BRITAIN’S IMPERIAL INTEREST IN THE MIDDLE EAST BEGAN, JUST AS it would eventually end, in southeastern Arabia. In 1798, following Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, the British secured a promise from the Sultan of Muscat that he would support them, rather than the French. Then, following a series of naval campaigns that aimed to secure the sea approaches to India, in 1820 they forced a truce upon the sheikhs of the Gulf coast that obliged them to give up piracy. It was this truce that gave the Trucial States their name.
A little later, the British persuaded the Trucial sheikhs to abandon the slave trade that represented their other major line of business and then, in the face of Turkish expansionism, to cede control of their foreign relations in exchange for British recognition and protection. A network of British political agents and officers arrived to manage the relationship and soon found themselves dealing with the sheikhs’ knottier problems. “He decides fishing disputes, negotiates blood-money, examines boundaries, manumits slaves,” wrote the outgoing political agent in Dubai of his own role in 1964. “He presides over the Sheikhs’ Council. He exempts, pardons, appeases, exacts, condemns, ordains. Over a large but undefined field he in effect rules.” The British took on a similar role in Muscat and Oman, where in 1920 they brokered the Treaty of Sib between the sultan and his rival the imam, which, for a time, brought peace to southeastern Arabia.1
If it took the French threat to India to draw Britain into the Gulf, it was the German Drang nach Osten that led them to take the step that would make them determined to cling on there. In 1899, following rumors that the Berlin-Baghdad railway might terminate in Kuwait, the British government offered the ruler of the benighted territory, Mubarak al Sabah, a thousand pounds if he would sign away his rights to enter any negotiation with, or lease any land to, another foreign power. After the outbreak of war in 1914, it then offered him the mantle of British protection. “We don’t want Koweit, but we don’t want anyone else to have it,” a British official admitted. This dog-in-the-manger calculation obtained right up until the moment when oil was discovered in the country, at a shallow depth and near the coast—a combination that was, as the American ambassador to Riyadh put it, “an oil-man’s dream.”2
Mubarak’s grandson turned a silver wheel to fill the first tanker load of crude oil in June 1946. When Mosaddeq then nationalized his country’s oil industry five years later, Anglo-Iranian, which owned half the Kuwait Oil Company, switched its focus to the emirate. By 1957, Kuwait was producing half of Britain’s oil. In British eyes, it had become the most important country in the Middle East. Just as important, the ruler of Kuwait, whose income was estimated at one and a quarter million pounds a week, had become the single biggest investor in the City of London.
If one of the British government’s two greatest fears was that the ruler of Kuwait might switch his reserves from sterling into dollars, the other was the threat posed to its advantageous position in the Gulf by Nasser. By 1957, the British were uncomfortably aware that Egypt was encouraging growing domestic opposition to the reactionary rulers of Kuwait and Bahrain—opposition that, in their role as the protectors of both men, they might ultimately be called on to help crush. Until this point, the rulers of the poorer sheikhdoms down the Gulf were by and large unchallenged. But then, in July 1957, just as Britain’s foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, was weighing up whether masterly inactivity or the gentle encouragement of reform was more likely to prolong Britain’s decidedly anachronistic position in the Gulf, a revolt broke out in inland Oman.3
IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE Buraimi incident in 1955, the Sultan of Muscat embarked on a car journey to stake his claim to inner Oman. Although his forces took Nizwa, the capital of his inland rival the imam, without firing a shot—the imam simply retired to his village—the effect of the sultan’s royal progress was short-lived. The imam’s ambitious younger brother Talib fled to Saudi Arabia, where he received help from King Saud and Nasser to recruit and train a five-hundred-strong army of disaffected Omanis. In June 1957, Talib and his guerrillas landed from dhows along the coast east and west of Muscat and established themselves in their home villages inland. Meanwhile, the imam returned to Nizwa and raised his standard over the drum tower of the fortress that commanded the town.
