AFTER DINNER ONE EVENING LATE IN APRIL 1963, THE TELEPHONE rang at Jim Johnson’s Chelsea home. Johnson was now an insurance underwriter at Lloyds; Brian Franks, the man on the other end of the line, was a friend from a former life. Until the previous December, Johnson had commanded 21 SAS—the territorial regiment. Franks, a near-legendary figure who had led the second of the two SAS regiments in the war, was now the corps’ colonel commandant. “May I come round and have a glass of brandy?” Franks inquired. “Of course,” Johnson replied, intrigued.1
When Franks turned up a little later, he explained that he had come directly from a meeting at his club with the foreign secretary Lord Home, Julian Amery, Billy McLean, and the SAS’s founder David Stirling. McLean and Stirling were both just back from separate missions to southern Arabia, where, on the surface, the news seemed bleak.
To gain the upper hand ahead of another American-led peace initiative, that spring Nasser had deployed more troops to Yemen and attacked. During the Ramadan Offensive, Egyptian forces captured the eastern towns of Marib, Harib, and Al Jawf from the royalists—the very towns that McLean had driven through the previous October. Following some shuttle diplomacy between Cairo and Riyadh, an American mediator named Ellsworth Bunker had just announced that he had secured a deal between the Egyptians and the Saudis, whereby the Egyptians would begin a phased withdrawal while the Saudis ended their support for the royalists. A forty-kilometer-wide demilitarized zone along the Saudi-Yemeni border would be watched by the UN, and President Kennedy had reluctantly agreed to send a squadron of fighter jets to Saudi Arabia to deter the Egyptians from mounting further bombing raids on the Saudi side of the border. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, the deployment made the president nervous. “If we are going in there shooting down Egyptian bombers,” he reportedly said, “I want to hear about it before we shoot.” To the Saudis’ irritation, Nasser had announced that he was withdrawing his forces, presenting the move as a triumph.2
Franks, however, had just heard a different story from McLean, who arrived back in London on April 18. He urged Johnson not to trust anything he might have read in the papers. “Don’t believe the Americans about the Yemen. They don’t understand the Middle East,” the maverick MP said. “The resistance under the Imam is terrific.”3
McLean had reported that while King Hussein had largely abandoned the royalists following intense American pressure, the Saudi crown prince Faisal had no plan to follow suit, though he was frustrated by British inactivity so far. Inside Yemen itself, the royalists’ situation was much the same. But, under daily attack from Egyptian and Russian bombers and desperately short of arms and ammunition, they feared that they would have to withdraw from the Khawlan, the massif immediately east of Sanaa, from which they controlled the road to Marib, which the Egyptians were having to resupply by air. If the royalists abandoned the high ground, the Egyptians would be able to take over the road. Not only would they then be able to supply Marib far more easily, they would also consolidate their grip over the east of the country, disrupting the royalists’ supply lines, which for the time being were still open. McLean had been into the Khawlan by camel, passing within five miles of Marib. He had seen the situation for himself.
If the Khawlan was key to victory, the key to the Khawlan appeared to be the airstrip from which the Egyptian and Russian air attacks were being launched. It was this Franks had come to see Johnson about. “Would you like to go in and burn all these aeroplanes?” he asked.4
“Well, yes,” replied Johnson. “I’ve got nothing particular to do in the next few days. I might have a go.”
THE SPECIAL AIR Service had been set up by David Stirling twenty-two years earlier to conduct operations of precisely the type that Franks and Johnson envisaged. A year before Willkie’s appearance in Cairo ahead of the decisive El Alamein battle, at a time when the North African desert war was still seesawing back and forth along the Mediterranean coast, Stirling had created a force to raid the Axis airfields far behind enemy lines.
The purpose of Stirling’s visit to the Middle East had been to see whether the same trick could be repeated in Yemen. Leaving London on April 12, 1963, he had flown to Aden, avoiding customs by leaving the airfield through a hole in the perimeter fence. Habit, rather than necessity, explained the manner of his exit, for his host was none other than the governor of Aden, Charles Johnston, with whom he had shared a wartime apartment in Cairo, where they frequently caroused.
Johnston welcomed Stirling to Government House and then, pleading tiredness, retired early to bed. His disappearance was probably diplomatic because it gave Stirling the opportunity to ask Johnston’s aide-de-camp, Tony Boyle, if he could help with a deniable operation sanctioned at the top levels of the British government. Initially, it would involve spiriting former members of his old regiment through Aden airport and onward into Yemen without documentation. Boyle readily agreed.
