11 words. That is what a senior British official is reported to have said to his American counterpart in a private exchange in late 1970 after Washington began quietly pressing London for details about the deteriorating situation in the southern Arabian Peninsula. The exact phrasing has never been declassified.
The substance drawn from the broader diplomatic record of the period is unambiguous. You cannot win this war without us. Stay out of it. It was not a boast. It was a warning. And the warning traveled along the same Anglo-American intelligence pipeline that had run almost without interruption since the Second World War. From Bletchley Park to Berlin, from Suez to Thrron, from the rooftops of Oman in 1958 to the streets of Saigon in 1968.
By the autumn of 1970, the United States Central Intelligence Agency was watching with mounting concern as a Marxist Leninist insurgency swallowed roughly 4-fifths of the territory of a country most Americans could not have located on a map. The country was Oman. The province was Dar.
The straight that lay just to its north, narrow as a rivermouth and wider than a small sea, was Hormuz. and through Hormuz even in 1970 ran a percentage of the world’s oil so large that no western capital could afford to lose it. The CIA had options. It had assets in Iran. It had an embassy in Thrron. It had the personal trust of the Sha.
It had in theory the budget, the technology, and the political mandate to insert itself into yet another shadow war on yet another disputed border. What it did not have was permission. The British had decided quietly and at the highest level that Oman was a British problem with a British solution. And that solution did not involve American helicopters, American special forces advisers, or American press conferences.
It involved fewer than 80 men from a regiment most Americans had never heard of. Operating under a name designed to mean nothing, British Army Training Team. bat three letters that would over the next 5 years do something that the entire American intelligence community had been told was impossible.
They would win. This is the story of how that happened. How a country the size of Italy ruled by a sultan who banned bicycles and forbade his people from wearing trousers came within months of falling to a Sovietbacked Chinese-trained Yemen armed insurgency. How a single squadron of British soldiers working under a polite fiction that fooled almost nobody raised a guerilla army out of the very enemy they had come to defeat.
And how a quiet message from London to Langley, never officially acknowledged and never publicly disclosed kept the Americans out of a campaign the British were determined to fight on their own terms. To understand why the British were so adamant, you have to understand what Oman was in 1970. And what it had been for the better part of a century before that, the Sultenate of Muscat and Oman, as it was then formerly called, was less a country than an idea sustained by treaty.
The current ruling dynasty, the Al-Saied, had been bound to Britain by a series of agreements stretching back to 1798 when an East India Company representative had concluded an arrangement with the then Sultan that gave London exclusive influence over the Sultanates foreign affairs in exchange for protection. In 1958, that relationship had been formalized by a defense treaty under Harold McMillan that established the Sultan’s armed forces, the SAF, as a hybrid creature commanded almost entirely by seconded British officers and contract personnel,
manned in large part by Beluchcci soldiers recruited from what is now Pakistan and answering ultimately to the Sultan in Salala and the foreign office in London. The Sultan in question by 1970 was a man named Sed bin Thai. He had ruled since 1932. He had governed Omen with a mixture of medieval suspicion and personal frugality that had reduced his country despite the discovery of significant oil reserves in 1964 to a state of near biblical underdevelopment.
There were three primary schools in the entire sultanate. There was one hospital. There were no newspapers, no public radio, no political parties, no constitution. Wearing sunglasses required a permit. Smoking in public was banned. Education abroad required the Sultan’s personal permission.
Seyed had retreated after a 1966 assassination attempt by members of his own bodyguard to his palace at Solala, the capital of Dofar province where he had not been seen in public for years. Dopar itself, the southern province bordering Yemen, was a place apart. Its mountains, the Jabel, rose green and monsoon, soaked from the coastal plain, populated by tribal peoples who spoke languages older than Arabic and answered to no central authority but their own.
The Dofar Liberation Front, founded by tribal traditionalists in 1962 in protest at the Sultan’s Misrule, had begun as a localized separatist insurgency. By 1968, it had been captured ideologically by a younger generation of leftist cadres trained in Beijing, Moscow, and Aiden. It had renamed itself the popular front for the liberation of the occupied Arabian Gulf Flo and its ambitions had expanded from Dofari independence to the wholesale Marxist Leninist transformation of the entire Arabian Peninsula. Soviet AK-47s flowed across
the border from the newly independent People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. Chinese advisers trained Gera cadres in mountain warfare. North Korean instructors taught sabotage and assassination. By 1970, according to British and American assessments, the Flo controlled roughly 80% of Dopar province. The Sultan’s armed forces had been pushed back to a handful of fortified positions on the coastal plane.
