Even the friendliest Arabs seemed to harbour the suspicion that, as a race, we were congenitally hypocritical.1
On November 29, 1967, the last British soldiers left Aden after 128 years of unbroken colonial rule. The withdrawal from Britain’s only Middle Eastern outpost left a power vacuum that was quickly filled by the National Liberation Front (NLF), the principal armed opponent of the British-backed Federation of South Arabia. Between 1963 and 1967, some 200 British troops and British civilians were killed and thousands injured, which would pale into insignificance when set against those Arabs who died, were wounded, or were exiled from the country in the wake of Britain’s evacuation. Indeed, we may never know the number of Arabs affected by the NLF’s seizure of power because no accurate official record was ever kept and no official history of Britain’s Aden adventure has ever been written.2 The episode remains one of the last forgotten battles of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century.3
This chapter gives an overview of British military operations in South Arabia in the context of the four-year ‘armed struggle’ launched by the NLF in 1963. Drawing on official records, private papers, and eyewitness testimonies, it analyzes how colonial rule was enforced and protected, arguing that Britain never applied a consistent counterinsurgency doctrine in either its fight against upcountry tribesmen or urban-based terrorists. Instead, the chapter makes the case that the British merely relied on an ineffectual policy of coercion that failed to generate the intelligence “product” necessary to combat an insurgency marked by its tenacity and sophistication. In exposing Britain’s mishandling of the insurgencies ranging against it, the chapter also looks at the social basis of dissent, which provided a permissible environment in which terrorism and insurgency thrived. To be sure, anticolonial unrest and violence was sustained over time in the Aden urban area by the proletarian muscle offered by the Aden Trade Union Congress (ATUC) and by the anticolonialist Movement of Arab Nationalism (MAN) in its lobbying of tribal leaders in the hinterland of the Western and Eastern Protectorates,4 an effort initially backed by an influx of resources (cash, training, weapons, and explosives) provided by the Egyptian Intelligence Service (EIS).5 To take an accurate reading of the situation, one must, therefore, factor in the engagement between the insurgents and the security forces.
The Aden insurgency caught the British by complete surprise. The security machinery they had built up since Aden became a Crown colony in 1937, which was based on what one local political officer has called the “three Bs—bribery, bombing, and bluff.”6 This threefold strategy was meant to protect the port and surrounding military bases from the tribal lawlessness that bedeviled the expansive 112,000 mile square interior of South Arabia (a landmass bigger than England, Scotland, and Wales combined), which stretched from the border with the Imamate Kingdom of Yemen in the southwest of the Arabian Peninsula, hugged the southern border of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (known as the Rub’ al Khali or “Empty Quarter”), and met with the border with Muscat and Oman in the east.
By 1959, the British had adjudicated in the creation of a Federation of South Arabia (encompassing the six tribal units of Lahej, Dhala, Yafa, Beihan, Upper Aulaqi Sheikhdom, and Fadhli) and by 1962 negotiations were completed in London that would see the member states eventually expand to 12. Significantly, the intent was to merge Aden colony with the other states and house its government in the purpose-built city of al-Ittihad, midway between Little Aden and Aden proper, close to its busy international seaport. The long-term intention was to safeguard British commercial and security interests in the region despite the winds of decolonization sweeping through Africa, South Asia, and the Far East.
In Lahej State, in the Western Aden Protectorate, the problem of unpacified tribalism meant that parts of the hinterland remained fertile ground for the rejection of British imperialist designs, especially among the sons of those few rulers who presided like feudal lords over the poorest and most destitute peoples in the whole of South Arabia. Not much had changed in these places for generations. The scenes that greeted English writer Evelyn Waugh in the early 1930s were typical of a pattern of life uninterrupted by the onset of modernity and industrial development. Observing a tribal gathering, Waugh felt he was witnessing tribesmen living “a life of almost squalid simplicity,” who talked little to one another and suffered from interminable shyness and awkwardness. “Their embarrassment,” he said, gave them a “pop-eyed look, quite unlike the keen, hawk faces of cinema sheiks.”7 But this was a misrepresentation of the natural order upon which tribalism rested. High commissioner for Aden and South Arabia, Sir Kennedy Trevaskis, summed it up well: “Jealous and suspicious of their neighbors and seeing no further than the perimeters of their own parochial interests, rulers, Dolas, and tribes had clung to the moated security of their hearths and homes, fearful of any lowering of drawbridges.”8 This had real repercussions for Britain’s “Forward Policy”9 because, as Trevaskis observed, somewhat sardonically, there was “the curious fact that the bulk of Aden’s population originates from the Yemen and has no closer links with the South Arabian countryside than an Irish laborer in Glasgow is likely to have with the highlands of Scotland.”10
In late 1963, British authorities moved to put an end to the taxing of goods passing through the rugged mountains of Radfan in the northwest of the Western Aden Protectorate. For centuries, tribesmen had imposed their own locally based levies on goods being brought up along the Dhala Road from Aden in the south to Yemen and Saudi Arabia in the north and west. The custom of collecting local taxes was an integral component of tribal life in the area. However, by October 1963, the local political officer, Godfrey Meynell, acting on the authority of the Federation of South Arabia and the local Radfani ruler, Sheikh Abdullah Abdhali, moved to extend the writ of the central Federal Supreme Council and end subtribal taxation.11
As a mark of the Federation’s determination to break the power of the tribes, Meynell was authorized to bring forward a battalion of the Federal Regular Army (FRA) under the command of Aqid (Colonel) Haider Saleh al-Habili. On October 14, acting on intelligence of arms being smuggled across the border from Yemen, Meynell (as the senior federation representative) ordered the reluctant Arab officer to return fire in a skirmish with a small group of dissident tribesmen, who were soon subjected to the full weight of British-backed federal combat power. In the resulting firefight, a tribal leader was killed, an action that signaled the opening salvo of the NLF’s liberation struggle.12 Although they lost the battle on that day, the NLF was by no means beaten and quickly began to graft its EIS-trained cadres onto existing tribal structures in a way that would continue to cause the federation trouble on the main Dhala Road.
