The War that Never Was

by Duff Hart-Davis

  On 5 January 1967 the Egyptians carried out the most devastating air-attack of the entire campaign – a raid on the village of Ketaf. Although the target was almost certainly the Royalist headquarters, in caves a short distance from the houses, it was the ordinary people who became the victims. The raid began at 0730, when two MiGs dropped one smoke bomb apiece to assess the direction of the wind. Nine Il-28s, in formations of three, then dropped twenty-seven gas bombs upwind of the village. Each bomb made a crater about three feet deep and six wide, releasing a grey-green cloud that drifted over the houses. More than 200 people died almost at once. Most of them expired within fifty minutes of the attack; they died with blood emerging from mouth and nose, but without any mark on their skins. Affected survivors suffered no blisters or visible injury, but had difficulty breathing and coughed continuously. In the opinion of the International Red Cross doctors sent by Jim to investigate, the rest of those caught by the gas within a mile or so downwind of the impact-point were unlikely to survive. All the animals in the area perished, and crops and vegetation turned brown.

  The attack provoked worldwide condemnation. Mercenaries who saw some of the victims were disgusted by the Egyptians’ callousness. Bushrod Howard, a young American formerly employed by various oil companies in the Middle East, and now working as an anti-Nasser propagandist, managed to reach Ketaf just two days after the bombing; he collected accounts from survivors, got them to dig up dead animals, loaded them into a truck and took them to Saudi Arabia.3

  Howard also helped organise press coverage, and on 21 January twenty reporters, including Richard Beeston of the Daily Telegraph, were flown to Najran. From there they had a twenty-seven-hour march with donkeys to the village – and when they arrived back in Najran, they were greeted at dawn on the 28th by an Egyptian air-raid, in which eight Il-28s and two MiGs bombed the town, killing four people and destroying numerous houses. Luckily many of the bombs proved duds, including a whole stick that fell along the main street, but failed to explode. A second raid with parachute flares and 500-pound bombs took place that night.

  As Jim remarked, the journalists ‘reported on the [Ketaf] incident from first-hand experience, and the world press is reacting enthusiastically. The Saudi Arabian Government is no longer able to overlook the fact that it is being attacked by the Egyptian air force.’ And yet, in spite of the extensive newspaper coverage, the Egyptians persistently denied using poison gas, and claimed that Britain was exploiting the reports for the purposes of psychological warfare. The victims at Ketaf (proclaimed Cairo radio) had died of tuberculosis.

  In London the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, rejected suggestions that Britain should refer the atrocity to the United Nations and, when asked an anxious question about the future of the South Arabian Federation, told the Leader of the Opposition, Edward Heath, to recognise the fact that ‘we cannot, and should not, be asked to go on indefinitely maintaining an international peace role in all parts of the world when our monetary, manpower or physical resources will not permit it’. On 1 March U Thant, United Nations Secretary General, declared that he was powerless to deal with the matter.4

  Many observers concluded that Nasser had become desperate to finish off the Royalist resistance; but in fact his murder-by-gas campaign simply increased his own difficulties. Spurred on by the Ketaf raid, the Saudi Government at last decided to reinvigorate the Royalist guerrilla campaign, and to abandon attempts to achieve a solution by political means – good news for the mercenaries, who were asked to revert to an aggressive role.

  Jim had been in Jeddah on the day of the gas attack, and on 11 January he was still there, writing to Judy and Hannah Stirling:

  It is now 3.45 and at last everyone has gone to bed . . . & I am nearly exhausted. Today after a full day and night Tourist [Sultan] finally agreed. We are to start up again in earnest – four months’ contract and no mucking about.

  I have spent the last three hours getting our Friends to agree to fly out a heart, lungs, clothing, earth and grass, all saturated with this gas from Ketaf. They will, I hope, be able to prove it at last . . . We must try to prove it and tell the world what’s happening here. The Friends have pulled out their finger and will fly their man to London tomorrow with all our bits.

  That same day Jim sent a radio message to Shami in London:

  Excellent meeting Sultan. Four month renewal. Permission to restart operations including French mortars as Saudi Arabian Government now admit no hope of political solution to problems.

