The War that Never Was

by Duff Hart-Davis

  As always, MI6 agents were eager to glean information about what was happening upcountry in the Yemen, and James Nash, one of the Political Officers, maintained close liaison with Peter. On 1 November Peter wrote to Johnny:

  As you know I have been passing tit-bits on to Radcliffe [code name for John de Silva, the MI6 Station Chief], who I gather has met you in your previous occupation. He has asked me to see if I can get him an ORBAT of gyppos and Republicans, if possible with complete establishments and unit numbers etc . . . Can you help? Keep up the bangs, from the outside the Egyptians sound most unhappy.

  In England Jim had been busy recruiting. ‘This letter is to introduce you to David Bailey and Cyril Weavers,’ Tony Boyle told Johnny on 4 November 1963. Weavers, described as ‘a communications expert’, was indeed a technical wizard, but also (in the view of one colleague) ‘a bit of a simple soul’ and rather disorganised – an amiable fellow, but not a warrior. Now thirty-five, and formerly a signals sergeant in the SAS, he took so much equipment with him on the aircraft to Aden that his extra baggage cost £165 – but in due course he proved invaluable at establishing a reliable radio network linking the Yemeni commanders with each other and with Aden.

  Bailey, a former National Service officer with the Royal Sussex Regiment, who had had some grounding in demolition work, was, at that time, the only British mercenary not to have served with Special Forces, and over the next three years – most of which he spent living in caves – he conceived enormous admiration for the reticence of his companions, with whom he was often at very close quarters. Never once did any of them speak of their SAS background.

  On the Comet he found himself placed next to Weavers, who told him that if it turned out he was not the person he claimed to be, he would be eliminated. This friendly greeting made Bailey nervous, and he realised belatedly that he should not have told his mother where he was going. He therefore went to the back of the plane, wrote a note to his parents asking them not to let anyone know what he was doing, and put it in an envelope which he gave to one of the air-hostesses. ‘The organisation must have had someone on the plane watching us,’ he recalled years later, ‘because they took the envelope away – but luckily the girl had the gumption to pass the message anyway.’8

  With him and Weavers came the dark and bespectacled Chris Sharma (from Birmingham, of Anglo-Indian descent), who had been hoping to win a place at Birmingham University, and who now called himself ‘Mansoor’. He was accompanied by Liam McSweeney (always known as ‘Mac’), a heavily moustached, forty-year-old bachelor, also from Birmingham, who had served for five years in 23 SAS and in civilian life had wrestled professionally under the name Milo the Greek.

  For dealing with close encounters, Mac had a simple formula: ‘Don’t take out a gun unless you’re going to use it, and if you do take it out, use it. Don’t talk.’

  Some of the volunteers objected to being called ‘mercenaries’. A true mercenary, they said, was someone who was paid to fight. Their role was specifically not to fight, but to advise the Yemeni commanders on tactics and help train their men. All the same, they had to admit that they were being paid to take part in a war, and that they were doing it for the money. Besides, in the Yemen they went about armed, and it was clear that if – or when – they got into difficulties, they would fight as ferociously as anyone.

  Some of them may have been fired by the patriotic sentiments that drove Jim to form his private army, and some just saw the experience as a big adventure. But money was also certainly a strong incentive. At the start of the operation Jim began making payments to individuals out of his own account at the Pont Street branch of the National Provincial Bank; but when the tempo increased, with the arrival of a Saudi cheque for £10,000 at the end of October 1963, he opened a No. 2 Account, still in his own name. In April 1965, to cover his involvement, he opened another new account in the name of Rally Films, and then at the start of January 1966 he changed the ficititious firm’s title to Foster Productions, which, for cover, moved briskly from one address to another: from Sloane Street to Montpelier Street (opposite Harrods) to North Audley Street, to yet another basement in Earls Court.

