Confronting the Colonies (22 page)

Believing the threat was unconventional, the JIC acted as a moderating influence on belligerent local and Colonial Office demands. The committee advised against a response in the form of conventional air strikes. JIC assessments downplayed the threat of Yemeni strikes against FSA territory, and in doing so rebutted hawkish arguments in favour of
photo reconnaissance flights and retaliatory air strikes.
⁵⁸
The issue again rose to the fore in early 1964. Still downplaying the conventional threat to the FSA and Aden, Bernard Burrows was ‘not convinced that there was an existing pattern of hostile overflying or deliberate intrusion'. He ultimately advised the chiefs of staff not to delegate greater authority to launch such action to trigger-happy local commanders.
⁵⁹
Similarly, Stewart Crawford, an assistant under-secretary at the Foreign Office and a gifted analyst, later echoed JIC arguments to counter further Colonial Office calls for retaliation following a series of bombings against FSA territory in spring 1964.
⁶⁰
The Defence and Oversea Policy Committee, however, relaxed the rules of engagement by allowing local military authorities to treat planes penetrating Adeni airspace as hostile. A few days later, Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home sanctioned a retaliatory air strike on a fort at Harib.
⁶¹

Indicative of the JIC's rising status and confidence, this episode reveals members if not crossing the intelligence-policy divide then at least edging very close to it by strongly advising on a very specific policy issue. It further demonstrates the committee's initial moderating influence on policy discussions, the tense Whitehall atmosphere in which the JIC operated and the committee acting responsibly by offering intelligence that certain consumers (notably the Colonial Office) did not want to hear. Ultimately, the JIC's warnings were vindicated as retaliatory air strikes created a political backlash against Britain in the United Nations.

Having established that the primary threat was not of a conventional military nature, the JIC then had to examine the extent to which the subversion was either violent or political. Intelligence was also required on the levels of external Egyptian involvement. Although initially focused solely on Yemeni affairs, Egypt increasingly turned its attentions towards South Arabia. Republican troops began to struggle in the desert quagmire and Nasser believed that arms were being smuggled to Royalist forces from over the border in FSA territory. From December 1963, Egypt, which exercised increasingly direct control of Yemeni policy, evermore opposed the federal government in South Arabia. Nasser sought to remove British influence.
⁶²
This, however, was a highly contentious issue within the government and intelligence assessments could not operate in a political vacuum.

Instead, the JIC was caught in the midst of an acrimonious Whitehall debate. The protagonists' positions were strongly shaped by prejudices
from historical encounters with Nasser, views on the retention of the empire, understandings of local agency in colonial security and the best way to ensure the security of Aden. On the one side sat the so-called Aden Group and its local allies. The former included certain members of parliament, such as Julian Amery, who had supported Eden's attack on Suez in 1956. Son-in-law of Harold Macmillan, Amery famously represented the last flings of British adventurous imperialism. The Aden Group's local allies included the Adeni Governor Charles Johnston and later the imposing figure of High Commissioner Kennedy Trevaskis. They strongly emphasised a coordinated Egyptian threat to the existence of the federation. To give just one particularly virulent example, Trevaskis wrote in early 1964 that ‘it must now be accepted that the UAR is determined to destroy our position in Aden in collaboration with its satellite, the YAR [Yemen Arab Republic]'.
⁶³
These officials, according to Christopher Gandy of the Foreign Office, ‘viewed Nasser as the Great Satan' and believed that he was ‘wholly responsible' for the overthrow of Imam Ahmad in Yemen.
⁶⁴

On the other side, Foreign Office officials, whilst acknowledging a threat from Egypt to the FSA did exist, were more cautious. Diplomats accused Trevaskis of exaggerating his case. As for the JIC, it quickly recognised that Egyptian support for Republican forces was vital for the survival of the new regime and closely monitored the levels of Egyptian forces stationed in Yemen.
⁶⁵
Like the Foreign Office however, the committee was more prudent regarding subversion against Aden. Again, the central intelligence assessment process acted as a moderating influence within Whitehall.