As Britain depended more and more heavily on Kuwaiti oil, Oman had acquired a new strategic significance because it commanded the entrance to the Gulf. After the sultan requested British help, Macmillan discussed the matter in the cabinet on July 18. He and his colleagues were acutely aware that failure to defend any one of the states might lead their sheikhs to look to the United States for protection. As the defense minister Duncan Sandys observed during that cabinet meeting, “All these Rulers are looking to see whether we shall support them or let them down.”4
Convinced that Aramco’s and the State Department’s sympathies would lie with the rebels if they declared independence, Macmillan was determined to nip the rebellion in the bud. The best way to do so, he argued, was by a direct attack on the imam’s fortress at Nizwa, even though such action would probably elicit a “howl from the Saudis, Egypt and perhaps the United States.” His colleagues agreed with him. That day they sanctioned an air strike on the forts that were now in rebel hands; worried about international criticism, Lloyd insisted that “rockets not bombs” should be used. On July 24 and 25, British jets attacked, but the rockets exploded harmlessly on the great stone tower at Nizwa, and when the sultan’s forces followed up the aerial attack, the rebels drove them off.5
To further complicate the situation, the Americans were angry at what the British had done. Although Macmillan had sent a message to Eisenhower on the day after the cabinet meeting (a Friday) to forewarn him of the rocket attack, the president only received the message the following Monday. By then British journalists were claiming that the rebels had Aramco’s support and were using American-made weapons supplied by the Saudis—allegations that Lloyd, who felt that Washington was being “suspiciously quiet,” then had to dodge when he was summoned to the House of Commons to make a statement the same day. When Dulles saw the coverage in the British press, he assumed, probably correctly, that the allegations were officially inspired and mounted a counterattack. After a State Department spokesman dismissed the allegation about Aramco as “hogwash” and said that there was “no evidence” that American weapons were involved, Ike sent a tersely worded reply to Macmillan, which, while not quite denying the rumors, encouraged the prime minister to quash them. Dulles, simultaneously, warned the British that the fundamental problem was the still unresolved dispute over Buraimi.6
Macmillan and Lloyd then managed to dig themselves into a deeper hole. After the foreign secretary had promised Dulles that “there was no question of using British troops there,” a day later the British government had an abrupt change of heart. However, at a further meeting with Dulles on July 31, neither Macmillan nor Lloyd could bring himself to admit that British troops were being sent into action. Dulles was justifiably annoyed when he found out about it by other means soon afterward and refused to do more than abstain when the Arab League raised Britain’s conduct at the UN.7
To end the uprising the British had to send in a company of infantry and a troop of armored cars. Despite temperatures that reached a hundred and ten degrees in the shade, by mid-August, this force brought Nizwa into the sultan’s hands. But once again, the imam and his brother Talib got away.
Macmillan wrote in his diary that the military operation had been “brilliantly conducted,” but from the diplomatic and political standpoint, the handling of the episode left much to be desired. Not only had the Americans proved hostile, so too had the British press. Its journalists were furious that they had been denied access to the frontline in Oman and had spent the campaign cooped up in Bahrain where they were spoon-fed disinformation by the British political resident.8
In a series of editorials, the Times blasted the British government’s handling of the uprising, arguing that its unwarranted faith in the effectiveness of air power had led to a situation in which it was then obliged to put troops on the ground, a deployment that Nasser’s Voice of the Arabs mercilessly exploited. A pair of articles at the end of the campaign concluded that the sultan needed to do more for his people and that Britain was jeopardizing her interests in the developed sheikhdoms of the Gulf by propping up such a reactionary man. “The basic lesson of the Oman adventure,” the second article concluded, “is surely that it should not happen again.”9
THE PROBLEM WAS that further military action looked all but inevitable. From Nizwa, the imam and his brother Talib had escaped north to the Jebel Akhdar, the green mountain that divided the coastal plains of Muscat from the hinterland of Oman, where they were joined by the Jebel’s self-styled “Ruller” (so said his business cards) Suleiman bin Himyar, who believed that the two brothers might advance his own separatist ambitions.10
Part natural fastness, part lost world, the Jebel was protected on all sides by forty-five-degree flanks, pierced in a few places by sheer-sided wadis that ran off a six-thousand-foot-high plateau, which was in turn surrounded by higher peaks. The temperate climate and running water all year round created, by Omani standards, a veritable Elysium on the plateau: fruit and cereal crops grew abundantly there. Last conquered by the Persians in the thirteenth century, the Jebel retained a mysterious reputation. “An Arab from the mountain,” Wilfred Thesiger recounted, “once told me that in the winter the rain sometimes turns into a soft white powder like salt.”11
Since the British had withdrawn almost all their troops following the United States’ unwillingness to support them enthusiastically at the UN, the sultan’s forces had to deal with the situation alone. Initially, they made a futile attempt to blockade the Jebel. But, as they lacked the numbers to do so on their own, they relied on local tribesmen whose sympathies were really with the rebels. As a result, the cordon was utterly ineffective, and a stream of volunteers and weaponry continued to find their way up the mountain.
