The War that Never Was

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Next day Tony set out alone to build stone cones, to mark the positions for lights on the DZ. Two Bedouin who passed by carrying wood told him, ‘Go away’, but he riposted, ‘No – you go away!’, which they did. There was just room for the lights in the pattern that he wanted, and that evening he sent a message to Headquarters confirming, ‘We ready’. The Israelis, however, were still nervous, and asked for further clarification of Egyptian positions, which Tony gave them. A day later he went out again, only to find that his carefully placed stones had been removed by Bedouin, who had surmised that they were markers showing the Egyptians where to bomb.

  With the DZ relaid, everything looked good. During the afternoons storms tended to brew up, but in the evenings they died down, leaving the sky clear at night. As always, special code words had been set to confuse any eavesdroppers: ‘Wolf’ for Headquarters, ‘Tiger’ for DZ, ‘Lion’ for aircraft, ‘Bear’ for ‘Operation within twelve hours’, ‘Birds’ for Egyptians, ‘Baboon’ for successful completion of the drop. Radio communications with Tel Aviv were variable: sometimes reasonable, sometimes impossible. One night, when contact was good, Tony sent a message saying, ‘Security difficult to hold. Please help by Bear as soon as possible.’ That evening ‘the radio came alive with numbers of boxes, lists of contents and instructions to burn cardboard containers and dispose of damaged mines’.

  Next morning, 26 May1964, with the first contact at 1100 GMT, in came ‘Bear, rpt Bear’. On the DZ Tony found Chris Sharma bandaging a man with a 4-inch cut to the bone in his shin. When Chris injected a local anaesthetic so that he could start stitching, the man got up to leave: the pain had gone, so he thought he was cured. As the day went on, the weather deteriorated until cloud covered the mountain and fog was rolling in wet billows up the gorge outside the radio cave. The spirits of the reception party fell steadily as thunder crashed overhead, and they prepared to send a message asking for the drop to be delayed. Then the clouds began to clear, and in came a message ‘Dollars 2100’ – the aircraft’s ETA – which showed that it had already taken off.

  At 1800 they briefed the fire-lighters. At 1815 another radio message warned that the aircraft might be half an hour early. The Imam had duly summoned the local sheikhs to his cave, and sent messengers out to surrounding villages and gun positions, telling them not to open fire on aircraft they might hear during the night. Tony’s assistants went off to their allocated stations. One man, detailed to sit on top of the wall of a derelict house, lost his nerve, until Abdullah [al-Khibsi] said he would do it – which shamed the man into doing it himself.

  Once again radio messages from the Khowlan, relayed through Nuqub, gave Tel Nof all possible information about their distant, dangerously placed target:

  Johnny: No. 1: DZ is as briefed, except following. One: drop direction now 224 rpt 224 degrees. Two: max length three-quarters mile. Prefer over to undershoot. If poss make four dropping runs . . . DZ on plateau at 6,000 feet. Highest point on plateau 238 degrees, five miles, as briefed. Nothing higher within 30 miles. DZ plateau descends sheer to 2,000 feet, then slopes to sea level at Jizan. Can see Jizan from here. Nearest birds 35 miles south at Qafl.

  Tel Nof: Received yr No. 1. Please state exact map reference or distance and direction from nearest known town to DZ. No. 3. Your No 1. Jizan bears 296 degrees, 97 kms. DZ position sixteen degrees thirty-one minutes north forty-three degrees twenty-two minutes east. Correct my No. 2: Birds at Haradh 31 kms east . . .

  No. 5: Due surface obstructions, ‘T’ laid out as follows. Lights four, six, two and one comprise cross-piece indicating commence drop. Lights three, five, six and seven comprise tail with lights three and five on DZ. New light nr. eight marks other end DZ . . .

  No. 5: Reconfirm birds’ distance at all directions from DZ. Do you know if birds have AA guns? Is Jizan lighted at midnight?

  No. 8: Yr No. 5. Nearest birds at Haradh thirty-one kms west rpt west with no AA guns. At Qafl thirty-five miles south birds have 40mm AA guns. Jizan has electricity. Maybe lighted midnight . . .

  No. 13: Have you any radar in area? If yes, details.

