The War that Never Was

by Duff Hart-Davis

  At about 1730, after allegedly passing unseen enemy positions, they suddenly emerged onto a forward slope above the road. There Jack found ‘plenty of corners, [a] steep hill and possible site to blow road into small ravine’. Armed with this intelligence, he could now advise on ambushes, mining, and demolition on the road and its Egyptian traffic – but had he not insisted on making a close approach, he would never have got the information.

  The next few weeks amply confirmed the frustrations of the mercenaries’ existence, recorded in David Walter’s journal. On 14 January 1964 he was due to leave the Imam’s headquarters on a mission to cut the road between Amran and Hajjah, an important road-junction north-west of the capital, notorious as a prison town, but also an important religious centre. Dr Bartlett was to go with him, to attend to battle casualties; but too few donkeys turned up, so David sent them away with instructions to return the following day.

  On the morning of the 15th: no donkeys at all. Instead of leaving, David staged some training in mining and demolitions; but an accident occurred, ‘resulting from the necessity to improvise’, and he sustained injuries to his hand and face, which left him with a perforated left eardrum and fragments of metal embedded under the skin. This made him decide that his materials were too dangerous for the training of raw recruits, and he cancelled further instruction.

  On the 16th the doctor passed him fit to travel, but still no animals were available. Five more donkey-less days passed, and only on 22 January did transport at last appear. For the next two days the party was on the move, but on the 24th their start was delayed by the number of patients who demanded treatment. Arriving at the village of Affar, they were invited to dine, but afterwards the donkey wallahs did not wish to proceed, and in the argument one of them pulled his jambiya knife on Bartlett.

  Once it had been decided that the man was to be put in gaol, they proceeded with speed, passing through groves of banana trees said to belong to the Imam. They then went up a very steep ascent and in mid-afternoon came to Bait Adhaqah, where they were entertained by the local Amir for two hours, before proceeding to Mabda, which they reached at 2100 hours.

  Meeting Abdullah bin Hassan in his ‘very dirty cave’, David discovered that the road he had come to destroy had already been dug away in several places, and its use denied to the enemy. Hassan made it clear, however, that his visitor would not have been allowed to do the job anyway, since this was a task for the Yemeni Royalist soldiers. David’s role would be to train them.

  Next day, having treated a case of toothache with a pair of engineer’s pliers, Bartlett went off, and David remained behind to teach techniques of demolition. Although he had cancelled such instruction at El Qara, he decided that his visit should be justified somehow, so he taught some improvisations as if they were standard, ‘the only trouble being one stampeded camel train’. On the way back to El Qara he found that the camel-load of mines which he had intended should supplement his supply of 852 plastic explosive had ‘disappeared from the face of the earth’, and that Bill Bartlett had treated only three battle casualties, all of whose wounds were more than two months old.

  In the cave at El Qara, to his chagrin, there was still no sign of the battery acid for which he had been waiting. It was reported to have leaked and killed the donkey that was carrying it, but Bartlett said this was not possible, and David concluded that it had gone the same way as the camel-load of mines. ‘The pace of this war is being dictated by the donkey wallahs,’ he decided, ‘and no one else seems to care. My temper is easily roused.’

  Tony Boyle, meanwhile, had flown to Saudi Arabia to enquire about the possibility of using an abandoned airfield as a despatch-point for parachuting supplies into Yemen. First he was granted an audience with Prince Feisal, who seemed genuinely interested in the idea; but when he went on to see Prince Sultan, the Defence Minister rejected the proposal. The Saudis’ reason for refusing was feeble in the extreme. ‘Somebody might find out about it,’ they said. Tony’s trip proved not only disappointing, but dangerously divisive. The idea of using a Saudi airfield had come from David Stirling – but he had told Tony that Jim and Billy McLean must not know the true purpose of his journey. The abortive trip thus widened the split that was opening up between Jim and Tony on the one hand, and Stirling and McLean on the other.