By the end of 1957, the sultan’s forces were outnumbered and had been forced on the defensive. Pinned down in their bases at night by sniper fire, they spent their days trying to de-mine the road between Muscat and the Fahud: the location of the dome-shaped hills that Thesiger had spotted eight years earlier, where the oil company was now hunting for oil. By early 1958, according to one of the British officers who led the sultan’s force, the American-made mines had become such a menace that “our entire effort, physical and intellectual, was absorbed by this nuisance.” On bad days they were losing two or three trucks each day. The British resorted to laying sandbags on the floors of all their vehicles to try to absorb the blast.12
THE UNDERSECRETARY FOR war, Julian Amery, witnessed the British officers’ frustrations when he paid a flying visit to Muscat in January 1958 and decided that the answer was to beef up the sultan’s army. The man he turned to was his old wartime colleague, David Smiley. The two men had known each other since the war when they had both parachuted into Albania together for Special Operations Executive. Smiley, who earned a bar to his earlier Military Cross medal for blowing up “Albania’s third largest bridge” during that escapade, was lucky to survive a later mission in the Far East, when the thermite briefcase he was using to carry top secret papers prematurely self-combusted, burning him severely.13 Since then he had worked with MI6 trying to subvert the communist regime that then took over Albania after the war, before commanding his old cavalry regiment, the Blues, and serving as military attaché at the British embassy in Stockholm. It was just when he was coming to the end of that posting in early 1958 that he received a call from Amery.
Smiley recalled the conversation vividly. Would he like to go to Muscat to command the sultan’s army? his old friend asked. When he queried whether he was the right man for the job—given that he spoke not a word of Arabic and had never worked in the Middle East—Amery reassured him. Smiley recalled him saying that “I had probably got more active experience of guerrilla warfare than almost any officer in the Army and would therefore be well suited for commanding troops who were engaged in guerrilla war.” Unable to resist the offer, he flew to the Middle East that April.14
After staying five nights with the British political resident Bernard Burrows, he went on to Muscat to take up his job at the headquarters of the sultan’s armed forces, the Beit al Falaj, a whitewashed, crenelated fort that flew the sultan’s scarlet flag. Although Burrows’s residence looked like “a ghastly abortion of the architecture of Harlow and Crawley,” in the opinion of one visitor, it did at least have the merit of effective air-conditioning.15 By contrast, the Beit al Falaj felt like a furnace. To quote an old Persian proverb, as one of Smiley’s colleagues did to him: “The sinner who goes to Muscat has a foretaste of what is coming to him in the other world.”16
After a few days at his new headquarters, Smiley returned to Muscat to meet his new employer, Sultan Said bin Taimur. Dressed in a black cloak edged with gold and a turban of purple, green, and gold, he wore a jeweled, curved dagger in the middle of his belt; his gray beard smelled faintly of frankincense. Described by Macmillan as “a good old boy” because of his willingness to stand up to the Saudis, the sultan had inherited the throne as a twenty-two-year-old after his father abdicated, leaving the country in a financial crisis. “Now Said in jail, I free,” his father was reputed to have said as he set out for exile.17
Now forty-eight years old, Sultan Said bin Taimur was a short, round despot, a man who had had his favorite slave’s tongue cut out to ensure the man’s discretion. Averse to trousers and sunglasses, both of which he banned, he also resisted Western pressure to improve his subjects’ lot. “At present many children die in infancy and so the population does not increase,” he told Smiley (infant mortality ran at about 70 percent). “If we build clinics many more will survive—but for what? To starve?” He was even more suspicious of schooling. “That is why you lost India,” he told one of his British advisers, “because you educated the people.” And he flatly rejected the idea that some of his Arab officers might be trained for higher command, up to—Smiley ventured—the rank of lieutenant colonel. “You must know, Colonel Smiley,” he replied in faultless English, “that all revolutions in the Arab world are led by colonels. That is why I employ you. I am having no Arab colonels in my army.”18
