Massaoud, eight years old. Died two hours after vomiting blood and his skin and flesh falling off when he scratched.

  2 His brother, Hussein Ali Massaoud, two years old. Sleeping in a nearby house when bomb fell. Vomited blood and died after 2½ hours.

  3 Abdullah bin Ali bin Nasser, five years old. His body swelled up, vomited blood and skin, and flesh fell off when he scratched it. Died after four days. He could not swallow, and when given water or milk, it came out through his nose.20

  When McLean reached Al-Kowma, six weeks had elapsed since the raid, and heavy rain had fallen; even so, 20 or 30 yards from the bombs’ impact point he became aware of ‘an unusual, unpleasant and pungent smell . . . rather like a sweet-sour musty chloroform mixed with a strong, sour odour of geranium plant’.21 Many of the surviving children had sores and scars; some adults had red eyes, and complained of comparative loss of vision. Cows had lost their coats, their udders were covered with scabs, and they had ceased to give milk.

  From Al-Kowma the party descended steeply several thousand feet into a valley, then climbed even more steeply up the escarpment on the other side on a well-made path of marble slabs, constructed (McLean was told) by the Imam’s great-grandfather, who had been lord of the nearby medieval castle of Washha.

  The tall stone houses of El Qara, with their flat roofs and empty eye-sockets of windows, crowned the ridge of a mountain, and the Imam’s bombproof cave was at the foot of the cliffs below. He was sharing his accommodation with the short, thickset al-Hirsi, who was not only his secretary, but also his father-in-law. Earlier, Hirsi had defected with the state funds from Lahej (west of Aden) to the Yemen, and the Imam had married his daughter as a second wife. McLean described him as the Imam’s ‘most intimate confidant and former boozing companion’. Clearly, Hirsi had become indispensable to the ruler; but many Yemenis told McLean how much they disliked him, because they thought he exercised an evil influence, and they resented the fact that the Imam trusted him rather than them.22

  Outside the cave there was always a milling crowd of supplicants and tribal leaders clamouring to present their warraqas – chits, or requests scribbled on scraps of paper – and offering their allegiance in exchange for rifles and gold. McLean thought the Imam ‘an amiable young man’, with an easy-going manner and a ready sense of humour; but he also felt that the ruler, though brave, ‘lacked the ability to apply himself seriously to any task other than political plots or personal intrigues’. He slept late and spent the afternoon and half the night signing chits, writing letters and chewing qat, so that it was generally not until far into the night that he became free for serious talks. Never once during the four days that McLean was present did he leave his cave.

  ‘Despite the Imam’s personal faults,’ McLean reported, ‘his name carries fantastic prestige among the tribes. He is also lavish with his money which endears him even more to the tribesmen.’ Later McLean recorded that he had been:

  amazed at the respect, affection and love the Yemenis hold for the Imam and the institution of the Imamate. The Imam’s position is something like that of a spiritual pope who is also a temporal king. On the one hand, the Yemenis are very fierce in their insistence that the Imam and the princes must fight the Jihad, or holy war. I have been told many times of tribesmen who have come to the Imam and said, ‘We will die together with you fighting the Jihad . . . but if you leave us, we will kill you, for this is a fight to the death.’23

  And yet, as the war went on, it became increasingly clear that the Imam was neither directing strategy nor exercising command over his scattered armies. He was naturally indolent, and far too fond of alcohol to make an effective military leader. Decisions were left to individual princes, who spent most of their time widely separated from each other by the rugged nature of the environment, and had (at first) only the most primitive form of communication in the form of human runners, so that messages often took days to reach their destination. The result was that the Royalists never managed to organise concerted action – and this was the principal reason for the war lasting so long.

  Attempts to render the Royalists assistance were veiled in secrecy. While McLean was moving around in the Yemen, Tony Boyle had visited Beihan and seen Sherif Hussein’s son, Emir Saleh, who told him that money had arrived from Feisal, as well as 50,000 rounds of .303 ammunition. But when the Sherif proposed to spend the money on Mauser ammunition and send it all to Abdullah bin Hassan, Tony emphasised that ‘this must not get to the ears of the British authorities, as, if it did, they would be unlikely to provide any further assistance.’

  In 1963 the Yemen was still in most respects medieval. Outside two or three cities there were no roads, no telephones, no electricity, no medical facilities, no piped water, no schools. The country was closed to foreigners, so that 99 per cent of its inhabitants lived in ignorance of the outside world. If Ronald Bailey, until 1962 the British Consul in Taiz (the country’s second city), wanted to go for a walk, he first had to obtain permission from the Imam, which could take two weeks to arrive. If permission was eventually granted, he was obliged to perambulate carrying an open umbrella, to demonstrate that he was a person of importance, so that people would treat him with respect.

  When someone gave the old Imam an aeroplane, he had it taken to pieces and stored the parts in different caves so that nobody could steal it.

  His authority, based on Islamic law, was tempered only by the main tribes, and by the decisions of the Ulem’ma, a body of respected elders. The principal unit of population was the tribe – a military and political as well as a social group. A tribe was split into clans, the clans into sections, and each section into a number of families. Within the tribe, the members looked to a chief (sheikh), who acted as judge or mediator to settle inter-tribal disputes.