Following an attempted assassination bid on Trevaskis in December 1963, senior military officers in FRA HQ at Seedaseer Lines in Little Aden were ordered to plan for a major military mission. Operation Nutcracker was duly launched in January 1964 and initially consisted of three battalions of FRA, supported by one troop of 16/5 Lancers (with Centurion tanks), J Battery, 3rd Royal Horse Artillery, six Royal Navy helicopters from HMS Centaur, and RAF Hawker Hunter and Shackleton aircraft based at Khormaksar.13 The dissident tribesmen were few in number (some intelligence placed them at a total strength of 12), but within weeks the number had swelled to several hundred. Britain now faced three distinct but overlapping security challenges—large-scale industrial unrest and civil disobedience in Aden, cross-border hostility from the Egyptian-backed Yemen Arab Republic, and an implacable rural-based insurgency led by trained NLF fighters. While the federation forces were largely successful in clearing the dissident tribesmen from the Dhala Road and securing favorable terms from some sections of the Radfani confederacy, they could not bring everyone to terms. Within weeks of the end of Operation Nutcracker, dissident tribesmen had returned to their default position of harassing convoys and extracting taxes in the Rabwa Pass as well as destroying the road. Their numbers had now swollen to 500 and included “a hard core of some 200 Egyptian-trained guerrillas.”14 Something had to be done, and quickly.
Sir Kennedy Trevaskis and the Middle East commander in chief Lieutenant General Charles Harington had taken different positions on how to the deal with the problem of attacks on the Dhala Road. The divergence in opinion over how Operation Nutcracker would achieve its objective of demonstrating British determination to control what happened within the federation was recorded by Julian Paget who felt that the options open to the Aden authorities were limited to three courses of action. He outlined these as (a) the enforcement of Federali rule by the imposition of airpower, (b) the extension of developmental projects like school and well-building, and (c) a major ground operation against dissident tribesmen. With “air action” ruled out because of the unfavorable international climate and “civil action” unreliable in winning short-term gains, it was decided that “military action” was the only real option open to the Federalis.15 When it became evident after the “success” of Operation Nutcracker that a further penetration of the Radfani’s tribal heartland was required to finish the job, the task fell to regular British military units to augment seasoned battalions of FRA troops already operating in the area.
45 Commando Royal Marines was perhaps the most experienced unit to have deployed to Aden and the Protectorate. In unbroken service in the region between 1960 and 1967, they had spent considerable time exercising in the harsh climate and inhospitable terrain of the Radfan Mountains. Masters of mountain warfare, 45 Commando also maintained the flexibility to launch other forms of contingency operation. By maintaining a fleet of Commando helicopter ships and aircraft carriers off the Arabian coast, Britain’s Royal Marines could mount cliff assaults, long-range patrols, and heliborne assaults, pioneering the technique before even the Americans. Operating from HMS Centaur stationed in Aden harbor on June 22, 1963, for example, they were quickly tasked with deploying into Aden to conduct routine Internal Security (IS) drills in the towns of Crater, Ma’ala, and Sheikh Othman.16
It was due mainly to their operational dexterity that 45 Commando was chosen for the follow-up mission to Operation Nutcracker. Together with 1 East Anglian Regiment, they were tasked with undertaking a punitive operation “to end the operations of dissidents in the defined area.”17 The operations were designed to augment the overarching political objective of establishing the authority of the fledgling federation and would last from mid-April until the end of June. The Radfan Force (or RADFORCE for short) spent much of their time advancing to contact across harsh terrain in a combined arms operation designed to clear and hold ground seized by dissidents. With the introduction of 39 (Airportable) Brigade from Lisburn in Northern Ireland in May, the temporary RADFORCE mission was turned into what one staff officer called “a Rolls Royce of an operation.”18 By the end of May—and with the introduction of another regular battalion, 3rd Battalion The Parachute Regiment, into the South Arabian theatre—the British had succeeded in driving the rebels off the Dhala Road after a final battle in the Wadi Dubshan.
British military operations in the first half of 1964 paved the way for the opening of roundtable political talks in London designed to settle the future of South Arabia. As minister of defense, Peter Thorneycroft was triumphantly to inform Parliament in the summer of 1964:
For the foreseeable future Aden will be necessary to our strategy, and our absence from it would both render us unable to discharge our direct obligations to our friends, and would set in train events harmful to the cause of peace. It is therefore our purpose and intention to stay there, and our military plans, dispositions and actions will be shaped to this end.19
The British Conservative government, therefore, sought to build up the federation as a vehicle by which it could transition South Arabia toward independence. However, given that British national interests were at stake, it was important for any future settlement to protect Britain’s key commercial arteries in the Arabian Peninsula, which meant oil exploitation and the vital trade route through the Suez Canal. This was easier said than done. Up until that point, the principal opposition to continuing British interests came from the organized Labour movement as represented by the most heavily unionized workforce in the Middle East.20
Aden was first occupied by the British in 1839. Then its population stood at only 500, but with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, it would explode to 44,000 by the end of the century. By 1931, it had grown to 51,500, reaching 225,000 in 1963.21 Together with the Western and Eastern Protectorates, the total population of South Arabia stood at just over 1 million. With the quadrupling in Aden’s population came an increase in its importance to British imperial strategy. Yet, it was an uneven growth, as the port became shielded from the tribalism that ruled supreme in the interior. This irregular development, recorded political scientist Fred Halliday, “later became the determinant factor in the area’s politics.”22 Indeed, as Ottoman influence spread across North Yemen and threatened to penetrate the hinterland, the British entered into treaties with the tribal rulers. As Halliday later noted, “These treaties fossilized tribal divisions and froze relations within the tribes by strengthening the sheikhs with recognition and subsidies.”23
As a sign of British intentions to retain its foothold in the Arabian Peninsula, the political and military hierarchy in London authorized the transfer of headquarters of Middle East Command (MEC) from Cyprus to Aden in 1960, even going as far as to invest £20 million in the development of the base to house over 25,000 British soldiers and their dependents in brand new accommodation overlooking the sun-kissed beaches of Steamer Point.24 Nonetheless, the dreamy tranquility of Aden as a backwater port was soon to be shattered forever once the merger between Aden and the hinterland completed in January 1963. Huge demonstrations in Aden brought thousands of disenfranchised migrant workers (mainly immigrants from North Yemen and Somalia) out onto the streets to protest at the fact that they were to be ruled by unelected sultans, sheikhs, and emirs who prevented them from reaching the entitlements of full citizenship. Radical anticolonialism backed by the trade unions under the stewardship of the young, middle-class firebrand Abdullah al-Asnag would lead to several large strikes throughout the remainder of the year, which would soon be joined with armed insurrection in the autumn.