  Jim considered that Stirling had become so indiscreet as to be a danger to the whole mercenary operation. Ideas mentioned to him in confidence one day kept coming back from other people, and in the end Jim and Tony decided, for safety’s sake, to cut him out of their loop. This annoyed Smiley, who began making critical remarks about them, and also began to undermine McLean’s faith in the mercenary organisation. Serious differences arose also over attitudes to the Hamid ud Din family. McLean wanted it restored to full power, but Jim and Tony had no wish to see it reinstated. Although they came to like some younger members of the Imam’s clan, they considered the regime unenlightened and cruel – and Tony, struggling to reconcile opposing views, briefed his own people by saying that the aim was to get the Egyptians out of the Yemen, and that the only way to do that was to back the Royalists.

  Meanwhile, the pressure on HMG from America was increasing: In a cable Lord Harlech, the British Ambassador to Washington, asked that ‘vigorous action be taken to stop the involvement of British mercenaries and British territory in the Yemeni war, in order to avoid feeding American suspicions of our motives.’10

  HMG ignored this request. No pressure was put on Jim, then or later, to withdraw his teams; and in fact the mercenaries, beyond the reach of far-off arguments, were having small successes – as when, at the beginning of March, at Bait Adhaqah, Jack Miller ‘nursed’ a sick .50 Browning machine gun back to health, and people began calling him ‘doctor’. But he was still exasperated by the task of goading idle tribesmen into action, and had composed a new ‘peasant-driving song’, to the tune of ‘Colonel Bogey’:

  Yallah is what we say to you.

  Yallah, the only thing to do.

  Yallah, and then by Allah,

  We’ll get there somehow, on some day, it’s true.

  Lazy, you’re on your backside still,

  Lazy, you know your job is ‘Kill!’

  Lazy, you’ll drive us crazy.

  We’re here to help you, and help you we will.

  On 10 March he spent a long day supporting Amir Mohamed Ismael on an inspection of the front line west of Hajjah:

  0725, depart cave. 0730, passing Mabian town. Caught by two Ilyushins diving low over town. Surprise complete. No bombs on this run; why not, I shall never know. Dash to overhang of rock on edge of houses and slightly below. Shell from Hajjah suddenly lands less than 100 yards away. Then bombing starts: too close for comfort, five bombs in area, two failing to explode. Showers of stones and debris. One plane attacks every seven to eight minutes; other cruises round high up, no doubt to observe and report to bombing aircraft.

  0800. Depart and find Amir sheltering lower down hill below Mabian. 0930 Hot sun. Amir announces he can go no further. 0940 Halt at home of Sheikh in Beni Shaumi. 1030. Comb honey eaten off knife. 1100. Bomb explodes in Mabian. Lunch, hospitality terrific. This is more like a picnic than a tour of the front line. Qat. 1700. Dep[art] Beni Shaumi. 1800. Arrive village of El Adbar on low ground. Thus all day we have done about two hours’ serious travel. Coffee, chatter and qat, crammed into a small house in great discomfort. Heat terrible . . . Notables arriving all the time to kiss the hand of the Amir – and add to the crush.

  The worst thing is having no chairs. I cannot get used to the floor, and I have given up not pointing the soles of my feet at people. The best people don’t seem to worry, anyway.

  Amir says the peasants believe that unexploded bombs can move about over the ground. This is the best yet! The bonhomie of the soldiers is terrific and to some extent atones for the hostility encountered among the peasants in Bait Idhaqah.

  Grin had also been on the move, touring the country on yet another visit, an
d in a cautiously optimistic report to Prince Feisal played up the mercenaries’ role. The influence of the foreign specialists was beginning to make itself felt, he wrote, and without them the Royalists would be in a much weaker position. ‘I consider their presence essential for the continued conduct of the war.’

