BRITAIN COULD ONLY SEND TROOPS AT SHORT NOTICE TO KUWAIT because of her long-standing presence in the opposite corner of the Arabian Peninsula at Aden. There, between two fists of black volcanic rock, lay the best deep-water harbor in the region: it had been seized by the British in 1839. Though oven hot and utterly unprepossessing, the port gained added strategic importance following the opening of the Suez Canal. It then profited enormously from the crises that beset Britain elsewhere in the Middle East during the 1950s. Having learned from the Iranian oil crisis, Anglo-Iranian decided to build a new refinery on the western promontory to process the crude oil it was drilling in Kuwait: in 1954 Queen Elizabeth II visited and laid the plant’s foundation stone.
Aden’s strategic location at the pinch-point between Arabia and the Horn of Africa then made it the obvious new base for Britain’s Middle East Command after the withdrawal from Suez in 1956. In the next three years, the number of British troops stationed in the colony quadrupled. Duty-free shopping sucked in passing tourists. By 1962, what had once been a village of two hundred mud houses was now the second or third busiest port in the world, surveyed by a statue of Queen Victoria and a clock tower modeled on Big Ben. Aden was not simply key to Britain’s Middle East strategy; it was, in the words of Duncan Sandys that November, a “vital stepping stone” on the way to Britain’s far eastern base at Singapore. The colony was now integral to Britain’s self-portrayal as a global power. And once the United States was embroiled in Vietnam, even the Americans were keen for the British to hang onto it.1
In the years following their seizure of the port, the British tried to create a buffer zone by offering protection to the sultans who ruled the hinterland to the immediate north and, when they had accepted, grouping them into eastern and western protectorates. But try as they might, they could not insulate the port from Nasser’s fiery rhetoric. Aden, and its new refinery in particular, relied on tens of thousands of migrant workers who came from the protectorates and Yemen farther north. Poorly housed and denied any democratic rights, by 1956 the Yemeni immigrants had formed themselves into an effective trade union, which Voice of the Arabs harangued with propaganda.
British officials on the spot initially played down the nationalist movement that was developing in tandem with the trade union, describing its leaders as “moral perverts, people with a chip on their shoulders… failures, misfits, etc.” But such was its influence that by 1958 the British governor of Aden was arguing that the best way to maintain any British presence in the area would be to dilute the nationalists’ power by merging the colony and the friendlier protectorates into a new state with which Britain could then sign a treaty preserving her base rights. In London, however, Macmillan initially vetoed this idea. Convinced that the inhabitants of this new country would only “sell their freedom to Egypt” on independence, he was backed up by Selwyn Lloyd, who believed that Aden was “Nasser’s next target.”2
IN FACT, NASSER’S priority was next door—Yemen. Backward, and going backward, the rugged highlands of the Yemen were like Oman’s Jebel Akhdar but on a national scale. Never successfully colonized, they had been ruled since the ninth century by an imam from the Zaidi, Shiite tribes concentrated in the north and east of the country. Although the Zaidis were a desperately poor, barely educated minority, the imam lorded it over the more prosperous Sunni Shafii majority who lived in the towns farther south by virtue of the fact that he was generally accepted by both sects as the successor of Muhammad and thus infallible. In the case of the current incumbent, this involved an athletic leap of faith. For the sixty-fifth Imam, Ahmad, was a corpulent, pop-eyed, and sex-mad tyrant who had once “summoned his household to observe and celebrate his achievement of an erection” following a successful course of hormone drugs. But, as Nasser appreciated, the view that defying the imam was akin to disobeying Allah himself was not universal. Proof of this came in the form of the three bullets lodged inside the Yemeni leader, an unwelcome souvenir of an attempt on his life in 1961 that left him in near-constant pain.3
By then Nasser had been trying to dispose of Ahmad for nearly four years. In 1958 he had met the imam’s son Badr in Damascus and offered to help him overthrow his father. Badr, who was jockeying with his uncle Hassan to succeed to the imamate, agreed but could not carry out the coup. Ahmad, in the meantime, realized that he was vulnerable and joined the United Arab Republic in a bid to cozy up to Nasser, but when Syria then seceded from the UAR in 1961, he could not resist attacking the Egyptian leader. “Why do you pollute the atmosphere with abuse?” he asked him, who responded by ending their union.4
Syria’s secession was a huge blow to Nasser’s prestige, and Nasser did not forget Ahmad’s slight. He redoubled his efforts to destabilize Yemen during 1962. Again, he called on Badr to remove his ailing father, but Badr refused, saying that the old man had become suspicious of, and was monitoring, his activities. A separate coup attempt in the spring, a strike, and student demonstrations all failed to bring the imam down. When, against all expectations, Ahmad died peacefully in his bed on September 19, his brother Hassan was in exile. And so Badr was elected the sixty-sixth imam at the age of thirty-five.