North Yemenis lived predominantly in Crater and Sheikh Othman. They were mainly employed as dock workers or in the construction industry. Somalis lived in shanty towns on the slopes of Crater—one of the most infamous being the “Kutcha Huts”—and formed a poor proletariat of unskilled workers earning a living principally through casual labor. A small number of Jews (about 7,300) tended to work in commerce, though most had left in the wake of serious civil disturbances in 1947–48 at a time when conflagration had spread across the Middle East due to turbulence generated by the unanswered Palestine question. Coal bunkering became big business. A total of 2.5 percent of Aden’s GDP was generated through this activity, while the oil refinery accounted for 9 percent. Only local government employment rivaled it at 10 percent of GDP. Because of the passing trade from passenger ships, a number of duty-free shops sprang up around the piers of Tawahi and Steamer Point. Some 13 percent of GDP could be tied to wholesale and retail. The service industry boomed, with insurance firms and banks dominating at 7 percent. Apart from the oil refinery run by BP (British Petroleum), construction accounted for 7 percent of GDP, which equated to 50 percent of all industrial jobs.25
The formation of the ATUC in 1958, under the stewardship of the indefatigable Abdullah al-Asnag, ushered in a range of possibilities for politicizing Aden’s multiplicity of competing working class interests. Under al-Asnag, the ATUC had led a mass strike in 1959 to protest against the formation of the federation (originally encompassing six states). It was the first of its kind in Aden and was aided and abetted by the lack of appetite for a radical alternative to be provided by the Islamic tradition. Many of the tribal traditions dated back to pre-Islamic times; so powerful were they that the NLF—by 1966 representing a fusion of a rural-based tribalism and a noxious form of urban Marxism—became ruthless in its attempts to destroy its hold on life in Southeast Arabia once the British departed in 1967.
Al-Asnag and the ATUC had strong links with the more militant Front for the Liberation of South Yemen (FLOSY), which found concerted political expression in the form of the Peoples’ Socialist Party (PSP). FLOSY was headed by al-Asnag and the former chief secretary in Aden, Abdul Mackawee. Tired and frustrated that their nonviolent opposition to British-backed federal authority was getting them nowhere, al-Asnag’s rhetoric became more and more militant. Though bombastic, he was an intelligent individual who got on well with High Commissioner Kennedy Trevaskis. After a failed assassination bid in December 1963, the prospects for a peaceful future for Aden looked distinctly unappealing to the radicals. Many of those caught up in the attack—including tribal leaders—resorted to settling disputes in the only way they knew how: through the medium of violence. It was in this ancient tradition of an eye for an eye that members of the Fadhli tribe carried out an assassination bid on the cousin of Abdullah al-Asnag, one of the PSP’s most trusted lieutenants.
Unsatisfied by the extraction of tribal justice, the chief of the Fadhli tribe, Sultan Ahmed al-Fadhli, lost no time in demanding further concessions from the British. “If Britain refuses us independence,” he ranted, “it will lose its friendship with this area. It will also be a crime against the people.”26 The British discounted this as “just another piece of Fadhli nonsense and irresponsibility that can do little harm or little good to anyone.” Indeed, the deputy high commissioner, Tom Oates, went so far as to telegraph Trevaskis in London with news that Sharif Husain was of the opinion that Ahmed al-Fadhli was being bribed by Nasser.27 With few options open to him, Trevaskis bowed to the demands of the other federal rulers for a more determined security response to counter the growing instability provoked by the ATUC. Acting on the basis of emergency legislation, Trevaskis moved to issue a formal decree for the rounding up of the PSP’s key activists. The security forces promptly rounded up 50 ATUC and PSP activists and dispatched them to prisons outside Aden State.
Not long afterward, allegations of ill treatment of the detainees began to surface. Led by al-Asnag’s mother, Khadaji, a small delegation of women visited Ras Morbut, by now the principal interrogation center where the detainees were held, to find conditions were as bad as they had been expecting. As they promptly informed the Aden Chronicle newspaper: “Interrogation, we are told, continues nonstop, four hours at a time. A detainee is ordered to stand upright, for the full length of the interrogation. They are denied access to legal counsel. Speaking in the House of Lords, Lord Devonshire had promised the detainees that they would see their lawyers.”28 The delegation found that the detainees were alleging that they had been subjected to stress positions and psychological torture; as Mrs al-Asnag told the Aden Chronicle: “These boys have been held for political offences, we presume. We, therefore, demand that they should be treated as political detainees and not as criminals condemned and convicted before trial.”29 In a letter which appeared in the same issue of the Aden Chronicle, Mrs U. A. Rahman, an English-born wife of one of the detainees complained: “What advantage [do] the authorities think they will gain from this emergency?” She laid responsibility at Britain’s door: “Aden is a British Colony, not a Federal State and [as] such the British are responsible. It is 36 days since my husband [has been] away from me. How much longer do they intend to hold him [?] This is all I want to know.”30
The truth was that Trevaskis had to walk a fine line between pressure from tribal rulers in South Arabia (who had been aggrieved by the assassination bid) and the Tory grandees in London, many of whom seemed completely guided by the prospect of an international furor over allegations of mistreatment of detainees, which would likely follow in the wake of a strong security response. In secret correspondence with London, it soon became clear that the high commissioner was to be guided by criticism at Westminster on the issue. As he revealed in a communiqué to the Colonial Office:
You indicate that we should be guided in this matter by the strength of Parliamentary criticism and that in the absence of positive proof the detainees should be released. If we had positive proof the detainees would of course be taken to court, and indeed if detention were only considered justifiable, where positive proof was available, emergency powers would be meaningless.31
For the moment, the authorities in Aden would have to tread a very fine line and one that would increasingly permit the NLF to take advantage of the lackluster approach by Government House and the Federal Council in Aden.