  To part-time soldiers the rates of pay seemed astronomical. At the outset Johnny Cooper received £400 a month, lesser operators £300 or £250 (worth about £5,000, £3,500 and £2,900 by the standards of 2011), with most of the money going straight into accounts that Jim had opened for them at the Guarantee Trust of Jersey, a merchant bank in the Channel Islands. Johnny was also getting £200 a month ‘expenses’, for paying what he called his siasi, his little gang of three or four tribesmen whom he trained to gather information about the adoo – the enemy. Some of the money went on ‘kini-mini’ – another SAS expression (pronounced ‘keeny-meeny’), which could cover anything from bribery to rewards for underhand services rendered. As the mercenary operation expanded, the expense rapidly increased: by June 1966, with twenty-two men on the payroll, the monthly wage-bill came to nearly £8,000 (£100,000 in today’s terms).

  The source of funds was Saudi Arabia. While things were going well, a cheque for several thousand pounds from Jeddah arrived in London every month, whereupon the BFLF office allocated pay to the mercenaries’ accounts; but whenever Saudi enthusiasm cooled, Jim had to lobby repeatedly for support to be continued or increased, and he flew to Jeddah or Riyadh time and again in his attempts to convince the Saudi rulers that they were getting value for money.

  The Saudis were spending fortunes. Not only were they paying the British and French mercenaries’ wages; they were also pouring gold sovereigns and Maria Theresa silver dollars into the Yemen, from north and south, so that the princes could pay their tribesmen and hand out bribes on a lavish scale. The silver dollars were handsome great coins, nearly 2 inches in diameter, and were used as everyday currency, the precise value of a particular coin being determined by how much or how little the bosom of the Empress had been worn down by use.10 More highly prized were the sovereigns, bearing the date 1915 and the effigy of King George V, all struck at the mint in Beirut. They arrived in Beihan or Jizan packed in small, extremely heavy strong wooden boxes, for loading into camel saddlebags and onward distribution upcountry.11 Whenever the money looked like drying up, and it seemed that whole tribes might defect to the opposition, the Royalist leaders appealed to the mercenaries, and the mercenaries sent frantic calls to Aden, for onward transmission to London, pleading for the flow to be restored.

  Towards the end of November 1963 Franco (Rupert France) moved from Aden to a house at Nuqub that Whiskers had allocated for use by the mercenaries, and there he discreetly operated the hub of the new radio network. News of enemy casualties kept coming from deserters – as on 23 November, when Johnny reported that 200 Egyptians had been killed at Thilapa, that Colonel Mohamed Hartram, Commander of the 3rd Infantry Battalion, had died on the 10th, that on the 12th Colonel Mohamed Said, one of the Egyptian tank commanders, had been killed, and that on the 20th Captain Mohamed Alakwarth had been seriously injured near Sana’a.

  In Aden, Peter de la Billière was in chirpy form. ‘Well, you old rooster, how’s your mud hut?’ he enquired of Franco. ‘Continue with your press-ups to avoid obesity.’

  Franco himself was cheerful. ‘Life seems to have settled not unreasonably here,’ he told Jim:

  My link to Stan [in Aden] has never failed yet (inshallah) . . . As we are not issued with arms until we leave here, there is a daily stream of MK5 rifle and revolver vendors, all locals and all terribly friendly (we hope) . . . but at least we don’t have to rely on knives, forks and spoons to defend ourselves.

  I have an absolutely gorgeous .25, brand-new STAR revolverette, my dear! In fact it’s so fucking small everyone asks me whether it will fit in my handbag! Actually a most convenient house defence weapon . . . Like most of us I had my hair cropped, and I’m bloody certain I shall be bald for ever more.

  I have decided to go into business after this: I intend manufacturing and placing on the market an aphr
odisiac called Ever Hard. The advertising slogan will be, ‘It takes the wrinkle out of your winkle’. Should make a fortune. How about getting some capital for it?

  Tony Boyle, meanwhile, had returned from London to Aden, his old stamping ground, on a special mission. ‘Tony has so far avoided arrest and is in good form,’ Peter reported. The Royalist commanders had been demanding with increasing vehemence that arms and ammunition should be parachuted in to them, and Tony’s practical experience of flying and aircraft management made him the man best qualified to plan any such operation. His particular task on this, his first journey into the Yemen, was to make his way into the Khowlan and check an area that Johnny Cooper had identified as a possible DZ.