Badr knew of several plots to kill him but was reluctant to take action: his renowned love of cheap South African brandy did not endear him to the more devout among his subjects, and he preferred not to make any extra enemies. A week after his election, on September 26, one of his own bodyguards tried to shoot him. There was “a click and a scuffle,” recalled Badr, who owed his survival to the fact that the man’s gun had jammed. Tipped off about a further plot by the Egyptian military attaché, he invited a seemingly trustworthy brigadier, Abdullah Sallal, to bring his forces into Sanaa to protect the royal palace. Sallal turned against him, however, and that night Badr found himself under attack at point-blank range. Initially, he grabbed a machine gun and shot back, before thinking better of it and fleeing for the mountains. On the radio the next day, he heard that a republic had been established and that he lay dead beneath the rubble of his palace. Other members of the ancien régime were not so lucky. Caught and shot without a trial, their bodies were “left in the open to be eaten by stray dogs and birds,” it emerged later.5
Although the coup had Nasser’s fingerprints all over it, its timing was highly inconvenient for him. At that moment he was trying to sideline his incompetent but popular rival, Abdel Hakim Amer, the head of Egypt’s armed forces. But Amer, realizing what was about to happen, resigned before Nasser could shunt him and then vanished six days before the coup took place in Yemen. Amid a general feeling that “something must be done” to help the new regime in Sanaa but disagreement as to precisely what, Nasser saw the coup as a test of his leadership. Reflexively, he dispatched an aircraft carrying a number of Yemeni exiles, gold, guns, a radio transmitter, and a squadron of aircraft, protected by a company of commandos, to help the Yemenis. He also asked Moscow for Antonov transport aircraft, which could operate in Yemen’s primitive conditions, so that he could send more troops and supplies.
The Russians rapidly agreed to Nasser’s request, and on October 1, 1962, the Soviet Union followed Egypt in recognizing the new Yemeni Arab Republic. Within a few days, the first of many Egyptian reinforcements started arriving. “I sent a company to Yemen and had to reinforce it with 70,000 soldiers,” Nasser would complain in 1967. He would eventually call Yemen his “Vietnam.”6
IN A WHITE House caught up in the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam, Yemen was never a priority. “I don’t even know where it is,” John F. Kennedy confessed, when he and Macmillan first discussed the country in November. But the news from Sanaa was, nonetheless, unwelcome in Washington because Kennedy was trying to mend fences with Nasser, following a National Intelligence Estimate that described the outlook for “conservative and western aligned regimes” in the Middle East as “bleak.” After Syria’s secession from the UAR, the administration tried to lure Nasser away from the Russians with the promise of aid. The hope, as Kennedy’s envoy Chester Bowles put it, was that Nasser might now “forsake the microphone for the bulldozer”—in other words, focus his energies on developing his own country.7
A familiar problem now presented itself to Kennedy’s administration. Although the Egyptian leader had thrown his weight behind the new republican regime in Sanaa, the royalists’ de facto leader, Badr’s uncle Hassan, had been to see the British, King Hussein of Jordan, and King Saud, who all looked very likely to lend him their support. Although the Americans were inclined to recognize the new government, their allies would probably not. “If we come down on UK/Jordan/Saudi side, there goes our new relationship with Nasser,” commented the deputy national security adviser Bob Komer. “If we come down on other side, we open Pandora’s box.” The Americans’ greatest fear was that Saud’s and Hussein’s willingness to support the royalists would only give ammunition to their many opponents at home.8
On Komer’s advice, the administration put off recognition in the hope that the problem might resolve itself. Perhaps Nasser and the republicans would gain ground fast enough that the Saudis would realize that resistance was futile, the deputy national security adviser suggested. “Let’s wait till it becomes clear to Saud and Hussein that they’re losing, so they won’t blame it on US recognition.”