The NLF was originally formed by key individuals from the South who had crossed into the YAR after the revolution of September 1962, but did not officially call a conference to agree its initial aims until March 1963, when it met in Sana’a.32 To enable practical operational control over its subversion in South Arabia, the NLF’s headquarters was situated in Yemen’s second city, Taiz’z, and brought together a mixture of tribal leaders, army officers, Yemeni, and Adeni port workers and intellectuals. It even had a vibrant women’s section, numbering several hundred, which played a support role in the urban areas and an active role in the fighting up country.33 Although eager to liberate South Arabia from colonialism, the NLF stressed “the primacy of national over social or class elements,”34 preferring to sidestep the Marxist fundamentals of class struggle, atheism, and economic determinism for the sanguinity of armed revolution. Unfortunately, few politicians in London were comfortable with the idea of exposing Nasser’s intrigue for fear of making matters worse.35 By August 1964, the NLF had resolved to launch a major campaign of terrorism in Aden, beginning with grenade attacks on British service personnel and the assassination of Arab Special Branch officers. It was this decision that would have profound effects on the ability of the Aden government to respond to terrorism.
It is hard to conceive that British intelligence had little understanding of the challenge posed by the NLF until as late as 1965, when the Aden Intelligence Centre was revamped and reorganized by Brigadier Anthony Cowper. However, it is not at all surprising that the tensions between Trevaskis and Greenwood would be reflected in the structural relations between the various government departments responsible for security in Aden. Evidence from the official papers suggests that internal disagreement between the Colonial Office, MoD, and federal government over who should ultimately lead the fight against the NLF delayed Cowper’s arrival until mid-1965. Cowper immediately ordered a radical shakeup of Aden’s intelligence infrastructure, which paved the way for the appointment of a new head of Special Branch a year later. John Prendergast’s arrival in 1966 signaled the return to Britain’s preferred constitutional position of a civilian law enforcement lead in combating terrorism in its internal security campaigns. Prendergast was an old-hand colonial policeman who had seen Special Branch service in Palestine, Kenya, Cyprus, and Hong Kong.36
The lack of a concerted law enforcement response to the problem of terrorism in Aden up until this point had placed considerable pressure on MEC, which was already responsible for a patch that extended from Kenya in the southwest to Kuwait in the northwest. The MEC was commanded by a three-star military officer (of lieutenant general, admiral, or air marshal rank) who was assisted by a general officer commanding (GOC), flag officer, Middle East, and air officer commanding, Air Forces Middle East, all of whom (as two-star officers) worked to a joint command structure and oversaw the day-to-day running of operations across the Middle East. In Aden, the GOC had responsibility “for the operational efficiency and training of their forces and for the detailed conduct of operations” to maintain the security of the Aden base, subject to overall control by the commander in chief MEC. Policy advice on IS matters within Aden came directly from the Aden Security Policy Committee, which included the commander in chief and high commissioner as members.37 Aden Brigade, the resident garrison force, was regarded as something of a sleepy backwater in military terms and was typically commanded by a brigadier close to retirement.
Under the new high commissioner, Sir Richard Turnbull, one of the principal means of fighting the insurgents was through a systematic process of “deep interrogation.” This was a highly controversial set of techniques readily applied to insurgent suspects who were unlucky enough to find themselves subjected to the attention of a secret army of Army and Special Branch personnel based at the Fort Morbut Interrogation Centre in Steamer Point. A “grim” two-storey building that also housed a military guard, Fort Morbut, was regarded as the “nerve centre” of counterterrorist operations in Aden. However, it soon gained a reputation for unsavory methods, so much so that Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross commissioned their own fact-finding missions into what exactly went on inside Fort Morbut when allegations broke of detainees being subjected to inhumane and degrading treatment.38 While the British foreign secretary, George Brown, bowed to pressure and ordered his own internal investigation into the allegations, it was not enough to placate international human rights groups that quickly dismissed the inquiry as a whitewash.
One soldier who served at the Interrogation Centre was Corporal George Lennox, who later described what he saw in vivid detail. It was mid-afternoon and he was going about his daily work routine when he saw Special Branch officers arrive at Fort Morbut with four suspects in tow, all of whom had been arrested on suspicion of murdering two RAF corporals on the Ma’ala Straight. Lennox claimed he heard screams and howling coming from the holding cells where the detainees had been taken. It was something, he claimed, would become a daily occurrence, when on at least one occasion he heard a single shot ring out across the compound when an interrogator allegedly pulled his gun on a detainee. Lennox made further allegations:
Through the Guard Room window I watched three soldiers from a famous Infantry Regiment in Yorkshire, drag out an Adeni detainee into the exercise yard. There was blood coming from the man’s mouth and he was dressed in a loin cloth round his waist. The three soldiers, standing about five yards apart, began, in turn, to hit the Adeni. The first soldier was using a five foot long broom handle and beating the man about the head and prodding him in his midriff and genital[s]. He was then passed to the second soldier who hit him with a tin mug, commonly used by the Infantry. The third used his fist. The unfortunate wretch feel unconscious twice. He was revived with a fire hose only to be beaten again. This was the only act of brutality I witnessed but you can be assured many more took place. The fact that the sickening screaming occurred usually prior [to] or immediately after the arrival and departure of the intelligence and interrogation officers makes me convinced of the validity of the reports made by the soldiers themselves and Amnesty International.39
Although he had left Aden for a posting in Germany in February 1966, Lennox was promptly arrested when his allegations were drawn to the attention of the MoD by the editor of The Sunday Times.
Curiously, it seems that some journalists gave more weight to his allegations than perhaps they ought to have. The MoD ordered the GOC to carry out an investigation into the allegations, which were subsequently disputed.40 In a letter to the editor of The Sunday Times, the MoD said:
Perhaps the most curious part of the corporal’s letter is his account of an incident in the exercise yard of the interrogation centre, which he says he observed through the guardroom window. In fact the guardroom was outside the high wall of the centre and it would have been impossible to see into the yard. This was confirmed by all witnesses and was physically checked during the inquiry. In spite of the graphic detail given by Corporal Lennox this part of his story must be untrue.
Despite Lennox’s recollection of bloodcurdling screams, none of the witnesses interviewed by the MoD heard noise from the detainees at any time. Those soldiers who served alongside Corporal Lennox also reported that he made no mention or report of anything untoward at the time. The orderly officers on five of the days concerned confirmed that they received no reports of unusual incidents.