  During the next ten days McLean made his way right through the Yemen and met other Royalist leaders in their mountain strongholds: sometimes driving, more often riding camels or walking, he frequently had to take cover from Egyptian air-raids, and once was machine-gunned by a helicopter before he emerged into Beihan. Always a man for detail, he jotted down some logistics of Yemeni transport:

  Camel loads

  A good camel can carry up to 300 lbs on flat or about 250 lbs in hills.

  Average speed of camel on flat 3 mph. In hills 2 mph. Average daily journey twenty miles.

  Rifles weigh 9 lbs – therefore 20–30 rifles [per camel].

  Average 24 on flat, 20 in hills.

  Ammo box 600 rounds = ? lbs.

  Average camel load – two boxes = 1,200 rounds ? lbs.

  Donkey – One box ammo, 10–20 rifles.24


  Perhaps his most important discovery was that all the Royalist armies were severely short of arms and ammunition. Rifles were highly prized by the tribesmen – for rifle-shooting was the national sport. Proud owners habitually carried their weapons fully loaded, with a round in the chamber, the safety-catch off, and the barrel aligned horizontally backwards or forwards over one shoulder: a continuous hazard to anyone in close proximity. The commonest type of rifle was the British Lee Enfield Mk 4 .303, dating from the First World War; but still more popular were the even-older .300 Mausers, made in 1903 or 1904 for the Shah of Iran, which in spite of their age were excellent long-range weapons. As one of the British mercenaries remarked, ‘Even if you failed to kill a man at 1,000 yards with one of them, you could give him a very nasty fright.’ Because they had a little engraving of the sun on the action, the Mausers were known as abu ashams, father of the sun. One Lee Enfield fetched 140 Maria Theresa silver dollars (known as ‘MTD’s and each worth about seven shillings, or £10 in today’s terms), and a Mauser up to 380.

  As a result of constant practice, the standard of marksmanship among the tribesmen was extremely high: many of them, firing over open sights, could hit a Maria Theresa dollar at 50 yards. But there was always a risk that when new consignments of rifles came into the country, half of them would disappear and be hoarded, sold or bartered away as a form of currency, rather than used against the enemy. Heavier weapons included bazookas (shoulder-held anti-tank rocket-launchers), 57mm and 75mm recoilless anti-tank rifles, which also fired rockets, and various types of mortar (3-inch and 81mm), which launched bombs in a high parabola. The Egyptian infantry had Kalashnikov automatic rifles – essentially close-quarter weapons, good up to 300 yards – and various heavy weapons also of Russian manufacture, including machine guns, T-34 tanks and artillery.

  In London McLean’s message to the politicians was the same: that the Royalists urgently needed support from the West; but the Americans were putting pressure on both Jordan and Saudi Arabia to back Sallal’s regime. In March 1963, determined to strengthen his knowledge of the situation, he set out yet again for the Middle East – a journey that he described in a Top Secret report.

  In Riyadh he stayed with Prince Feisal, who was then engaged in a power-struggle with his half-brother, the King, but felt most strongly that HMG should give help to the Royalists, and suggested that ‘the British could do this secretly in ways that they knew how to use better than anyone else’.

  In the Yemen McLean paid a brief visit to the Imam, who had temporarily gone to ground in caves on the side of a steep valley at Shadda, near Hijla, in the north-west. There McLean found him living ‘in the greatest possible squalor and confusion, but . . . almost completely safe from air attacks’.25 According to the ruler, the position in the north and west was stronger than ever, but elsewhere the Egyptians had cut some of the Royalists’ supply routes, and were threatening to isolate elements of their forces in the east, where there was a desperate shortage of ammunition.

  On his way back through Riyadh, McLean saw Feisal again, and after a conversation noted that the Prince had agreed to send 10,000 gold sovereigns to Sherif Hussein, the de facto ruler of Beihan – ‘5,000 immediately by air and 5,000 overland’ – for Prince Abdullah bin Hassan, Commander of the Royalist Second National Army in the Khowlan. Feisal also agreed to spend up to £50,000 financing an operation by the BFLF, ‘but not through Saudi Arabia’.26

  A stout, middle-aged man with a bushy beard, Sherif Hussein became known to the BFLF by the code name ‘Whiskers’, and was described by one journalist as ‘an old roaring lion of a man’. Dynastic complexities meant that his eldest son, Emir Saleh, was the nominal ruler of Beihan, but in fact it was Whiskers who took the decisions. Saleh might happily tell the British that they should be bombing the Egyptian forces in the Yemen, just as the Americans were bombing the enemy in North Vietnam – but he had no executive power.