Solala airfield itself, the main British Nomani military base in the south, was being shelled with mortars at night. In Whiteall, the assessment was bleak and precise. Without a fundamental change of approach, the Sultenate would fall, the Gulf would tilt, and the Straight of Hormuz, through which roughly half of the West’s oil supply passed in a slow and constant procession of tankers, would become a Sovietle leaning choke point.
In Washington, the same reading was being made. The Nixon administration, already pinned in Vietnam, was not in a political position to consider another deployment of American troops to a Muslim country. But the CIA had paramilitary capability. It had quiet relationships. It had through the sha of Iran a regional partner who was already eyeing Dfar nervously and would eventually commit thousands of his own troops to the fight.
The question circulating in Langley by the autumn of 1970 was simple. Should the agency get involved? The answer that came back from London through channels that have only been partially illuminated by the slow declassification of British government archives under the 30-year rule was equally simple. No.
The British did not want American operators in Dofar. They did not want American advisers shaping Omani military doctrine. They did not want, most of all, American journalists and American congressional oversight peeling back the layers of a campaign the British government was determined to keep almost entirely invisible. The Heath government, which took office in June 1970, had inherited a cold war problem in a country that technically Britain was supposed to be withdrawing from.
The famous east of Suez announcement of 1968 had committed Britain to ending its military presence in the Gulf by the end of 1971. To then deploy a major British military force into Aman openly would have created a political crisis at home and a diplomatic embarrassment abroad. The solution had to be small. It had to be deniable. It had to be fast.
And it had to be wholly British. The instrument the British government chose was the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment. The SAS in 1970 was not the household name it would later become. The Iranian embassy siege, the moment that introduced the regiment to a global television audience, was still a decade away.
The SAS was a small secretive unit of fewer than 300 badged operators headquartered at Heraford. with a history that ran from the North African desert in 1941 through the Malayan jungle in the 1950s, the mountains of Oman in 1958, the swamps of Borneo in the 1960s, and the back streets of Aiden right up to the British withdrawal in 1967.
The regiment had in fact fought in Oman before. In January 1959, a squadron of SAS soldiers had scaled the southern face of the Jabel Akar at night, surprising the tribal forces of Imam Galib Bin Ali and ending an insurgency in the north of the country that had threatened the Sultan’s rule for the better part of 5 years. That campaign had saved the regiment from disbandment.
It had also given the SAS something invaluable. institutional knowledge of Omen, of its terrain, its tribes, its fault lines, and the precise weight of a Bergen on a Welshman’s spine. After eight hours of climbing in 40°ree heat, by April 1970, the SAS had already begun planning. A document held in the National Archives at Q file FCO 81437, dated the 6th of April that year, sets out an outline plan to restore the situation in Dopar using special air service regiment troops.
It is one of the foundational documents of what would become Operation Storm, the code name under which 22 SAS deployed to Omen from July 1970 until September 1976. By the time the plan was activated, the political ground had been prepared by a separate operation that has never been formally acknowledged but is now openly discussed in the historical literature.
On the 23rd of July 1970, Sed bin Taimore was deposed in a palace coup. The coup was orchestrated by his own son, Kaboo bin Sed, a Sandhurst graduate and former officer of the Cameroonians with the active complicity of senior British officials inside the Sultanate apparatus. Said was wounded in the foot during the brief firefight that followed, abdicated and was flown out of Oman to live the remainder of his life in a London hotel.
Caboos took the throne. The British had their reformer. Within hours, SAS personnel were on the ground. The man who shaped the SAS approach more than any other was the regiment’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Watts, known to his men as Tony. Watts was an officer of unusual intellectual range. He had read counterinsurgency theory at depth, drawing on the campaigns of Sir Gerald Templar in Malaya and Sir Robert Thompson in Vietnam.
He understood that the war could not be won by killing rebels. It had to be won by removing the conditions that produced them. The plan he put before the Sultan and the British government in the late summer of 1970 was structured around what came to be known as the five fronts. Intelligence, information, medical, veterinary, military.