Regarding violent subversion externally coordinated and directed from Egypt, the JIC initially exercised caution and only began to recognise the severity of the threat from spring 1964. Until then, the committee focused more on Egyptian links with the Adeni People's Socialist Party, which was essentially a political rather than terrorist organisation. Whilst still focussing on external factors at the expense of local agency and ideology, the JIC acknowledged Egyptian involvement in political subversion including propaganda and political support. Egypt possessed merely the potential for active violent subversion.
⁶⁶
This left JIC analysis at odds with assessments from the high commissioner and Colonial Office. Elements within the central intelligence machinery were reluctant to believe local colonial sources, fearing them biased. This perhaps is indicative of
the influence of Foreign Office chairmanship of the committee. There was, however, a lack of appropriate balance between sources within intelligence assessment. Analysts dismissed colonial sources rather too easily in favour of those provided by the Foreign Office and GCHQ. This was not lost on officials in the Colonial Office. In a handwritten note, one lamented how ‘much of the argumentation coming from Aden too obviously lacks objectivity and therefore is discounted here by Departments. Clearly this is very dangerous'.
⁶⁷
Throughout 1963, therefore, the JIC saw the main threat to Aden as being union-driven strike action rather than organised Egyptian violent subversion.

In fact, the JIC provided no warning of the impending violence at all, let alone warning of a coordinated Egyptian campaign against Aden. Although it had never been formally articulated, the JIC's warning and monitoring role had gradually become increasingly expected by consumers. In 1961, Field Marshal Gerald Templer had called on the JIC to issue more forward-looking papers and this was later extended ‘to keep[ing] under review threats to security at home and overseas and to deal with such security problems as may be referred to it'.
⁶⁸

A hand-grenade was thrown at Kennedy Trevaskis at Aden airport in December 1963. Two lives were lost, including that of Trevaskis's deputy, but the high commissioner escaped with only a wound to the hand. The attempted assassination proved to be the catalyst for the declaration of emergency regulations. The JIC (Middle East) explicitly wrote, however, that the incident ‘should not at this stage be interpreted as the beginning of a widespread terrorist or assassination campaign'.
⁶⁹
This proved in stark contrast to the assessments of colonial figures such as Trevaskis who emphasised that the declaration was the result of evidence of a mounting campaign of Egyptian-led subversion and violence. For example, Trevaskis swiftly wrote a strongly worded message to Duncan Sandys in Whitehall. He argued that ‘the grenade incident would now appear to be part of a deliberate plan for the subversion of the Federation'. The high commissioner outlined an organised and deliberate conspiracy against British interests involving Yemen, Nasser, the PSP, violations of air space and mass strikes (which he interpreted as political not industrial). Highlighting the importance of a strong local response, Trevaskis urged the government in London to take similar action.
⁷⁰

The JIC was unconvinced by Trevaskis's logic. Perhaps demonstrating what Trevaskis had privately lamented as London's ‘old womanish attitude',
⁷¹
the JIC agreed with its regional outpost that the attack was probably an isolated incident. Committee members declared that they had not seen evidence to convince themselves otherwise and that ‘before initiating a major subversive campaign against the British in Aden or against the Federation Nasser would need to feel able to risk at least a major row with the West (including the possible cessation of US food supplies) and at most a military confrontation with British forces for which he is ill-prepared'.
⁷²
With hindsight, it appears that the JIC fell into the ethnocentric trap of mirror-imaging or ‘the misperception that the enemy would behave exactly as you would yourself'.
⁷³
Intelligence analysis transposed Western values and logic on a foreign regime, thereby underestimating psychological factors such as prestige and overestimating the importance of Western models of rationality and deterrence. As demonstrated below, the JIC later learned from its mistake in judging Nasser's intentions. But this would not be the last time that British intelligence was guilty of mirror-imaging.
⁷⁴

Aden was a territory of strategic importance to Britain and fears of a domino effect in the region should Yemen fall to Arab Republicanism were growing. In the spring of 1964 JIC assessments began to shift in emphasis and recognise that Egypt had become more actively involved in directing violent subversion against British interests in the FSA (as opposed to political subversion). This raises two difficult questions. Firstly, was the JIC slow to recognise the Egyptian threat and thus guilty of cognitive rigidity in the face of growing evidence? Or should the committee be praised for initially showing caution before demonstrating cognitive flexibility in adapting to changing circumstances at the right time? Secondly, why did this shift occur and was it a result of new evidence or subtle political pressures?