Bernard Burrows, the political resident, admitted that Britain was partly responsible for the sultan’s woes. Not only had the British damaged his prestige when they stopped him from trying to take back Buraimi single-handedly in 1952, but they had then encouraged him to overextend himself by permitting the Iraq Petroleum Company to hunt for oil in the interior. The British plan—that the discovery of oil would bring the sultan revenue, which he could then spend on security and development, making his benighted subjects happier—had one small but significant flaw. The dome-shaped hills of the Fahud, which Thesiger had first spotted on his travels a decade earlier, had not yet yielded any oil at all. The sultan was left trying to police the hinterland on a shoestring.
By the time that Smiley arrived in-country in April, it was already too hot for serious military campaigning. And so he decided to spend the period before he was due to take summer leave making a seven-hundred-mile circuit of the Jebel Akhdar where the rebels were now based. No sooner had his convoy entered the main pass through the mountains than the leading scout car struck a mine, losing a wheel, which landed dangerously close to Smiley’s Land Rover. “After spending a large part of my military career laying mines and teaching others to lay them on enemy roads, it was galling now to find myself at the receiving end,” he commented later. Measures such as fining or burning villages where mines were found or forcing “mascots” (local people) to sit on the hood of the lead vehicle—a tactic the British had used in Palestine between the wars—were now deemed indefensible. More effective would have been to stop the Americans from supplying their mines to Riyadh in the first place. “I know we tried,” said Smiley, “but the Americans were brutally unsympathetic. Their reply was that they supplied the mines to Saudi Arabia under their military Aid Programme, and it was not their concern how the Saudis chose to employ them.”19
Smiley visited Nizwa and the oil prospectors’ camp before retracing his steps and cutting northwestward past the Jebel’s southern flank to visit Buraimi, where the contrast in fortunes between the people living in the sultan’s and Sheikh Shakhbut’s villages was noticeable. He then returned to the north side of the mountain, from where he drove to Sohar on the coast.
In Sohar he heard news of an important development. A truck from Saudi Arabia, carrying a cargo of Browning and Bren machine guns, mortars, and ammunition, as well as forty volunteers, had managed to get across the border. Assuming it must be bound for the Jebel, Smiley decided to give chase. But the patrol he led up one of the wadis on the north side of the mountain came to grief. “We had made about five miles up the gulley when there was an explosion behind me, and I heard the cries and groans of wounded men.” The Land Rover immediately behind Smiley’s had hit a mine, and its four occupants were now lying among the wreckage of their vehicle, “badly charred and covered in blood.” There was nothing for it but to call off the pursuit.20
As Smiley made his way back down the mountain toward the coast and the white, hot Beit al Falaj, he realized that there was only one way to regain the upper hand. “I decided that our first objective must be to secure ourselves a foothold, somehow, on that plateau, from which we could harry the rebels.” If the Persians had managed it eight hundred years earlier, he reasoned, then “so could we.” But to do so, he knew he required more and better troops and he would have to go to London to persuade the government to send them.21
Smiley’s return to Britain was delayed by the July 1958 coup in Iraq, and it was not until about August 11 that he reappeared in Whitehall. There he found that the Foreign Office was very wary of a repetition of the previous year’s trouble in the United Nations. As he recalled, “the very suggestion that regular British troops might again be committed to action in Oman made their well-groomed hair stand on end.”22