King Saud’s brother, Crown Prince Faisal, was in the United States at the time of the coup, and he did not share Komer’s analysis at all. Faisal was worried that, after Yemen, Nasser’s next target would be Saudi Arabia. In a meeting with President Kennedy, he argued that the republicans would not survive without support from Cairo and Moscow. Openly casting doubts on Kennedy’s claim that he could steer Nasser because of Egypt’s dependence on U.S. food aid, Faisal went on to confirm what the Americans suspected: his country would help the royalist leader Hassan. “Not at all reassured” by his encounter with Kennedy, he left the United States a few days later. Before he did so, he had established one comforting fact from British diplomats at the United Nations in New York. Even if John F. Kennedy did not share his anxieties, on the other side of the Atlantic, Harold Macmillan did.9
MACMILLAN’S PERSPECTIVE OF the Yemeni coup was very different from Kennedy’s since it presented a direct threat to British interests. Successive imams of Yemen had laid claim to South Arabia and Aden, and Macmillan immediately appreciated that Nasser was likely to encourage the new regime in Sanaa to do the same. “We are very much worried about the situation in the Yemen,” he told Queen Elizabeth. “We have so far been able to maintain our position in the Gulf better than we had dared to hope.… But so much depends on Aden, and if we were to be driven out of Aden or faced with serious revolutionary troubles which might make the base useless, our whole authority over the Gulf would disappear.”10
The main reason why Macmillan was so anxious was that the coup had come when Britain’s relationship with Aden was at a critical stage. Having once opposed turning the colony and the protectorates to its north into a Federation of South Arabia, the prime minister had recently changed his mind, having seen the role that Aden’s military base had played during the 1961 Kuwait crisis. In the summer of 1962, the British government decided to pursue the merger, and by an uncanny coincidence, the Aden Legislative Council had voted in favor of the measure on the same day that the coup took place in Sanaa.
At first glance, the vote meant that the merger would go ahead, but the reality was far less certain. The council had been set up by the British three years earlier to give the colony a semblance of democracy, and its composition meant that its approval was a foregone conclusion. The debate sparked rioting in Aden’s streets, in which one man died. When after two and a half days’ debate, the issue was put to a vote, only three of the ten Adeni representatives favored the measure; the other seven had already walked out of the chamber. In other words, it was the feeblest of endorsements.
