Coup D’état Oman

Coup D’état Oman

By

Raymond John Kane Copyright © 2014-2019

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978 0 9560 589 6 6

Smashwords Edition

Foreword

IN 1970, while America was bleeding its way through the Vietnam War and its secret, illegal Cambodia Incursion, Oman and Britain were fighting and losing their own secret conflict against Russian and Chinese-backed, armed and trained Marxist revolutionaries on the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf.

At stake, should the then Cold War turn hot, was the free flow of 43% of the West’s crude oil through Oman’s Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf.

Only a change of leadership could harness the political, developmental and military forces necessary to prevent what could otherwise be a disaster for both Oman and the West.

In the absence of a democratic ballot box to remove the obscurantist Sultan Said bin Taimur there was just one alternative.

The bullet.

Wrapped in the memoir of an irreverent Irish-born soldier, this is the true story of the only publicly-known coup d’état executed by the British Army in living memory.

Map: Arabian Peninsula, Persian Gulf, Oman, Dhofar Province

Ray Kane, Haluf, Dhofar Province Oman 1970

Table of Contents

Map: Arabian Peninsula, Persian Gulf, Oman

Image, Ray Kane, Haluf, Dhofar Province, Oman, 1970

Prologue

Chapter 1: Ireland

Chapter 2: England

Chapter 3: Africa, South, Konstabel Kane

Chapter 4: Africa, East, Seaman Kane

Chapter 5: British Army

Chapter 6: Germany

Chapter 7: Oman

Chapter 8: First Action

Chapter 9: Ambush

Chapter 10: Red Company

Chapter 11: Open the Road

Chapter 12: Retreat

Chapter 13: Skirmishing, Wadis and Jebals

Chapter 14: Coup D’état

Chapter 15: Britain’s Role in Oman’s Coup

Cartoon, Daily Sketch

Chapter 16: Close Quarter Skirmish, Anthills

Chapter 17: Ambush

Chapter 18: Cyprus

Chapter 19: Close Quarter Battle, Defa

Chapter 20: Goodbye Red Company

Chapter 21: The Firqa

Chapter 22: Operation Simba

Chapter 23: Goodbye Oman

Chapter 24: Professional Military Advisers

Epilogue

Personalities

Glossary

Prologue

Sultan’s palace Salalah, Dhofar Province, Oman, 23 July 1970

LIKE slow moving lava, viscous, dark red venous blood seeped from beneath the crumpled corpse. On the wall behind, the heavy 7.62mm bullets passing through the unknown man’s upper body had splattered bright red arterial blood roughly tracing its ex-owner’s outline. Leaving the body soaking in its own blood-lake, we tackled the labyrinth again. I climbed up through a skylight and jumped onto a flat roof. Bullets thudded beneath my feet. The Sultan was below, had heard me land and was firing into the ceiling. We had him trapped.

Dropping down a two-metre wall landed me onto a patio next to a glass door. Captain Richard Wood and his light-machine-gun (LMG) team were across the patio. A group of al-Hawasina askars appeared on the palace’s top-most roof. We were outnumbered. Hopefully the bribe was still working. I tried the door handle – locked. I butt-stroked the glass panel – armoured, and made by Pilkington, I read in the bottom right hand corner. Signalling to Richard Wood, I drew a white phosphorous grenade and hugged the wall behind a column by the door. Resting his LMG on a soldier’s back and maintaining the same aim point, Richard Wood fired 2-round bursts at the door from 15 metres range and within 30 centimetres of my left shoulder. Whining bullets ricocheted around the patio. A hole appeared in the glass, expanded gradually by double hits from the LMG travelling at 836 metres per second.

A hole appeared also in the Command Group’s confidence. My name, shouted from the palace courtyard, brought me to the patio parapet. Sheltering below behind a building corner, Lieutenant Colonel Teddy Turnill, Desert Regiment’s Commanding Officer, shouted again. He ordered me to withdraw, adding that he intended to negotiate with the Sultan; behind him, Captain Tim Landon, Intelligence Officer and Qaboos’ friend, added his voice. Teddy was taking counsel of his fears, or of someone else’s. Fuck that, I thought. I assured them that it was nearly over, ignored Teddy’s order and Landon’s protestations and went back to work.

Aged 25 years, I had come a long way from the damp, emerald-green turf of County Kildare, Ireland, to fight someone else’s war in Oman’s parched brown deserts, mountains and wadis – and in its Sultan’s palace.

Chapter 1: Ireland

CONCEIVED during my father’s D-Day pre-embarkation leave, I was born into a rural Irish working-class family on 04 October 1944. By then, my father was in Normandy, busily lobbing 25-pounder shells at the German army that had thrown him and his mates out of France via Dunkirk in 1940.