Following a thorough investigation, the MoD quietly rebuked Lennox’s allegations. One official, R. M. Hastie-Smith, relayed the quandary facing the MoD to Denis Healey personally: “I am afraid that it will generally be regarded as bearing out the Rastgeldi allegations.” Summing up, Hastie-Smith felt that the army would “react strongly” to this report but doubted whether Healey would “wish to suggest to the foreign secretary that the report be either edited or suppressed in any way.” The official did, nonetheless, check the matter with Brown’s private secretary and was told: “Mr Brown regards this as a good report and is quite happy to publish it.” Despite the furor caused by the allegations of brutality, the MoD was able to express “some doubt whether the Bowen recommendations could be implemented before the withdrawal from Aden in 1968 but the F.O. [Foreign Office] are unworried on this score.”41
The government would soon breathe a further sign of relief when an MoD investigation found “no substance whatsoever of Corporal Lennox’s allegations.” As a result, The Sunday Times took the decision to press ahead with the publication of Lennox’s letter. In an official minute to the minister for the army at the time, the senior officer responsible for the investigation, General Sir Ian Freeland, wrote:
Any further publicity for the charges of brutality by Army interrogators is regrettable, simply because it makes more smoke for the people who say there is no smoke without fire. But in this particular case we have quite a good answer and if our reply were printed alongside the letter we need not come out of it too badly. In any event we cannot prevent publication and may put ourselves in a bad light if we try.42
They needn’t have worried as the United Kingdom’s mission at the United Nations moved to suppress the report until after the current round of discussions on Aden had concluded, thereby blocking the repeated attempts of British officials to support the work of the UN Committee that had visited Aden. The findings of the committee were seen as an essential rubberstamp to British withdrawal, despite history repeating itself from the Palestine debacle and the fact that Labour remained unsure to whom to actually hand over. These were difficult times for British troops, especially given the controversies stirred by allegations of inhumane treatment. At a time when Britain was under diplomatic pressure at the United Nations on other colonial issues, including Rhodesia and Gibraltar, South Arabia provided another, unwelcome headache. Healey also urged caution in relation to the allegations, giving the impression of a man who did not want to rock the boat for fear that any action by the government “might in certain circumstances have repercussions that would prejudice our prospect of successfully disengaging ourselves from South Arabia and of leaving behind an organized state.”43
On the whole, senior military commanders were unapologetic about the rigorous interrogation methods employed in Aden. They regarded them as necessary and unavoidable and, in lieu of a better alternative, the only way to blunt the threat posed by terrorism. For the GOC, Major General John Willoughby, terrorism was a “deliberate and calculated weapon” used indiscriminately on civilians and service personnel alike. “If it is to achieve anything,” he emphasized, “the user must go the whole way. It is a murder game without scruples, without quarter, and at its most callous.”44 Playing to an audience at home who were tired of hearing of the murders and injuries being sustained by British troops, Willoughby pulled no punches in outlining his thinking for those who may have winced at the thought of applying such methods:
You have to explain to Parliament why you felt it necessary to pass sentence of death on the gunman in the street. I am not absolutely convinced that rubbing everybody out on sight is the best answer, but it would certainly be worth while trying, would it not?45
These remarks echoed the coercive policy now firmly in train in Aden and were eventually to set the Labour government on a collision course with Turnbull once the international press attention became intolerable.
The arrival of the 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment, in May 1967 signaled the resolve of the British military hierarchy to continue with the deployment of frontline troops to ensure that the planned withdrawal went smoothly. 1 Para would take over from the 3rd Battalion, The Royal Anglian Regiment, whose tour had been marred by the deaths of several of its men. Elements of 1 Para had been in Aden before, with several officers and NCOs having soldiered during the Radfan campaign of 1964 and companies of each of the Parachute battalions stationed in the Gulf would rotate into Aden to practice their IS drills. Sheikh Othman was a tough nut to crack. Violence had been spiraling out of control since 1965, but with the breaking apart of the united Front, composed of FLOSY and the NLF, events took a dramatic turn for the worse as both groups fought to gain the upper hand on the dusty streets of Sheikh Othman.
On June 20, 1967, tribal dynamics reared their ugly head in the most powerful of ways. Soldiers returning from early morning practice on the rifle ranges next to Khormaksar airbase were massacred as they drove past Champion Lines. Arab soldiers and police recruits had mutinied, killing nine soldiers and wounding the same number. It was a body blow for the British who had been focused on an orderly transition from British to Arab responsibility for security. Matters were to worsen when a recce patrol from the 1st Battalion, Royal Northumberland Fusiliers (accompanied by several troops of the incoming 1st Battalion, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders) drove into an ambush in Crater town, which had been seized by a combination of NLF intrigue and Arab police indiscipline and disloyalty. Two British Land Rovers ferrying troops past the main armed police barracks were shot to pieces and engulfed in fire. All of the men on the patrol—with the exception of Fusilier John Storey—were massacred. There can be no doubt that paranoia played a huge role in the Arab mutiny but it has to be acknowledged that the British made matters worse by not having a very convincing grasp of the individualism inherent in Arab tribalism in this part of the Middle East. Moreover, the British had always held a patronizing suspicion of the Arab soldier, as FRA commander, Brigadier James Lunt, was to observe in his memoirs:
His ceaseless struggle against the elements has conditioned the Arab tribesman to [the] idea of violence, and has made him a violent man. He can change in an instant from a rational being into a screaming lunatic, quite beside himself with rage as he pleads his cause or threatens his adversary. Tempers lie so close to the surface, and are so often exacerbated by the climate, that blows are struck without a second thought.46
The unpredictable tribal dynamics that had given rise to this unfortunate set of circumstances had a long gestation and their resurfacing should not have caught the British by complete surprise. That it did would prove an indictment on British complacency.
