Although the British government remained officially unaware of the operation, MI6 was kept fully informed. On one occasion, the Press got wind of it and questions were asked in the House of Commons, but the Prime Minister, by then Sir Alec Douglas-Home, denied all knowledge of such activities.
A far bigger scandal would have resulted had the Egyptians or anyone else learned that, from 1964, Johnson’s men were being supplied by air-drops of ammunition and arms from Israeli planes, as a result of a top-secret deal between the mercenaries and Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.
Operation Leopard, as it was codenamed, took place at night with Israeli pilots skilfully flying 14 missions into the high mountains to drop their consignments. The Saudis would have cut off their funding immediately if they had learned of the Israeli involvement. For the Israelis, though, the co-operation made perfect sense.
Nasser had sworn to destroy Israel, and war between the two countries seemed inevitable. But if the British tied up large numbers of his forces in the Yemen, he would have fewer to deploy against Israel.
When the UK and Israel were friends and allies.
Such nostalgia.
Operation Leopard, it was:
The same was true of incoming arms and ammunition. A more secure means of delivery was needed, and it was the Israelis who provided it - for they, like the Saudis, were eager to keep Nasser distracted elsewhere.
Negotiations were conducted in absolute secrecy, first by the Conservative MP Billy McLean (a close associate of Johnson), who flew privately to Tel Aviv to meet Moshe Dayan, the defence minister, and Meir Amit, head of Mossad. The next envoys were Johnson and his second-in-Command, Tony Boyle, who conferred with Shimon Peres, Director of the Ministry of Defence, and Major General Ezer Weizman, Commander-in-Chief of the Israeli Air Force.
To help preserve security, the mercenaries called Israel "Wales" and Israelis "the Welsh". Later, the operation was known as "Mango", and Israel became "Mango Land". So efficient was the obfuscation that the British Government knew nothing about it. Had word got out, Nasser would have had an immense propaganda coup, and the Saudis would immediately have cut off the supply of gold.
To Israel, it was Operation Leopard, in which a converted Boeing Stratocruiser flew 14 missions into the Yemeni mountains by night, parachuting arms, ammunition and gold directly to the Royalist armies.
The flights were extremely hazardous, for the dropping zones chosen by the mercenaries were among 12,000-foot mountains, and lacked all the navigational aids to which pilots were accustomed. Only small fires and the occasional headlamp purloined from a lorry guided the Stratocruiser in. Major Arieh Oz, pilot on most of the missions, reckons to this day that "for daring, planning and execution, it was a masterpiece of a military operation". His first flight lasted for 14 hours, and he touched down at Tel Nof airforce base, south of Tel Aviv, with only 15 minutes' fuel remaining in his tanks.
The drops undoubtedly did a great deal to bolster Royalist morale, and - though their value cannot be quantified - they certainly increased the difficulties in which the Egyptians found themselves by providing the Imam's followers with rifles, machine guns, explosives, mortar bombs and ammunition. In the course of the civil conflict, Nasser lost 20,000 dead, and came to regard the Yemen as his Vietnam.
The effect on the Six-Day War is equally unquantifiable. There is no doubt that the shattering initial air-strikes in the early morning of 5 June 1967 set Israel on the road to victory; but equally, the fact that 30,000 of Egypt's best troops were still pinned down in the Yemen, and that 20,000 men had been killed there, must have contributed something to the country's defeat. No doubt Israel, with its domination in the air, would have won anyway even if the whole Egyptian army had been present - but the land battle might have been longer and more bloody.
The Israeli high command certainly thought so. Two days after their victory they invited Johnson and Boyle out to Tel Aviv, where they were congratulated by Dayan. They were then flown all over the Sinai battlefield - and they were shocked by the evidence of carnage close beneath them, especially by the sight of wrecked tanks and lesser vehicles packed like lemmings in the Mitla Pass, through which the drivers had vainly tried to escape towards Suez.
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