  He reiterated that most of the Royalist soldiers were no more than armed tribesmen, best suited to guerrilla warfare, and that they must be discouraged from trying to capture towns or take part in pitched battles against trained soldiers in defended positions. He also reported that money was playing an ever-larger role in the struggle: the Egyptians, having realised that they could not advance into the mountains against the Royalists, were making more and more attempts to buy the tribesmen with large-scale bribes of money and rifles.

  Jack Miller, who was closer to the ground and had reduced a pair of desert boots ‘almost to ruin’ in just over two weeks, was more cynical. ‘I feel about ten years older in the last two months,’ he wrote:

  Quite soon I shall reach breaking-point, as I do not think many people really care who wins this war. The Brit. Govt. obviously does not mean to do anything either. Therefore it could be better to leave these people to go their own sweet way.

  Occasionally, however, he saw a happier side of Yemeni life – as on the day he and a French mercenary, François, made a ‘triumphal entry’ into the town of As Sudah. Accompanied by little boys carrying their weapons, they joined a procession and were installed in the large private house of the Emir, where they spent two days ‘in the lap of luxury’:

  Lunch was bread and milk, bintasahr (pastry and honey), helva, milk pudding, bread and honey, tomatoes, stacks of meat (only the best bits). It is such a relief to be able to eat as much as one can hold before the Arabs finish it all, as they eat faster than we do!

  6

  Manna from Heaven

  Early in 1964 Royalist morale was greatly strengthened when weapons and ammunition began dropping into the Khowlan from the skies. The princes and tribesmen had no idea where this bounty was coming from – and they would have been astounded to learn that the source was that arch-enemy of Arab states, Israel.

  To members of the BFLF and their Royalist allies, the advantages of air-drops were potentially enormous. Until then, whenever arms had been delivered in Beihan, there had been no proper control over how they were distributed, and the expense of sending the weapons on into the Yemen had been considerable. Since one camel could carry only 300 pounds, large caravans were needed to move each consignment upcountry, and every journey meant up to twenty-four hours’ hard riding through territory occupied or patrolled by the enemy. Some of the tracks were mined, and caravans had to pass through avaricious tribes, who demanded money and a share of the arms to let the travellers go. In the words of one BFLF report, ‘an inordinate amount of equipment is being siphoned off at the behest of the Sherif to bribe tribes on the Yemen side of the border’.

  The hazards of an overland journey had been all too clearly illustrated by the disaster that overtook the Hantash caravan in January. Air-drops would bypass all such dangers and deliver munitions straight to the front line. ‘The question of parachuting is very important,’ said Cooper on a tape sent home from his redoubt in the Khowlan:

  For over four months now we have been saying we are going to parachute. Everybody talks about parachute. If one plane arrives and drops something, it is going to clear up the great problem of re-supply. At the moment the camel men are pointing a pistol at the Emir and saying ‘You will supply fifty, sixty, seventy Rials per trip’ . . . but when the Emir can turn round and say ‘Look – I have my aircraft, you can go fly your kite,’ the position is going to be much better.

  Jim’s earlier schemes had proposed that containers of arms and ammunition should be flown into Beihan, unloaded, fitted with parachutes and placed in smaller aircraft for dropping into the mountains. The BFLF had also considered the more ambitious idea of buying its own aircraft: a second-hand Lockheed Constellation C 749 with freighter configuration (though capable of seating eighty-two passengers), two owners since new, at a price of £65,000, plus brokerage of £5,000. ‘As you can imagine,’ said a letter from the firm’s contact:

  the calculation of running costs is a very difficult problem. I have no idea for example what your crew-costs (one Captain, Second Pilot, Navigator and Engineer minimum) will be in the area in which you intend operating the aircraft, [but] I have approached a Lockheed Captain with a view to converting any pilots you have in mind.