Later, as a teenager reading Charles Dickens, I realised that my early years had differed little from that of most working class children in Victorian England. However, any reader expecting a ‘misery memoir’ will be disappointed, for life in a loving family was an adventure from the day’s first outside footfall to the owl’s last lullaby as my mother smothered the candle.

We lived in a three up, three down cottage set in an acre of land bounded on two sides by minor roads and on the others by pasture and arable farmland. No mains water meant an outside lavatory and a two-kilometre round trip to fetch drinking water. No electricity (it later did arrive in the form of a single light fitting and no wall sockets) meant cooking by primus stove or open wood fire and lighting by oil lamp downstairs and candle upstairs. A radio, powered by lead-acid batteries exchanged for ones freshly charged in Leixlip, our local village a few kilometres distant, was one of the few household gadgets that betrayed our existence to be in the 20th and not the 19th century. In a noisy house, it was only when the voices of Kathleen Ferrier or John McCormack crackled across the airwaves did my mother enforce the silence of a Trappist monastery on her boisterous offspring.

It was, in a word – cosy, and as clean as only a professional cleaner, as my mother was for a Dublin dentist, could achieve. The family was six: maternal grandfather, mother, two boys, one girl and a mostly absent father serving the English King and later Queen in the British Army. Maybe I should include the chickens and the pig, family and playmates until they became breakfast, lunch and dinner.

McAlpine’s Fusiliers was the wider family’s regiment and those not digging holes or otherwise living by their hands, muscle and sweat in Ireland were doing so in England, America and throughout the Irish diaspora. Except for a few, that was, for the struggle out of the working class had started. It would take a generation to gain momentum.

My father, Johnny, was a Falls Road, Belfast, man, born along with a brother and four sisters into a mixed marriage – which in Ulster meant people of different religions and not different races as in the rest of the world. After his school teacher mother’s death, his father’s re-marriage and the birth of a half brother, the family split. Aged 17 and impatient to join his already emigrated siblings in Lockport, New York State, Johnny sailed to Canada and jumped the border into America in 1924. Arrested three years later, my illegal immigrant father was an Ellis Island internee and graduate (yes, he assured me, he did scratch his name on a cell wall) and soon passed the Statue of Liberty from the wrong direction as he travelled eastwards away from the New World, deported to Liverpool.

He joined the British Army in 1927, served in the Royal Horse Artillery for three years and returned to Ireland on the Army Reserve. Working with horses, he travelled to most racecourses in Ireland along with my mother, Peggy Gough, who had replaced horses as the love of his life after they met in 1937. One year and one baby later, he was mobilised for World War II; like thousands of Irishmen on the British Army Reserve he, too, could have stayed warm and safe in neutral Ireland but like them, did not.

While the Irish government decided not to join Europe’s war against fascism and genocide, a host of its people did not so decide. My father was just one of 60,000 (including 7,000 men who deserted the Irish Army) men and women that joined the British and Allied forces.

Thirteen years after Johnny’s American deportation, he was deported again, this time less courteously, along with 330,000-odd comrades of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from Dunkirk. Arriving in France on 04 May 1940 just in time to be welcomed by the German Blitzkrieg of 10 May, he was back in England on 30 May with his boots, trousers, shirt, helmet, rifle and life. Behind in France, his artillery battery probably still smouldered from the Stuka dive-bombers that had meant the loss of the guns and sent its survivors drifting to the beaches through a bantering infantry rearguard doomed to death or capture.

Johnny’s British Army ‘Certificate of Service’ records him as being ‘Home’ on 02 June 1944 and in ‘N.W.E’ (North West Europe) on 03 June 1944. Presumably he was aboard ship on 02/03 June. Whether he disembarked on D-Day or D-Day + is uncertain but back in France, uninvited by its then owners, he certainly was; he fought with the 51st Highland Division through France and the Rhine crossing to the war’s end.

He ran a stable in occupied Germany with Otto and other ex-Wehrmacht soldiers, now grooms for the British victor. Back in the UK Johnny served as a riding instructor with the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, before finishing his time in Bulford, Wiltshire – on the back of a horse, of course.

Gender and working class roots sentenced the average woman born into early 20th century Ireland to a harsh life. That my mother Margaret, known to friends as Peggy, enjoyed rather than endured life was testament to all Irish womanhood’s intrinsic strengths and hopes. Brunette and green-eyed, she was nicknamed the Turret (her birthplace) Hare for her sprinting prowess. My brother, with his Celtic combination of black hair and blue eyes took after her side of the family while my sister and me, inherited the blued-eyed and fair-haired genes of our father. Heroic role model to my eventual four daughters, Peggy would watch their progress from grammar school to university with awe but expectation, experiencing more social and other changes in her 86-year-long life than they probably will in theirs. Now, in the frequent absences of her soldier husband she was the matriarch, clothing, feeding and disciplining three unruly children and their six-foot, moustached, cadaverous, recalcitrant but gentle grandfather.