The military front was deliberately listed last. Civil development came first. Watts drawing on the regiment’s experience and on the work of British advisers who had preceded him understood that the population of Dar the Jabalis the mountain people were the center of gravity. Win them and the war was won. Lose them and no amount of firepower would matter.
The SAS deployed in tiny numbers. The initial troop, the very first contingent on the ground was 20 men. By the peak of the campaign, the SAS commitment in DFAR would amount to roughly two squadrons, a force of perhaps 80 operational personnel rotating through six-month tours supported by signalers, intelligence specialists, and a thin tale of logistical staff.
Set against an enemy estimated at 6,000 fighters at its peak, with safe havens, modern weapons, and the moral support of a third of the world, the disparity was so extreme that British planners openly acknowledged it could not be closed by direct combat alone. The Sultan’s armed forces expanded after the 1970 coup from approximately 3,200 troops to nearly 9,000 by mid1 1972 would do most of the conventional fighting.
The SAS would do something else. They would change the war. The first thing they changed was the medical front. Within weeks of the coup, an army medical detachment soon supplemented by a raffield surgical team was operating out of Salala. By the end of August 1970, 600 patients a day were being treated.
SAS medics trained to a level that exceeded most civilian paramedics fanned out into the towns of the coastal plane. They treated infected wounds. They delivered babies. They stitched cuts that untreated would have killed within a week from gangrain. The veterary front mattered just as much. The wealth of a doofari was measured in cattle and camels.
An SAS sergeant who could cure a sick cow was in the world view of a Jabali tribesman more valuable than a battalion of soldiers. The information front was just as patient. A small transmitter set up in an old shack at Salala and christened radio DFAR began broadcasting in the local languages.
Leaflets were printed. Notice boards were established in coastal towns where defectors could read amnesty terms. The message repeated month after month was deceptively simple. The new Sultan was different. Schools would be built. Wells would be drilled. Slavery banned by cababoos in his first month would not return.
Education for girls forbidden under the old sultan would be permitted. The fogue, by contrast, had begun to alienate the population by attacking traditional Islam, executing tribal elders who refused to embrace Marxist doctrine, and importing political commasars from outside Dar. The British did not need to invent grievances against the rebels.
They needed only to amplify the ones that already existed. What followed is in some ways the most extraordinary single decision of the entire campaign. In the early months of 1971, an SAS team based at Mirbat made contact with a small Dari tribal leader named Solim bin Mubarak. So had been a mid-ranking figure in the rebel movement.
He had in the language of the time been turned. He proposed something that the Sultan’s armed forces commanders received with open skepticism. He would bring his men over. He would form a unit that would fight against the Flo. The SAS would arm them, train them, and pay them. They would be called a firka, the Arabic word for a company, and they would not be commanded by British officers. The British would advise.
The Firka would decide its own leaders, vote on its own operations, and answer ultimately to the Sultan. But it would be a Tofari unit fighting a Tofari war. The commander of the Sultan’s armed forces, Brigadier John Graham, and the Doofar brigade commander were by all accounts unenthusiastic. The notion of arming surrendered enemy personnel, SCPs, in the language of the campaign, and trusting them to fight the very movement they had recently belonged to seemed on its face indistinguishable from suicide. The SAS had done it before
in Malaya and Kenya with mixed results. In Dfar, they would do it on a scale never previously attempted. The first furka named Firkat Solahaden after the great Kurdish Muslim warrior was raised in early 1971. Solomon bin Mubarak died of an apparent heart attack on the 5th of March that year before the unit was fully operational.
A month later, his multi-tribal experiment self-d disbanded as the Forgetmen reorganized themselves along strict tribal lines. But the principle had been established. By December 1975, the Furka program had grown to over 3,000 fighters. Roughly half of the most experienced rebels of the early war ended the conflict on the Sultan’s payroll, hunting their former comrades through the same watties they had once used as safe havens.
The mechanics of the FKA operation run by what were now formerly designated British Army training teams or BATS embedded SAS troopers in Dofari villages for months at a time. A bat was typically built around four to six sassmen, sometimes fewer, sometimes growing to 20 or more, depending on the size of the fura attached.
