Actually, my life in the Secretariat was not at all unpleasant, and included a number of authorised escapes from behind the desk, mostly hitching a lift with the C-in-C on visits up-country and, once, to Kenya, Malawi, Swaziland and Lesotho. And there were occasionally interesting joint-service matters being pursued in the Command operations room, the responsibility for which belonged to the top management but to which I was privy as the duty scribe from the Secretariat. One such involved the use of the (then) new Landing Shop Logistic, HMS Fearless, while it visited Aden; the idea was to use the ship and its landing-craft to support a surprise landing at Hauf, a village some distance eastward along the coast, where it was thought a number of dissidents were based. Surrounded in the operations room by senior figures busy with the intricacies of the operation upon which their forces were embarking I wondered if anyone had remembered that, at that particular time of year, the waves along the coast were often quite mighty rollers. They had, but felt that they would not baulk the landing craft carried by the LSL. In the event they were not entirely baulked, but in the interests of safety in an operation of minimal priority my own Service had to be asked to help to carry the embarked troops ashore by helicopter. That week I was left in no doubt about what I was to include in my draft for the C-in-C’s Committee.

The terrorist situation was getting progressively worse as 1966 moved onwards towards 1967 and there were signs of the beginning of a deliberate targeting of the British Security hierarchy. The first manifestation of this was an explosion during a drinks party in the flat of a man rather disingenuously listed as a ‘foreign office official’, Tony Ingledow. An anti-personnel mine had been hidden behind a bookcase, which by good fortune his wife had later moved to clear more space for her guests, thereby causing the mine to fall on its side; as a result, instead of jumping up to head height before exploding, as it was designed to do, most of the force of the blast went through the nearby French windows. Nevertheless, its effect was still nasty: it killed the wife of the MI5 representative in Aden, the wife of a major in the Intelligence Corps, and wounded ten others. How bad things were getting can be measured by the fact that in the first quarter of 1967 there were over 300 security incidents and, in the second, over 1,000.

The British Government had granted Aden a constitution and a Council of Ministers in 1962 and, by 1963, Aden had become part of the Federation of South Arabia, an entity that it was hoped would be fully functioning and capable of governing after British withdrawal. By 1965, sixteen of the twenty treaty chiefdoms in the Aden Protectorate had joined the Federation, and plans were well advanced for creating a Federal Army comprising some nine battalions of infantry plus supporting artillery. In early 1966 the British Foreign Minister, George Brown, had announced to Parliament that British withdrawal would be ‘not later than 1968’, and it was hoped that this announcement would reduce the indiscriminate killing in Aden, particularly as the date for British departure approached. However, this bit of wishful thinking in Westminster was subverted by the determination of the two main terrorist groups, the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen (FLOSY) and the National Liberation Front (NLF), to compete for ultimate control, and to do so by intensifying terrorist activities. And, of course, it did much to undermine the confidence of those in the area who had been persuaded to go along with the idea of a Federation.

Meanwhile, the elements decided to add to everyone’s problems. Almost in the style of a biblical omen the weather did something on 1 April that one could well believe it had not done in that part of the world since Noah built his ark: rain fell very heavily in Aden for about twelve hours non-stop.³ In the morning the Mallah area was swilling in a two feet deep mixture of water, mud and the accumulated goat droppings of the ages. The mud and the droppings had flowed down from the shanty settlements on Shamsan, and, as no provision had ever been made for any form of drainage, none of it had anywhere readily to go. The balcony of our flat had filled to a depth of over six inches overnight, rather like a bathtub, and I had to drain it in the morning by opening the French windows and letting the water flow through the flat and down the lift shaft.

The flood in the Mallah area slowly dried up under the sun’s influence but left everywhere a rock-hard brown mess of permanent nastiness about a foot deep. It says much for the grit of the many families housed along the Straight that they got on with their lives in spite of the unsavoury smell emanating from this new surface – and this coming on top of curfews lasting for days, lack of maintenance (any foreign tradesman capable of fixing a lift or an air conditioner had long since left Aden), and worry about personal safety.

However, all this was nearly over. A planned evacuation of Service families began in late April, with the occupants of the Mallah Straight area going first. My family went in early May, taken to Khormaksar by coach heavily escorted by the Army, speeding up whenever it passed one of the many knots of Arabs who were standing about shouting. To compound the feeling of gloom and finality of that day, terrorists fired a couple of rocket projectiles into the naval fuel tanks situated on the narrow coastal strip backed by cliffs beside the road linking the airfield with Mallah and Steamer Point. Flames, billowing black smoke, and a flow of heavy oil across the road trapped those of us who had gone to see our families off until finally a landing-craft was organised to take us up the harbour.

With the completion of the evacuation of women and children, and a thinning out of Headquarters personnel, those of us who remained were moved within the wire at RAF Steamer Point. I was allocated a room on the ground floor of a lovely beach-side Married Quarter – how absolutely marvellous it would have been to have had the points needed to get it when I had a family there. In fact, such houses were few, and generally one needed to be at least two ranks higher than mine to stand a chance of obtaining one.

Among the extra tasks that I attracted during the wind-down of the HQ was to see that the Secretariat’s archive of top-secret files was dealt with strictly in accordance with the rules. This involved me in classifying all files either for retention and despatch to London, or for destruction. Destruction required shredding and burning the covers and their contents, both activities to be witnessed and recorded by an officer. When I found that one top-secret file had been opened purely to contain the sensitive saga of Married Quarter allocation in Aden, I could hardly believe the absurdity of it. The problem had been created by the difficulty in getting the single Services and supporting civilian staffs to agree on an equitable system for this. The Army pointed to the fact that RAF officers tended to get promoted at an earlier age than their Army rank equivalents and thus a system based on rank would be unfair. The Navy felt that because its personnel had normally so little opportunity to live with their families anyone in a shore-based job should have special consideration for Married Quarters. The civilian attitude was simple: unless they were to be allocated acceptable family accommodation they would not go to Aden. My satirical corporal typist suggested, as he handed me yet another file for perusal, that the main reason we were leaving Aden might be because we could not agree a MQ allocation scheme; it was a joke, but it had some pertinency.

The evacuation of families had been timely for, on 1 June, FLOSY and the NLF organised a general strike. This was accompanied by considerable violence and bloodshed. Then the Six Day War, which began on 5 June, inflamed the Middle East, and its peripheral effects were felt in Aden. While it was on, every Adeni seemed to have a transistor radio permanently attached to his ear, and they all heard, among other things, King Hussein’s foolish broadcast falsely charging the Royal Navy with flying sorties in support of the Israelis from a British aircraft carrier that had recently gone north from Aden via the Suez Canal. This broadcast contributed to the total and permanent withdrawal of local labour from Aden Port and this, plus the closure of the Suez Canal, caused a severe headache for those on the staff tasked with organising the removal of military stores from Aden in advance of our final departure.

But more serious problems were building. On 20 June 300 trainees belonging to the second battalion of the Federal National Guard, based in Champion Lines, barricaded the gate, seized weapons and ammunition and positioned a machine-gunner in the minaret of the camp mosque. He began to spray RAF Khormakar and Radfan British Army camp, killing several people. In the middle of this a lorry carrying nineteen men back from rifle-firing practice was machine-gunned from the minaret as it passed; three were killed immediately and the rest bailed out only to be pinned down for three hours during which time seven more were killed and six wounded.

Rumours of likely British retaliation spread wildly and, by midday, the bulk of the men within the Aden Armed Police Barracks in Crater had mutinied, had broken into the armoury, equipped themselves with its contents, and were ready to fight. Contact had been lost with part of a platoon of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers (the unit currently on security duty in Aden) that had been sent to remove a barricade near the Armed Police Barracks. Their company commander went to see if he could find out what had happened, taking with him a Major from the newly arrived Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the unit shortly due to relieve the Fusiliers; they came under intense cross-fire and eight of the nine officers and soldiers in the party were killed. Concurrently some terrorists took up position in the old Turkish fort commanding the Main Pass road into Crater and added to the Army’s problems by firing at anything that attempted to move along it.

These various speedily developing events caught the military off-guard and a great deal of confusion followed, made worse by lack of clear and understandable reports reaching the Command HQ. A meeting of the members of the Commander-in-Chief’s Committee was hastily called to discuss what was known of the situation and decide what ought to be done about it. Admiral Le Fanu was in London and it fell to Andrew Humphrey, who was in charge in his absence, to chair the meeting. The GOC, Major-General Phillip Tower, who had been in post for little over a month, counselled caution and advised against any precipitate action. His views prevailed and the Committee nervously decided that it would be best, for the time being, to keep all units out of Crater and to try instead to contain the trouble within it by cordoning off the main routes out of it.⁴ They did, however, sanction one timely and essential action: they allowed a Saladin light tank to fire its cannon at the Turkish fort and dislodge its occupants.

A state of total anarchy and lawlessness developed and persisted in Crater for almost a fortnight. Then, on 3 July, when it had become patently obvious that something had to be done to restore order, even if this meant risking a mutiny among the entire South Arabian armed forces, the GOC (urged and encouraged to action by the C-in-C) ordered a move into Crater. This was carried out by the Argylls, who by now had replaced the Fusiliers. Almost entirely due to the robust and determined tactics of the Argylls’ commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Mitchell, the action succeeded dramatically well and by nightfall on 5 July the re-occupation was complete. It was fascinating to be on the fringe of decision-making on the top deck of the HQ at this time – the Secretariat provided a very privileged observation post – watching the discharge of responsibility without having to assume any oneself, at risk from nothing other than the occasional mortar shell lobbed in the HQ’s direction.

Once he and his men were established in Crater, Mitchell was determined to show the local populace that the Argylls were in charge. He was sensibly suspicious of all, and particularly so of the Aden Armed Police. On his orders, his men set about conducting extremely rigorous patrols, stop-and-search operations, house-searches and interrogations, and these suppressed terrorist activities within Crater for most of the next fortnight. However, the hope in Westminster, even at this late stage, was that we would be able to hand over to an established South Arabian Government, and the British Government’s policy therefore remained one of treading softly and winning ‘hearts and minds’. The fact that winning hearts and minds was a military nonsense in the circumstances was ignored, as was the fact that the chorus of complaints, now being raised and broadcast widely about the Argylls’ actions, was deliberately designed to attract international condemnation and weaken resolution in London, in the High Commission, and in the Command HQ in Aden. On 18 July the GOC summoned Mitchell to meet him and, after telling him that he must ‘throttle back a bit’, made it clear that his hitherto successful methods of control in Crater were to be dropped.

Back in Crater Mitchell issued a Battalion Order to explain the new situation to his men. Unfortunately he expressed himself in a manner that could readily be construed as implying criticism of this limitation on his regiment’s actions and, in essence, of official policy. And, although he made the point that as a soldier under orders he had to be ‘100% loyal to his superiors’, he introduced a touch of ambiguity dangerous to himself by ending up with the injunction: ‘…so let us be even more alert – with fingers on the trigger for the good kill of terrorists which may soon present itself’. Philip Tower interpreted the Battalion order badly and there can be little doubt that he would have had Mitchell removed from command of his battalion had it not been for the nasty situation on the ground. In the circumstances it was decided that Mitchell would have to stay in command and that the C-in-C, acting in support of his GOC, would interview Mitchell and informally express to him the unacceptability of his ‘disloyalty’. I suspect, though I have no proof of it, that Ginger’s heart was not in this action. Nevertheless, it was done, not in the HQ, but in the GOC’s house. Mitchell was not invited to speak.

Lieutenant Colonel Mitchell was a gifted soldier, popular with his men. He was presented with an almost insoluble problem and tackled it firmly. It was suggested at the time that his head had been turned by the media attention he and his men were receiving, and maybe it was. And, as a serving soldier, he must have known the risks inherent in even hinting publicly at dissatisfaction with the policies of his superiors. However, he deserved praise for what he achieved and it was in my view distastefully small-minded of those superiors to recommend him merely for a Mention in Despatches when he left Aden; even I got a Mention, for simply manning a desk! He had done enough to merit a more significant gallantry award.

I finally got the wretched task of the disposal of Top Secret files done, bar one file, just as the remaining members of the HQ staff were bailing out of Steamer Point in a planned move to Khormaksar. I couldn’t find the missing file, which had a recorded number but no title. I had been to just about every office in the HQ that I could think might conceivably have had a Secretariat file but drew a blank – until, at the last moment, I thought of bearding the Foreign Office people in their den in the crypt-like basement of the building. There had clearly been a clean out in this previously busy little empire as the normally locked entrance was open and there was only one person in the place when I went in. He was sitting in an almost bare office looking at, of all things a holiday brochure. ‘Do come in, old chap,’ he said, ‘what can I do for you?’ I explained my problem and he shuffled to his feet, and without another word, led me into what I imagine a strong room in a major bank might look like. It was empty other than for one top-secret file – I spotted the familiar scarlet hue immediately – lying on a top shelf. ‘Help yourself,’ he said and retreated back to his chair. Unfortunately for me the file cover was empty, the contents gone. ‘Don’t fuss old chap,’ he said when I remonstrated, ‘the contents were far too sensitive to keep and we destroyed them.’ I recorded the destruction of the ‘file’ and hoped that the papers that it had contained would never turn up where they should not.

By September it was clear to everyone that the South Arabian Government had no future. In October the Federal Army threw its weight behind the NLF, and that hastened the end. The Federation collapsed and the British Government rather shamefully bowed out, our final withdrawal negotiated with an unsavoury bunch of Marxist terrorists. Distasteful as that was, however, the negotiations allowed the remaining British forces to withdraw without our having to call for assistance from the fleet that was lurking just over the horizon to cover the possibility that we might have to fight our way out over the beach.⁵

The planned run-down in the HQ staff brought my job to an end in late October and I was on my way home. I just had time to try to ensure that my bits and pieces, and my Aden-appropriate Fiat 500, stood some chance of being loaded onto a Ministry of Transport chartered ship as indulgence cargo – on deck – before climbing onto a Britannia for the flight to the United Kingdom. As we took off and climbed, and I watched the monotonous stretches of sand and rock fall away below us and recede, I felt a great sense of relief to be leaving behind all the nastiness and risk that had been part of our lives in Aden. And yet, in spite of my misgivings about the place when I first saw it on my way back from Singapore, and the nature of our existence during my time there, there were some things I had enjoyed about it and, in a perverse sort of way, I was glad to have been there at that particular time. I had had a splendid opportunity to cut my teeth on staff-work in a role that I had found to be a lot more satisfying than I had expected. However, I was now going back to take up an appointment as a flight commander on a Lightning Squadron at RAF Leuchars in Scotland, and I had no mixed feelings about that: I was delighted by the prospect of getting back in the air.