From Aden, Stirling flew on to Bahrain where he met an old comrade from the war in the desert, Johnny Cooper. In 1943, the two men had been captured by the Germans, but while Stirling then spent the remainder of the war in captivity, Cooper had managed to escape. “We used to specialize in German airplanes on the ground. Get back behind their lines, get onto an airfield at night—do in a sentry, you know… and then attach pencil bombs to as many planes as we could get to,” he told an American journalist, euphoric after surviving a four-day trek across the desert to the Allied front line. The SAS had accounted for hundreds of enemy planes, he continued, “before Jerry got onto that airport dodge.” Cooper had led one of the two squadrons on the Jebel Akhdar and, after being forced to retire from the SAS on grounds of age, then joined the sultan’s army in Oman. He had been Stirling’s youngest recruit. Now in his forties, he signed up straightaway to his old commanding officer’s plan. In early June 1963, he arrived in London to meet Jim Johnson, who, with the connivance of 22 SAS’s colonel, had managed to recruit several other volunteers.5
Cooper did not spend long in London. On June 5, after months of speculation, the sex scandal that was to destroy Macmillan’s government erupted when the minister of war John Profumo issued a statement admitting that he had been lying when he claimed that there had been “no impropriety whatsoever” in his “acquaintanceship” with a call girl, Christine Keeler, and resigned his ministerial job and parliamentary seat. The news prompted a telephone call to Stirling from Duncan Sandys telling him to call the operation off. Sandys had been widely, though wrongly, rumored to be the “headless man” captured on Polaroid receiving a blow job from the Duchess of Argyll: he did not want to be the cause of further trouble for Macmillan, who now looked as if he had either been colluding with Profumo or was dreadfully naïve.6
Stirling passed the order on to Johnson, who decided to ignore it. He booked Cooper and the other volunteers onto overnight flights to Aden. Cooper’s itinerary took him via Tripoli, where he had a narrow escape. Checking in for the connecting flight in the Libyan airport, one of his suitcases burst open, spilling rolls of plastic explosive wrapped up in paper. As security guards helped him cram the packages back into his case, Cooper explained away the tell-tale smell by claiming that he was a traveling marzipan salesman. On arrival in Aden, a local man beckoned him and his colleagues from the plane and ushered them into an old Dakota, which took them to Beihan and the frontier. Riding camels by night and lying up by day, they took the same route as McLean had done two months earlier to pass west of Egyptian-held Marib to reach the camp of Abdullah bin Hassan in the Khawlan.
The son of Badr’s erstwhile rival for the imamate, Abdullah bin Hassan, was one of the few royalist leaders who had impressed McLean during his three visits to Yemen. A short, handsome, and toothy-grinned youth wearing a white turban, with a curved dagger thrust down the front of his belt, Abdullah had been educated at the American University in Beirut and had worked in Yemen’s delegation at the UN. Not only was he clearly intelligent, he was also unquestionably brave. When the bombers came overhead, McLean noted approvingly, “he made no move to take cover and showed no sign of fear.” Since Abdullah had accounted for about five hundred Egyptian deaths in the first two months of the war but was desperately short of money to pay his followers, arms, and ammunition, McLean ensured he received some of the supplies that the British had sent into Yemen that spring.7
Cooper must have reached Abdullah’s camp by about June 10, 1963. He soon realized that the sabotage expedition was a “pipe-dream” because, as he told Stirling, “a full-blown war is now in the making” in the area he would have had to cross to reach the airstrip. Instead, he devoted the time to giving the tribesmen some basic training in the art of fire and maneuver and how to use the Bren machine guns they had now received. The Khawlanis were “pleasant, hospitable, polite, cheerful, in some ways childlike” people who “like[d] guns and knives,” recalled another of the mercenaries. Like Abdullah, they all wore daggers in their belts, which they called sallal abyad or “white power” because of their steel blades, which they drew for the final stage of an attack. Another British visitor saw a man who had tucked an ivory-handled table knife, a pair of scissors, and a fountain pen into his belt next to the ever-present dagger. Given literacy rates in the country, it is likely that the pen, unlike the sword, was just for show.8