  Yr. 13: None this area.

  Tony left a vivid account of the final hour:

  At 1935 we turned on the Sarahs, Chris one by the radio cave, and I one in the centre of the T. At 2000 there was no sign of the aircraft, nor at 2030. Abdullah could not sit still, but had to walk up and down. Fire-lighters were beginning to look suspiciously at us.

  I decided to light the fires at nine, whether the aircraft was in sight or not. With Abdullah protesting strongly, I fired the green Verey to signal the fires to be lit. All sparked quickly, and the T looked impressive. A long five minutes, then a drone from the West, getting louder. Another green Verey. Then the aircraft was overhead, flashed its lights to signal to speak on the Sarah. Thinking it must be Egyptian, Abdullah disappeared, to hide under a rock.

  Tried to tell the aircraft to drop slightly to the left of the T. Luckily they could not understand me. The aircraft disappeared to the east in a wide, descending circuit, then roared in overhead – still too high – almost exactly over the T. Another wide circuit, then in again, with doors open, but nothing dropped. A third circuit, roaring in again exactly over the T.

  Then they came. Three or four boxes fell, kicked to the left, a gap, then more, all kicking left. Would they drift back? No – the wind was dead calm. Then crunch, crunch, and they were landing, fifty yards left of the centre line and 100 yards down the DZ. Then the aircraft circled left and swept in low over the T in a final pass on its way home.

  One man had been so close to a box when it landed that a rope from one of the chutes had tangled round his leg. One box fell in a mosque a yard from a deep-water reservoir. Another landed in a house and fell down through two stories to the ground floor. Arabs appeared out of nowhere to guard the boxes (under the Imam’s orders) and would not allow even Abdullah to open them without considerable argument. We folded the chutes and sent them to the HQ, and left a guard on each box. Bedouin squatted on the chutes, hoping we would not notice them. An old sheikh exulted, ‘By God, we are so strong that not only will we take Sana’a, but Aden as well!’ This – as the stuff was supposed to have come from the British – was pretty rich.

  Back in Jizan, Tony went to see the Governor, Prince Mohamed Sudairi, who congratulated him on the mercenaries’ efforts and told him that, according to Cairo radio, there were 500 of them in the Yemen. It turned out that the people of Jizan had had two unpleasant frights. By chance the drop came in a year to the day since they had first been bombed by the Egyptians – so, when they heard a big aircraft passing overhead in the night, they immediately switched off the electricity supply and waited, blacked-out, in trepidation, which increased when then they heard the plane again, forty-five minutes later, flying low and fast without lights on its homeward run. Of course they wanted to know where it had come from, but nobody enlightened them.

  News of the operation spread slowly, the Arabs reacting first with amazement, then with gratitude. A week later they were saying that tanks had come out of the sky and asking, ‘When is the next one?’

  The success of the first two drops made the Israelis enthusiastic about mounting further operations: at the end of September 1964, Tony, back in London, told Johnny: ‘They are very keen to keep going,’ and the code word for a drop became ‘Repairs’. It was agreed that Repairs should be carried out once a month. One constant hazard was the danger that radio messages might be intercepted. On the one hand, the Israelis wanted the fullest possible information about the terrain around each DZ, and frequently asked for checks to be repeated. This created problems, because the men on the ground had no theodolites or sextants – not even any good maps – so they had to rely on marching compasses, which could produce discrepancies when coordinates were retaken. On the other hand, the reception parties were anxious to keep radio traffic to a minimum. Even in a static location, a sudden start-up of routine exchanges through day and night could mean only
one thing to eavesdroppers, and moving a station to an isolated spot four days before a drop would be even more significant.

  Over the next two years the Israelis mounted twelve more Repairs sorties, never using the same DZ on two successive occasions, and very considerable quantities of weapons and ammunition were delivered into the mountains. ‘Special Consignment No. 8’, for instance, dropped in May 1965, included 250 rifles of .303 calibre, 50,000 rounds of .303 ammunition, four Bren guns, twenty-four Bren magazines, twenty anti-tank mines, 200 kilograms of plastic explosive, 1,200 metres of fuse, 1,000 rounds of .38 pistol ammunition and two boxes of medical equipment – besides tins of beer, beef, baked beans, carrots, peas and sardines, and bottles of whisky and brandy. Other drops brought bazookas, anti-tank rockets, short-delay time-bomb fuses, gold sovereigns, and two Hispano-Suiza 20mm mobile anti-aircraft guns that Jim had specially ordered.

