Eye of the Storm (14 page)

Chapter Six

I
F
our politicians had to go out and keep their own promises, honouring our often dubious treaties of friendship in parts of the world that will never feature in the holiday brochures, we would have a House of Commons full of pacifist isolationists.

Unfortunately for the common soldier, however, we are still a long way from such a happy turn of events, which is why, in 1973, I found myself, by way of a very tortuous and clandestine route, bound for Oman, the independent sultanate on the Arabian Gulf. Or to be exact, for Dhofar, a province in the south of Oman which 90 per cent of British schoolchildren couldn’t point to on an atlas.

Oman then was a country with very little to recommend it, at least to our eyes. Its borders were, and are still, largely undefined, its people were among the most poverty-stricken in the world. There were a great many poisonous snakes, scorpions and spiders, while the ubiquitous mites, lice and flies carried diseases such as dysentery and scrub typhus. Temperatures ranged from over 120 degrees Fahrenheit on the low ground during the day to below freezing at night on the plateaux. Dehydration and sunstroke could be fatal, while sunburn was just extremely painful. You needed to drink at least a gallon of water a day simply to feel more or less normal.

A five-month tour in these conditions would have finished off most of our politicians, and that was before I come to the real danger, and the reason for our being there: the continuous war being waged against the Marxist-backed rebels, or People’s Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf, to give them their full name. Locally these brutal, cold-blooded, uncompromising killers were known as the
adoo
, which, predictably, means ‘enemy’ in Arabic. They were also, to a man, convinced atheists.

Until 1970, Oman had been ruled by a despotic and cruel Sultan whose almost medieval tyranny had made him deeply unpopular among the people. It was then that his Sandhurst-trained son, Qaboos, took over in a bloodless palace coup inspired, if not actively backed, by the British.

Bloodless, that is, except for the old Sultan himself, who decided not to go gently. Not being quite the trusting father Qaboos imagined him to be, he had an automatic pistol concealed in his robes. On being told that he must abdicate, he drew this and fired off the whole magazine, managing to kill one servant, wound a senior courtier and shoot himself in the stomach and foot. That evening, after abdicating, he was flown to London in an RAF Viscount. Once recovered from his self-inflicted injuries, he spent the last two years of his life there in glorious exile.

Within hours of taking over, Qaboos’s first act, under Oman’s treaty with Britain of 1789, was formally to request British assistance in putting down the Marxist-inspired insurgency. He asked specifically that the SAS be sent to support the Sultan’s forces in crushing the adoo. The first of our guys were on the ground there by the following day.

Not that the British public became fully aware of this piece of latter-day gunboat diplomacy until a considerable time later. But Britain, in the shape of the Foreign Office and the Conservative government of the then Prime Minister, Edward Heath, had as compelling reasons for supporting Qaboos as she had for encouraging the coup in the first place.

Oman is one of the southernmost nations in the Middle East. In the south-east it is bordered by the Arabian Sea, and its north-western border faces Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Its western border, however, marches with Yemen, a Marxist state that had recently incorporated the former British protectorate of Aden, where British troops, badly supported if not actually betrayed by Whitehall, had been kicked out in an inglorious and politically bungled fiasco. The Yemeni government was now supplying Russian-sponsored weapons, ammunition and equipment to the adoo, as well as providing them with training and a safe haven once they crossed back into Yemen from Oman.

Victory for the adoo in Oman would leave the communists controlling the Gulf of Oman, which forms the country’s northern border, the entrance to the busiest and richest sea lane for the world’s oil tankers – the waters of the Persian Gulf. To this would be added the not inconsiderable oil reserves of Oman itself, which had been operating with increasing efficiency and output since 1964. These were rich prizes, and their loss to the communists would be a severe blow to the West in general, and Britain in particular.