  Over the years the Sherif proved a staunch ally of Britain. Although a clever man, he was not educated, and occasionally became recalcitrant and devious; but he gave invaluable help by granting the mercenaries the use of various houses, and letting them, their arms and ammunition pass through his territory on their way into the south-east corner of Yemen. War materials and gold came through in great quantities from Saudi Arabia: Sultan Ghalib al-Qu’aiti, the young ruler of the Hadhramaut (one of the states in the Aden Protectorate) remembered sitting on a small hill one evening and seeing columns of vehicles crawling across the desert, for hours on end. By discreetly milking the convoys, the Sherif made a great deal of money, and became so rich that he was able to present King Feisal with a Rolls-Royce. His own policy was certainly robust: whenever Republican Yemenis came across the border and blew up a house belonging to his own people, he would riposte by sending in a gang to blow up two of theirs.

  If the Royalists were in trouble, things were not going well for the Republicans, either. At a press conference in Sana’a, Sallal had inadvertently given the impression that he was no more than a puppet, completely dominated by the Egyptians;27 and when he visited his outlying garrison at Marib, in the south-east of the Yemen, to bang the drum, all the tribesmen had disappeared from the town, so that he found himself addressing 150 Egyptian soldiers, to whom he made the futile proclamation: ‘The revolution in Arabia is imminent, and all Arab countries will be Republican.’ Reports of food shortages in Sana’a seemed to be substantiated by the fact that he had two cows killed, loaded them onto his truck and drove them to the capital.28

  The Saudis were becoming ever more eager to get the Egyptians out of the Yemen, and at the end of April Feisal signed a Disengagement Agreement, whereby he would stop sending supplies to the Royalists if Nasser would withdraw his troops in phases and cease attacking Yemeni villages from the air. Nasser’s reaction was typical: having got this agreement, at the end of June he increased the number of troops in the Egyptian Expeditionary Force from 23,000 to 32,000 and resumed the bombing and strafing.

  Back in London, McLean again pressed his cause. If the Royalist regime was to be saved, and Nasser thwarted, urgent action was needed – and so it was that HMG, lacking the resolution to send in the SAS, looked the other way when SAS officers past and present – Johnson, Stirling, Woodhouse and Franks – went into action, and Jim’s tiny private army slipped quietly into being.

  All four instigators were formidable characters, and none more so than Woodhouse. With his slender, gangling figure and a bit of a stoop, he did not cut an immediately impressive figure; but he was an enormously professional soldier, and in the words of a fellow officer, he was ‘steel to the core . . . an outstanding leader who always drove himself to his limits, put the welfare of his men above his own, and expected the highest standards from everyone’.29 The recent successes of the SAS in Malaya and Oman had been due in no small measure to his leadership and dedication.

  In May 1963, via the Governor’s Office in Aden, McLean had sent a message to one of the Royalist princes, saying that ‘a group of Englishmen in no way connected with the British Government will be coming out here’. When they came, the note said, they would need support, and the writer emphasised that silence would be essential, ‘as the scheme could not be condoned by the Govt, and would have to fall through if HMG heard about it’. On 5 May Tony Boyle passed on the information verbally in an interview with Emir Saleh of Beihan, asking for his help to infiltrate men into the Yemen, and on the 10th he did the same with the Emir’s father, Whiskers, or (more properly) Sherif Hussein.

  In another secret report McLean suggested that the poison-gas bombs that devastated Al-Kowma might have been dropped in an attempt to kill the Imam, and that the pilot of the aircraft hit the wrong target, misled by the fact that Kowma had a white mosque, as did EI Qara. It was not long, however, before the Egyptians resorted to similar tactics on three other villages south of the town of Sa’ada; no one was killed in these attacks, but some fifty people were blinded or scorched and left with skin peeling off. />
  Secrecy was all as Johnny Cooper and his companions set out from Beihan into the hinterland, to establish contact with Prince Abdullah bin Hassan, Commander of the Second National Army, at his headquarters in the Khowlan, the towering mountain country east of Sana’a, and to ascertain the strength of the occupying Egyptian forces.

  After the brief flight from Aden to Beihan, they drove on to Nuqub, only 15 miles from the Yemeni border. There they were issued with Arab clothes and joined a train of some 150 camels carrying weapons, ammunition and other supplies. Each man had escape money in the form of thirty gold sovereigns sewn into a belt. (Other mercenaries, thinking a belt too obvious, stowed the money in a kind of home-made sporran, under the futa – the theory being that any tribesman searching them would hesitate to fumble in that area, for fear of appearing to make homosexual advances.)

  After one night in the home of the Sherif, the pioneers crossed the border at dusk next day and set off on a long penetration march. Because Egyptian MiG 17 fighters and Ilyushin 28 fighter-bombers were liable to appear suddenly overhead at any time during daylight, the caravan moved only at night: before dawn the camels were unloaded and let loose to graze on whatever scrub they could find, and the humans camouflaged themselves among rocks or scattered bushes. The newcomers became terribly sore in the backside from the unaccustomed, lurching gait of their mounts, and found it less painful to walk than to ride. The biggest obstacle on the route was the town of Marib, which rises out of the flat desert on a mound. Once it was the capital of the great Sabaean empire, and reputedly the birthplace of Bilqis, the legendary Queen of Sheba; now the Egyptian garrison had mined the tracks around it to prevent parties of this very kind getting past; but the Royalist guides knew the minefields well and had no difficulty leading the camels through in single file.30