The War that Never Was

by Duff Hart-Davis

  One notable survivor of the civil war was Ahmed al-Shami, who became the united Yemen’s first Ambassador to London. But the Imam went into exile in England privately, and died there aged seventy in 1996; his father-in-law, secretary and boozing companion Yahya al-Hirsi settled in Hampstead. After more than a thousand years, the reign of the Hamid ud Din dynasty was at an end – but its demise brought no peace to the Yemen.

  Nasser died of a heart-attack on 28 September 1970, aged only fifty-two. In spite of all his failures, his disastrous initiatives and his patent mendacity, more than six million people turned out to watch his funeral procession move through the streets of Cairo. It could be said that he had won the war in the Yemen, for the Royalists had eventually been defeated; but the victory had been achieved at the terrible cost of more than 20,000 Egyptian dead.

  Also in 1970, South Arabia became the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY), the first Arab nation to turn communist, bolstered by aid from the Soviet Union and China, and offering sanctuary to terrorist organisations such as Baader-Meinhof and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. From the inception of the Marxist state, violence was endemic, and in 1986 the infighting erupted into a full-scale civil war, in which more than 10,000 people were thought to have died.

  In 1990 the PDRY joined forces with the YAR to form a single country, the Yemen Republic, which became peaceful enough over the next decade to allow visits by tourists, particularly members of the British-Yemeni Society and others. But in recent years the country has become increasingly dangerous, with terrorist groups such as al-Quaeda established in training camps in the mountains, and frequent threats to the British Embassy in Sana’a. As a result, the Foreign Office discourages visits by British subjects.

  15

  Aftermath

  Some time after the mercenary operation had closed down, John Woodhouse wrote a brief review of its activities and achievements. As always when discussing the SAS or its members, and being a perfectionist himself, he was outspokenly critical of anything that he considered to be a failure or poor performance.

  In the early summer of 1963 (he recapitulated) three SAS NCOs were ‘permitted to be absent without leave’ from the regiment to accompany Johnny Cooper on his reconnaissance of the Sana’a area. ‘This disclosed that the Egyptians had no hope of victory if the Royalists could be encouraged to go on fighting.’ The initial presence of the mercenaries, though limited to about four weeks, ‘caused an immediate and considerable improvement in the morale of the Royalists’. Though serving SAS soldiers were not again ‘allowed’ to go absent because of the risks involved, more ex-SAS were recruited, largely from the territorial army; but ‘most were well below the average SAS officer and soldier, both in up-to-date technical knowledge, and general intelligence and ability’.

  Woodhouse remarked that the mercenaries carried out a considerable amount of weapon training, but while in the field they ‘did as they pleased’ and sometimes allowed standards to slip, being subject only to self-discipline. Cooper and Mills (both former members of 22 SAS, and therefore more highly trained than their part-time colleagues) organised successful operations, but others achieved little apart from providing medical assistance, fixing up radio communications and taking air-drops. The colonel criticised the organisation’s level of security, which he denounced as ‘always very bad’, due to the fact that the mercenaries had received no training in this field. He might have added, in mitigation, that this was not their fault: it was only because he had not been allowed to deploy fully trained, serving members of the SAS that the part-timers had been drawn into service. Almost all the mercenaries were amateur soldiers – civilians who had done territorial service. He agreed, however, that the ability to give skilled medical assistance ‘again proved of great importance in winning popular support’ – even though the religious fatalism of the Arabs ‘does reduce the effectiveness of this asset compared to other countries’.

  Woodhouse reckoned that the amateur army ‘could have inflicted much more damage on the enemy factions had it been energetically and efficiently directed in the field’. His verdict was typically severe, and made no allowance for the fecklessness and irresolution of the native commanders. He did not acknowledge the Yemenis’ highly developed gift for procrastination, and the consequent difficulties the mercenaries had in persuading them to form coordinated plans. Nor did he point out that the number of mercenaries had been extremely small, that they were scattered over huge areas of extraordinarily difficult country, and that, in any case, they had no authority to issue orders. As Bernard Mills remarked, forty-five years later, ‘No Briton or Frenchman could go and tell a Prince what to do, or lead tribes into battle. A Prince or a sheikh had to be in command.’ What the mercenaries did do, on the other hand, simply by their presence, was to give moral support to princes or tribal leaders and increase their prestige: merely to have a British officer present was often a great help when native commanders were dealing with intransigent followers.