  The French had been awaiting this moment for months. In training at their camp outside Najran they had found that the size of the 120mm mortars made them formidably difficult to handle: a single base-plate weighed some 300 pounds, and, to transport one across difficult terrain, they had to hoist it on a sling between two camels. When the opportunity for real action came at last, Frank Smith, who had carried out a special reconnaissance, led the detachment up to a prominent launch-point that commanded a view of the new Sana’a airfield, some 8,000 yards away, and early one morning the French opened fire. A bombardment of some fifty rounds left the runway pepper-potted with craters and put it out of action for days.

  The maverick Lord Lambton, then the Conservative Member of Parliament for Berwick-upon-Tweed, had been reporting ‘Nasser’s bestial little war’ for British newspapers, and under the banner headline THE ONE-SIDED WAR IGNORED BY U.N., he published a vivid description of life in a Royalist camp, where he had spent a night:

  It lay on a mountain which looked like a huge pile of stones . . . As the sun came up, out of crannies and crevices came men and animals: little fires were lit, breakfasts were cooked, and the whole scene was one of animation. At about nine o’clock the front of the mountain had the appearance of an animated beach, when suddenly the warning was given of aeroplanes. Within two or three minutes the space was empty – the rocks concealed everybody. The planes went on, and I could hear them dropping bombs . . .

  The mercenaries’ Bulletin No. 12, dated 11–17 January 1967, listed numerous actions in the war zone, including many raids with magnesium bombs designed to destroy crops. A more unusual news item reported that three women from the royal family had escaped from their incarceration in Sana’a and gone up into the Khowlan.

  Bulletin No. 13 reported the preliminary interrogation of an Egyptian defector, Majdi Ali Hamed, service ID card no. 563161, who said that the Egyptians were transferring all gold and Maria Theresa dollars to Egypt, as if in preparation for a pull-out, and that the numerous spies planted among the soldiers in Nasser’s army were shopping anyone who denounced the regime. All the operational pilots in the Yemen were Russian – Egyptian pilots not being trusted to fly in the mountains.5 The gas and most of the high-explosive bombing attacks were being mounted from Egyptian aircraft refuelled in the Yemen. Gassim Monassir was ‘a much-feared opponent. He prevents sleep and kills three or four Egyptians daily.’

  A rapid build-up of mercenaries, French as well as British, was causing problems for Tony Boyle, who had taken over control in Jeddah, and on 22 January he told Jim that he had had ‘a pretty hectic time for the last few days’, as there had never been fewer than fifteen people in the house, and at one time the number had reached twenty-six. ‘It has been like a terrible nightmare,’ he wrote, ‘when the house goes on getting fuller, and no matter how many you despatch to Najran, one or two more than you send off arrive on the next plane from Europe.’

  To shift all these people to the Yemen border, he had chartered an aircraft; but the details had been left to his asinine liaison officer, M’saad – with farcical results:

  We told him to tell Saudi Airlines there would be nineteen passengers and 400 kilos of freight. He came back and told us everything was all right. Would we please be at the airport at 5.30, as the aircraft left at 7? He would meet us there and would take us in the back way, and everything would be all right.

  By 5.20 I was at the airport, where I waited for M’saad for fifteen minutes. Needless to say, no M’
saad, so I took the first load of luggage in to be weighed. That came to 500 kilos. By this time Frenchmen and luggage were piling up outside the airport building, so I told them to go in. Of course at that moment M’saad and another load of luggage arrived.

  M’saad, in a frenzy, said to bring all the luggage back again, and to put everyone into cars and drive round the side way into the airport. As the aircraft was about to take off, I wasn’t too keen, but complied, so we pulled all the weighed luggage back to the cars and took it and all the people round to the front in relays.

  By this time all the airport staff and half the military personnel had heard that there was a good performance going on, and had turned out to watch, and everyone was saying, ‘Who are all these odd-looking people?’ The whole point of going round to the front secretly was lost. In addition we had over 1,000 kilos of freight, and we had to off-load seven people to compensate, so we only got eleven away on the flight.