Part of the British plan for handing control of Aden over to the federation was to train and equip the FRA. However, tribal loyalties, corruption, and nepotism put paid to the strategy of Arabization. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Lawson, the British officer in charge of training Arab soldiers in Aden, experienced firsthand the propensity for his allies to act in collusion with Arab militants, when he was knocked to the ground and his life threatened after an assault on NLF fighters holed up in the Al Noor Mosque in the town of Sheikh Othman. The divided loyalties of those Arabs who, on the one hand, resented both the terrorism of the NLF and FLOSY but, on the other, saw the writing on the wall for the federation post-withdrawal, are examined in more detail here. Intelligence pointed to the increasing sophistication of attacks on high-value targets, including British military and police officers and federal government ministers. In one such attack, the Sultan of Lahej narrowly escaped death when his convoy was hit by rocket-propelled grenades. Intelligence was now suggesting that members of the EIS had entered Aden and were preparing for “some spectacular sabotage or terrorist operation.”47
The lack of any continuous media presence meant that the British public was spared the horrific images of young soldiers being shot, abducted, tortured, and mutilated by frenzied mobs. However, the truth of this small war could not be kept hidden from the families of servicemen and women who read with considerable concern the stories of firefights, bombs, and derring-do. In a letter to Foreign Secretary George Brown, the sister of one soldier serving in Aden made her views on what was going on crystal clear:
Why do our troops have to stay in Aden until January, killing and being killed? It is senseless when they are leaving next year. Bring them out immediately. It makes my blood boil—this senseless slaughter of young men. I know what I’m talking about. My young brother is out there and it makes me weep to read his letters. Every time I hear news of more soldiers being killed and injured my heart lurches.48
Letters flooded into Downing Street. A civilian working in the Officers’ Mess at RAF Khormaksar rounded on the prime minister. “I asked what we were doing about it and the answer I got, shocked me, ‘nothing, there’s not much point now.’ ‘Nothing.’ It seems to be getting a habit, doesn’t it,” she fumed.49 Even the shadow cabinet was not spared the wrath of the British public. A bank manager living in Crater vented his anger in the direction of Duncan Sandys:
Yesterday’s incredibly disgraceful show … Our soldiers’ lives were needlessly lost through some half-witted order to go in with “maximum restraint”! And as they went in, magazines for their weapons still in their pockets only to be shot down like clay pigeons. Mark it well—magazines for their weapons still in their pockets. Ask the hospital where the dead and wounded (our service dead) were taken. Isn’t it about time we had some muscle instead of blubber at the top? We don’t want to hear Mr Brown’s “dear Mr Nasser please can you stop throwing bombs in Aden” anymore. When, oh when, will reality tear the gouge from the eyes of the labourites.50
Although the trickle of letters proclaiming the senselessness of the slaughter continued, it served to redouble the politicians’ efforts to pull the plug on Aden and to rush for the exit as quickly as possible. This meant that decisions became less and less strategic and more and more focused on cutting the knot, come what may. But for some soldiers deeply affected by the loss of their comrades there was a feeling of having to seek retribution and to ensure that Aden did not become another Dunkirk or Palestine. There was much riding on peaceful withdrawal, without bloodshed and, if possible, by formally handing over power to a new government. However, by the end of June 1967, the British government was still hedging its bets on who that successor would be, opting to support the Federalis, but only “until something better came along.” It was a dangerous position for the British government to adopt and would lead to a violent response from FLOSY and the NLF. The seizure of Crater was now entering its second week and British prestige and authority was in the doldrums. Something had to be done.
Crater was the central town in South Arabia. Set amidst the crater of a dormant volcano, it was largely urbanized. It had two routes in and out, which, in theory, made it easy to secure. However, the fusiliers, stationed in Waterloo cantonment for the first six months of 1967, opted not to occupy Crater but simply to mount checkpoints in and out of the town. This would pose significant problems toward the end of their tour, particularly when public disorder broke out on its streets. With the arrival of the Argylls in June 1967 in the wake of the Crater ambush, their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Colin Mitchell, took the bold decision to reoccupy the town and station his troops in key positions across the high points overlooking the townscape. For several weeks after seizing Crater in a daring night-time operation on July 3–4, they would clamp down on insurgent activity and general lawlessness. Mitchell’s policy of “tolerant toughness” worried his senior commanders and he was eventually ordered to “throttle back” so as to take the pressure off ordinary Adenis who were complaining about the constant harrying by Mitchell’s soldiers.
It would be difficult not to overstate the importance of the success in the reoccupation of Crater. Not only did the reputation of Britain in South Arabia depend on it but its prestige across the whole of the Middle East. The Arab-Israeli Six Day War of June 1967 confirmed the military superiority of the Israel Defense Force and also signaled a huge defeat for Nasser. By opting for a conventional fight with his nearest neighbors, he played an unwinnable hand. It was something watched closely by Harold Wilson’s national security tsar, George Wigg, who urged the prime minister to come to understand the extent to which the prestige and standing of Great Britain have been liquidated in the past few weeks. They also show that the short-term policy should be to keep our heads down whilst in the long run we should lay the foundations of what would be a novel policy of taking fully into account the needs of Great Britain in the modern world.51
Wigg’s hard-fought battle to convince Wilson of the need to remain vigilant in the wider politico-military struggle with communism amounted to little. In a major debate on defense policy, Wilson told his Conservative opponents:
The view we took on Aden—on everything we know and have seen—and many of my hon[ourable]. Friends made speeches about this in opposition—the decision to withdraw our forces from Aden, was and is right and necessary. Aden must have a political solution. I do not underrate the difficulties of getting it. An extension of our presence in Aden would do nothing to further that political solution.52
Much depended on a success of the withdrawal. Britain’s senior military figure, General Sir Richard Hull, privately admitted that “if the situation in South Arabia deteriorates seriously after independence … [little could be done] in time to restore the situation.”53
It was not without a touch of irony that Mitchell and his senior officers faced a three-way game of duplicity and intrigue from the British colonial authorities and their senior military officers, the Labour government and its diplomats, and Nasser’s intelligence services. As the Argylls’ intelligence officer (and later adjutant) David Thomson subsequently recalled:
The Egyptian Intelligence Service were regarded in those days as second only to the Russians in their ability to manipulate and they were well-funded, well-led and we woke up pretty late in life to the depth of penetration that they had had in the area. And of course part of the problem was that … we had a Labour Government in power at the time [which had] long standing links with the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen, who were, by-and-large, seen as the predominant terrorist organisation that we were competing with. Again, very late in life, people began to realise that there was another organisation, the NLF, very much in the hands of the EIS, who were likely to become the dominant partner in any future regime in Aden, and, of course, indeed, did. And therefore, the conflict between those two and a Labour Government which had almost wedded themselves to people who were actually members of FLOSY (and of course they did not necessarily proclaim that at the time) and this was always going to undermine whatever we were going to do in political terms at the end of our time there.54
The Argylls, a proud regiment with a reputation for fighting Britain’s small wars alongside the Parachute Regiment, Royal Marines, and SAS, were battle-hardened and resolute. They had in their CO a man who would not roll over even amidst the danger lurking down the back alleys of Aden.