They lived in the village. They ate what the village ate. They learned, however imperfectly, the Dofari languages. They drank tea with elders who 3 years earlier had been giving intelligence to the rebel cells operating from the same houses. They handled the radios. They called the air strikes. They paid the men.
They were not technically in command. The Furka elected its own leaders, voted on operations, sometimes refused to fight in another tribe’s territory, sometimes refused to fight during Ramadan, sometimes refused to fight on a particular Tuesday because someone’s brother had had a dream. The SAS learned with infinite patience to negotiate, persuade, and accommodate.
Ian Gardner, a Royal Marines officer who served extensively in Dohar, would later compare leading fura to hurting cats. Other officers were less polite, but none of them disputed the underlying point. The war could not have been won without them. While the political and tribal architecture was being assembled, the conventional fight was being prosecuted with steadily growing intensity.
In October 1971, the SAS, two SAF battalions, and five Fria units launched Operation Jaguar. It was the first serious effort since the start of the rebellion to plant a permanent government presence on the Jabil itself. The operation lasted 4 days of heavy fighting. The adu, the Arabic word for enemy, used universally to describe the rebel forces, admitted defeat and retreated.
For the first time in 8 years, the sultan’s forces had a base on the high ground. From that base, over the next 8 months, they fought what one veteran described as a war of fierce gun battles. The casualties were significant on both sides. The strategic significance was enormous. The mountain for the first time no longer belonged to the rebels alone.
Then came Mirbat on the morning of the 19th of July 1972 at 6:00 in the dying days of the monsoon when the clouds sat low over the coast and visibility on the Jabel was measured in tens of meters. An attack force estimated at between 250 and 300 flow fighters moved silently down the slopes of the Jabel Ali, a small hill outside the coastal town of Mirbat.
The Adu had planned this operation for months. They had spent the rainy season undercover of low cloud, training, rehearsing, moving weapons forward. They had studied the British Army training team house just outside the port, a small whitewashed building defended by nine SAS soldiers under the command of a 23-year-old captain named Mike Keelley.
They had calculated correctly that the monsoon weather would ground the Sultan’s air force. They had calculated that the SAS detachment, isolated and unsupported, could be overrun in a matter of minutes. Capture Murbat, hold it for a few days, execute the local governor and his advisers in front of the population, indoctrinate the town’s people, vanish back into the Jabel before the cloud lifted.
It would have been, as one historian put it, the rebels Tet offensive, a propaganda victory that could have unwound everything the SAS had built over two years of patient work. The defense that followed has entered the cannon of British military history as one of the great last stands of the modern era. The full account requires its own film.
But the essential outline is this. Captain Keelley, observing through binoculars the figures advancing through the mist, initially mistook them for the night picket of Omani Gandharmry, returning from sentry duty. He realized within seconds that the picket had been killed. He gave the order to open fire.
From the roof of the bat house, his men engaged with L1 A1 self-loading rifles, a single Browning M2 heavy machine gun, and an 81 millimeter mortar fired at almost vertical elevation as the adu close to within a few dozen meters of the perimeter. 300 yd away, alone in a sandbag gunpit beside the old Wall-E Fort, a Fijian sergeant named Talas Labal Laba, Laba to the regiment, was operating a Second World War 25p pounder field gun designed to be crewed by six men.
He fired round after round, lowering the elevation as the IDU charged closer, eventually firing the gun over open sights at attackers a few yards away. He took a bullet through the chin. He kept firing. Trooper Secayiah Takabesi, another Fragian, ran the 800 meters from the bat house to the gunpit through heavy fire to support him. He was wounded twice.
He kept firing. Trooper Tommy Tobin, the medic, ran in to help. He was shot through the face and would later die in hospital. Lava was killed in the gunpit. The attack did not stop. It came in waves. At one point, the adu were inside the perimeter wire of the gunpit. Captain Keley, who had crawled forward with Tobin to support the gun, found himself in a hand grenade duel with rebels yards away.
Then, around 8 in the morning, the cloud lifted just enough. Two back strike masters of the Sultan of Omen’s Air Force scrambled from Salala came in low under the ceiling and strafed the Jabel Ali. One was hit and had to return to base. By the time helicopters from G Squadron, newly arrived in country and at that moment conducting live fire training at Salala, landed reinforcements south of the town, the ADU were beginning to break.