With six months to go before the merger was due to take place, Macmillan and his colleagues realized that events in Yemen might easily derail their plan. But they struggled to agree on what to do next. The prime minister himself was torn. Even though he complained that “we should so often appear to be supporting out of date and despotic regimes and to be opposing the growth of modern and more democratic government,” his instincts seem to have lain with the royalists even though he accepted they were unlikely to succeed. In private he admitted that he was “reminded of the Bonny Prince Charlie conflict in the Scotland of 1745; the Highlanders were more attractive, but one knew that the Lowlanders would win in the end.”11
When the cabinet discussed the question of recognition, the foreign secretary Lord Home argued that there was little choice. Failure to recognize the new regime would antagonize Nasser, while its royalist opponents were so grotesque that active support for them would, as Macmillan was now forced to admit, be “politically repugnant.” Following news of further setbacks for the royalists and Yemeni claims that they would not interfere in Aden, on October 23 (in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis), the cabinet agreed to recognize the new government in Sanaa “in principle.” But tellingly, it did not set a date when it would do so.12
There was an important reason for that vagueness. A day earlier Macmillan had met the governor of Aden, Charles Johnston, and the cabinet’s main advocates for and against recognition, Lord Home and Duncan Sandys, now secretary of state for the colonies. Although they all agreed that it was highly unlikely that the royalists could overthrow the new government, Johnston pleaded for more time. He wanted Hassan and Badr to be given one last chance to turn the tables so that he could show the Federation’s sultans that Britain had done her best to help the royalists before the British government bowed to the inevitable and recognized the new regime. Macmillan commented in his diary: “About a week seemed the time allowed.”13
A week also gave time for another scheme, which Macmillan must have tacitly condoned. Soon after the coup his son-in-law, Julian Amery—now minister for aviation—had met King Hussein of Jordan at Claridges Hotel in London. “Don’t let your government recognise the Republicans,” Hussein had urged him. “The Royalists are tough.” The two men agreed that another of Amery’s old comrades from Special Operations Executive, Billy McLean, now the Conservative member of Parliament for Inverness, should go on a mission to the country. His task would be to write an eyewitness report that showed how little of Yemen Sallal actually controlled, at a time when neither the Foreign Office nor MI6 could supply up-to-date information about what was going on. Hussein generously offered his CIA money to pick up McLean’s tab.14
The “epitome of cavalry dash and swagger,” according to one friend, McLean had added a red cummerbund to his army uniform when he worked alongside Amery in Albania in the war; the two men had been friends ever since. Elected to Parliament at the end of 1954, he saw his majority cut in the 1955 election and then started to believe that Scottish nationalists in his constituency were conspiring to kill him; a psychiatrist diagnosed paranoia brought on by excessive drinking. The result was that he only spoke for the first time in the House of Commons in March 1956, during the debate after the ousting of Sir John Glubb that went so disastrously for Eden and marked the moment when the then prime minister became determined to get rid of Nasser. McLean finished that speech with an Arab proverb to warn the government against inaction: “Well may you weep like a woman for what you could not defend as a man.” Eden apparently never spoke to him again.15
McLean blamed Nasser for Glubb’s removal. During 1956, he and Amery used their friendship with Albania’s exiled King Zog, who was close to King Farouq, to explore the possibility of restoring a member of Farouq’s family to the throne in Egypt by provoking a coup by disgruntled officers in the Egyptian army. Once MI6 had decided that killing Nasser would make him a martyr, it encouraged this project, and the two MPs had spent their summer shuttling between meetings with the Foreign Office and George Young of MI6, the Wafdists, and exiled members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Geneva and the French Riviera, to where Zog had decamped. The Restoration Plot, as it became known, came to nothing; the fiasco that followed only made Amery and McLean all the more determined to get their revenge on Nasser.
