As they listened over their shortwave radios, with a battle raging sporadically around them, the British civilians stranded in Aden, the capital of South Yemen, could hardly believe their ears. A BBC announcer in London told them to assemble in "the northeast sector of the Soviet-embassy compound, repeat the Soviet-embassy compound, from which you will be taken to the beaches for evacuation."
Caught unawares by South Yemen's rapidly spreading civil war, the British and Soviet governments were participating in a joint rescue operation that in a modest way resembled the Allied evacuation at Dunkirk during World War II. As savage fighting...
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