By 12:30, it was over. 38 rebel bodies were recovered. The total ADU dead and wounded by some estimates approached 100. Two SAS soldiers had been killed. Several were wounded. The town had held. The battle of Mirbat is sometimes called a turning point of the war. Sometimes called the war’s decisive engagement.
Both descriptions are debated by historians. What is not debated is the political effect. The Flo, having staked its credibility on a spectacular victory, had suffered a catastrophic and visible defeat. Defections to the Furka program accelerated. The British government, unwilling to publicize SAS involvement, refused to issue gallantry awards for nearly four years.
Captain Keley received a distinguished service order. Trooper Takavves a distinguished conduct medal. Sergeant Bennett a military medal. Tobin received aostumous distinguished conduct medal. Labbalaba was mentioned in dispatches. SAS veterans have argued for 50 years that he should have received a Victoria Cross.
He was almost certainly worth one. What Mirbat did in the longer arithmetic was buy time. Time for the Fria program to grow. Time for the Iranian contingent, eventually around 4,000 troops sent personally by the sha at Sultan Kaboose’s request to deploy from late 1973 onwards. Time for the Jordanians to send special forces and engineers.
Time for the Sultan’s armed forces to build the great barrier lines, the Hornbeam line in 1974, the Damavan line shortly after that severed the rebel supply routes from Yemen. Time for Chinese support to taper as Beijing reoriented its diplomacy. Time for the 1973 oil shock to quadruple Omani revenues and fund the civil development that the SAS strategy had always identified as decisive.
By December 1975, Brigadier John Akahhurst, the Dopar Brigade commander, transmitted to Sultan Caboose a message whose phrasing was so deliberately understated that its weight is easy to miss. He had the honor to inform his majesty that DFAR was now secure for civil development. On the 11th of December 1975, Kabuz formally declared the war over.
The cost in the British accounting was small by the standards of the conflict’s significance. 35 British military personnel killed in total during the conflict, 12 of them from the SAS. The Sultan’s armed forces had lost more than 200 dead with over 600 ADU confirmed killed and many hundreds more captured or defected.
The Iranian contingent lost a comparable number of dead. The financial cost to the Sultanate by some estimates had reached half its gross domestic product before the 1973 oil shock rescued Omani finances. by any post-war counterinsurgency measure. The DOAR campaign was a strategic success on a scale matched only by Malaya. 10 years of war.
Five years of decisive intervention. Fewer than 80 SAS operators on the ground at any one time. A neighboring state defeated. A communist insurgency dismantled. A reformist monarch installed and supported. A vital strait kept open. A British presence in the Gulf reconfigured for a postimperial era and sustained in modified form into the present day. And the Americans.
What are the Americans? The CIA had watched, it had analysts. Its foyer reading room contains even now a 1972 intelligence memorandum titled the mountain and the plane, the rebellion in Oman, alongside earlier and later assessments. The agency understood in granular detail what was happening in Dfar. It also understood with equal clarity what its British counterparts were asking of it.
Britain wanted to run this campaign alone. Britain believed that an American presence, overt or covert, would compromise the deniability that made the operation possible, alienate the Arab states, whose acquiescence the British had quietly secured, and risk exactly the kind of media exposure that the foreign secretary, James Callahan, in May 1975, would explicitly seek to avoid when he quashed a suggestion to publicize the sass civil affairs work on the grounds that left-wing members of parliament would draw unflattering
analogies with the American Green Beretss in Vietnam. The British did not want to be associated with Vietnam. They wanted instead to be associated with Malaya. And to be associated with Malaya, they needed to do it the way they had done Malaya. Quietly, slowly with patience that the American system, by its nature, struggled to sustain.
What did Washington receive in return for its restraint? A great deal. The British shared intelligence. They shared assessments of Soviet and Chinese intentions in the region. They kept the strait of Hormuz open. They maintained the Sultanate as a stable western aligned monarchy that by the end of the decade would quietly become one of the most useful American partners in the region, granting access in 1980 to the Msira base for the abortive operation Eagleclaw.
The attempted rescue of the Tan embassy hostages and remaining a significant facility for American power projection across the following decades. The Anglo-American intelligence relationship, the so-called special relationship that ran through the wartime Yucusa agreement and the five eyes architecture that grew out of it was strengthened, not weakened by the British insistence on running DOAR themselves.