  Woodhouse’s own brief experience of the theatre had perhaps given him a false impression of what could be achieved by guerrilla raids. He was lucky to have joined forces with the most aggressive of all the Royalist commanders, Gassim Monassir; and there is little doubt that, given heavy mortars, he could have created havoc by bombarding the airfield and other Egyptian installations round Sana’a. But Gassim’s redoubt was the only one from which such an incisive attack could have been launched.

  In spite of his criticisms, Woodhouse conceded that the mercenary organisation ‘played a decisive part in defeating the Egyptian occupation because it raised and sustained Royalist morale’. He could have added that the men living in the war zone were usually under severe strain, harassed by daily air-attacks and often, for weeks on end, in the company of tribesmen with whom they could barely communicate. In retrospect, it seems greatly to their credit that although one or two of them did become a little eccentric, most survived extremely well.

  The colonel might also have touched on two wider issues of importance. The first was the fact that the prolongation of Royalist resistance substantially retarded any plans Nasser may have had for attacking Saudi Arabia, and the delay gave the Saudis time to strengthen their defences by the acquisition of new aircraft and equipment. In supporting the Royalists and financing the mercenary force, they had spent millions – but the money had been spent well, for it had bought them safety, at any rate for the time being.

  By the end of September 1966 ten supersonic F-35 Lightning fighter aircraft had arrived in the country, together with Thunderbird ground-to-air missiles installed to protect the airfields. In the absence of trained Saudis, the aircraft were being flown by British pilots employed by Airwork Services; it was never made clear whether or not these men would fly in combat; but the mere presence of the Mach-2 jets gave the Saudis a feeling of security, as it reduced the possibility of a sudden Egyptian air-assault. An urgent training programme was put in hand, to equip native pilots to fly the Lightnings; but the instructors’ task was not eased by the fact that their pupils were unshakeable in their belief that, no matter how many mistakes they made, Allah would ensure their survival.

  The second and more far-reaching effect of the Yemen deadlock was its contribution to the collapse of the Egyptian forces in the Six-Day War. In the view of the historian Professor Clive Jones, the mercenary involvement ‘proved to be the nemesis of the Egyptian army’.1 It was never the intention of Jim or his private soldiers to render assistance to Israel; but that, as it turned out, was what they did, by helping to detain perhaps one-third of the entire Egyptian Army in a foreign country far from home.

  The story that Nasser offered Jim seven years’ free accommodation, in any penitentiary he cared to name, may well be apocryphal. But the Egyptian President certainly made an attempt to buy him off. Flying from Jeddah to London one day, Jim found himself next to a Palestinian who lived in Saudi Arabia and said he had a message from Brigadier Shawkat, the Head of Egyp
tian External Intelligence. The message was an invitation to meet Shawkat in any neutral country, but preferably Switzerland, where he would offer Jim a sum in dollars that he simply would not be able to refuse. Jim replied that this was very decent of the Egyptians, but pointed out that they were exceedingly short of money, whereas he had the entire wealth of the Saudi oil royalties at his disposal – so he would make a counter-offer ‘for Nasser to join us’. No more was heard of that initiative.

  In January 1970 Jim was upset to hear that a former colleague was planning to write a book about the mercenary operation – even though all ranks had sworn never to reveal anything about it until he himself authorised disclosure. To spike the guns of the would-be author, Jim fed carefully selected parts of the story to Ian Colvin, one of the senior reporters on the Daily Telegraph. In three long articles, published on 4, 5 and 6 February – miserably displayed and illustrated, as was the paper’s wont at that time – Colvin divulged a few of the campaign’s secrets.