The young Sultan was not so naive as to imagine that he would not have to pay for all this assistance. So for the next six years, mainly in secret and personally supported by Heath and, after 1974, by the Labour government of Harold Wilson, the SAS maintained a presence in Oman under the codename ‘Operation Storm’. It was they, who, in the end, were principally responsible for putting down the insurrection on the jebel – and for most of that time men of the Regiment never went for more than forty-eight hours without coming under serious enemy fire. Having done three tours on Operation Storm, I have to say that no matter how many bushels of riyals, bars of gold or barrels of oil the Sultan was paying, or the goodwill that accrued to Britain in this strategically vital part of the world, it wasn’t enough.

By the time I arrived for my first tour in Oman in January 1973 the ‘hearts-and-minds’ campaign implemented by the former CO of 22 SAS, Lieutenant-Colonel Johnny Watts, was already paying dividends, beginning to win over the locals in favour of the young Sultan. Coming as it did after the Regiment’s stunning successes in Malaya and Borneo during the 1950s and 1960s, this campaign would confirm the SAS as the most successful counter-insurgency unit in the world.

Its basic idea was to supply medical and veterinary care for the half-million or so people in the arid and mountainous province of Dhofar – where the adoo were at their most active and dangerous – and their animals, and to drill for new sources of water. The veterinary aid was particularly inspired, as the Dhofari’s main concern after himself was his livestock – his family and his tribe came much further down his list of priorities. We also set up a local radio station broadcasting propaganda for the Sultan and his government, to counteract the communists’ Radio Aden, and organized the printing of thousands of leaflets explaining the new Sultan’s policies and attacking communist methods and ideology. The leaflets were dropped from the air in selected areas of Dhofar.

Most telling of all, perhaps, was our offer to arm and train any of the Muslim tribesmen who wanted to protect themselves and their property against the increasingly vicious and ruthless adoo. Certainly the insurgents had some very strange ideas about how to win friends and influence people. If any of the people they liberated refused to deny the existence of God, and these were most frequently the elderly, they were tortured, often to death. In this respect, and although operating on reversed principles, the adoo would have given the Inquisition an extremely good run for its money.

Children were snatched from parents and sent for reschooling in Yemen, and the young of both sexes were shipped off to training camps in China and Russia, to return thoroughly indoctrinated in Marxist theory and dogma. Among the ordinary Dhofaris, anyone suspected of supporting Qaboos, or anyone denounced by a fellow tribesman for holding similar sympathies, would be tried and executed on the spot, usually by beheading.

All in all, the province was a kind of ‘lost world’, a hellhole with a lunar landscape and an unforgiving climate. But then, we were hardly being sent there for a holiday, or for the good of our health. We were there because, in their wisdom, the Foreign Office and the government of the day had decreed that that is where we should be.

I left for my first tour in Oman in January 1973, by which time the SAS had been involved there for nearly three years. D Squadron were flown out from RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire to Cyprus, and from there by way of a couple of other destinations before finally landing at Salalah in Dhofar, the province’s principle town. It was a small place with a population of about ten thousand, and apart from the airport, which by then was being used mainly as a military base by the Sultan’s forces, seemed to our eyes to have very little going for it. The men there may have been on the side of the angels when it came to loyalty to the Sultan and his government, but they all looked pretty villainous to me, while the women had all their assets completely hidden from view. They may have had hour-glass figures to rival Monroe and faces to match, but if so we never got to see them. The Muslim majority were always muffled up in voluminous hanging garments and yashmaks. Nevertheless, the local young men must have found ways of penetrating all those outer wrappers, for the birthrate in Oman was nearly twice the world average, and 41 per cent of the country’s population were under the age of fifteen. At the time, I reckoned that if screwing were to be made an Olympic sport, then the Omani team would have won every medal in every category. It was obviously their main national pastime.

The second seemed to be shooting at the SAS.