Washington learned in that quiet exchange that there were things the British could do which the Americans could not. And the British in turn demonstrated that the cold war was not as some in Washington had begun to believe by 1970 a zero sum competition in which only American power could deliver western victory. What did the SAS take from DFAR? Almost everything that defines the modern regiment.
The five fronts model civil development, intelligence, information, medical, military became the template for British counterinsurgency doctrine for the next half century. The Furka concept would resurface in different forms in Northern Ireland, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, where the SAW would once again find itself raising tribal militias and embedding small teams within them.
The hearts and minds methodology that the regiment had inherited from Malaya was refined and extended in Dfar, given a sharper edge, made more transferable. The institutional muscle memory built between 1970 and 1976. The long patrols, the close quarter battle drills against fortified mountain positions, the medical and signals capabilities would carry the regiment through the Iranian embassy siege of 1980, the Faullands campaign of 1982, the Gulf War of 1991, and the long Iraq and Afghanistan deployments of the 21st century. But
more than any of that, Dfar gave the SAS a theory of itself. Before DFAR, the regiment was a small specialist unit with an uncertain post-Imperial future. recently rescued from disbandment and casting about for a role after DFAR. It was the most experienced counterinsurgency force in the Western world with a doctrine, a record, and a reputation.
The CIA officer who would later coin the phrase about a different species was in some sense describing what DFAR had built. The Pentagon planner, who in 2005 would warn against expanding the British footprint in Baghdad, was knowingly or not ignoring the lessons that had been written into the very floor of the regiment’s planning rooms by the men who had returned from the Jabel.
The four-man team that walked into a Romani neighborhood in 2006 with a paper map and a compass was, whether they articulated it or not, walking in a line that ran directly back to the Fria houses of Taka and Mirbat in 1971. The 11 words, if they were ever spoken in quite that form, were not bluster. They were prophecy.
Britain had a method that worked. Britain had operators who could execute it. Britain had a relationship with the Sultanate that no other Western power could replicate. And Britain had, in the quiet judgment of its own intelligence services and its own special forces commanders, a window of perhaps 18 months to prevent the Marxist takeover of one of the most strategically important pieces of real estate in the Cold War.
The CIA, briefed and persuaded, stood back. The SAS went in. 5 years later, the war was over. The Sultan was on his throne. The strait was open. The Soviets were retreating. The Chinese had walked away. The Flo had collapsed into a remnant force broadcasting from a transmitter in Aiden that nobody listened to.
Dar was secure for civil development. And in a small whitewashed house outside the coastal town of Mirbat, the bullet holes in the walls were already being painted over. It is sometimes said that the most successful covert operations are the ones that history forgets. By that measure, Operation Storm is the high watermark of the British way of war.
Most Americans have never heard of it. Most Britons, even now, half a century later, could not place Stofar on a map. The men who fought it took their secrets to their graves or carry them still in their 70s and 80s, scattered across the small towns of Herafford and Worcershure and the quiet corners of Fiji, where the families of Talasi Labala and Second Aayatakavves still keep his memory. But the lesson stands.
A warning, 11 words long, spoken in a private room in the autumn of 1970, was honored. The British were left to do what only the British could do. And they did it. They walked into a war that the most powerful intelligence agency in the world had assessed as nearly unwinable. And they won it with fewer men than would crew a single American destroyer.
Not with technology, not with overwhelming force, not with money, with something older and harder to measure, with the patience to sit in a Dari village for 6 months and learn the elders names. With the courage to put a Bergen on a man’s back at Heraford and tell him that in 3 years time he would be operating a 25p pounder gun alone against 300 attackers and there would be nobody coming to save him.
with the institutional confidence to believe against all the trends of the modern military age that a small number of properly selected and properly trained men could change the course of a war. You cannot win this war without us. It was true. They didn’t. The British did and the strait is still open and the sultenate still stands.
And somewhere in the archives at Langley, the file marked omen 1970 sits closed, never officially opened, never officially answered. the quiet record of the time the Americans listened and the British went to work and a regiment of fewer than 80 men changed the geography of the Cold War without a single American boot touching the ground.