Life around home in Confey, Leixlip, County Kildare was exciting. Like a picture subtly changing as the seasons unfolded, our scullery window looked out over a mostly wild garden into which our nearest neighbours, a beef cattle herd, trespassed occasionally, wandering out again when they remembered that the grass tasted the same as on their side of the fence.

Making a quick detour between his farmer’s fields, a friendly ploughman and his horse-team made short work of turning our garden’s rich sod ready for the seed potatoes whose crop would feed us for a year. As the ploughman and his horses clip-clopped away, the first gulls arrived to feed on suddenly naked worms.

Sprinkled over what was a meadow with a bit of cultivation rather than a garden, spring and summer’s bluebells, buttercups, daisies, dandelions and nettles lay undulatingly like Joseph’s coat of many colours. Rich, dense smells became almost a tangible perfume. Silent butterflies shared airspace with honeybees that flitted from petal to petal before buzzing off to regurgitate their nectar in the hives we never managed to discover. Sun and windless perfumed air combined with monotonous bee buzzing to induce a delicious sleepy apathy. Autumn’s rain flooded a low-lying patch for a few days, fooling a few wading birds into stopping off for a shallow paddle, and maybe finding a juicy slug where they expected a minnow. Winter’s white blanket reminded us each year that we were not alone, exposing the paw prints of badgers, dormice, hedgehogs and rabbits, and the fox on his nightly patrol to check if the humans had fastened their hencoop.

Against this snowy background, Robin Redbreast, despite its perennial presence, seemed Christmas’ harbinger.

Together with a friend, my brother and I roamed and ran free, wild and wide over farmland, hills, moors and rivers acting out our natural Irish devilment. Further afield over towards County Meath, the Hill of Tara and Fairyhouse – home of Ireland’s Grand National – were the stud farms. Here the thoroughbreds pranced about like skittish ballerinas, snorting and neighing in unwelcome voice and flashing their hooves at us little wanderers. We got the message, left them alone and headed home, helping ourselves to a farmer’s carrots fresh from the ground, or a few apples from his orchard on the way and wondering why both tasted better than those plucked freely from our own garden did.

We kept the local rabbit population in check and varied our own diet by snaring. Aged eight, I felt the hunter’s thrill: find the run, place the copper wire, drive in the stake, and next morning gather the fruit. Sometimes the stew’s main ingredient would still be alive, slowly strangling; I knew the origin of the words ‘rabbit punch’ from a young age. Cat population control was harsher and why I, the youngest, became executioner I do not know; maybe with the innate cruel streak of the male child I volunteered. I threw the sack and its four condemned kitten prisoners into the pond with alacrity at the time but replaced by guilt in adulthood.

Preferring game to coarse fishing, the River Rye and not the Dublin canal, was our main fishing ground. In this little tributary of the mighty (for Ireland) Liffey, the trout loved to linger in the shade of the tunnel that took it under the Dublin canal and railway line. Here, the biggest trout ever caught by our little gang chose my bait to swallow. A quick run home to show off to my mother and recently arrived home-on-leave father found them in bed. Why in bed in mid-afternoon with the sun shining, I wondered, looking at my father with his hands behind his head, smoking a cigarette in what I would later recognise as the post-coital dreamy state. Well done, both of you, I reflected in adulthood.

My big brother did not always want his little brother around and in those times, I entered my own world of The Wild West with its Cowboys and Indians. By 11 years of age, thanks to weekly comics and an atlas, I knew western America geography pretty well. I reckoned I could have mustered a wagon train in Missouri and led them along the Oregon Trail to the Pacific or down to California. Had I been around, then Crazy Horse would surely not have embarrassed General George Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Davy Crockett would have lived to fight another day rather than cashing in his chips at the battle of the Alamo. And certainly, I would have killed and skinned more buffalo than Buffalo Bill.

The whole idea of the Wild West permeated my thoughts to such an extent that the highest accolade I could bestow on an area’s topography as we travelled to various parts of Ireland visiting relatives was, ‘This would be a good place to play Cowboys and Indians.’ Later in life, I would find the ideal place to play such games, with real guns, real ammunition, real enemies and real death.

