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Out of the Hills. The present Sultan, eleventh of his line, is Said bin Taimur, 46, a portly greybeard who was educated at a college for princes in British India, writes precise letters in English on crested blue paper, reads the airmail London Times delivered by the R.A.F., and understands perfectly what oil could do for his depleted fortune.
In the early 1950s he granted a British-run subsidiary of the Iraq Petroleum Co. a concession to drill for oil in the Omani hinterland. But he was not quite master in his own house. The fanatic Ibadhis in the hills, resentful of the Sultanate rule, had long ago elected a new dynasty of Imams and in 1920, after decades of hard fighting had won from the then Sultan a grudging acknowledgment of the Imam's rule in the mountains. So when two years ago the Sultan's foreign oil drillers went to work near the northern border, the Imam's tribesmen attacked them. The Sultan struck back, sending a few hundred British-officered levies to quell the rebels. He advanced in a flying column of Land-rovers, and it was a walkover. The Imam retired to a remote village, his brother led to Saudi Arabia, and bedaggered sheiks by the hundreds kissed the Sultan's hand.
Red & the White. Fortnight ago, the Imam donned his curved dagger of command, and with his brother Talib took to the warpath again. With 200 modern rifles and up-to-date automatic weapons, mountaineers swiftly took their old capital of Nizwa. The British were quickly convinced that the modern equipment came from King Saud's arsenal, even though that Saudi Arabian potentate, as if indifferent to the whole affair, was off in Ethiopia calling on Haile Selassie. They also feared that the U.S. would naturally side with Saudi Arabia, whose oil concessions are wholly American—but the fact is that U.S. oil money dominates even the areas where British protection prevails: U.S. companies own 50% of the stake in Kuwait, 100% in Bahrein, the Neutral Zones and Dhofar, 23.75% m Muscat and Oman.
The attack from the hills took the British by surprise. ("There is supposed to be a gentlemen's agreement in the Persian Gulf area," grumbled one officer, "that nobody fights in the summer—it's too bloody hot.") With the temperature last week at 130°, the Sultan's commander in chief, Pat Waterfield, was on home leave in England. So was Britain's top political resident in the Persian Gulf, Sir Bernard Burrows. That left command of the Sultan's army to Major Pat Gray, one of the soldierly Britons who were tossed out of Jordan's Arab Legion along with Glubb Pasha. In response to the hillmen's attack, Major Gray sent several truckloads of troops up to reinforce the garrison, but they were stopped by mines—the first land mines ever used in battle in the Sultanate. At this point the Sultan consulted his Foreign Minister, a hulking Scot named Niel Innes who used to command the Khartoum jail, and called for London's help.