WHILE EGYPT’S DEFEAT DURING THE SIX DAY WAR DESTROYED Nasser’s reputation, the closure of the Suez Canal and the Arabs’ oil embargo put Britain under severe financial strain yet again. Over the next three years, the need to buy dollar-denominated oil cost the country £175 million it could ill afford. A mixture of anger and fear that the government might introduce capital controls led Arab investors to pull about the same amount from British banks. Harold Wilson had been loath to devalue the currency, believing that was what had compromised the last Labour government’s credibility. But by the autumn of 1967, he no longer had a choice. On November 19, ten days before the last troops pulled out of Aden, the government devalued the pound by forty cents, and the chancellor, Jim Callaghan, resigned.
Devaluation was not enough. Further cuts to public expenditure would be necessary at a time when, according to opinion polls, the government was hemorrhaging support. The government had already been thinking about quitting the Gulf by 1975; on January 4, 1968, Wilson and his ministers agreed to bring the departure date forward to 1971.
The foreign secretary George Brown now had the unenviable task of breaking this news to the Americans, and he left for Washington under no illusions about how the government’s decision would go down. President Johnson, who was still then planning to stand for reelection in November that year, was preparing his State of the Union address, and Brown had already been warned by the American ambassador to London that “the appearance of our being deserted, in the midst of our Vietnamese involvement, by a Government assumed to be our most reliable ally, headed by a Prime Minister who had repeatedly declared himself an ‘East of Suez Man’ was unwise, provocative and totally unacceptable.”1
By the time that Brown met Dean Rusk on January 11, Rusk already knew what he had come to say because Denis Healey, who was annoyed by Wilson’s handling of the matter, had quietly given an American diplomat in London his version of the January 4 cabinet discussion. Brown, however, presented the matter as if there was still some possibility of a change of heart. Although Rusk told him that he smelled “the acrid aroma of a fait accompli,” he asked him to report his deep concerns to Wilson. The State Department’s version of the meeting reports him saying that he was “profoundly dismayed” and “particularly disturbed” by the British government’s intention. “For God’s sake act like Britain,” Brown reported Rusk as saying, on his arrival back in London.2
The appeal had no effect. On January 12, 1968, after Brown had described his conversation with Rusk, Wilson and his colleagues decided not to change course. “The time had come,” the minutes of the meeting state, “for a decisive break with our previous policies. We should no longer adopt policies merely because the United States wished us to adopt them and out of fear for the economic consequences if we did not do so. The friendship of the United States had been valuable to us; but we had often paid a heavy price for it. Both countries now faced balance of payments difficulties. The United States were dealing with theirs by a policy based mainly on self-interest. They could not complain if we did the same.”3
BEFORE THE BRITISH departed, there were loose ends to tie up. Although the spread of communism to the Middle East had long been prophesied, it was only in 1968 that it came to pass, when the short war that followed Britain’s exit from Aden resulted in the establishment of the region’s first and only Marxist state, the People’s Republic of South Yemen. Although the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban advisers who soon replaced the British never made much headway in Yemen, their impact was quickly felt in the neighboring, isolated Dhofar region of western Oman.
Whereas South Yemen saw rapid economic improvements following an influx of Russian money, neighboring Dhofar did not. Cut off by monsoon clouds and a fierce surf for part of the year, the mountainous Dhofar was a fertile and yet extraordinarily poor place even by the low standards of Oman, peopled by herders who fed their cattle dried fish. “To a man,” a British soldier wrote, “they were alert, aggressive, quick-witted and possessed of keen power of argument.” An independence movement backed initially by the Saudis—the Dhofar Liberation Front—had operated there since the mid-1960s and nearly succeeded in assassinating the Sultan of Oman in 1966. Chastened, the sultan retreated to his palace in Salalah and thereafter conducted the business of government and his campaign against modernity with underlings by radio telephone. He had started to receive a cut of revenues from the oil that had finally begun to flow in 1967 but refused to share the wealth, arguing that it was important to build up financial reserves first. The British grew increasingly unpopular by association.4
The establishment of communist South Yemen next door in 1967 gave the Dhofari insurgency a new and more sinister momentum. South Yemen provided a safe haven for the rebels; Chinese, then Russian, advisers banned prayers, indoctrinated them in Marxist thinking, and supplied weaponry and training in guerrilla warfare. By 1969, the Dhofaris commanded the heights that dominated the coastline, had inflicted a series of defeats on the sultan’s forces, and, crucially, controlled the road that linked Salalah with Muscat and the oilfields in the north. In a sign of their ultimate ambition, they renamed themselves the People’s Front for the Liberation of the Arabian Gulf.
With the 1971 deadline looming, and having promised the Americans that they would assure an orderly transfer of power, the British were forced to intervene. Having identified the sultan’s son Qaboos as a suitable replacement—he had trained at Sandhurst and then done work experience with Bedfordshire County Council—the British encouraged him to overthrow his father, which he did on July 23, 1970.
Today, the Foreign Office says that its file “Oman: Politics 1970” has somehow been lost. But the British attempt to deny any involvement in the overthrow of the sultan has been undermined by the discovery of a memorandum, written hours before the coup took place, which set out the travel arrangements for the sultan once he had been ousted. The sultan, who shot himself in the foot while trying to defend himself, spent the remainder of his life in a suite at the Dorchester Hotel on London’s Park Lane. It was said that whenever anyone mentioned Oman to him, he roared with laughter. His son Qaboos transformed the country and is still in power today.5
A few weeks earlier, Harold Wilson had lost a general election; his successor Edward Heath left open the possibility that a Conservative government might reverse Labour’s decision to withdraw from the Gulf. That depended, significantly, on the attitude of the shah of Iran, the man whom the British had once dismissed as unreliable and indecisive but who was helping the Omanis fight their Dhofar insurgency and had recently expressed an interest in buying a large number of British tanks.
In Britain’s departure the shah saw an opportunity—to press his country’s long claim to Bahrain and a number of disputed islands in the Gulf. When Heath’s foreign secretary, the former prime minister Alec Douglas-Home, met him, it was evident that the Iranian ruler was not going to be easily persuaded to change his mind. That November, just before they left the Gulf, the British acquiesced to Iran’s seizure of what one man called “a rock with a few snakes and three Indians with a lighthouse.”6
It was in South Arabia that Britain’s reputation best stood the test of time. Oman, Britain’s oldest ally in the region, remains her strongest. The terrible postcolonial experience of Yemen next door encourages some decidedly rosy recollections of the pre-1967 era. When I visited, forty years later, in the spring of 2006, one man asked me if the British might like to come back. I am still unsure if he was joking.