A cross-section of Irish working people passed our little cottage by the crossroads in Confey. Cheerful hedge cutters and road crews offered our gawper gang a sip of their midday tea flavoured by wood smoke. Gypsies in their painted wagons went past with the superior air of the nomad over the settled that I would see again in Africa and among the Arabian Bedu. Tinkers, Ireland’s peasantocrats, were regular callers selling nothing but eying up our chicken run to see if it was worth a midnight call. Disturbed from his morning sleep, grandfather would shout in the same Irish English – that mocked the correct pronunciation of ‘th’ as both effeminate and aping of the Englishman – I spoke then, ‘Get along outta dere or I’ll trow the feckin’ piss-pot over yis.’ They laughed but left. Maybe their friends, smelling of piss, had warned them about grandfather.

‘Mad’ Murray was a weekly visitor. Shouting and swearing, we would hear him long before we saw the shapeless, gesticulating bundle of rags that was the local tramp, waging his vocal war with an unanswering universe. As though a switch had been flicked, he would ask quietly and courteously for a cup of tea, or a sixpence or cast-off clothes before resuming his journey and tirade. His voice regained crescendo before fading as he headed towards Leixlip, this harmless, mad personification of the Doppler radar effect.

Another weekly visitor was the local drunk. His righteousness and maybe Holy Communion wafer swimming in a pool of Guinness after Sunday Mass, the drunk would meander his bike up the canal bridge from Leixlip. Now he would mount and freewheel down the hill towards our cottage. Once on the flat, his befuddled brain would forget to order his limbs to pedal until gravity had had enough of him, collapsing the drunk in a muddle of limbs, pump, wheels and expletives. Here he slept, woke up eventually and departed without disturbing our Sunday roast.

One hundred metres from our front door our nearest human neighbours rested, or rather their remains did. Our favourite playground, the cemetery, held no fears for us, at least not in daylight. News of a death in the local area meant three days of entertainment for us as the gravediggers did their work. If the grave was a new site and the soil dry, there was a chance of collapse and a good laugh at the swearing gravediggers. Maybe there would be a corpse in an already occupied grave waiting patiently for reunion with its spouse to resume an old argument, and an errant foot might go through the rotten coffin.

It happened only once, but it was well worth the wait as the swearing fat gravedigger’s boot crumbled the coffin lid. It was my first sight of a fleshless head and I was not disappointed. The skull was toothless. Maybe the corpse had worn still perfect dentures that only a fool would bury in those austere times. I could imagine a friend’s remark to the legatee, maybe a daughter: ‘Shure that’s a grand set of teeth your mother left you. Now you look even more like her.’

The biggest bonus, of course, was if the deceased had been a family friend, in which case we attended the wake. With tea, cake, fizzy drinks, the odd sixpence from tipsy wakers and as many views of the corpse as we wanted, could life be better for an eight-year-old?

Once the mourners had left the cemetery it became our friends’ and ours again and the new grave, last in a straight line stretching towards the ruined chapel at the end, became our athlete’s hurdle. With its palm-fringed sub sections, the cemetery was hide-and-seek paradise. Waiting for the seeker one day and as natural and unhurried as the full moon rising over the silvery Liffey, my hiding companion, Nuala Eif, and I shared our first, and last, kiss together.

In time, my grandfather added to our line of hurdles. The man against whom I stacked the playing cards before he came downstairs each morning, who pissed out the open upstairs window when the night pot was full, died after his allotted biblical three-score-years and ten – with two more added as a bonus, or maybe a punishment. Though I had seen many corpses by now, his was the first death I witnessed and the first death rattle I heard as my mother and aunt comforted him on his way. The body lay in the house for three days, washed and dressed by my mother and grandaunt. Auntie Maggie, from that formidable caste of scary, sinister, spinster Catholic women who housekeep for priests, took charge, placed the candles around the corpse and ignited the incense. To a child, the wakers, ‘Ah shure, doesn’t he look well?’ And, ‘Ah shure, he’s never looked better,’ seemed an odd description of a dead man.

Unable to negotiate the coffin past the 90° hallway bend, the pallbearers slid grandfather through the front window, just underneath its upstairs mate through which he had often pissed. Grandfather’s death was a family seminal event. Her promise to her dying mother to, ‘look after your father’ fulfilled, my mother could now take us to join our father in England.

If home life was idyllic, life outside Confey bordered on nightmarish. The reason read like an algebraic equation with no unknowns: Catholic Church + priests + Christian brothers = an unholy trinity of misery.