To lure the Egyptians into the Khawlan, Cooper instructed the tribesmen to mine the main road in the valley opposite a wadi that climbed up into the massif before forking into two ravines. At the fork, he discreetly marked out an ambush site above which he placed three parties of gunmen. “At about 0900 hours the Egyptians moved into the wadi in great strength, with a parachute battalion up front and a force of T-34 tanks and light artillery bringing up the rear,” he later recalled. The tanks and the artillery stopped about halfway up the wadi, but the foot soldiers continued. “As the enemy reached our markers, our men opened up with devastating effect, knocking down the closely-packed infantry like ninepins. Panic broke out in the ranks behind, and then their tanks opened fire, but their shells were exploding not on our positions, but among their own men. The light artillery also joined in, and most of the casualties they took during the ten-minute firefight were from their own guns.” Cooper counted eighty-five Egyptian corpses after the exchange. It was the first of many bloody encounters he arranged before he returned to London that autumn to brief Stirling and Johnson on the situation.9
A few days after Cooper arrived in Yemen from the south, another man entered the country from the north. David Smiley bore accreditation organized by Julian Amery, stating that he was the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent, but his only previous journalistic experience was as an inspector for the Good Food Guide in Scotland, the job he had taken on his retirement from the Sultan of Oman’s army. In May 1963, he received a call from an old friend. “David?” enquired Billy McLean. “How would you like to come with me to the Yemen?” Scotland in the 1960s was not known for its cuisine, and Smiley did not need asking twice. “I ate more bad meals than good,” he recalled later, “and thought it a pity that a country producing some of the best meat and fish in the world should cook it so atrociously.” It was to be useful training for Yemen, however, where he survived on tinned pineapple.10
Smiley’s brief was to report to his former enemy, the Saudis, on what was happening in northern Yemen. The purpose of this report was twofold: to show where the royalists could improve their tactics and to provide evidence that Nasser was rotating rather than withdrawing his forces, which the Saudis could then put in front of the American ambassador. There was another reason why Smiley was ideal for this job. The UN secretary general, U Thant, had just announced that the United Nations Yemen Observation Mission, which was supposed to monitor the agreement brokered by Bunker, would be led by a Swedish general, Carl von Horn. Von Horn was a good friend of Smiley, and Smiley intended to use that friendship to put pressure on the UN to acknowledge that the Egyptians were not respecting the deal.
McLean and Smiley left London on the same day that von Horn arrived in Sanaa. In Jeddah, in his hotel’s lobby, Smiley saw a face that looked familiar. It was the Imam of Oman’s brother Talib, one of the three men Smiley had spent several months of 1959 trying to kill. McLean warned Smiley away from introducing himself, but soon afterward he was recalled to London to vote in a debate called by the Labour opposition on the Profumo affair. As a result, Smiley went into Yemen on his own. A few days earlier, Russian bombers operating from Aswan had hit the Saudi border town of Jizan. Now, as Smiley crossed the border, it was obvious that he was entering a war zone. “At intervals a shell would land fifty or a hundred yards away, to spur us on; from the north-west came the sound of rifle and machine-gun fire and the thud of bombs, and the sky was bright with parachute flares and the flash of bursting high explosive.”11
Having met the imam at the cave that doubled as his headquarters in Qara and completed a further tour of royalist positions south in the mountains, which form the spine of the country, Smiley returned to Qara again. In June, the Egyptian bombers had started using gas bombs, and the imam suggested that Smiley, on his way out of the country to report to the Saudis, might detour via a nearby village, al Kawma, which had been hit, in order to investigate. Smiley photographed the sores and blisters of children and animals who had been exposed to the gas and extracted some of the bomb casing from a crater. “There was a pronounced smell of geranium, and suddenly I felt queer and almost fainted,” Smiley wrote later. “There seemed little doubt that these were gas bombs.”12
The question was, what kind of gas? Smiley hurried to Jeddah with the bomb casing he had collected, some of which he gave to the head of the new MI6 station in the city. He also wanted to present a sample to von Horn, but the Swedish officer was under instructions from the United Nations not to have any contact with him, so Smiley had to give it to one of his subordinates.
