As always, Johnny was fizzing with energy and optimism. In a bulletin to Jim on 21 November he had reported that ‘mining and kini mini go from strength to strength’. He had supervised the laying of fifteen ‘effective’ mines, and claimed sixty-five enemy deaths. Seven more mines were about to go in. The Egyptians had partially withdrawn, regrouping closer to Sana’a, but ‘the WAR is due to start any day now . . . The tempo is quickening towards all-out attacks on the Wogs.’ He himself had been due to pull out of the Yemen at the end of the year, but now felt that he was ‘too committed’ and must stay on. ‘The snowball build-up of informers, mine-layers etc is alarming,’ he wrote. ‘My kini-mini set-up works to me only, and would take ages to hand over successfully,’ he told Franco. ‘No – I am not indispensable, but it has taken six months to build up, and the Arabs do not trust new faces on this tricky subject.’
Scraps of news kept coming in from all quarters. On 22 November it was reported that the Royalists were managing to steal weapons from the Egyptian post near Ghayman. On the night of the 26th fifteen Republicans deserted from Asnaf with four machine guns. On the 30th a mine placed in one of Sallal’s houses exploded, but the extent of the damage was not known. Also on the 30th the Egyptians tried an offensive in the direction of the Jauf: they attacked with 300–400 men, but twenty of them were killed, two tanks were burnt and two armoured cars destroyed.
Coded radio reports were coming into Aden every night from Gara and El Qara, and intelligence was passed back to Jim in London. But Stan Symons, a professional communications expert, had strong views about the abilities of the radio operators: he advocated that they should all be withdrawn for the time being, so that they could be retrained in his way of doing things, or that new men should be found and trained from the start. He considered that there was too much radio chatter, and no control over the operators, who were all working in their individual ways.
During November the International Red Cross had established a field hospital in a cluster of white tents at Uqd, out in the north-eastern Yemeni desert. The site, in a horseshoe-shaped re-entrant among big boulders at the edge of a gravel plain, was by no means ideal, as it had no water (which had to be brought by lorry from a spring an hour’s drive away), and it was too far removed from the fighting for wounds to be treated quickly; but this was the first medical facility that the people in that area had ever known, and its fifty beds were almost always occupied, largely by men wounded in the war.
The hospital was staffed by a team of six or eight Swiss doctors, backed up by twenty ancillary medical personnel, and its centrepiece was a German mobile operating theatre, known as the Clinobox, which had cost £50,000, with transport to the Yemen adding another £25,000 to the outlay. It was solidly built, with two side wings which could be folded down so that the whole became more compact for transport purposes, and included a conventional operating table and air-conditioning. The hospital also had an X-ray unit, operated by a Swiss girl, who obtained remarkable results in the unpromising surroundings of a tent, her darkroom being the packing case in which the X-ray equipment had arrived. Jack Miller, who visited the hospital towards the end of November, was impressed by the whole set-up and described it as ‘very clean and full of bright, affable Swiss, mostly young, including four women’.
On the last day of November 1963 Jack and David Walter left Jizan in a truck at 2230 and travelled through the night, bound for the Imam’s headquarters at El Qara. It took them four days of driving and walking to reach their destination, and once there David moved into a nearby cave at Qafl, in which an American doctor, Dr Bill Bartlett, and his English medical assistant, Arnold Plummer, a volunteer male nurse, had established a small outpost of the Red Cross hospital. David proceeded to set up the radio, and to build doors and cupboards for the cave. Later he devised a plumbing system so that it became possible to wash and have showers.
On 4 December Jack met the Imam, who discussed the military situation in a two-hour interview, and asked his visitor to go on at once, to advise Prince Abdullah bin Hassan in his headquarters, then at El Medah.6 So, on the 6th, Jack was on his way again, accompanied by one donkey, an escort of twenty-five soldiers and two followers:
1840, arr Shaib. Spend night. Meat, biscuits, tea. Cats under bed. Donkey within 6 ft all night. Camel nearby. Bints [girls] here wear trousers and seem from a distance quite fetching. But doctor’s description of their habits discourages investigation, as does local aversion to Europeans . . .