However, when all was said and done there was one important factor and that was that Britain’s own selfish and strategic interests would continue to trump local interests. As the former governor, Sir Charles Johnston, made perfectly clear in his memoirs, “the safest way of determining our aims in South Arabia will be by a hard-headed calculation of the two interests involved—those of Britain, and of the indigenous inhabitants.”55 Nowhere was this more evident than in the abandonment of the sultans who had for generations abided by treaties concluded with the British.
Britain struggled to understand the armed challenge posed by groups like the NLF and FLOSY. Politicians continued to back FLOSY out of shared labourist sympathies. It is important that policy should be clear so as to avoid unnecessary tactical risks. It was not at all apparent to soldiers, beyond their SOPs [standard operating procedures] (which covered everything from the mounting of sentries to the proper procedure to follow when searching vehicles at checkpoints), what it was that they were supposed to be accomplishing in Aden and South Arabia. In other words, while they were confident in their ways and means, few were aware of the ends they were supposed to be servicing. Thus—and despite the tough tactics of Colonel Mitchell and the Argylls—the British military could only ever hold ground for a short period of time. Once the politicians accelerated withdrawal plans—known as “W Day”—there was little more that could be done and the British military evacuated, leaving Aden and South Arabia to decide their own destiny.
The British experience in South Arabia has been seen as an abject failure. South Yemen expert Fred Halliday maintains that the NLF’s “victory was the only one in British colonial history which inflicted a defeat of this kind on the British Army and the British state.”56 He points to Southern Ireland, Cyprus, and Kenya as examples where nationalists had also “won” independence after protracted military struggles. However, he sidesteps what this defeat meant for the Arabs who lived there, a sizable number of whom had supported British rule and protection in this part of the Arabian Peninsula. The new Marxist state was totally unprepared for the task of government, which caused considerable problems in terms of maintaining the local economy and paying members of the SAA and fledgling civil service. Nonetheless, the NLF set about consolidating its position, seeking a closer rapprochement with the Soviet Union and effectively eradicating the tribal-based society that the British had sought to work for over a century through a mixture of economic inducement and coercive power. However, it might be worth considering the words of the last high commissioner, Sir Humphrey Trevelyan, who has suggested that:
In the end, our withdrawal was no success, but no humiliation either; for it was the result not of military or political pressure, but of our own decision to leave, and, if we failed to hand over our colony in the manner which we would have wished, it was principally not because the South Arabians were unable to produce in time a responsible political party having the support of the majority of the people and prepared to negotiate a more civilised approach to independence.57
In reality, Trevelyan no more understood the NLF position than his political masters in London or, for that matter, their former paymasters in Cairo. The NLF, under the conspiratorial guidance of MAN, prosecuted a deliberate plan of subversion, insurgency, and terrorism that was strategically orientated toward seizing power from the British; for better to have seized it than to have had it handed over. The legitimacy of the NLF position up until the departure of the last remaining British soldier depended on creating a myth about the purposeful and organized seizure of power by revolutionary forces. While it was certainly true that the NLF capitalized on an opportunity arising from tribal revolt upcountry in Dhala in late 1963, it nonetheless took an enormous amount of revolutionary zealotry to keep all of its fighters from accepting anything less. It also required that the British would want to leave Aden of their own accord, for the NLF’s strategy of harassment in the rural hinterland would not make significant inroads into the urban area until the summer months of 1967 and even then the Marxists were not pushing at an open door.
British involvement in its only Crown colony in the Middle East is rarely talked about today and there remains a palpable lack of education on the final stages of British decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. This has, unfortunately, not been helped by the onset of a case-study approach to “postwar British counterinsurgency” that tends to analyze the past according to a set of ahistorical concepts that tend to obscure more than they reveal about Britain’s involvement in South Arabia. As this chapter has attempted to show, what is badly needed is an understanding of the political and military dynamics informing insurgency and counterinsurgency and how they interacted in the engagement with British security forces and their tribal allies. For as the great military thinker Carl von Clausewitz has shown us, “Like two incompatible elements, armies must continually destroy one another. Like fire and water they never find themselves in a state of equilibrium, but must keep on interacting until one of them has completely disappeared.”58
1. Sir Kennedy Trevaskis, Shades of Amber: A South Arabian Episode (London: Hutchinson, 1968), 218.
2. For detailed discussion on the effects withdrawal had on security in Aden see Julian Paget, Last Post: Aden, 1964–1967 (London: Faber, 1969); Fred Halliday, Arabia without Sultans (London: Penguin, 1974); Vitaly Naumkin, Red Wolves of Yemen: The Struggle for Independence (Cambridge: The Oleander Press, 2004); Jonathan Walker, Aden Insurgency: The Savage War in South Arabia, 1962–67 (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2005); and Aaron Edwards, Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law: Aden and the End of Empire (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2014).
3. This is a sentiment echoed in the analysis of the Aden insurgency in the work of Walker, Aden Insurgency and Edwards, Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law.
4. The South Arabian hinterland stretched from Lahej in the southwest to the mountainous region of Beihan in the northwest and beyond to the Hadhramaut and Mahra in the east. Because of its size, the British divided the territory into two administrative units, known as the Western Aden Protectorate and Eastern Aden Protectorate. In 1963, Aden (only 75 square miles in size) officially joined the Federation of South Arabia, which had been formed in 1959. When South Arabia gained independence in 1967, it was renamed the Peoples’ Republic of South Yemen and Aden became its capital. South and North Yemen were to remain divided until 1990.