In the meantime, a real Daily Telegraph journalist, Dick Beeston, who was also in Yemen at the time, had received a tip-off that he, too, should visit al Kawma. His article was published on July 8, 1963. In it he reported that the village sheikh had told him that the bomb had exploded letting off a cloud of brown smoke, which had a “dirty smell.” Soon afterward his villagers had started coughing up blood; seven of them, in all, had died. As Egypt depended on the Eastern Bloc for all its military supplies, Beeston speculated that the bomb was made in Czechoslovakia or Russia. The British government raised the issue with the United Nations the next day.13
The British allegation that Egypt was using chemical weapons in Yemen corroborated a similar claim made privately by the Israelis in April, and three days after Beeston’s article was published, the American ambassador in Cairo confronted Nasser. Nasser initially dismissed the Telegraph as biased. He claimed that the bomb in question had not contained poison gas but napalm—an answer he may have hoped would discourage the Americans from pursuing the matter since they, too, were using napalm in Vietnam. Given the eyewitness reports of the incident, however, the ambassador persisted, saying that the report he had received suggested that the bomb might have contained anything “from phosphorous to mustard gas.” Nasser then conceded that “a bomb” was being used but that “he did not know the precise chemical content.” It must, he added, be “relatively simple” since Egypt’s expertise in this area was limited. The ambassador urged him never to use it again—advice that Nasser, as usual, ignored.14
Smiley returned to Britain thinking that he had found an issue that could be used against Nasser when the UN General Assembly convened that October. But the British government was oddly unwilling to pursue the matter. Its own chemical and biological warfare laboratory, at Porton Down, analyzed the casing that Smiley had given to MI6. Although it found traces of tear gas, it concluded that the bomb was “unlikely” to have contained a poison gas, which sits oddly with the eyewitness reports and what the CIA knew about the Egyptian chemical weapons program. Since the mandate of the UN Yemen Observation Mission did not permit it to visit royalist positions and its investigations in the rest of the country were being obstructed by the Egyptians, its own investigation was inconclusive. Von Horn realized he was wasting his time and resigned in September. At the UN, British and American diplomats were both quite happy to bury the matter because they thought that pursuing the issue would undermine their parallel effort to get Nasser to disengage.
FOLLOWING SMILEY’S REPORT and criticisms of the royalists’ operation, that autumn the British reorganized themselves. At a meeting in Aden in September, Stirling and Tony Boyle finalized a new setup in which Cooper, who was about to return to Yemen, would command the British Field Liaison Force. In this capacity, Cooper would rejoin the young royalist Abdullah bin Hassan in the Khawlan, while his colleagues spread themselves across the country. Together, they would attempt to coordinate the royalists’ activities through better radio communication. They had ambitious ideas for airdrops of weapons into the country. In the meantime, requests for supplies would be channeled through Tony Boyle in Aden. “Everyone is freebooting,” observed an MI6 officer to his chief. “Even the ADC to the governor-general in Aden.” But MI6 officers’ doubts about the wisdom of the operation had little purchase, however, when the clandestine British effort was supported by the new prime minister.15
On October 19, 1963, Alec Douglas-Home succeeded Harold Macmillan as prime minister, who had been forced to resign because of bad health, his reputation ruined by the Profumo affair. Douglas-Home, whom Macmillan well described as “steel painted as wood,” had earlier favored recognizing Sanaa’s republican government but was now alarmed at the way the Soviets had taken advantage of decolonization in Africa. Seeing the Yemen operation as a way to fight the pressures that would ultimately force Britain’s withdrawal from Aden, he was willing to trade on his straight reputation to protect it. “We are giving them nothing,” he lied, when Kennedy directly asked him if Britain was supporting the royalists in Yemen.16
Wrong though it was, that was the answer Kennedy wanted because he was hoping to get Nasser to honor his side of the disengagement agreement—something the Egyptian leader had so far conspicuously failed to do. The day after Douglas-Home became prime minister, Kennedy sent Nasser a pointed message accusing him of failing to keep his side of the deal brokered by Bunker. “We are confident that the United Kingdom Government and the Saudi Arabian Government are honoring their assurances to us that they are not aiding the Royalists,” Kennedy continued, unwisely taking Douglas-Home at his word.17
Nasser resisted the pressure, and within the month, Kennedy realized he had been duped by Douglas-Home. One version of the story says the president called up the prime minister directly over the scrambled line that connected the White House to Downing Street and effectively accused him of lying by saying that the CIA knew the British were officially supporting the royalists. Douglas-Home replied that he would make inquiries and promised to get back to the president two days later, on November 22. The conversation never happened because on the twenty-second Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. What seems more likely is that the insinuation was made diplomatically. On November 22, the British ambassador in Washington reported that Kennedy felt that his prestige was at stake over Yemen—since his policy of supplying aid to Nasser was now being fiercely attacked in Congress—and that the sharif of Beihan (through whose territory all British support was being funneled) needed to be restrained. Soon after Lyndon Johnson succeeded Kennedy as president, the secretary of state, Dean Rusk, returned to the charge. On December 3, 1963, he told the ambassador in London that it would be most helpful if the British could “clear the air” by “making a more vigorous effort to circumscribe the free-wheeling activities of the Sharif of Beihan.” Rusk told the ambassador, for his own personal information, that “we remain unconvinced the Aden authorities are doing their utmost in this regard.”18