  As Messrs Cooper and Bailey walked away from one of the drops in the dark, a single rifle bullet cracked past their heads. Both dropped to the ground, but a second later Johnny typically stood up and shouted out his cover-name, ‘Abdullah bin Nasser!’, and strode forward, confident that the shot had only come from some nervous guard.

  Jim flew on one of the missions; Tony was on board for all but two, and during the long-haul flights he learnt to play backgammon, ‘taught by masters’.6 He also enjoyed the ritual, repeated twice at exactly the same stage of each sortie, of being encouraged to move to the side of the aircraft furthest from Israel’s nuclear facility, whose existence the crew always hotly denied. He did once set eyes on the installation: early in the morning, in the final stages of a flight, he was sitting in the cockpit behind the pilots’ seats, and as they came past the huge building, Arieh Oz turned round and grinned at him.

  That tiny leak in security was a small price to pay for what the Israelis gained. Not only did they help detain and weaken the Egyptian forces in the Yemen; over the years they had also gained valuable intelligence about the capability and limitations of the air force, the size of Nasser’s expeditionary army, the way it operated, the weapons and ammunition it was using, and the tendency of its soldiers, when pressed, to throw down their Kalashnikovs and run away.

  On all his many visits to Tel Aviv, arranging the Mango drops, Tony was treated as a VIP – met at the airport and whisked out through a side door. Then, in the middle of one of his trips, he received an unpleasant shock. He had undertaken to act as courier for a consignment of sovereigns destined for the Royalists, and he had bought the gold in the suq in Jeddah (where it was cheapest). Because there were no flights between the Arab countries and Israel, he had been obliged to bring the money to London so that he could smuggle it out to Tel Aviv for loading onto the Stratocruiser.

  To his dismay he heard that the new Labour Government had tried to forestall a run on sterling by banning the export of gold, and that customs were making spot-checks on travellers’ luggage as they flew out of the country – but he learnt this only at the last minute, so that he had no option except to trust his luck. His locked suitcase was so heavy that he could scarcely carry it; nevertheless, the night before his flight he booked it in at the West London air terminal in Cromwell Road, hoping not to see it again until he reached Tel Aviv, and explaining its fearful weight to the girl behind the desk by saying that it contained legal documents for a big court case in Israel.

  Next morning at Heathrow, travelling on a new passport made out in the name of Shlomo, he was horrified to find a currency search in progress, with passengers required to identify their baggage and open it for inspection. At a long counter suitcases were being disembowelled, wallets emptied, pockets turned out. His only hope, he thought, was to hang back, present himself last in the queue and pretend that he was in danger of missing his flight. With his case and briefcase open, he waited in mounting trepidation – but the customs officer merely fumbled among the clothes packed on top of the gold, closed the lid of the suitcase, chalked it, apologised for the delay and let him stagger through.

  In Tel Aviv Tony had another fright. He had agreed to meet his contact in a certain hotel, and obediently sat waiting in the foyer. After a considerable time a rather irritated-looking man came up and said pointedly, ‘MR SHLOMO, I believe?’ You don’t seem to be responding very well to our calls for you on the tannoy.’

  7

  Shortage of Gold

  The mercenary effort was loose-knit, to say the least. Billy McLean, operating on his own, travelled to Saudi Arabia and the Yemen whenever he could spare the time; he kept Jim informed of his movements, but was not under his control. Similarly, David Smiley went wherever he felt like, without detailed instructions from the London office. Individual operators were sent to the mountain stations, but, once there, moved around their particular areas on their own initiative, or at the behest of their local prince or sheikh. It was never possible for Jim to coordinate the campaign from London, because the Yemeni leaders would not have responded to directives from somebody so far away – and somebody whom, in any case, they did not know.