Smiley received a warmer welcome at the War Office, where he met Amery and the secretary of state for war Christopher Soames. His warning—that “within six months there will be a major uprising and the entire country will turn against us”—chimed with a telegram that had just arrived from Air Vice Marshal Maurice Heath, commander-in-chief of British Forces on the Arabian Peninsula. Heath also felt that the current campaign against the rebels on the Jebel was ineffective. He requested permission to mount an operation to capture the mountain. As a consequence, Soames called Heath home from Aden, and Oman joined Jordan as one of two items on the agenda for the Cabinet Defence Committee meeting on August 19, when the most likely opponent of military action, the foreign secretary Selwyn Lloyd, happened to be absent.23
After Heath had outlined a plan for a swift operation—in which troops would parachute or be helicoptered onto the Jebel after a weeklong aerial bombardment that would be over before the press could reach the scene—the prime minister and his colleagues agreed that secret preparations for a ground operation should begin. But Macmillan, too, worried about the likely international reaction. Unless the sultan turned over a new leaf, Britain would gain nothing to offset the political damage that her resort to force would cause. As the earliest the operation could take place was at the end of November, he said that he would defer the decision on whether or not to go ahead until late September.
Predictably, Lloyd shared Macmillan’s doubts. When the Defence Committee met again on September 12, he warned that it would be unwise to launch Heath’s operation in November since it would coincide with the United Nations General Assembly. He preferred to spend the money earmarked for the operation on development and an attempt to reach a political settlement instead. He returned to the offensive on October 3, arguing that, since it would be impossible to conceal the preparation for the attack, “the Americans (in particular)” were likely to leak to the press. As a result the British government would come under intense pressure in the United Nations and might even be forced to abandon its plan. At best the operation would only buy time. At worst it would cause a backlash in Kuwait and Bahrain, the two states in the Gulf that, by virtue of their oil reserves, now really mattered. Lloyd’s salvo was decisive, and that day the committee agreed to cancel the operation. But the underlying problem remained. In Oman, the rebellion was gaining momentum, and the sultan’s forces were incapable, alone, of crushing it.24
Refusing to be beaten, the War Office then came up with an alternative suggestion to allay the diplomats’ fear that Britain would yet again be hauled before the UN. A squadron of the Special Air Service, then fighting communist terrorists in Malaya, would be flown secretly to Oman, where they would climb the mountain and then find and “kill the rebel leaders.” In the last week of October, the commanding officer of 22 Special Air Service (SAS) flew into Muscat to conduct a reconnaissance. Tony Deane-Drummond had parachuted into Arnhem in the war and evaded capture afterward by standing in a cupboard for a fortnight in a house full of Germans until he was finally able to escape. He struck Smiley as “the kind of man to whom difficulties and obstacles were a challenge rather than a deterrent.”25
There were good reasons why Deane-Drummond was keen to get involved. A month earlier he had heard that the SAS would soon be recalled to the UK where, because the service was seen as good only for jungle warfare, it risked being disbanded in the hunt for defense budget cuts. He seized the chance to show his men could operate elsewhere. Smiley backed him up: “there is a sporting chance that they might succeed in killing Talib.” On November 13, the Defence Committee sanctioned “a special operation.” Taking advantage of rumors that the rebels had had enough, the British were by now talking secretly to their leaders, unknown to the Sultan. If the talks had not achieved anything by December 15, the SAS would go in. Once the rebel leaders were dead, the logic ran, the Sultan would be in a better position to impose a settlement.26
The eighty men of D Squadron, 22 SAS, arrived in Oman on November 18 and split into two groups of two troops each. One group began a reconnaissance of the southern flank of the Jebel a week later, moving by night and watching by day. One patrol lost a man almost immediately when, used to working in a jungle backdrop, he stood up against the skyline and was shot by a sniper. The other had more luck. Having identified an extensive cave complex on the top of the plateau, they called in air strikes by RAF jets on December 1, which killed a man who turned out to be a cousin of Talib.
