Last Sunset - What Happened In Aden

What has happened to Aden? Why did we go there? Why did we leave? Since November 1967 when the last helicopter took off from the golf-course carrying the Royal Marine rearguard that had been covering the evacuation the last battle-scarred bastion of British power in the east has vanished from the news.

Yet, as Stephen Harper shows in this vivid and exciting book, the departure of the Imperial power has by no means inaugurated an era of satisfied tranquillity where each man lives peaceably under his own vine and his own fig tree. On the contrary, Aden has become the lair of international terrorists. In the church where the Governor used to read the lesson on Sundays recruits to such organisations as the Japanese Red Army or the Palestine Liberation Front attend courses in urban guerrilla tactics and the techniques of murder and kidnapping. Figures like Carlos and the disciples of the Baader Meinhof group enjoy a hospitality extended to the most vicious enemies of the human race.

The wheel has come full circle. Aden in the 1970s is in modern terms what it was in the 1830s when the East India Company reluctantly allowed an enterprising officer to obtain a lease from a minor sheikh - a nest of pirates.

Stephen Harper was frequently in Aden during the last ten years of the British presence, covering for the Daily Express the series of local wars and subversive activities by which Britain's enemies tried to prise her hold loose. As he shows from brilliant first-hand reporting the courage and skill of our forces rose to the most desperate occasions. Indeed Colonel Mitchell and the Argylls showed the world that urban violence could be met and mastered. It was not military quality but political will that was lacking.

Besides giving a lively account of the 129 years of British occupation Stephen Harper surveys the scene in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa as it is today and points to some little noticed and not unhopeful developments. His assessment of the double threat presented by Soviet seapower and Arab diplomacy to the oil supplies on which the Western economy is so dangerously dependent gives food for thought. But it is the people that interest him and will interest his readers: Arab sheikhs, revolutionary leaders, colonial administrators and policemen, above all soldiers and airmen whom he knew as only those who shared their dangers and hardships could. As a first-hand account of the final scenes of the Empire this book could hardly be bettered.

Stephen Harper was an eye-witness of the major events of Britain's demise from paramount power in the Middle East. As a foreign correspondent he described events as they made the news headlines. In Cairo at the height of the Suez Crisis of 1956, he reported at first hand every major development leading to the British withdrawal from East of Suez in the early seventies. His despatches, subject to censorship, official obstruction and deviousness, frequent physical exhaustion and sometimes horrified shock, appeared within hours on millions of breakfast tables. Now he writes of the last years of our Imperial story in continuous, reflective narrative against the wider perspective of its effect on subsequent events.

© Stephen Harper 1978

First published 1978 by William Collins Sons & Co

ISBN 0 00 216458 2