  Having flown to Beihan on 28 November, he was driven to Nuqub, where he found Rupert France, Cyril Weavers, Chris Sharma, David Bailey, ‘Mac’ McSweeney and David Walter, together with a Frenchman known as Freddy, ‘all in good health and high morale’, gathered in the mud house that the Sherif had lent the organisation.

  ‘Rupert is well and has got this huge madhouse which is his headquarters into very good shape,’ Tony reported to Aden:

  Some of the messages he has sent have been a little odd, because J. C. [Johnny Cooper] tells his French operator to translate it into French, then it is encoded in a French code, then transmitted, decoded, translated, encoded, transmitted and finally decoded. The miracle is that we can understand it at all.

  After a lunch of pancakes, meat and onions he allocated his companions tasks as follows:

  Rupert and Chris Sharma to stay in Nuqub and man the base radio.

  David Bailey and Cyril Weavers to join Johnny Cooper in the Khowlan.

  David Walter to join Jack Miller in the Jauf.

  So the first real wave of mercenaries set off for the hinterland. Because word had come in that the Egyptians were trying to ambush an arms caravan on its way to the interior, Tony and his party made one false start, driving far out into the desert to the east, and, after three days, returning to Nuqub, where they heard that a man had just tried to murder Johnny in return for a Republican bribe of 1,000 MTDs. Another message came up from Peter, confirming that cigarettes dropped by an Egyptian aircraft were booby-trapped, and that one had exploded in an ashtray.

  As Tony’s party was preparing to start again, a message came in from Johnny saying, ‘Crisis rpt crisis. If Abdullah money/arms do not arrive in seven days at the Khowlan 3,000 men will desert from Royalists.’ Galvanised by this cri de coeur, a large camel-caravan set off on what turned out to be a five-day trek. Considering that Tony had been working in a London office, and had never had any SAS-type training, he withstood the rigours of the march extraordinarily well, and in his diary left a vivid account of moving through enemy-held territory at night.

  Set off at 10 a.m. in convoy of twenty camels. Ride across a sand desert, stop for 1½ hours at three, then ride and walk until sunset (5.30) for the Bedou to pray, a few miles from Egyptian-occupied Marib.12 We have a quick meal, then set off to ride through the night.

  We have to ride in silence, without cigarettes. Become tired, irritable, uncomfortable, every slip of the camel painful, going up and down over endless enormous sand-dunes. Camels plod slowly up each one, then slide down the steep descent from the crest.

  Lights appear ahead. Then, looming even blacker than the black horizon, a camel moving fast towards us. We stop. The leader goes to meet the newcomer – one of the spies warning us of Egyptians right ahead, waiting for us in the wadi we are entering. We canter back, tension mounting. We try the next wadi at a trot – all clear.

  The lights of Marib appear again ahead, not many and not clustered. Then we are among them. A shout close on the right, answered by others all round us. The glow of a cigarette. My neighbour whispers they are Egyptian guards, shouting to one another to stop themselves being frightened in the dark.

  Caravan strings out. In front of me a camel falls and rolls descending a steep dune. Mine narrowly misses it in the dark. The Bedouin riders’ laughs and curses crank up the tension, then quickly fade in the immensity of our universe, a myriad bright stars captured for eternity in an immeasurable dome of black velvet, in which we alone are moving.

  We are through the lines now. I slip off my camel, preferring to run rather than endure the bone-shuddering jolts of the beast’s trot. Angrily, the caravan leader tells me to mount again, as my big footprints in the sand will tell the Egyptians that a European has passed this way, and they may take reprisals on the local tribes. Mounted again I almost wish the Egyptians would capture me, to halt the pain of this ride.

  Dozing sometimes, then jerking awake as I start slipping from the saddle. What slaves we are to sleep: reality becoming fantasy, camels appearing as prehistoric ships. The bowl of the horizon seems sometimes tiny and enclosing. We progress towards it, yet it never gets any nearer. Dunes become houses, mansions, castles, palaces. As we move into the hills west of Marib stunted trees look like monsters swaying in the cold night desert wind.

  At last, as it must, night ends. At our back the sky lightens and the world around us starts to come back into normal focus. In the cold light my companions are grey and drawn, with cloths wrapped round their heads to keep out the wind. Then sharply the sun lunges above the foothills behind us and dispels the strange atmosphere of cold tension and hallucination. We smoke desultorily. One of the Bedouin starts to sing, a quavering falsetto of infinite poignancy. At last we find a wadi, off the main dried river-bed we followed until now, and lead our camels into shelter.