Douglas-Home took no notice because, so far as he was concerned, protecting Aden mattered more. Eleven days after Kenya attained her independence on December 12, Nasser spoke in Port Said. “We cannot accept… that Britain continues to colonize a part of the Arab nation… when she has abandoned her other colonies,” he declared, adding that he would do his utmost to drive the British out of Aden. In the Khawlan, Johnny Cooper responded three days later with a mortar attack on an Egyptian encampment guarding the road between Sanaa and Marib. “The panic was fantastic,” he reported, of a bombardment in which another seventeen Egyptians were killed. By March the following year, McLean reckoned that about eight thousand Egyptian soldiers had been killed. He calculated that the war was costing Nasser about $500,000 every day.19
BY NOW THE ISRAELIS were doing what they could to increase the Egyptian casualty rate. Since 1956, when Eden would not deal with the Israelis directly, relations between Israel and Britain had improved considerably. The thaw was undoubtedly helped by Britain’s surreptitious sale of heavy water to the Israelis in 1958—an ingredient that would help them build a nuclear bomb and that in turn led the United States to supply conventional weapons to Tel Aviv, in an attempt to ensure they did not use it. When McLean raised the possibility of working with Tel Aviv during 1963, he was put in touch with Dan Hiram, the Israeli military attaché in London. That autumn, Smiley flew out to Israel to discuss the possibility that the Israelis might help drop in supplies to the royalists. The Israelis had converted a Boeing Stratocruiser for just this type of job and willingly agreed.
In the Khawlan Cooper found a flat piece of ground that would serve as a drop zone and communicated its location to London via Aden. He remembered the arrival of the first consignment in the spring of 1964 vividly. “The Israelis had muffled the engines and it was very quiet.… the huge aircraft came in for the actual drop and as it passed 60 parachutes spewed out of the back. It really was excellent dropping, real professional stuff.” Abdullah bin Hassan was delighted; Cooper, deeply impressed: “The source of these weapons was brilliantly concealed,” he later wrote. “Every serial number had been scored out, the parachutes were of Italian origin and even the wood shavings used in the packing had been imported from Cyprus. Even the most expert intelligence analyst would have had a job to unravel that one.”20
The Israelis’ efforts to conceal their involvement were successful; those of the British, less so. The Conservative government’s deepening unpopularity, and the internal disagreement over how deeply Britain should be involved in Yemen, both encouraged a leak. On February 18, 1964, a Labour MP asked Douglas-Home if he was aware of the existence of copies of receipts for the export of twenty thousand Lee Enfield rifles to Yemen during 1963. “I know quite well that no rifles have been exported to the Yemen,” Douglas-Home replied, not quite answering the question. A few days later the director of the British company involved, Robert Turp, said he had subcontracted a Saudi order to a Belgian firm, which had then purchased weapons that the Belgian government had earlier bought from the British. In line with export licensing requirements, the shipment was made after the Saudis stated that the weapons would not be reexported. “The rifles were not destined for the Yemen, and to the best of our knowledge they are still in use by the Saudi Arabian forces,” claimed Turp of this deliberately byzantine arrangement.21
Journalists covering the conflict could see that the tribesmen were often equipped with British rifles, and they were well aware of the British presence in Yemen, even if they were bound not to report it. In March, the U.S. secretary of state Dean Rusk summoned the British ambassador to register his concern at new reports that British mercenaries were present in the royalists’ camps. The ambassador claimed that his government was trying “to discourage this private enterprise, which was a very amateur operation, because they realised that infiltration from the Federation led to retaliation.” Knowing that this was nonsense, when he reported the exchange to London, the ambassador asked that “vigorous action” now be taken to stop British involvement in the war “in order to avoid feeding American suspicions of our motives.”22
The Egyptians were also well aware that the British were supplying the royalists. On March 13, Egyptian jets bombed two encampments inside the Federation of South Arabia, killing camels and burning down tents. The incident left the British government in an awkward position. To retaliate would certainly land it in hot water at the UN; but to do nothing would cause outrage in the Federation of South Arabia, where the British high commissioner (as the governor was now known since the merger of Aden and the Federation) warned that a failure to protect the Beihani tribes might lead them to defect to the Yemeni side.