  The first piece, under the headline SECOND LAWRENCE FOILED NASSER’S ARMY IN YEMEN, described Jim as ‘an elusive City and West End club man’, and covered the launch and early stages of the operation. The second article concentrated on the air-drops and, after putting up a useful smokescreen by mentioning the Rhodesian Air Services’ early contribution, focused briefly on ‘new aircraft, whose markings were less notorious’, parachuting supplies into areas of the ‘unmapped Yemen’. No mention was made of Israel, and Tony Boyle came out of cover only far enough to recall how he had flown on one of the missions, giving a false time for take-off to disguise the length of the flight and providing harmless details of the final approach to the DZ. He even revealed that the British had put out, as a cover story, the fact that the aircraft came from Israel – a claim so incredible that it was treated as a joke, both at the time and later. Colvin’s third article described Nasser’s attempts to bribe the Royalist tribesmen with gold, touched briefly on the murder of the three mercenaries in August 1967, and discussed the political consequences of the war.

  Congratulations on the disclosures came from Bob Walker-Brown, who wrote to praise Jim’s ‘Napoleonic bit of strategy’ and to say that his ‘handling of the main hot potatoes was clever and highly convincing’. The release of selected information left many secrets intact, but it was enough to deflate any attempt at a rival account. Another potential author was Billy McLean, whose reports to Jim and to the Government had revealed him as an excellent writer with a flair for description. He made copious notes for the outline of a book on his involvement in the war, but never got round to writing it.

  The disclosures in the Telegraph brought about a reconciliation between Jim and Bernard Mills, who by then was working as Field Director for the Save the Children fund in Nigeria, at the end of the Biafran civil war. Jim sent Bernard copies of the articles together with a covering note, so that he would be aware of the party-line – and the package reached him in the middle of the Niger Delta. Relations restored, Jim and Bernard ended up friends again.

  Jim never boasted about the achievements of his private army; yet, looking back with forty years’ hindsight, he still felt it remarkable that four officers – Stirling, Woodhouse, Franks and himself – had managed to ignore Foreign Office policy for five years and, while HMG remained supine on the issue, had gone a long way towards discrediting Nasser. As he said, ‘In those days, you could do those things.’

  After the Yemen conflict, the mercenaries’ two leaders went very different ways. Tony Boyle, by his own account, ‘declined an invitation to join the British Intelligence Service’. Once freed from any form of military discipline, he gave vent to the slightly eccentric side of his character. Never marrying, he bought and ran a forty-acre farm in Shropshire, with a house so decrepit that when Jim’s grandchildren came to stay, Tony warned them that, to avoid precipitating a collapse, no more than one of them must go on the stairs at any one time; he also, to their delight, positively ordered them to scribble on the walls as much as they could manage. In the end the house had to be demolished – whereupon he supervised the design and building of a new one. As a sideline he invested in a scanner that enabled farmers to tell how many lambs pregnant ewes were carrying: a valuable device, now common, but then an innovation. He also made a duck-house from the remains of a double bed cast out by Jim.

  During the 1970s he travelled round the world and compiled an illustrated account of his journey, which he distributed to family and friends. A bon viveur, he was always full of new projects, and had a lifelong interest in the exploration of space.

  Jim carried on much as before. For a while he returned to Lloyd’s, but in 1974, together with David Walker (another former army officer, to whom he was introduced by Peter de la Billière), he formed KMS (Kini Mini Services) Ltd. The company’s first contract, from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, was to provide armed guards for the British Embassy in Buenos Aires: costings were worked out on the back of an envelope and, as Walker recalled, ‘in true entrepreneurial spirit the formal legal contract was signed on behalf of a company which did not yet exist’.2 Soon KMS was providing the British armed security for all our embassies.