5. Edwards, Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law, 60–63.
6. Interview with Stephen Day, November 29, 2012.
7. Evelyn Waugh, When the Going Was Good (London: Penguin, 1951, 2000), 154.
8. Trevaskis, Shades of Amber, 129.
9. The “Forward Policy” was the strategy by which Britain administered its rule in the hinterland “indirectly.” According to historian Spencer Mawby, it helped consolidate British influence while preventing “changing local circumstances and the associated rise of anticolonial nationalism from undermining the foundations of western influence in the Middle East.” See Mawby, British Policy in Aden and the Protectorates, 2.
10. Sir Kennedy Trevaskis, The Future of South Arabia (London: British Commonwealth Union, June 1966). This was something echoed by the Labour Defence Secretary Denis Healey at the time, who had found his visit to South Arabia more than a little exotic. See Denis Healey, The Time of My Life (London: Michael Joseph, 1989), 281.
11. Interview with Godfrey Meynell, August 30, 2013.
12. For more detail on the events surrounding October 14, 1963, see Aaron Edwards, “Britain and the Formation of Modern Yemen,” History and Policy, October 14, 2013. Archived at: http://www.historyandpolicy.org/opinion/opinion_130.html. Accessed: March 7, 2014.
13. Paget, Last Post, 47.
14. Ibid., 51–52.
15. Ibid., 46.
16. The most detailed assessment of 45 Commando’s role at this time is contained in the autobiography of former Commanding Officer Paddy Stevens. See Lieutenant Colonel T. M. P. ‘Paddy’ Stevens, The Long Summer: 45 Commando RM 1963–1964, Aden, Tanganyika and the Radfan (Eastney: Royal Marines Historical Society, 2009).
17. HQMELF, Operations in Radfan, 14 April–30 June 1964 (Aden: HQMELF, 1964). Copy in author’s possession.
18. Interview with Major Norman Nicholls, July 10, 2013.
19. House of Commons Debates, (Hansard), June 3, 1964, Vol. 695, Col. 164W.
20. Politically, this manifested itself in the form of fraternal relations between the ATUC and the British Labour movement. For more on this point, see Edwards, Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law, 84.
21. Mawby, British Policy in Aden and the Protectorates, 17.
22. Halliday, Arabia without Sultans, 154.
23. Ibid., 155.
24. National Archives, CO 968/734, Secret: The Aden Base, assessment by the Aden Department, May 6, 1965. See also Edwards, Defending the Realm? The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars since 1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 162.
25. Figures drawn from Halliday, Arabia without Sultans and Gillian King,, Imperial Outpost: Aden—Its Place in British Strategic Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
26. British Library (Hereafter BL), R/20/D/170, Fadhli Affairs, Reuters Bulletin, February 23, 1964.
27. BL, R/20D/170, Fadhli Affairs, Acting High Commissioner to Secretary of State for the Colonies, February 25, 1964.
28. Aden Chronicle, January 23, 1964.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. BL, R/20/D/20, Detention of Persons under Emergency Decree, Secret Telegram from High Commissioner to Secretary of State for the Colonies, December 23, 1963.
32. Noel, Brehony, Yemen Divided: The Story of a Failed State in South Arabia (London: IB Tauris, 2011), 17.
33. Maxine Molyneux, Aida Yafai, Aisha Mohsen, and Noor Ba’abadd, “Women and Revolution in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen,” Feminist Review, 1, (1979), 4–20.
34. Naumkin, Red Wolves of Yemen, viii.
35. For more on this point, see Mawby, British Policy in Aden and the Protectorates.
36. Walker, Aden Insurgency, 146.
37. The National Archives, Kew (Hereafter TNA), CO 968/737, Directive from Lieutenant General C. H. P. Harington, C-in-C to GOC Land Forces. January 22, 1965.
38. Ian, Cobain, Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture (London: Portobello Books, 2012), Chapter 5.
39. TNA, DEFE 13/529, Letter from Corporal G .S. Lennox, RAOC, to the Editor of The Sunday Times, October 25, 1966.
40. TNA, DEFE 24/252, Draft Covering Letter from DPR (Army) to the Editor of The Sunday Times, October 25, 1966.
41. TNA, DEFE 13/529, Confidential Note to Secretary of State from Private Secretary on ‘Mr Bowen’s Report on Aden’, dated November 16, 1966.
42. TNA, DEFE 24/252, I.H. Freeland to PS/Minister (Army) on Interrogation Centre Aden—Allegations by Corporal Lennox, January 4, 1967.
43. TNA, CAB/128/41, Meeting held on November 24, 1966. The Attorney General Sir Elwyn Jones was also present.
44. Major General Sir John Willoughby, “Problems of Counter-Insurgency in the Middle East,” lecture given at RUSI on November 15, 1967, The Journal of the Royal United Service Institution 113, no. 650 (May 1968), 104–12. Quotes on p. 109.
45. Ibid., 112.
46. Brigadier James Lunt, The Barren Rocks of Aden (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1966), 172–3.
47. BL, R/20/D/208, LIC (Aden) Monthly Intelligence Summaries, Secret Intelligence Briefing for the Colonial Secretary from High Commissioner, May 10, 1966.
48. TNA, DEFE, 24/1896, Letter from Mrs. Stella Cozens to Rt. Hon. George Brown, dated June 1967.
49. Ibid., Miss S. Glasspool to Harold Wilson, dated June 21, 1967.
50. Churchill Archives, Cambridge (Hereafter CAC), GBR/0014/DSND, The Papers of Lord Duncan-Sandys, 14/1/2, HE Vernon, National and Grindlays Bank, Steamer Point, to Sandys, June 21, 1967.
51. London School of Economics Special Collections (Hereafter LSE), Wigg Papers, 4/123, Wigg to Wilson, July 14, 1967.
52. House of Commons Debates (Hansard), Vol. 751, Col. 1101, July 27, 1967.
53. TNA, DEFE 13/575, Note on “South Arabia” from Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Richard Hull, to Secretary of State for Defence, dated July 28, 1967.
54. Interview with Major General David Thomson, April 6, 2012.
55. Charles Hepburn Johnston, The View from Steamer Point: Being an Account of Three Years in Aden (London: Collins, 1964), 194.
56. Halliday, Arabia without Sultans, 221.
57. Humphrey Trevelyan, The Middle East in Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1970), 200.
58. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 216.