There was a further reason why in autumn 1962 it was a good time for McLean to get away from London. In the small hours of October 12, he was stopped by the police on suspicion of drunken driving. He had visited three clubs in St. James’s, he said. At the first, he had a vodka and tomato juice; at the second, a rum and lemon. Over dinner he had “a glass, perhaps two glasses, of wine” and a glass of port. At the third, “perhaps three or four glasses of port.” Then it was back to the first club, where he had two glasses of kummel. As he got into his car to drive home at 2:30 in the morning he recalled “feeling well, but a bit tired.” At some red lights he was approached by the police, who told him that they had just watched him swerve to avoid some bollards and narrowly miss a car going in the opposite direction. When McLean then denied this, they arrested him and charged him with being too drunk to drive. In the days before the breathalyzer it would be the policemen’s word against McLean’s when the case eventually came to court the following January.16
Ten days after his arrest, McLean found himself in the hotter and somewhat drier climes of Riyadh where he met King Saud, whose hands now shook as he spoke—a sign, the MP reckoned, of Parkinson’s disease. The Saudis were reeling from the fact that the pilots of several planeloads of weaponry that they had sent to the royalists had defected to the Egyptians. The Saudi air force was now grounded, and the king had called up a twenty-thousand-strong tribal levy, the Jaysh al Abyad, because he no longer trusted his army. Sitting on a leopard-skin-covered throne, Saud told him he was convinced that Egypt’s intervention was the first phase of a much wider plot in which the Russians were also involved. Its aim was to disrupt Saudi Arabia, the Aden Protectorate, and the Gulf sheikhdoms and later Jordan and Syria. The king was keen to restore diplomatic relations, which had been broken off following Suez. His message was that “Saudi Arabia was on Britain’s side.” It was the beginning of an important and, for British arms manufacturers, extremely lucrative rapprochement.17
From Riyadh McLean flew on to Aden where the authorities put him on a plane to Beihan, the most northerly outpost in the Federation of South Arabia, which lay on the frontier with Yemen. Crossing the border in a Land Rover, he then drove north, following the ancient frankincense route along the western margins of the Rub al Khali through the once-great towns of Harib, Marib, and Al Jawf to Najran in Saudi Arabia. “During the whole of my journey,” he later wrote, “I do not remember seeing a single Yemeni over the age of ten who was not carrying a rifle and sporting a well filled bandolier of ammunition in which was stuck a great crooked dagger with a silver or brass handle.”18 Although he was unimpressed by the discipline or the training of the tribesmen, who greeted him by firing hundreds of rounds into the air, there was no question that their morale was excellent.
After a further meeting with King Saud in Riyadh, McLean flew on to Amman to see King Hussein. From Jordan he returned home. The report he wrote up on his arrival back in London hammered home the argument desired by Amery: Sallal faced fierce resistance from the royalist-supporting tribes in a large part of the country. Since several journalists had by then published articles based on their visits to regime-held Sanaa, on November 6 McLean went public with his views. “Apart from four Russian pilots shot down near Marib and captured Egyptian soldiers, I was the first foreigner to have been with the forces supporting the imam in the mountains of the medieval Islamic kingdom of the Yemen,” the opening of his article for the Daily Telegraph strikingly began. The piece was widely read: that December McLean received a card from Nasser, in which the Egyptian prime minister conveyed his “best wishes for the New Year.”19
McLean’s report and the Telegraph article contained one blistering further detail that helped tip the argument against British recognition of the new republican regime in Yemen. During his cross-country trek, the British MP had been introduced by the tribesmen to a captured Egyptian parachutist. Confounding the official Yemeni claim that the new government would not interfere in Aden’s politics, which was central to the Foreign Office’s argument for recognition, this prisoner of war informed McLean that his unit had been told by Nasser that “they were being sent to the Yemen to fight the British.” In a cabinet meeting later the same day, Home was noticeably more equivocal. Macmillan argued that there was a “strong case” for delaying recognition, at least until after a parliamentary debate on the merger of the colony and the protectorate, due to take place in a week’s time.20
WHILE MACMILLAN PROCRASTINATED, the Americans tried to come up with a compromise that might simultaneously please Nasser and the Saudis. Once the Cuban Missile Crisis was over, Kennedy sent a message to Crown Prince Faisal in Riyadh to tell him that he would publish a message restating American support for Saudi Arabia ahead of recognizing the new government in Sanaa.
Before Kennedy’s message reached Riyadh, however, it was undone by events on the ground in Yemen. While McLean was in the country, the royalists had attacked republican positions in the north. On November 2—the same day that Kennedy wrote to Faisal—Yemeni republican and Egyptian forces retaliated. During this counteroffensive, Egyptian jets bombed Saudi territory.