  Pressing on into the mountains, they met some Bedouin who showed them two mines marked with Cyrillic lettering. Two others had exploded, one killing a camel, the other a hyena coming to eat its corpse. In the afternoon members of the local tribe, the Beni Dhabian, tried to charge them money for passing through their area. The argument raged for hours, and the party was virtually held hostage until the confrontation ended peaceably in the evening, when two families of the tribe arrived with two goats, which yielded dinner for them all.

  Early on the morning of 9 December they were joined by Sheikh Nagi al-Ghadr – ‘an impressive man, kind, firm, and strong’, who was emphatic about the need for parachuting, but had obviously ceased hoping for it. ‘Why did Johnny have to blab about it before we had finalised the arrangements?’ Tony wondered:

  I’m still uncertain of Nagi’s loyalties. He is besieged by people wanting to join the Royalists and so receive rifles, ammunition and money he has not got. Abdullah bin Hassan finds he has been given only 50,000 rounds of rifle ammunition of the half-million he was promised by Feisal. It has no doubt been eaten away at every stage of the journey from Saudi Arabia.

  That night they reached Musainah, where they spent the night in the Sheikh’s house, in:

  an absolutely bare room which was full of people squatting down watching our every move out of pure curiosity. Most had probably never seen Europeans before, and several pulled up my trouser leg to see if I was the same colour under the clothes.13

  On the 10th14 – ‘after a feast: eggs for breakfast!’ – they rode mules along a wadi with flowing water, then up a mountain into a fertile plain and to the village of Gara, many of whose houses had been smashed to rubble by bombs. Five minutes further on they came to Johnny’s stone hut, and found the occupant ‘fit, thin and slightly overwrought’. Not only had two people recently sworn to kill him, but his radio shack had been attacked by five men with rifle-fire; no one had been hurt, the radios were undamaged and four men had been caught, but one had escaped to Sana’a.

  On the 11th Tony was up at 7 a.m. for a breakfast of eggs, after which he went to the radio hut to send messages, getting good reception. Then he climbed to the point that Johnny had christened ‘Grandstand’, from which there was a phenomenal view down to Jihannah in the south-east and, in the other direction, to a hill overlooking Sana’a. As for the DZ – the object of his visit – this, he thought, seemed ‘absolutely ideal’. The land was ploughed, and there were
3 miles of open ground on either side, with ‘any amount of undershoot and five kilometres of overshoot’. He returned to Gara in time to hear Johnny debrief his mullaizim, or lieutenant, who garnered the information from spies and passed it on.

  After a long talk, he concluded that Johnny was doing a magnificent job. Information was flowing in all the time; mines were being issued for laying and exploding daily – Tony heard one go off in the distance with a dull thud at 11 p.m. one evening. Next day he set out on the return journey, and in three hours reached Abdullah bin Hassan’s house at Musainah. When the Prince arrived, he had:

  crowds of people around him trying to get his attention and give him little notes. Both his hands were stuffed with them and he was clenching an armful against his chest. We were all called to an upper room at about 4 p.m. and we talked for seven and a half hours.

  Tony returned to London via Aden, where the influx of mercenaries was stretching Peter to the limit. Having just sent Johnny 200 pounds of explosives, Peter told him: ‘I have been worked off my feet with all these operators passing through. Although they are old friends of mine, I have seldom been so glad to see the departure of them . . . My god, I wish I had half your patience.’

  The new operators were placed under Johnny’s command, to be organised as he saw fit. The first priority (in Peter’s view) was to establish radio links between the various armies, so that Johnny could advise the commanders and set up some coordination in the field. The second essential was to open a rear link to Jim in London, so that intelligence information and physical requirements could be passed back rapidly. The new men were assigned individual roles. David Bailey was to become Johnny’s relief adviser, and Cyril Weavers the radio operator at his base area. Chris Sharma was designated Johnny’s radio mechanic and personal operator, and Mac McSweeney was to go to the Imam as operator and adviser.15