  The incompetence of M’saad had featured frequently as a bad joke in letters (‘M’saad has vanished again into space. He must be the most useless LO ever, bar none’); but by then he was about to be moved to a new post, and Jim wrote from London:

  I do hope there is no gross malfunction when M’saad is fired into orbit. I am delighted to hear that he is on count-down. However, don’t hesitate to light the blue paper even if I cannot get there to see it go off pop! He has done a great job and we are all proud of our boy, but please don’t tell him my address in London, just mention Billy’s name.

  The beginning of March saw Jim in Jeddah yet again, sending Hannah Stirling a long list of administrative tasks: aircraft seats to be booked, visas obtained, cheques made out, telegrams sent. The organisation had built up to such a level that she was now handling 200 movements a year, and fielding some awkward requests – as when Tony asked her to research ‘the best size hollow rubber springs to go between spring and frame instead of the bump stops on the 2½ litre short wheel-base Land Rover’.

  ‘My dear Hannah,’ Jim wrote on 4 March:

  As we are now forty strong, and going on leave twice yearly, and the average leave pay request is £400 cash, this means a total of over £30,000 from the London petty cash account. This is bound to draw attention for tax & subsequent follow-up on individuals. Therefore think prudent henceforth only channel either in Sterling to Jersey or dollars to your BBME accounts Jeddah – but the latter always liable to seizure if the Egyptians arrive. Either way is legal.

  The surge of enthusiasm shown by the Saudis at the beginning of the year quickly subsided. On 7 March the mercenaries’ Bulletin No. 15 struck a gloomy note, saying that the hopes of substantial support from the Saudis were dwindling, as week after week went by without any sign of them following up the aggressive announcements provoked by the Ketaf gas attack. In the meantime, as the talks in Riyadh dragged on, the situation in the Yemen was ‘rapidly approaching anarchy’.

  By the beginning of April 1967 Jim’s organisation was thoroughly demoralised. One report said that (with the possible exception of Mango drops) no offensive operation had been brought off during the last twenty months. Communications and medical support were the only fields in which any real contribution had been made. Jim’s own burdens were increased by the death of his father, which took place in the middle of April.

  Although short of meaningful tasks, the mercenaries were carrying on as best they could. On 3 February the Fluke team were galvanised by the arrival – at last – of Abdullah bin Hassan. To mark the occasion Duncan shaved off his substantial beard, but the Prince’s reappearance proved disappointing, for he was in low spirits. The team talked to him from 8 p.m. until 1 a.m., but, as Duncan remarked, the whole discussion could have taken place in half an hour, for the Prince’s options were limited by a dire shortage of money. The Saudis had awarded him a budget of 500,000 riyals in January, but he had already spent two-thirds of it, and his tribesmen had not been paid for six months. He was in great need of gold, weapons and ammunition – and the Jacham tribe would not let his trucks through without payment. So desperate was he that he wrote out a note, in his peculiar English, for immediate radio transmission to King Feisal: ‘All the tribes . . . are revolting and need strong commendores.’

  With Abdullah had come Prince Hassan bin Ismail, described by Duncan as ‘an amusing bird, very good-looking, a highly civilised, smooth individual’, who until then had been Keeper of the Royal Wives in Beirut. This was the first time he had been into the Yemen, and from the way he behaved the mercenaries concluded that he had ‘no more idea of commanding an army than a nightclub operator’.

  Two days later there was some excitement when, in the evening, dissatisfied tribesmen started shooting into the area of Abdullah’s cave from the other side of the wadi. They were quickly driven off, but not until a good many rounds had been expended. ‘They did not try anything in this direction,’ Duncan recorded, ‘so we just carried out normal drill when the glen is under fire – shut the door and turned up the wireless. Never any good to be heroic when you don’t need to be. Seven o’clock is the popular time for shoot-ups.’

  Next morning two local sheikhs came up the wadi, each with fifty or sixty tribesmen, to pay their respects to Abdullah, and no doubt wishing to get paid. A tremendous feu de joie took place:

  The Digga force arrived at about midday, and the first we knew about it was two bullets whizzing over the top of the bait [house]. Accompanying their blazing-off, all the warriors were singing the Malakee war chant, and a drum was being beaten with no sense of rhythm. To add to the confusion a bloke sometimes tootled on a trumpet.