The other group tried to exploit a breakthrough that one of Smiley’s own officers had made earlier in the month, when he discovered that the ancient path cut by the Persians up the north side of the mountain was unguarded. It was only when the SAS took this path to the top that they realized why this was so. Between the peak that the path led to and the main plateau, there was a rough and narrow mile-long ridge commanded at its far end by two conical peaks. These the men immediately dubbed “Sabrina,” after the model who had attracted significant publicity when she insured her chest “against deflation” at Lloyds of London the previous year. The SAS scaled the peaks by rope and fought a close-quarter battle in the darkness with the rebels, who shouted “Come on Johnnie!” at them, before they withdrew back along the saddle to their base.27
After the initial death, the SAS had sustained no further casualties, but they were fighting constantly, and by mid-December it was obvious to them and other British officers on the ground that they needed reinforcement. Deane-Drummond, by then back in Malaya, heard about the strain his men were under and appealed to the War Office to allow a second SAS squadron to join the first. Since the first squadron had attracted no publicity whatsoever—the Foreign Office’s only fear—on December 19 the Defence Committee waved through the request, providing that all the troops were out by April, when the Middle East was due to be discussed at the UN. Deane-Drummond reached Muscat on New Year’s Day; A Squadron, SAS, joined him eleven days later. By then he had come up with a plan to assault the Jebel soon after the full moon on January 24, 1959.
What intelligence there was suggested that Talib was most concerned that the British might attack either by the Persian route up the mountain or by the wadi that ran up from Tanuf, a village on the south side of the Jebel. Deane-Drummond aimed to nourish these suspicions with displays of military activity in both areas, while the real attack would be made up a rock buttress that rose out of Wadi Kamah, a valley farther to the east and nearer to the villages on the plateau where Talib, his brother the imam, and Suleiman bin Himyar were most likely to be staying. Once on the top, the SAS would be relieved by Smiley’s forces and resupplied by airdrop, enabling them to press on with their objective of dispatching Talib. To help convince Talib to reinforce his pickets at Sabrina and at the head of Wadi Tanuf, the British also gathered together the local donkey drovers, swore them to secrecy, and then asked them about conditions for watering the animals in Wadi Tanuf, knowing that the query would soon reach Talib’s ears.
After being delayed by bad weather, the assault began late on January 26. It took the SAS nine and a half hours to reach the plateau, meeting almost no opposition along the way, although two men would die after a stray bullet exploded an Energa grenade attached to one trooper’s rucksack. The tribesmen, meanwhile, mistook the airdrop as a parachute landing and surrendered. The SAS advanced to the first village, Saiq, where tribesmen offered to show them where Suleiman bin Himyar had been staying. A fire was still burning in the cave when Smiley arrived. Although there was no sign of the sheikh, nor of Talib or his brother, there were nearly a thousand letters, which set out in detail the rebels’ network across the sultanate.
Malcolm Dennison, Smiley’s shrewd, MI6-trained intelligence officer, tracked the three outlaws to a house in the Sharqiyah, the hills immediately south of Muscat, about a fortnight later. But premature action by another of Smiley’s colleagues, who fancied receiving the credit for capturing them, gave the game away, and all three escaped by dhow to Saudi Arabia.
The Jebel Akhdar operation avoided the publicity that had vexed earlier British operations, and it bought the sultan a few more years. But, measured by the exacting standards that the SAS had set itself, it was, strictly speaking, a failure. The SAS did not succeed in killing either Suleiman or the imam, who were pictured in Alexandria later that year, shaking hands with Nasser. Although, following their escape, the rebellion lost impetus, the mine-laying campaign, directed by Talib from afar, continued unabated. The ultimate solution to the crisis would be political, as Lloyd had acknowledged when he considered Britain’s options midway through 1957. It required the British to establish better relations with the Saudis, which happened, and the sultan to grasp the advantages of development, which did not. As a consequence, the British were to play a leading role in his overthrow in 1970. It was British, and not Arab, colonels who did for him in the end.