  Casting around for a simpler solution, Jim went to see the Iranian Ambassador to London, Ardeshir Zahedi, the son-in-law of Shah Reza Pahlavi. When Zahedi agreed to send weapons in through Saudi Arabia, Jim flew to Teheran to negotiate the deal with the Iranian Foreign Secretary – only to find himself abandoned incommunicado for five days in the Hilton Hotel. Eventually he established contact, and tried to arrange for arms supplies to be parachuted in – to which the Iranians agreed, but asked that, in return, he would arrange training for a few of their Special Forces personnel, to give them some experience of guerrilla warfare.

  In due course four men arrived in London, regular officers of the Iranian Special Forces, one of them a sergeant of astounding breadth; they had already been trained by the Americans at Fort Bragg, but they turned out to have no equipment of any kind and had to be comprehensively kitted out. In cables and radio messages Jim described them as ‘the cubs’, and in due course he sent them out to the Yemen; but they proved perfectly useless (see page 217) and the Iranians never parachuted any weapons.

  Into the breach stepped the Israelis. It was very much in their interest to give the Royalists extra fire-power, and so keep as many Egyptian troops as possible in the Yemen, draining Nasser’s coffers and bleeding his forces closer to home.

  The missions had to be planned with elaborate secrecy, for their implications were as explosive as the munitions that they were designed to deliver. As Johnny Cooper remarked afterwards, if the true origin of the drops had become known, ‘the political repercussions would have defied description’. Nasser would have been incandescent with rage that his bitterest enemy was entering the fray, and the Saudis would almost certainly have withdrawn their support, for (as Prince Feisal told Billy McLean in a private interview) at that stage they believed that Israel was secretly supporting Nasser.1

  The contacts with Israel were entirely private: HMG was neither consulted nor involved. It is no longer clear from whom the idea of collaboration came – but it was from the British side; and when Jim asked Shami about the feasibility of bringing Israel in, the Yemeni Foreign Minister said, ‘Go ahead – but don’t tell anyone, and be very careful.’ The first feelers were put out by Billy McLean, who flew to Tel Aviv to meet General Moshe Dayan, the Israeli Minister of Defence, and Meir Amit, head of the intelligence service, Mossad. Then, after consultations in London with Brigadier Dan Hiram, the Israeli Defence Attaché (conducted, naturally, at the Hyde Park Hotel), Jim and David Smiley left for Tel Aviv on 20 February 1964 to negotiate details of the first flight, designated Operation Leopard. A basic plan was agreed, but then Jim went out again, this time with Tony, to settle the details.

  On the way they stopped off in Geneva. There, acting on instructions, they booked into a hotel at a pre-arranged time and walked into an empty lift in the lobby. Just before the doors closed, a man followed them in, identified himself and, while the elevator was climbing to their floor, gave them passports made out in other names, in exchange for their real ones, for their onward flight to Israel.

  In Tel Aviv they met Shimon Peres, Director General of the Ministry of Defence, and Major General Ezer Weizman, Commander-in-Chief of the Israeli Air Force,2 who spoke good English and was described by Tony as ‘sarcastic, clear-brained, good memory for faces and personal details’. The visitors were also introduced to other senior officers, as well as to Nahum Admoni, who had been appointed Mossad’s ‘case officer and liaison’ for the operation. The Israelis had by no
means decided whether or not they would take part: for two whole days the visitors sat round a table in one of Mossad’s safe houses, conferring with up to twenty other people in an exhausting series of debates about what might happen under various circumstances. Because Jim and Tony were convinced that microphones had been planted in their hotel rooms, they conducted serious discussions sitting back-to-back on the lawn.

  Tony had some difficulty convincing his hosts that the para-drops would be technically feasible, the main cause of concern being the exceedingly wild nature of the Khowlan terrain: flying low at night into 12,000-foot mountains, without navigational aids, was not a prospect that appealed to any pilot, however experienced. Another worry was the proximity of enemy forces: the main Egyptian base at Sana’a was barely 15 miles from the proposed DZ (dropping zone), and the approach would have to be almost over the capital.