Coup D'état Oman

“How did a boy from Leixlip, County Kildare, Ireland, end up shooting (he, too, was shot) a king and his bodyguards in an Arabian palace?”

While America was bleeding its way through the Second 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 for the West in this Cold War period, was the free passage of 43% of the West’s crude oil through Oman’s Hormuz Straits. In the absence of a ballot box to remove the war-losing, obscurantist despotic Sultan, there was just one option.

The Bullet. Britain decides to replace Said bin Taimur with his son, Qaboos.

Wrapped in the memoir of an irreverent Irish-born soldier, Ray Kane’s narrative begins with his childhood among the Irish rural working class. After emigration to England surveying, labouring, bar-tendering, operational service in the notorious South African Police, hitch-hiking from Durban to Sudan, deportation to Kenya, stewarding aboard the Braemar Castle from Mombasa to London are a pleasant prelude for the teenage Kane before being commissioned into a British Army infantry regiment.

Rumours of a “nice little war” in an interesting place re-awakens a dormant adventure lust. Leaving the British Army, Kane joins the Omani army as a mercenary captain.

Readers are taken to a land, circumstances and events that most will not have known existed or occurred. Dhofar, site of the eponymous war, is a land annexed by Oman, known to the Romans as Arabia Felix and home to Boswelia Sacra – the frankincense tree – and the starting point of antiquity’s Frankincense Trail.

The “nice little war” develops into a nasty, vicious affair against a brave, well-armed patriotic enemy in harsh mountainous terrain and an unforgiving climate. Kane commands the 150-man Red Company, The Desert Regiment, that in his command tenure, would suffer four soldiers KIA and 37 WIA.

But for now, on 23 July 1970, the outnumbered Desert Regiment is the only force to stand between the enemy and victory. Thirty-five days into Mr Edward Heath’s premiership, UK government machinations have decided that the reign of Sultan Said bin Taimur would end this day. As Kane prepares to fly out for 30 days R and R in Kyrenia, Cyprus, he is summoned urgently to the regimental operations room.

Colonel Teddy Turnill gives Kane 60 minutes to round up an assault force, storm al-Husn palace six kilometres distant, and “capture or kill Sultan Said bin Taimur”.

Kane had never been to the palace, had no information on its layout, the palace guard or bodyguards, and had just a vague notion of what the Sultan might look like from an ancient photograph.

From the sharp end of the palace assault team we get an unique blow-by-blow account of an event in itself unique on two counts. It will become the only publicly known coup d’état executed by the British Army in living memory and the only coup led by an Irish-born soldier in a foreign land, ever.

The coup is the pivotal event of the Dhofar War leading to eventual victory for Oman.