9/12. 0425, Amir and staff leap out of bed to pray. 0700, eggs, bread and coffee. 0730–0750, grandstand view of two Ilyushins bombing El Jahali and El Jabr to west, above Shamsan (on map). Clockwise runs over targets and turn between us and Bait al Wali. One run over us flying straight and level. Could see bombs leaving aircraft. Several apparent hits, others wide . . . Lunch – two hens (that had been hanging upside-down from a donkey for some time), pineapple, Yemeni soup, bin and bread . . .
1815, arrive Bait Idhaqah (on map). Amir Abdullah is here by a stroke of luck. Have seen him briefly. His guards are the biggest apparent crowd of cut-throats I have yet seen!! Now installed in state on a sofa, with people continually calling to look at me . . .
10/12. Breakfast – eggs, bread and tea . . . Village is quite beautiful, with market and lovely trees like lilac in blossom. Have shaken hands briefly with Amir [Abdullah], who has not yet been polite enough to say what my programme will be or even when we will talk. He looks like a native of the Australian bush . . .
1300, Summoned suddenly to presence of Amir and talk before and during lunch . . . In spite of appearance, Amir Abdullah seems more businesslike than some of the younger princes, and we should get on all right. Has a great sense of humour. Seems very keen to have help such as I hope to give . . . Thinks guerrilla warfare plus isolation of enemy positions a good idea. We shall see . . . Says his spies go everywhere, right into Sana’a. He wants ‘bombs’ to put in houses. Says he has so much info that interrogation of POWs is not necessary!! Splendid chap. He ‘knows all enemy most beforehand’.
On about the same date early in December a British journalist, John Osman of the London Sunday Telegraph, managed to reach both Abdullah bin Hassan and the Imam. Propaganda was being showered on Royalist areas in the form of leaflets dropped by Egyptian aircraft and headed ‘In the name of God the Merciful’. One, seen by Osman, warned that the inhabitants of two villages would be ‘extinguished completely’ to make them an example for others, if their sheikhs and other leaders did not report to the nearest Republican headquarters within twenty-four hours.7
In London, Jim was continuously extending his search for weapons, and berating the French for not keeping up with promised arms deliveries. ‘We have spent £50,000 on arms in Spain,’ he told Peter on 6 December 1963:
These will go to Amman next week, officially. We then decided the French were not getting anywhere, so I have got to go to Amman to collect them from there from the 21st onwards. This has not been paid for by Sammy [Shami] yet, so it is not firm. The moment he pays it is on, though . . . After that, subject to the cash keeping going, I will buy regular shipments along these lines once a week for as long as he wants. The Amman–Yemen a/c [aircraft] will fly regularly for me too.
All this is I’m afraid behind the French backs, but they are impossible. However, it is Top Secret from everyone, and we must let everyone think it is still a 100 per cent Frog effort.
At the end of the year the weather in the mountains turned very cold. On 13 December 4–6 inches of snow fell, and, as Jack Miller put it, ‘Amir Mohamed is delighted that it is cold, as it keeps his followers huddled in their blankets and he can be alone.’
He says this snow is the worst in living memory. Asks to be photographed. He is twenty-seven, educated partly at Bonn University – has been in UK. Loves guns. Has built himself a house in Sana’a and wants to be in business when war is over, developing tourist trade and exports – good hotels in mountains would be wonderful.
In Aden
, Peter de la Billière continued to amaze colleagues with his energy. Not only was he doing his legitimate job as Intelligence Officer to the Federal Regular Army and at the same time acting as the BFLF’s covert link-man: he was also studying for the Staff College exam, which he sat at the start of December; and in spite of the overpowering heat he regularly ran up and down Jebel Shamsan, the extinct volcano towering 1,800 feet above the town. In May he had organised a race up the mountain, the Shamsan Scramble, which attracted forty-six entrants, including two women, and was won by a seventeen-year-old Arab schoolboy, Muhammed Deria, whom Peter described as being ‘wiry as a spider and incredibly fit’ (Peter himself came fourth). Further, he devised a combat survival course, out in the desert, which was so tough that, although it did not quite kill anybody, it left both participants and supervising authorities in a state of shock.