The Americans bounced back from this setback. Correctly, they appreciated that Nasser had thrown his forces into Yemen because of his struggle with Amer at home. Given that the Egyptian leader’s future depended entirely on the outcome of the conflict, they tried to offer him an escape route. In mid-November their ambassador to Riyadh suggested that the Saudis could stop helping the royalists in exchange for a commitment from Nasser to stop helping the Yemenis. When Crown Prince Faisal angrily rejected this one-sided proposal, slamming it and President Kennedy’s letter on his desk in front of the American ambassador, the Kennedy administration decided to press ahead with recognition regardless. Bob Komer hoped that the move might jolt the Saudis to their senses, persuading them “to abandon their futile war in Yemen, lest they end up being brought down themselves.” On December 19, the United States government recognized Yemen’s republican regime, arguing that in doing so, it was trying to save King Saud and King Hussein from themselves.21
Across the Atlantic, McLean had just returned from another visit to Yemen. He and Amery met Macmillan in Downing Street on the same day that Washington recognized the Yemeni republic. During his visit, McLean had met Imam Badr, and he now told the prime minister how amazed he had been both by the loyalty that Badr commanded despite his rickety reputation and the tribesmen’s visceral hatred of the Egyptians, which was unlike anything he had witnessed in Albania. He argued that the situation in the country favored the royalists and that “the maximum possible support should now be given to the Imam.” McLean came armed with a map showing how the royalists had surrounded Sanaa and a shopping list, which included fifty thousand rifles, ten million rounds of ammunition, radio sets, money, mines, Molotov cocktails, and machine guns and fifty experts who could train the tribesmen in their use. He also hand-delivered a letter addressed to the prime minister from the new imam. “I am asking for your help, politically and militarily, and to make this help effective by any means you prefer, secretly or openly,” Badr’s message read. Macmillan was convinced. “It was one of the few turning points in history which I have witnessed,” Amery recalled later. His father-in-law delegated responsibility for the matter to him. Thereafter, whenever Yemen was on the cabinet’s agenda, Amery was always present for the discussion.22
McLean’s report was circulated around the cabinet in the first week of January 1963, a few days before its author was found not guilty of drunken driving. It provided the meat for a memorandum by the cabinet secretary that rehearsed, and then took apart, the Foreign Office’s arguments for recognition of the new republican government in Sanaa. Although the dispute between the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office over the issue continued, the matter was never debated in the cabinet again, and midway through February, the Yemenis resolved the problem by severing diplomatic relations with London. Macmillan described the foreign secretary Lord Home as “rather upset” at this development; the colonial secretary Duncan Sandys, on the other hand, was “triumphant.” Privately, Macmillan reckoned it was “the best thing in the short term.”23
President Kennedy continued to press Macmillan to recognize the Yemeni republic. But provocative statements by Nasser and Sallal, an attack by Yemeni and Egyptian forces on British positions along the frontier of the Federation of South Arabia, and an inept airdrop by the Egyptians of weapons to arm dissidents inside Saudi Arabia soon convinced the British prime minister that he had made the right decision. He also thought that the Kennedy administration’s willingness to trust Nasser was utterly naïve. “The Kennedy administration consists of new men: very clever but very ignorant,” he told his colleagues, who agreed with him. “For Nasser put Hitler and it all rings familiar,” Macmillan wrote in his diary on the same day that JFK held a meeting in Washington to try to find a new way to persuade the Saudis to disengage.24
Now that there were nearly thirty thousand Egyptian troops in Yemen, and since the Egyptian airdrop of weapons in Saudi Arabia, the Kennedy administration was having second thoughts. “What is ironical,” Macmillan wrote, “is that the Americans, who accepted the threat to Aden and the Federation [of South Arabia] with some equanimity (only an old colony!) are now tremendously excited and alarmed about Nasser going for Saudi Arabia and all the vast American oil interests involved.” Although Washington was still keen to discourage the Saudis and the Jordanians from becoming embroiled in the war, the administration was equally quite happy for the British to take action.25
Macmillan feared that there was little more than they were already doing to help the royalists. But others were more optimistic. McLean and his allies shared the American analysis that Nasser was trapped in Yemen. But far from trying “to save Nasser from the consequences of his adventure,” as they believed the Americans wished to do, these British diehards now intended to exploit his predicament in an attempt to destroy him.26