Built on a hilltop, the church dominated Leixlip village as Catholicism dominated its inhabitants and the rest of the Irish. Like parole prisoners reporting to their probation officers, the mentally tagged villagers made their monthly confession to supposedly celibate priests steeped in unreality. Fear for their immortal souls was the sheepdog that herded the flock of men, women and children into the incense-stinking temple-pen each Sunday. Here they listened to a Mass in Latin that they did not understand and to an admonishing harangue in English that they did not deserve.

Every way the sheep turned there was a collection box: in the porch on the way in, in front of the candle array, during the Mass and in the porch on the way out. Incomprehensible to a child, boxes marked ‘Sacred Heart’, ‘White Fathers’, ‘Retired Priests and Nuns’, ‘Special This’, ‘Special Fucking That’, seemed animated as they jostled like autograph hunters before a celebrity. Each month the priest read from his pulpit the ‘special’ collection donors’ list as though it were a league table of holiness and grace: O’Farmer, £2, O’Doctor £3, O’Publican £1, O’Peasant, sixpence. Now the priest was okay for another good day at the horse races, or perhaps with his dog-collared unholy mates at the greyhound track and a bottle of Jameson’s mouthwash afterwards.

My father, already hero-worshipped, reinforced his position one Sunday by absentmindedly breaking into a strong whistle – Colonel Bogey – as he twirled his hat with one hand during the sermon harangue. Grandfather had also been unimpressed by the men in black. Told one day that the priest was coming up the road on another of his infrequent visits, he had retorted, ‘I don’t give a crow’s arse if it’s the Pope himself. Tell him that I’m sick,’ his voice had echoed slightly as he retreated up the stairs. Would he empty the piss pot out the window on the luckless departing priest, I wondered always, and hoped. He never did.

Meanwhile Mass over, the temporarily released women and children went home while the men made for the local pubs and, in many cases, drunken oblivion.

My first memory is as a three and half year old, attending school on the first day in my brass buttoned black overcoat. With its headmaster, Mr Leonard of the weasel eyes and pimp style moustache, and two teachers, Jimmy Rowan and Miss Malloy, the three-roomed building was my first introduction to the threat-laden atmosphere of the Irish schools of the 1950s. I had gone from an environment of love, laughter and the fun of family and kindly adults to a world of where chastisement – child assault – was the norm.

I developed a stutter, manifested during school hours only, and a complete inability to answer the school register. This was not a problem as Miss Malloy, my first teacher, said patiently every morning, ‘Just say ‘Yes’, O’Cathain.’ But Reamon O’Cathain – Irish schools used the original Gaelic version of its pupils’ Anglicized names – never did. In year two, Jimmy Rowan was not as accommodating as Miss Malloy and my brother had to leave his classroom and enter mine as Rowan shouted ‘O’Cathain, Reamon.’ My brother would answer, ‘Yes’, and return to his class. When he left the primary school, the tall, gently spoken Miss Malloy with her jet-black hair tied in the severe manner of the Spanish flamenco dancer, would leave her classroom and answer for me.

Rowan was a curly-headed, jowly and constantly angry bully, routinely beating his pupils across the open hand with the top half of a billiard cue. Among beating offences were making mistakes – particularly in Gaelic language lessons – and left-handedness. I grew out of the stutter and the primary school with its terrifying toilet facility. Rather than squat in the shit-encrusted dungeon, some pupils would soil themselves and be sent home with hands stinging from Rowan’s billiard cue.

As my sister annoyed the nuns at Maynooth Convent School, my brother and I moved to new schools in Dublin. While O’Connell School welcomed my brother, St Laurence O’Toole took me in its grasp. Christian Brothers, half-priests but whole bastards, ran both. With a dog collar half the width of a priest’s these non-ordained creatures, a so-called Teaching Order, were Ireland’s home-grown children’s Black and Tans, inflicting pain and terror on those of its child population unfortunate enough to encounter them. Useless teachers, they tried to beat the Gaelic language into us pupils, imbuing a dread, rather than a love, of our ancient tongue. There may have been good men among them, but I never heard – then or since – an ex-pupil of theirs admit to having met one.

Ireland may have gained its freedom from England but freeing its citizens from poverty seemed impossible for a government steeped in nationalism ruling through a constitution that awarded the Catholic Church a ‘special position’. Any country that once had an Orwellian-sounding Committee on Evil Literature as Ireland did, needed time and a leg-up before economics overtakes moralising as a national imperative. Saint Laurence O’Toole School, in Dublin’s North Wall district, fronted the road that each week swam with the excrement of beef cattle on their way to England to feed the ould enemy. On other days, Ireland’s main export – its people – travelled other roads to Dunlaoghoire for the ferry to Liverpool and Anglesey to work for English money to feed their families. Saint Laurence’s catchment area netted boys from the local tenements and the sight of a few shoeless pupils on my first day