His time was running out, for early in the New Year he was due to return to the SAS; but before he left, the BFLF suffered an unpleasant jolt. Somehow a cable was sent in clear to Sana’a and New York, provoking Peter to protest to Jim:
The cable office out here is fully staffed by people in the pay of both Egypt and the United States, and one must be fully prepared for all this text to have been leaked to these two countries. I have been very careful to guard my [personal] security and the security of this organisation. It must now be assumed that I am blown not only to MI6 but to Egypt and America. It is just as well that I am going.
Discontent was spreading among the mercenaries. From Nuqub, Franco reported that Cyril Weavers (‘a bloody good man’) was fed up and threatening to leave if he wasn’t moved somewhere more interesting. Jack Miller, at El Qara, had become even more critical of the Yemenis’ attitude and called for ‘less talk, more action’. In particular, he complained of the tribesmen’s wilful refusal to observe – or even pay lip-service to – Western ideas on working to schedule, or to look after any weapons except their own rifles. He was maddened by the almost total lack of discipline, and by the soldiers’ tendency to attribute any failure to the will of Allah. ‘I should like to know,’ he wrote acidly, ‘how many consider whether it is the will of Allah that the Egyptians remain in Yemen for twenty years.’
At the end of January 1964 a new doctor, twenty-eight-year-old Colin Wilson-Pepper of the British Red Cross, arrived, and on Sunday, 9 February, in Bait Idhaqah, Jack watched him stop the bleeding in the arm of a man hit by a hand-grenade fragment twelve days earlier. Another man had a Kalashnikov bullet in his leg muscle, but the doctor decided he could not operate until he was given a clean room. Yet another casualty, lying wounded in the suq (the bazaar), was not being fed, because he had been unable to draw his cash allowance. Jack wrote:
In the suq there is still talk of ‘Egyptians’ and ‘djinns’ (devils) when we appear. However when Ali [the interpreter] and I offered to fight a couple of chaps who called us Egyptians, they backed down . . . Colin estimates that the average villager here is living about the standard of peasants in the time of Alfred the Great (and he has done social anthropology).8
Chagrined though he was by the prevailing inefficiency and irresolution – he once twisted the arm of a donkey-driver who had insulted him – Jack occasionally came upon something much more agreeable:
In late afternoon Colin and I walked up to Turkish remains to west of village. Up there is a kind of utopia untouched by war that is very pleasant to see. Green terraces (at about 10,000 feet) and pretty little hamlets stretching away down towards a wadi far below.
In the Khowlan, Johnny Cooper had recently organised a major assault on the Egyptian garrison outside the town of Jihannah – a tented camp surrounded by barbed wire and mines. On 25 December 1963, in preparation, he and what he called his gaish Abdullah bin Nasser (his little army) of seven moved out to the village of Bishar to carry out a reconnaissance, but met with a mixed reception. Many of the villagers did not want them to attack the town, because they knew it would provoke reprisal air-assaults. Others wanted action, but not from the site Johnny had already selected. ‘So,’ he reported to Jim, we moved down on the night of the 26th and shivered to death under some fig trees.’9 Next morning a reconnaissance of the proposed mortar site proved abortive, as it was too far from the target:
So we looked further and nearer to Jihannah and found an ideal site about 1,700 yards from the town. We returned, gathered our crew and man-handled from the camel road-head the mortar and 28 bombs. On arrival we checked for ambush signs, but our aiming posts had not been tampered with. We fixed the night aiming-lights and we parted, I to the OP [observation point] behind a fine jebel 300 yards forward of Philippe and Georges [another French mercenary] on the gun site.
We awaited the moon (full that night) and at 7.10 p.m. we opened fire on a convoy of five tanks entering the Ordnance Depot compound, their lights giving a fine target. After ten bombs the mortar jumped the base-plate and damaged the plate. The [enemy’s] reaction was slow, but after ten minutes all hell broke loose – tanks, mortars, MMG and small arms. We sat this out and checked the mortar site, to find the damage not so bad.
We lined up again, and this time at 8.15 p.m. we took one correction, 200 up, and we put the remainder seventeen bombs (one misfire) down in RAPID [fire]! Most spectacular display, and there was a negative reply this time.