In the first instance, Rab Butler followed his officials’ advice and decided only to protest to Sanaa. But “anger and dismay” from Aden at this feeble response led him and his colleagues to decide that further overflights had to be answered with violence. This policy was then put to the test when the high commissioner reported on March 27 that an Egyptian helicopter had machine-gunned a military outpost in Beihan. The twenty-seventh was Good Friday, and the news reached London “about tea time”—which seems to have meant that the officials who had argued for moderation were not present when Douglas-Home, Butler, Sandys, and the minister of defence Peter Thorneycroft agreed to retaliate during a phone call that evening. Harib fort, then occupied by the Egyptians, was picked as a target. Ten people died and several more were injured when British aircraft bombed it the following day.23
In sanctioning the reprisal, Douglas-Home and his colleagues accepted that they would face censure at the UN. But they calculated that the Americans would have to back them because, as Sandys put it, sooner or later Washington would face a similar dilemma either in Cuba or Vietnam and would need London’s support.
Sandys’s intuition was correct. When the Arabs tabled a resolution attacking the British at the UN a few days later, the American permanent representative at the UN, then Adlai Stevenson, called Rusk and told him that if the United States failed to support a resolution condemning Britain’s action, “no one would respect the US moral position any longer.” But Rusk disagreed. As Sandys had guessed he would, he said that if the United States voted against the British, “it would undermine reasonable and moderate elements in London and make it difficult to get British help on other matters.24
Kennedy’s successor as president, Lyndon Johnson, felt the same way. Having decided to escalate American involvement in Vietnam, he was pleased to have the British share some of the international opprobrium he might otherwise have faced alone. A few days earlier, he had reassured Douglas-Home that he would support Britain’s ongoing presence in Aden, which the Americans realized was key to the security of the Gulf. He agreed with Rusk that the vote also offered an opportunity to signal to Nasser that American patience with him was now wearing very thin. And so, when the resolution was put to the vote in New York, Stevenson, on instructions from Washington, abstained. But Johnson warned Douglas-Home afterward that “on the merits, in a future case, it would be hard for me to make the same decision again.”25
The furor over the bombing of Harib reinvigorated Douglas-Home’s appetite for clandestine methods. Wondering whether “we have exhausted all the possibilities open to us as regards attributable and unattributable action,” he ordered a review of British policy in Yemen. Butler, alarmed by the rough ride his diplomats had had in New York, wanted to limit support to the frontier tribesmen; Sandys, by contrast, produced a long list of actions to escalate the war, which included the sabotage of Egyptian military facilities and the assassination of Egyptian intelligence officers in Yemen. Neither of these measures was approved, but in line with Douglas-Home’s desire to “make life intolerable” for Nasser, the government redoubled its efforts to help the royalists during the summer of 1964.26
At the end of April, Butler went to Washington to see Rusk. Having told him openly that the British government was not willing to let Yemen get away with what it was doing and would support the royalists covertly through Saudi Arabia, he then asked the secretary of state to help them force Nasser to quit Yemen, a step Rusk refused to take. At the National Security Council, Bob Komer argued that British efforts to prise Nasser out of Yemen had only made him more determined to hold on. “Butler says they’d stay covert,” he reported, “but this is impossible in the Middle East (we know). The whole affair will soon leak as Cairo trades legitimate charges of subversion with London.”27
And so it proved. In early May, Nasser told the American ambassador to Cairo that he had “completely reliable and convincing evidence” that the British were supplying arms, money, and advice to the royalists across the Federation border. That evidence came in the form of several intercepted letters, which were then published the same month in the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram. The British press initially believed that the Egyptian report was propaganda, and it was only after the Sunday Times’s Insight team had investigated more thoroughly that it became clear that was not the case. On July 5, 1964, the paper printed copies of five letters the Egyptians had acquired, including one to Cooper from his bank, two from Tony Boyle that mentioned parachutes and drop zones, and another offering its recipient “Abdullah” (Cooper’s nom de guerre) “congrats on the mineing [sic].” The subsequent military career of its author, Peter de la Billière, might not have been so golden had his signature been legible.28
So ended Britain’s secret war in Yemen. Exposed in the press, and then orphaned in Whitehall when the Labour Party won that October’s general election, the mercenaries would fight on until 1967, by which time they had helped cost Nasser about twenty thousand men. But their cover had been blown, and with it went much of their usefulness. Now that it was clear who was orchestrating opposition to the Egyptians in Yemen, Nasser was able to confront the threat. In April 1964, on a surprise visit to Sanaa, he vowed publicly to “return aggression by force” and expel Britain from the Arabian Peninsula. Although it was to be a pyrrhic victory, the next three years would see him do just that.29