The timing of the JIC's shift raises issues relating to a further trap plaguing intelligence assessment: that of perseveration or ‘the belief in the virtue of consistency'.
⁷⁵
Colonial officials would have argued that the central intelligence machinery was slow to recognise the Egyptian threat and maintained its original thesis of political subversion in the face of growing evidence to the contrary. Yet Foreign Office officials would have praised the JIC for its caution and for moderating the inflammatory
assessments of their colonial counterparts before adapting intelligence assessments in response to new evidence.

It is, however, a particularly difficult question to answer. There is no exact date on which the Egyptians stepped up the campaign against British interests from which to measure the timing and accuracy of the JIC's response. According to the historian Spencer Mawby, the Egyptian-sponsored Republicans added the emerging nationalist politicians of the south to the anti-British coalition: ‘This process culminated in February 1963 with the emergence of an Egyptian-sponsored coalition of opposition groups, the National Liberation Front, which had as its specific goal the removal of British influence from what they regarded as occupied South Yemen'. Similarly, Clive Jones writes of tribes ‘armed and sponsored' by the Egyptian intelligence service in spring 1963. With Egyptian support, the NLF launched an insurgency campaign in October 1963 seeking to confront British imperialism.
⁷⁶
Local colonial officials, however, feared such a movement almost immediately after the Yemeni coup. One paper issued at the end of October 1962, for example, warned that there was ‘ample evidence' of plans to form a guerrilla liberation army, which would ‘probably be directed by Egyptians experienced in such operations' and which would pose ‘a most serious threat'.
⁷⁷
This seems prophetic. Yet the relationship between Egypt and the insurgents is extremely difficult to ascertain. Vitaly Naumkin, a former Soviet specialist in the region who had access to insurgent papers, has acknowledged Egyptian support and influence in the groups' policies but states that anti-imperialist groups had a degree of autonomy from the outset.
⁷⁸

It was of course a very complex situation. It roughly appears, however, that the JIC's intelligence assessments were somewhat slow to recognise the dangers of externally coordinated violent subversion in South Arabia. Interestingly, however, when the committee did belatedly highlight the Egyptian role it went too far and neglected internal factors and local agency, as discussed below. Although performing a useful function by providing a prudent balance to bellicose Colonial Office rhetoric, one could argue that the JIC, fearing bias, was too quickly dismissive of evidence emanating from the Colonial Office and was overly reliant on intelligence from the Foreign Office or GCHQ. The JIC initially perceived the more political body, the PSP, as posing the main nationalist and Republican threat to Aden at the time and examined the PSP in the
context of constitutional and electoral developments. Again highlighting external links over internal agency, however, the committee did conclude that the PSP received Egyptian financial support.
⁷⁹

By the end of 1963, the committee was vaguely aware of the formation of a ‘National Front for the Liberation of the South'. This was thought to have been created in June 1963 to coordinate tribal dissidents and instigate trouble in Aden. Information, however, was scant. There was no mention of an NLF in the available weekly intelligence reports throughout 1963 and when referring to the insurgency in the Radfan area of South Arabia, the committee wrote only of ‘tribal dissidents, supplied with arms, ammunition and grenades brought in from the Yemen'.
⁸⁰
Strategic intelligence reports offered no initial hint of Egyptian involvement or support. Instead the JIC linked the NLF to potential future support of a new Yemeni-controlled ‘Liberation Army of the Occupied South' in a political and propaganda campaign in Aden. It was not until February 1965, as a result of some successful (if apparently brutal) interrogation sessions, that the JIC was informed of a detailed picture of the NLF's organisation. It then became apparent to the JIC that the NLF had a hierarchical structure that could be traced politically and financially back to Egypt via Yemen. Interrogation also revealed that Egyptian military intelligence officers were directing the violent activities of the NLF from Yemen.
⁸¹
It therefore appears that the JIC did not draw explicit links between the NLF, direct Egyptian involvement and coordinated violent subversion until 1965.
⁸²
Given the aforementioned intelligence deficiencies, this initial failure to give sufficient weight to the NLF and over-focus on the PSP most likely emanated not from perseveration and stubbornness but from a lack of intelligence. The JIC was hindered, however, by its neglect of colonial sources and over-reliance on GCHQ. Local sources may well have been flawed but overlooking them altogether owing to fear of bias and politicisation can actually skew intelligence assessments to the point where they ignore evidence that may well end up being accurate.