When bombs started raining down out of the night, the defenders were terrified. In contrast with the Royalists, who could take refuge from air-attack in caves, all except the tank crews were caught in the open, and their tents gave them no protection. As Johnny remarked, ‘Observed from the top, the panic was fantastic.’ Unable to pinpoint the source of the initial bombardment, the Egyptians loosed off indiscriminately in all directions; and then, when the second fusillade came in, they simply lay low. After two days of confusing reports, Johnny got confirmation that seventeen people had been killed, among them the second-in-command of the detachment, and that one medium machine gun and one mortar had been destroyed. ‘No question of Royalist feelings,’ he reported. ‘They hate the Republicans, and even more so the Wogs – but you know Arabs: money, rifles and little all-out war is their cup of tea.’
As he expected, the attack did provoke a reaction, but a less violent one than he had feared. Although planes flew over Jihannah next day, there were no attacks on Royalist positions; but all Republican troops were evacuated to Sana’a and the north, and Egyptians took over the forward defence locations in the area. There is no doubt that the occupying soldiers lived in dread of sudden, opportunist attacks like this one: being unwilling or physically unable to climb into the rarefied environment from which the Royalists were operating, they must have felt like sitting ducks.
One hazard with which the mercenaries had to contend was the arrogance of some Yemeni commanders, all too well illustrated by the disaster that befell a caravan of 120 camels commanded by Sheikh Ali Hantash. In January this great armada set out for the Khowlan from the Beihan border, loaded with arms, ammunition, money and some radio equipment for which Johnny had been waiting for months. The caravan passed Harib unchallenged, but about 20 miles further west the sheikh decided to lay some anti-tank mines on the track behind them, to frustrate any attempt by Republicans or Egyptians to follow them up. The mines were laid without difficulty, but then Sheikh Ali ordered the caravan to march over them, to disguise the places where they had been buried. When the caravan was straddling the field, a heavily laden camel triggered one of the devices, causing a stampede, and in the ensuing chaos another six mines exploded. One man and seven camels were killed, and sixteen of the camel men refused to go on.
The sheikh disdainfully ordered the remaining ninety-seven camels to resume their journey, but they were stopped by men of the Beni Dhabian tribe, who demanded a levy for every animal. Hantash refused to pay anything, suggesting that he would fight rather than hand over money, and in the end he was allowed to continue unmolested. Johnny, however, reported that he received only eleven out of thirty-six packages despatched for Abdullah
bin Hassan. As Peter de la Billière had remarked about one of the Rhodesian Air Services’ deliveries, ‘I’m afraid this air landing is a dead loss, as the loads do not find their way to the correct location and there is nothing we can do about it.’
At Boa, 20 miles south-west of Khanjar, chaotic scenes ensued when the local commander, Mohamed bin Nasser, was assassinated by a shot through the head from about 300 yards. Mac McSweeney, who was in Boa at the time, reported that for about an hour utter confusion reigned, with people shooting in all directions. He himself grabbed a machine gun and a few magazines and moved up onto a hill, waiting till things quietened down, alarmed by the realisation that he did not know at whom he should be shooting if a serious gun-battle broke out. Almost worse, the Arab radio operator refused to let him use the set to transmit news of the assassination – and not until the next day, when the man had gone away, was he able to send a message to Nuqub.
Frustrated at Boa, Mac moved to the French camp at Khanjar, where he could at least help with weapon training; but even there work slowed almost to a standstill because of constant Egyptian air-attacks, mostly by MiGs now flying in groups of six and firing machine guns, explosive cannon shells and rockets. The final blow came on Boxing Day, when in what Mac described as a ‘very big bang’ rocket-launchers, mortars and ammunition were all destroyed.
At much the same time Jack Miller went with an escort of four to reconnoitre Egyptian outposts near Amran, a few miles north-west of Sana’a, from the forward Royalist positions. Moving a mile to the west along the Souda ridge, he could look down on white enemy tents around Bait al-Wali, and more tents and troops beyond the road to the north. From the number of shell holes round Royalist positions, it was clear that the enemy had perfected the range for their artillery. When he said he wanted to get a closer look at the road, a general argument broke out: his guides told him that the villages ahead were Republican, and that there were enemy units close to the road. Jack proposed going forward, nevertheless; but two of the guides disappeared, so he carried on regardless with the other two, down a steep descent into the foothills. Then he met a man called Haji Ali who agreed to take the party to the road. At this a third guide disappeared, leaving Jack with Haji Ali and the last of Prince Abdullah’s men.
The War that Never Was Page 12