  All the same, in March 1964, after yet another tour of the country, Billy had summed up the situation in an optimistic memorandum, saying that HMG’s decision not to recognise Sallal’s Republican Government had proved to be ‘both correct and wise’. It had become clear to all that the puppet regime had no popular support within the Yemen, and would have collapsed long ago but for the Egyptian military intervention. Nasser, he thought, had found the conquest of the Yemen a much tougher proposition than he expected: already at least 8,000 Egyptian soldiers had been killed, and the war was costing Egypt not less than 500,000 US dollars a day.

  McLean went on to make some alarming prophecies. If the war continued for any length of time, it might provoke Egypt to launch air-attacks on Saudi Arabia. The Soviet Union, which was already giving Nasser very substantial support, might infiltrate the Yemen in greater force. McLean therefore felt that the war should be brought swiftly to an end by forcing the Egyptian army to leave the country, and he thought this would not be difficult, ‘if HMG were prepared to take certain steps now’.

  What these steps were, he did not specify; but Grin (David Smiley), on his third visit to the Yemen, found the Royalists obstinately pursuing tactics that he and others had tried hard to discourage. By then the Imam had moved a couple of miles from his previous hideout at El Qara into two large caves, one of which had electricity supplied by a generator – yet his ideas had not changed. Far from accepting Grin’s advice, he invited him to go and observe the all-out attack that his troops were about to launch on the Egyptian garrison in the town of Hajjah. When Grin asked why he had ordered the attack, the Imam replied that the place had been encircled for weeks (not true), and that its capture would raise morale, encouraging many Republicans to change sides.

  Hajjah is a town on the southern slopes of a mountain rising to 8,000 feet, surrounded by valleys. Nine typical Yemeni villages, of solid, stone, fort-like houses, clung to the slopes at nine different heights, all now occupied by Egyptians or Republicans, who had turned them into defensive positions. The one motorable road, from Hodeidah, approached along a wadi from the west and climbed the south-west flank of the mountain in zigzags.

  The Royalists held the sides of the valleys facing the town, and their plan was to open up a bombardment with their heavy weapons – 81mm mortars, 75mm and 57mm recoilless rifles – at dusk on the evening of Friday, 20 March 1964, while tribesmen moved forward to positions from which they could attack during the night. The forces to the north, under the command of Prince Mohamed bin Ismail, were to storm seven of the villages on the mountain, while the southern army, under Abdullah bin Hassan, was to capture three other villages, including Hajjah itself, and to cut the Hodeidah road in four places.

  Preparations for the assault were so chaotic that on 20 March Jack Miller wrote in his journal: ‘Progress there has got to be, or I will waste my time NO LONGER’ – and he was further exasperated by the fiasco that followed
.

  The attack failed for several reasons. First, because it was expected: the Egyptians knew it was coming – not necessarily from any spy, but because every tribesman within miles had heard the date and time of the assault days in advance. The second reason was that the preliminary bombardment proved ineffective: weapons were fired at extreme range, and many had no sights, so that shells and bombs fell short of their targets. Besides, the gunners loosed off indiscriminately into Hajjah, rather than at the Egyptian positions.

  ‘No attempt was made to go for Egyptian positions,’ wrote Grin in a letter to Jack:

  Oh for a trained British mortar team! They could have knocked out twenty trucks, the guns and a good deal more. As it was, I imagine the shells merely soured the local population. I saw a few parties of Royalist tribesmen moving forward in the evening but heard no firing. In truth I believe they never attacked at all.

  Each tribe had been allocated a target, but several made no attempt to move forward any distance, and some did not even start. Nor did they cut or mine the road. The result, Grin reported, was disastrous:

  By next day not a single objective was in Royal hands, and the Royal tribesmen had returned to their usual occupations of drinking coffee and chewing qat. Though [they were] singing songs of their prowess, I did not see one with a bandolier with empty places, to indicate that a shot had been fired.

  Far from pulling out, the Egyptians brought in more troops from the east, and forced the Royalists to withdraw and abandon seven of their precious heavy weapons. In a sharp, sarcastic report to Jim, Jack Miller savagely criticised Abdullah bin Hassan, who, he said, had completely ignored the advice given to him – principally to cut all approach roads and surround the city: