Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (26 page)

Stirling snorted: “Rubbish. I can produce a guy in London who has just given up command of 21 SAS [the reserve regiment ostensibly dedicated to stay-behind actions should the Warsaw Pact invade western Europe]. He could put something together.” The man Stirling had in mind was Jim Johnson, former Guards officer and a broker at the insurance market, Lloyds. Franks telephoned Johnson immediately and invited him to have a drink at the club. As they exchanged regimental small talk, Franks asked Johnson: “Do you fancy going into Yemen and burning the MiGs which are upsetting the tribes and bombing them? The tribes have no defense against them.” Johnson thought this was a good idea. At a later meeting in London, Johnson and McLean met the Imam’s foreign minister, Ahmed al-Shami. Johnson asked what funds were available. Al-Shami laid his checkbook in front of them and wrote a check for around $10,000. The money trail, which ultimately led back to Saudi Arabia, had to be concealed. Franks picked up the check and funneled it through the Hyde Park Hotel account, a process made easier by his role as chairman of the hotel board.

Johnson took leave of absence from Lloyds and opened a secret headquarters near the headquarters of 21 SAS. The commander of the regular, full-time 22 SAS Regiment obligingly provided unattributable weapons including Swedish submachine guns, which were stored in Johnson’s fashionable London home on Sloane Avenue. Stirling drummed up his wartime comrade and one-time driver, Major John Cooper, now working as a contract officer for the Sultan’s Armed Forces in Oman.

On 6 June, the anniversary of D-Day, Johnson, Stirling, and Cooper were at a mansion in Paris to meet two mercenaries nominated by the French Secret Service. These were Colonel Roger Faulques, a scarred veteran of a Vietnam prison camp and the Algerian war, and Robert Denard, a hulking freelance soldier from the French Atlantic coast. The gathering also included senior government officials from London and Paris. If Kennedy was mentioned, it was in less than reverent tones. The SIS also probably came in for its share of criticism. Much wine was drunk. Johnson later told the author: “We were entertained royally. The French side said they had a lot of ex-Foreign Legion Paras who had served in Algeria and spoke Arabic. But it was the wrong Arabic, Maghrib Arabic. They were unintelligible to everyone but themselves.”

What emerged from this gathering was a decision to send an advance party of four French and four British freelances on a reconnaissance mission to Yemen, led by Cooper, whose experience with the French Resistance during the Second World War would be useful in calling in Israeli supply drops. Back in London, the word was sent to Morse signals specialists serving with 21 SAS. On arrival, they were “invited” to join Johnson’s secret army. Three regular soldiers serving with 22 SAS—Geordie Dorman, a mortar expert; Corporal Chigley, a medical orderly; and Trooper Richardson, all-round firearms expert—were given leave of absence, or sheep-dipped (nominally discharged from the Army), to join the team.

The French volunteers drove from Paris in an official staff car, with a uniformed military driver and concealed weapons. One of them was Tony de Saint-Paul, alias Roger de Saint Prieux, a tall, sinister figure with deep-set eyes who went into battle dressed as an Arab, a curved dagger at his waist. He was to meet a painful death in Yemen soon afterward.

Shortly before they were to leave, Johnson received word that the U.K. government had taken fright. Scandals in high places, including the forced resignation of War Minister John Profumo, meant that there could be no other source of political embarrassment for the time being. Risky military adventures were not wanted. Nevertheless, Johnson hastily booked the team in ones and twos onto any flight available out of Britain, in the direction of Aden, before the British government could intervene. In a duplicitous farewell that night, Lord Home dined with Johnson and the team.

Cooper flew first to Tripoli, in Libya. He later recalled: “We had just collected our baggage from our various incoming flights when one of the cases broke open, spilling out rolls and rolls of plastic explosive.” Some of the Libyan security guards, he added, “actually helped us repack the stuff. I told them that stuff was marzipan, because of the smell, for various Arab heads of state.”

In Aden, the mercenaries and their dangerous cargo were able to bypass the usual formalities with the help of a young officer serving with British forces there: Captain (later Lieutenant-General) Peter de la Billiere. DLB, as he is known in SAS circles, arranged for the team to move by a Dakota of Aden Air to a border area controlled by an ally among local rulers, the Sharif of Beihan. Then the party of six, dressed as Arabs, with two guides, loaded their camels and joined a train of 150 camels carrying supplies to the royalists to cross the border. It was a hazardous journey, moving by night to avoid Egyptian aircraft, in single file through minefields.

From a mountain village called Gara, headquarters of Prince Abdullah bin Hassan, Taylor sent out reconnaissance patrols stiffened by his mercenaries in spite of continuous air raids in which attacks with iron bombs were followed with low strafing runs by Yak fighters using machine guns. Next, he set up an ambush for Egyptian infantry and tanks obliged to climb a gully to reach Hassan’s redoubt. Each gun position was camouflaged and sheltered by rocks, with additional shelter nearby in case of air attack. Cairns were built as markers, or orientation points for the defenders. Cooper wrote later: “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 the tanks started firing, not into our positions but among their own men. Then the light artillery opened up, causing further carnage.”
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The mercenaries’ campaign ran for the next three years, during which the Egyptians were increasingly confined to paved roads. They hit back with air power and poison gas. For example, on 4 July 1963, McLean, back in Yemen, reported to the U.K. ambassador to Saudi Arabia on his visit to a village called Kowma. “I went to the exact spot where two bombs had landed…. Even after an interval of about…five weeks during which heavy rains fell…I was immediately aware of, from between twenty and thirty yards away, an unusual, unpleasant and pungent smell…rather like a sweet sour musty chloroform mixed with a strong odour of geranium plant…I was told that all of the 120 people in the village still have severe coughs, irritation of the skin and of the twenty-two people injured, many still vomit black blood after severe coughing.”
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A gradual stalemate developed. The Egyptians placed a bounty on the heads of the mercenaries. Just before he was blown up by an enemy shell, the Frenchman Tony de Saint-Paul wrote: “The Egyptians’ price on my head has now grown from $500 to $10,000. I hope they increase it even more.” His companion, known only as “Peter,” blinded by poison gas, survived a two-week journey by camel to Aden, before being flown home to France. Though outgunned, the royalists enjoyed two powerful advantages thanks to the mercenary force. First was the use of tactical communications, which gave the Imam’s men flexibility the Egyptians usually lacked. Second, the supplies parachuted by Israel into drop zones controlled by Cooper gave the royalists an increasingly sophisticated edge. Jim Johnson, the political commander of the mercenary force, flew on some of these missions, using a new identity supplied by Israel with a Canadian passport and an escape kit including gold sovereigns. Serial numbers on the weapons Israel supplied had been filed off. Wood shavings in the containers were imported from Cyprus and the parachutes from Italy. A total of 50,000 British rifles was also dropped by civilian aircraft piloted by former Royal Air Force pilots, one of whom was now on Johnson’s team.

In 1965, 300 camels were used in the buildup for a royalist ambush on a road linking Sana’a and the Saudi border at a defile known as Wadi Humaidat. The ambush would need 81-mm mortars to destroy an Egyptian convoy and cut the road. The historian Clive Jones writes: “In what was perhaps the most efficient battle fought by the Royalists, 362 soldiers of the First Army, backed by 1,290 tribesmen…directed by two British and three French mercenaries cut this main supply route and, despite several days of determined Egyptian counter-attacks, held on to their positions.”
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In 1966, the French mercenaries launched a barrage of covering fire to assist a royalist advance on Sana’a, but the Imam’s men did not move. The royalists’ lack of resolve went beyond the front line. Johnson, after conferring with the Saudis who bankrolled the operation, concluded that a stalemate that pinned down 70,000 Egyptian soldiers in a war of attrition suited the Saudis nicely. With a new, Socialist government in London, SIS was also lukewarm about the right-wingers’ Yemen adventure. So in October 1966, Johnson wrote a memorandum describing “the apparent lack of interest by HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] and the stated indifference to our activities by MI6 [SIS] coupled with the absolute disinterest…of HRH [Saudi Prince] Sultan we appear to have three courses open to us….” He nominated the first of these, “to withdraw as soon as possible from the Yemen before disaster overtakes us,” for “there is no indication that HMG wants us to continue now.”

On 6 October he confronted the Saudis and asked: “Do you want us to win this war or not? The British have announced the date to leave Aden. If I go before they leave, it will be a shambles.”

The stalemate became a political fact in 1970, recognized by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, backed with a $300 million bribe from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to compensate Egypt for lands lost to Israel during the 1967 war, the outcome of which was affected by the absence from that battlefield of Nasser’s lost army in Yemen. The timing of this event oozed with dramatic irony. It was the year in which Communist guerrillas, based in the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Yemen (formerly the British-controlled Aden Federation), launched an offensive on Oman, coming close to bringing that kingdom into Moscow’s orbit. The SAS were to spend the next six years defending this gateway to the Gulf. No one now sought to defend Kennedy’s idealistic, unquestioning support of newly independent former colonies with a taste for republican government. Such countries were now part of a global battlefield over which the Cold War was being fought for real.

In 1975 the CIA spotted an opportunity to give the Soviets a bloody nose in Africa, specifically in Angola, using plausibly deniable British assets. By this time, according to the Church Committee, the Agency had run 900 major interventions and 3,000 minor ones around the world during the preceding fourteen years. With the withdrawal of Portuguese colonists, Angola was the latest ripe African fruit toward which both superpowers were reaching. Kissinger, witnessing Cuban intervention, warned the NSC and the Agency that unless something were done, “the whole international system could be destabilized.” In any case, in the wake of the Vietnam fiasco, it would be good for morale to score in Africa. Bill Colby, director of the CIA, gave the message to the National Security Council from the shoulder: “Gentlemen, this is a map of Africa and here is Angola. Now in Angola we have three factions. There’s the MPLA [Popular Movement For the Liberation of Angola, including the Communist Party]. They’re the bad guys. The FNLA [National Liberation Front, Angola], they’re the good guys, and there’s Jonas Savimbi [leading Unita], we don’t know too well.”
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As a geopolitical model it had the merit of simplicity.

John Stockwell, a lifelong Africa hand and chief of the CIA Angola task force, believed that in backing FNLA leader Holden Roberto, the most violent of the warlords, the Agency ensured that “the fate of Angola was cast, written in blood.”
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The operation was also fatally flawed. A war chest of $31.7 million was conjured from contingency funds, out of sight to Congress. In this respect, the phantom budget anticipated Oliver North’s plan to recycle funds from the Iran arms-for-hostages deal to fund the war in Nicaragua after Congress blocked funding for that campaign. The problem with the Angola deal was that the Russians took up the challenge, played poker and—uninhibited by democratic issues—raised the stakes to $400 million. The CIA ran out of money and blinked first.

The strategy was also designed for losers. A memorandum prepared for the CIA Director, George Bush, Sr. in the Agency’s Africa Division stated, in the second paragraph, that large supplies of arms to Roberto in northern Angola and Savimbi in the south “would not guarantee they could establish control of all Angola, but that assistance would permit them to achieve a military balance that would avoid a cheap Neto victory” (Agostinho Neto was president of the MPLA).
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Stockwell, reading the proposal, noted: “This memo did indeed state a no-win policy…I wondered what ‘cheap’ meant. Would it be measured in dollars or in African lives?”

The Angola program was then coordinated by Frank G. Wisner, Jr., whose father had been chief of the OSA and CIA covert operations a generation earlier. Wisner Jr. was now working for Kissinger in the State Department. He reasoned: “We had been forced out of Vietnam. There was a real concern on the part of the [Ford] Administration that the U.S. would now be tested” by the forces of Communism worldwide.
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The CIA recruited, at extravagant cost, some French mercenaries through the quality-control mechanism of Robert Denard. It was all profit for Denard, but there is no evidence that it benefited the operation known at Langley as IAFEATURE. Meanwhile Roberto, by some occult means, was advised to make contact with British mercenaries. The gang he recruited was led by Red Beret psychos who had served together in Northern Ireland and had been dishonorably discharged from the army. One was convicted for selling army weapons to Loyalist Ultras and was deemed mentally unstable. Another had robbed a post office using army weapons and an easily identified army vehicle. These two rounded up a ragbag collection of Walter Mitties and dreamers including two former road sweepers as well as a tiny kernel of professionals. The latter included one SAS expert, an SIS man, and a former submariner. News of their recruitment became public knowledge. Though many of them had no passports, the British and Belgian authorities waved them through open doors on their way to Angola via Zaire. Later, they were joined by a handful of naïve American crusaders against Communism.