From the airport at Salalah we were transported directly to our temporary camp at Um al-Gwarif, known to us as UAG, which was about four miles away. The idea was for us to stay there for three or four days in order to acclimatize ourselves, sort out our equipment and receive our final briefings, before being helicoptered to the
jebel
, the mountain area of the province, where much of the trouble was to be found. In the event, however, a small group of six of us, including myself and Jimmy, one of my friends from Mobility Troop, were sent to the coastal town of Mirbat, about fifty miles to the east, and the scene of a famous battle between the SAS and rebels in 1972. Our role there was to keep a presence on the ground, deliver medical aid to the local people, and to carry out patrols and gather information. It was a beautiful place, like a remote holiday destination with its ancient fort and sea and miles of sand, but we found life there extremely boring. After three weeks, however, we were summoned back to UAG and told that we would be deploying to the jebel in a few days’ time.

Our exact location was to be one of a pair of positions the Regiment had established and which we intended to fortify. About three miles apart, ‘Diana One’ and ‘Diana Two’ were in the range of foothills overlooking a wadi from where the adoo would launch their frequent attacks on Salalah. Some of their rockets had hit civilian repairmen working on the jets and helicopters for the military, and they had even destroyed aircraft on the ground. Without protection the men had threatened to go on strike, something that would have brought the war on the Omani side to a halt in that region, since it was from Salalah’s airport that the Sultan’s air force operated against the adoo in Dhofar.

Before we deployed to Diana One, Jimmy decided that it would be a great wheeze if he and I were to hitch a ride in a military plane or helicopter and visit some of the members of Mountain Troop, who were in a base known as ‘White City’. This lay to the east on the edge of the Darbat Plateau, and overlooked the coastal strip between Salalah and Rakhyut, on the border with Yemen. Since the adoo were primarily based in Yemen, it was an important position, for groups of insurgents were constantly crossing the border in both directions. Jimmy had managed to con us a ride in a Skyvan, a small, twin-piston-engined transport aircraft that looked like a bumblebee in flight and sounded worse, but which would, we hoped, carry us in one piece up to White City. The squadron OC had no objections to our going when we approached him, but warned, ‘Get back here in forty-eight hours.’ We needed no second bidding and, grabbing our bergens and rifles, we were away.

From the air the Dhofari landscape looked every bit as alien and hostile as it did close to, rather like the pictures from Armstrong’s moon walk – mysterious, uninviting and threatening.

The guys in Mountain Troop seemed happy enough to see Jimmy and we spent most of the time drinking strong tea and chatting. Left to myself, however, I think I would have preferred to have stayed put in the bar at UAG, looking at the pictures of girls printed on the Tennant’s lager cans. Since the Skyvan made the run most days, we expected to be riding out on the next one within twenty-four hours, so I’d be back in the bar before too long.

That was until intelligence came in that an adoo patrol was using a nearby
bait
, or native hut, as a breakfast stop-off point each morning, and Mountain Troop were immediately tasked with laying an ambush for them. At Jimmy’s suggestion, the White City troop commander agreed to take us along, Jimmy promising me, ‘I’ll get you blooded.’ This did not seem at all unlikely, as we were both assigned to the main killing group, which consisted of six men; the remainder were placed in two cut-off groups whose task was to prevent any enemy escaping.

I had long anticipated the moment when I would come under fire for the first time, and perhaps be forced to shoot to kill in retaliation. I hadn’t quite imagined, however, that it would be in circumstances such as these, or that it would be sprung on me so suddenly. I could feel the sudden tension that had invaded my body, and experienced a rush of adrenalin.

‘Right,’ I replied. There wasn’t much else I could have said.

The plan was simple. We would leave our base at 2200 hours that night in order to ensure that we would be established in a good ambush position when the adoo arrived in the morning – if they did arrive. Our back-up was a
firqat
, Arabic for ‘company’, made up of former rebel
jebalis
(Dhofaris from the jebel region) who had switched sides, and a troop of
geysh
, mercenary soldiers from the province of Baluchistan in Pakistan who were employed by the Sultan’s armed forces, and some of whom I quickly discovered were little better than useless. The firqats were a different matter, however. Organized, trained and paid by the SAS with money provided by the Sultan, they were a merciless, bloodthirsty lot who, when a firefight started, would hitch up their sarongs and rush like wild dervishes into battle. Good fighters, I learned to appreciate having them on our side.