  Next Jim was back in the Yemen, where the firm trained the President’s bodyguard – and it went on to undertake major training tasks in several Arab countries, not least Saudi Arabia. There Jim was welcomed by, among others, his old friend Kemal Adham, Head of Intelligence, and Sheikh Yamani, Minister for Oil. In 1976 KMS was instructed by Sultan Qaboos of Oman to raise, train and equip a Special Force recruited from the wild tribes in the mountains of Dhofar, where the SAS had fought a successful campaign against communist-backed forces from 1970 to 1975. The Special Force developed into one of the finest Arab units, and Jim spent many months in Oman, occasionally summoning Fiona (formerly Fraser, by then Mrs Robin Allen) to come and sort out his paperwork. By the time he retired in 1989, at the age of sixty-five, KMS had worked in every continent.

  To his great distress, his beloved Judy died of cancer in 1979, but in 1982 his friends were delighted when he married a wonderful successor, Jan Gay. Once again he had found a perfect partner. In retirement he went to live in a cottage near Marlborough – and at his funeral in August 2008 his friend and former colleague David Walker concluded his fine tribute by quoting a Regimental Sergeant Major of 21 SAS, who once looked at Jim admiringly and said, ‘Colonel, you’re a man of many parts.’

  David Smiley also returned to the Yemen, as a guest of the Government, who in 2003 invited him to Sana’a so that he could give them guidance on the official history of the revolution, which was then being written. Although, at eighty-seven, he had become rather deaf and lame, he enjoyed the trip, which he described in an article for the British-Yemeni Society’s journal.3 He was surprised to find that large numbers of men were still carrying rifles (mostly Kalashnikovs), and that numerous qat plantations had been established along the road leading east from the capital towards Marib; but he was delighted by the warmth of his welcome, and by the fact that he found no bitterness about the role the mercenaries had played in the civil war.

  More than forty years after the event, memories of the Yemen adventure are still strong, and from time to time veterans of Beni Johnson have met for reunions – as when, in 1993, thirty years after the beginning of the campaign, Alastair Macmillan organised a lunch for all the survivors he had been able to locate. Generous subventions from Jim Johnson and Mike Gooley meant that the meal would be free to all comers, and in a letter of 11 September Alastair told Jim:

  As far as the buffet meal is concerned, I tried to pamper to your nostalgia by ordering tinned mackerel flakes followed by boiled, emaciated goat, washed down by green, stinking water. You will be glad to hear that the Regiment’s traditional caterer, Tim O’Neill, persuaded me that a Regimental Curry, or the alternative of a salad main dish, might be more popular.

  Select Bibliography

  Bower, Tom, The Perfect English Spy: Sir Dick White and the Secret War, 193
5–90, Heinemann, 1995

  Clark, Victoria, Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes, Yale University Press, 2010

  Cooper, Johnny, One of the Originals, Pan Books, 1991

  Cradock, Percy, Know Your Enemy, John Murray, 2002

  de la Billière, General Sir Peter, Looking for Trouble, Harper Collins, 1994

  Dorril, Stephen, MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations, Fourth Estate, 2000

  Fielding, Xan, One Man in His Time: The Life of Lt-Col N.L.D.(‘Billy’) McLean, Macmillan, 1990

  Fiennes, Ranulph, Living Dangerously. Macmillan, 1987.

  Gardiner, Ian, In the Service of the Sultan, Pen & Sword, 2006

  Gibbons, Scott, The Conspirators, Howard Baker, 1967

  Harding, John, Roads to Nowhere: A South Arabian Odyssey, 1960–65, Arabian Publishing, 2009

  Hinchcliffe, Peter, Ducker, John T., & Holt, Maria, Without Glory in Arabia, I. B. Tauris, 1966

  Hoe, Alan, David Stirling, Little Brown, 1992

  Horniblow, Philip, Oil, Sand and Politics, Hayloft, 2003

  Jones, Clive, Britain and the Yemen Civil War, Sussex Academic Press, 2004

  Lee, Air Chief Marshal Sir David, Flight from the Middle East, Ministry of Defence Air Historical Branch (RAF), 1978

  Mackintosh-Smith, Tim, Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land, John Murray, 1997