  Sheikh Ali Abdullah arrived at about 12.30 with his gaggle, and again we got a touch of the ‘crack and thump’. Just as they were all below us, and the noise was more like a platoon attack going in, Stan took advantage of the din to try out his German automatic rifle, and fired 20 aimed single shots into the rocks far above them. These rifles of ours are quite impressive for the fire-power they can produce, and Stan’s little bit of controlled, brisk shooting put a stop to their antics for a few brief moments.

  Grim news of events in Aden and Vietnam dampened the Khowlan team’s spirits as they waited for news from Jeddah, to find out whether Tony Boyle had managed to prise more money for Abdullah out of the Saudis. ‘No money, no action!’ Duncan wrote.

  On 17 April, in the middle of his stint in Wadi Heera’an, Kerry Stone went off on foot for a two- or three-day recce on the Arhab plateau in the mountains just north of Sana’a. There the Jebel Asama, which dominated the road leading from the capital to the northern airfield, was occupied by a company of Egyptian troops armed with mortars and recoilless rifles, supported by tanks.

  The party of four – Kerry, his guard and two guides – set out on a misty morning with the aim of sniping at any target of opportunity that they spotted as they looked down from the jebel into the camp; unfortunately the guide led them into a zone commanded by enemy positions, where they came under fire first from mortars, then from heavy machine guns. The enemy were only 300 yards away, and above them. As Kerry remembered forty years on:

  This woke me up. I had just been plodding along with my mind in neutral. Now, on looking about me, I saw that the mist had burnt off in the early morning sun. Not only that: for about two miles in any direction the ground was as flat as a witch’s tit, and there wasn’t a morsel of cover. For the next 1¾ hours we were machine-gunned and mortared, before we managed to get back to our lines, where I promptly spewed up.

  The noise of battle had aroused the neighbourhood, and the locals observed the scene from afar. Sheikh Obeid [the Paramount Sheikh of the area] told me he had been very impressed, and that I was now to be known as ‘Ahmed al Arnab’. I thought, That’s nice. What does it mean? Ahmed the Magnificent? The Brave? The Great? I was a bit miffed when I found out that Arnab means ‘rabbit’. How could I sit in a council of war alongside Abdullah the Courageous and Mubarak the Mighty with a name like that?6

  On 20 April Stan told Jim, f
rom Jeddah, that ‘nothing firm has been arranged regarding David’s future’. Grin, described in cables as ‘penniless’, but still enjoying the confidence of Sultan, had just gone into the Yemen yet again, to show Duncan Sandys and Billy McLean the British base and training school at Amara: one message described him as ‘jubilantly playing Bob Walker-Brown’s role’, and he himself said that his particular brief was ‘to find out why the war has not started, why the French are not playing their flutes, and why we are not helping more’.7

  13

  Exit Jay

  For four years Jim’s nerve had held. In the face of innumerable frustrations he had remained amazingly calm, travelling thousands of miles, tolerating delays and broken promises; but at the end of April 1967 his patience eventually gave out. Some scribbled notes left a skeletal outline of his final interview with Sultan:

  Military situation [in the Yemen] since last two–four months – BAD! . . . No Princes in West now . . . . Khowlan unsafe – Abdullah bin Hassan gone after four years . . . Egyptians in Marib, Barash, Elsalah . . . Impossible to move now, and only civil war if you did . . . No control or command . . . Never worse since 1962 . . . No time left before Brits leave Aden in six months now . . . Our military advice is ‘Cancel us (+ one month’s pay). Or, if you want to appoint someone else, we will hand over.’

  Privately, Jim told colleagues that the Saudis did not really want the Egyptian Army to be defeated: they just wanted it to be progressively weakened and detained in the Yemen indefinitely, while Nasser’s soldiers were being killed and his coffers emptied. At 0900 on 30 April a message went out from Bosom to all stations: