Sitting at home wishing I was there

[Tim Cullis]

This week is the 50th anniversary of my first entry into Morocco in May 1972. I really wanted to be in Morocco for this anniversary, but family sickness prevents this. I've been writing up our experiences of the first trip, a portion of which I reproduce below.
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Within a week of arriving in Spain I was off again on a trip to Morocco with three friends in an old Land Rover. We were heading to southern Morocco to buy a huge quantity of the beautiful twisted glass canes, known as Goulimine beads, which we thought we could then sell in Spain. These ‘trade beads’ were in fact antique, being made in Venice as ‘millefiori’ and carried by the ton as ballast of ships trading in Africa and elsewhere.

A Land Rover is about as far removed from a luxury vehicle as you can get, and Wally’s 1949 Series I model was already 25 years old at the time of this expedition—in an era when normally only Volvos lasted as long as ten years. It was a cramped short wheelbase version with side-facing jump seats for the two who would be sitting in the back. Fuel consumption was terrible at 18-20 mpg, engine oil seemed to disappear at the rate of a pint every 150 miles, and we left a cloud of black exhaust smoke in our wake. 



We drove along the Spanish coast to Algeciras and took the ferry from mainland Spain to the Spanish exclave of Ceuta on the north African Mediterranean coast where we filled up with duty-free fuel costing about 9p/gallon and stuck cans with another 30 gallons of fuel on the roof rack.

Our first challenge was entering Morocco—apparently the authorities were fed up with long-haired dope-smoking hippies who bought little money to the country. The border police at Bab Sebta took one look at the length of our hair and turned us away. So we retreated to Ceuta and were shorn of our locks and tried again, but without success. By now the barber would be closed, so we waited at the border until the staff shifts changed and this time passed muster. However another hopeful visitor we met in the barber shop was still turned away as he had really long hair in his passport photo!

[Tim Cullis]

According to my airmail letter home, we set off from Ceuta on 4 May and arrived in Marrakech at 2am the next morning. I think we must have slept in the Landy which was parked up in the famous Djemaa el Fna (square of the dead). The next morning we didn’t hang about, we had a quick look round the souq, leaving Marrakech at 11am. In retrospect I am hugely impressed with the distances we managed to cover bearing in mind the state of the roads and the slow pace of the Landy. I think we must have been starting early, finishing late, and swapping over drivers on the road.

The obvious route from Marrakech would have been towards Agadir but whilst nowadays there’s both a main road and a motorway linking Marrakech and Agadir, in 1972 there was nothing. We had the choice of west to Essaouira and then south along the coast, or over the mountains.

So we travelled over the Tizi n’Test (tizi means pass) in the High Atlas mountains. This started as narrow asphalt, but from about 4,000 feet above sea level to the summit at almost 7,000 feet and then down the other side it was nothing more than an 8-foot wide dirt track with a sheer drop of more than 100 feet. Half an hour later we were still slowly climbing but the drop was now 800 feet. The swaying of the Landy’s knackered suspension was accentuated by all the fuel on the roof rack and it took six hours to travel 50 miles. Amazingly we managed to travel 300 miles that day, as far as Goulimine, arriving long after dark.

Nowadays, Guelmim (modern spelling) is a thriving provincial city but when we visited it was a small village with its dual claims to fame being the weekly camel market and the fact that it was a key point on the trade route south, past Tan Tan and across Spanish Sahara (modern day Western Sahara) to Senegal and beyond. Which I guess is why it was one of the main sources of the beads. We were advised to carry on to Tan Tan which was a further 100 miles into the semi-arid desert for a better choice of beads.

There weren’t many restaurants or snack places in rural Morocco at the time—most people grew their own vegetables, reared their own animals and made their own bread. When we could get food it was expensive, so we had lots of oranges and bananas. I do remember eating a vegetable tagine for the first time in Tan Tan and this was also the first time I encountered green chillis in a dish. I assumed they were green beans so there was some hilarity when they were quickly expelled.

We spent the rest of the day and the following morning in Tan Tan negotiating with a trader over a huge ammunition chest with more than 10 kg of Goulimine beads, until we finally settled on a price which was the equivalent of about £120 (lot of money in 1972!). When I came to pay the guy didn’t know the exchange rate for pesetas and I must admit I ‘erred on the side of optimism’, so the beads ended up costing just over £100. We decided to quickly hightail it out of Tan Tan and drove the 200 miles north to Agadir that afternoon.



Agadir had been destroyed in an earthquake twelve years previously and was being rebuilt as a modern town with all the atmosphere of Coventry’s 1950s concrete jungle. We spent the night there in the first hotel we had seen at a cost of £1.20 for the four of us. The next day we hit the road back to Spain and Fuengirola.


Given the amount we were all spending on lager (!), Peter Dean, the Sugar Shack owner was quite happy for us to set up a stall in the shade to sell the beads, possibly being a draw for more bar trade customers. So we started threading the beads onto leather thongs with options for necklaces, wrist bands, ankle bands and so on. They were a great success. We thought we could sell the £100 of beads for about £600 and this turned out to be spot on—by the time we had sold one-third we had recovered the price of the beads plus all our travel costs.

[Tim Cullis]

Jumping ahead a bit, the trip to Goulimine and Tan Tan was the start of my 50-year love affair with Morocco. I went another seven times that year, taking electric blankets to sell in Morocco and bringing back kaftans, bags, hats, drums, whatever.

On one trip I bought back a parcel of kaftans balanced on my motorbike fuel tank; the Spanish customs guy asked what was in the parcel and I replied “shirts for my friends.” He snipped the string and the parcel expanded three-fold to reveal 129 kaftans, but he merely commented that I must have a lot of friends. They were searching for more important stuff and they always assumed I was returning to the UK so didn’t impose the normal 100% duty between Morocco and Spain. 



Well this couldn’t last and the owner of a Moroccan shop in Fuengirola became aware of my success and denounced me to the Guardia Civil for evading import duties. One of the Guardia came to the Sugar Shack and casually mentioned to Peter, the owner, that they were coming to find me the next day. Peter warned me and I disappeared for a few days—I actually went back to Morocco to get more supplies!

I adored Moroccan mint tea, and on another trip decided to bring back a bag of mint. “How much?” I was asked. We had only recently gone metric in the UK and I was rather flustered and responded, “5 kilos”. Perhaps I should have said half a kilo. Well 5kg was an absolutely ginormous sack and when I reentered Spain the customs naturally suspected I was smuggling cannabis in the middle of the bundle, so took it apart and examined every leaf. It would have been really serious as mere possession (as opposed to supply) was said to be punished at that time with six years in prison.

[Tim Cullis]

I had ridden my motorbike down from the UK, and If you tried to design a less-suitable motorbike for long distance travel than the TriBSA, you would have failed. The engine was a Triumph 650cc twin bored out the 750cc, mounted in a BSA frame. It didn’t have conventional handlebars, instead the controls were mounted low down on the front forks (clip ons) which you reached by lying down on the tank. The conventional foot controls were instead mounted further back (rear sets). The very low and stretched riding position was finished off with a very hard and thin bench seat. The BSA GoldStar RRT2 close ratio gearbox allowed almost 70 mph in first gear which made starting off on hills a bit of a challenge.

I must have been stopped a dozen times in France, Spain and Morocco by the police, not because I was doing anything wrong but they were intrigued with the bike. Even now I remember my explanation, “Le moteur est triomphe, le châssis est bay-ess-ar.”

I was still making trips to Morocco and in August I decided on a longer road trip on the motorbike. The current King of Morocco, Mohammed VI, is highly-regarded and generally loved by Moroccans, but his father, Hassan II couldn’t have been more different. His reign was called ‘the years of lead’ as nothing positive happened. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when the first assassination attempt took place in 1971.

And then on 16 August 1972, Hassan was returning from Paris when his plane was strafed by four F-5 jets of the Moroccan air force, killing eight on board. Hassan reportedly grabbed the radio and told the pilots the King was dead and they stopped their attack. Of course, he wasn’t dead. General Oufkir, the instigator of the plot subsequently ‘was disappeared’ and his family jailed for decades.

Although in Morocco, I knew nothing of this at the time. I was playing tunes with the TriBSA gearbox on a wonderfully smooth and fast blacktop when I came round a corner and saw a roadblock ahead with gun-toting Gendarmes. The bike shuddered to a half just inches from the spikes laid across the road. The whole country was extremely jittery and I travelled at a much slower speed the rest of the trip.

In the 50 years since, I’ve visited Morocco more than 40 times since by plane, car, 4x4 but mostly off-road motorbike with post-retirement trips of six or seven weeks at a time. I did one 14-day trek with mules in the mountains. I also spent eight weeks in Fez learning Arabic. So it’s in my blood and I’ve spent getting on for four years in total in the country.

[Tim Cullis]

I stayed in Spain for the rest of the summer, arriving back in the UK in December 1972, My brother Roger stayed on as he had been offered a job as crew for a charter by George Allen, the owner of an ex-British naval attack vessel called 'The Albatross'.

The offer came from a Scottish ex-soldier named Alec (Alexander) Gay, who had been a mercenary in the Congo and then on the Biafran side during the 1968/69 Nigerian civil war. Gay later acted as a bodyguard for Frederick Forsyth, who at the time had been a BBC war correspondent covering the Biafran war. Forsyth subsequently became famous with his 1971 ‘Day of the Jackal’ novel that was based on the real-life attempts to kill President de Gaulle by the OAS—which included Rolf Steiner, another mercenary acquaintance of Forsyth. 



What became clear after the event was that Forsyth was using proceeds from the Jackal book success to fund the cost of this venture which was to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea, until 1968 a Spanish colony known as Spanish Guinea. Though most of the country lies further to the south, the capital of Equatorial Guinea is on an island then called Ferdinand Po that lies closer to the Biafran part of Nigeria than it does to the rest of Equatorial Guinea. If you capture Ferdinand Po you effectively capture Equatorial Guinea.

But I am getting ahead of the story. Roger was taken on to help crew the Albatross and in a letter back home in early November wrote, “we are doing an ocean-bottom survey for an oil company off the coast of West Africa near Dakar.” The first step was a re-fit in the docks at Gibraltar to make the boat ready for the 4,000 km voyage. The 74-ton Albatross was about 35m long and with its naval attack background was well-suited to nefarious tasks. Extra fuel tanks were fitted holding 9,000 litres of fuel, enough for 4,800 km and three 18-foot semi-rigid Seacraft inflatables were secured onboard.

Gay had organised the purchase of four machine guns, 40 assault rifles, 2 bazookas, 2 mortars and 40,000 rounds of ammunition through an arms dealer in Hamburg who would source the weapons from a Spanish army stockpile near Málaga. It’s not clear whether the Spanish knew the intended use was against the ex-Spanish colony, but Roger said the people involved were given a hefty bribe. I know some guns were already on board as I saw Roger’s later photo of a machine gun being used in target practice in the open seas.

Uniforms for 50 troops and other supplies were shipped from Tanger in Morocco. More mercenaries arrived, both British and French, who were put up in hotels in Fuengirola. They were told to be inconspicuous, however one of the mercenaries—sarcastically nicknamed WoodenTop—took to strutting around the deck of the Albatross in Fuengirola harbour dressed in full camouflage fatigues, which raised eyebrows amongst the omnipresent Guardia Civil. Roger wrote home from Spain on 25 November saying they were sailing the Albatross to Gibraltar the next day, then back to Spain on 29 November, before leaving for Africa on 1 December.

I don’t know at what point Roger’s and George Allen’s suspicions were first aroused, but the ‘penny’ must have really dropped when Allen was told that space was needed to load the six tons of arms, ammunition and explosives. The trip back to Spain on 29 November was to load the arms at Málaga, but that didn’t happen as the Spanish official baulked at supplying the export licence when he learned the Albatross was a ‘privately-owned wooden tub’ rather than a commercial freighter. So Roger ended up spending Christmas and New Year in Gibraltar.

Gay had warned Allen that his life as well as those of his wife and son would be short ones if he didn’t carry on with the operation, nevertheless Allen decided to spill the beans to the authorities. He made contact with the British Special Branch who were stationed in Gibraltar (largely to try to intercept IRA arms shipments and other activities).

So on 4 January 1973 a Special Branch agent named Llambias sent a classified British Foreign Office cypher, reading, “Information has been volunteered to Special Branch here of British-registered Albatross, a converted ex-navy MFV, to the effect that British, Canadian and French mercenaries and unspecified Africans, equipped in the full knowledge of the Spanish authorities [together] with Spanish Army may attempt to assume control over Ferdinand Po sometime after 20 January.” Llambias’s cypher was followed up with a full report that was met with a degree of hilarity and banter amongst British diplomats.

On leaving Gibraltar, George and Roger sailed the Albatross on to Olhao in Portugal where another seven French, British and Canadian mercenaries boarded. The revised plan was that the arms and ammunition would be loaded at Málaga on a Corsican freighter and the two boats would sail to the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago 100km off the coast of Morocco, where weapons would be transshipped at sea. Subsequently the Albatross would refuel in Cape Verde, then sail on to Benin where 50 Biafran mercenaries would be taken on board. From Benin to Ferdinand Po was only 1,000km so the Biafrans would sit and sleep on the open decks of the Albatross.

Well, that was the plan, but in the meantime the British Foreign Office alerted the Spanish government who boarded the Albatross when it reached Arrecife in the Canaries on 23 January. Over a few days of interrogation, the mercenaries admitted the plot and were deported, whilst George Allen and Roger in the Albatross were escorted by three Spanish gunboats to Casablanca, from where they were escorted out of Moroccan waters by the Moroccan navy.

Spain wouldn’t allow Albatross to return and Roger wrote to our parents from Gibraltar on 27 January, “We are heading for Portugal. Have much to tell you,” which was a real understatement! They stayed for a couple of weeks in Portugal before being allowed to return to Fuengirola, and Roger returned to the UK 22 February 1973.



A little over a year later Forsyth published ‘The Dogs of War’, a supposedly completely fictitious story about a coup in a West African state using an attack vessel called the Albatross whose captain was named George Allen. Although the attempted coup is said to have finally ended up costing £100,000, Forsyth made well over £500,000 from his book which was a massive amount 50 years ago, and was a tax exile for a while.


After Roger’s death in 1977 I must have been one of the few people outside of the mercenary ‘circle’ who knew of the coup attempt and Forsyth’s involvement, but in March 1978 there was a shootout in London between the police and Alan Murphy, one of the mercenaries who had been onboard the Albatross. After wounding a policeman, Murphy turned the gun on himself, but left behind a diary and many sensitive documents about his mercenary career.

Some of these reached The Sunday Times which ran a short expose that other papers picked up on. And then in 2005 the British National Archives released the Llambias report and a far more detailed account of the 1972-73 attempted coup was included in Adam Roberts’ 2006 ‘Wonga Coup’ book written about the Simon Mann/Mark Thatcher attempted coup in 2004. More information at

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/f...up-zwztl0p82n2

and https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/p...ar-ctlcm8bw7mf

[markharf]

Great story, Tim! Lots to contemplate in the ways our narrow, personal perspectives are interwoven with broader, geopolitical events.

I sometimes forget the difficulties crossing borders with the wrong hair length and/or clothing--and the waiting for midnight shift changes to try again. Cheers!

[PanEuropean]

Originally Posted by Tim Cullis

...apparently the authorities were fed up with long-haired dope-smoking hippies who bought little money to the country. The border police at Bab Sebta took one look at the length of our hair and turned us away.

Those were the days, back when we all had full heads of hair!

[cedar]

Great memories Tim
The joy of travel before the Internet when you had no idea of what to expect (except the unexpected!)
Should be there next week, will have a mint tea for you.
Bruce

[Surfy]

returned to the UK 22 February 1973

Great read, great story and even the end is older than my birthday!

I`m jealous about the experience you was able to collect in your life! The adventures you was able to experience. Today - we really know what we can expect - even on a transafrica over the west.

I had my container space already booked in south africa, my retrurn flights was booked as I did start my transafrica in 2012. For shure, something unplanned can happen anywhere, but - you was able to start without to know that detailed - what you will see during your journey.

Those rare travelbooks & black/white movies - didnt give you that idea, that clear picture we had today, with travel blogs, social media and the tv documentations who show us details, we never ever are able to see by ourself, even if we go to the same locations.

In times where you get more "wow" moments when watching tv-documentations as going somewhere in person - the old "expedition" feeling is completely lost. Probably that is our own fault, we can do digital detox, tv detox, travelbook detox - and are able to travel without any impression - even today. Too late for me, after reading/watching my whole life...

Surfy

[backofbeyond]

Originally Posted by Tim Cullis

Our first challenge was entering Morocco—apparently the authorities were fed up with long-haired dope-smoking hippies who bought little money to the country.e border police at Bab Sebta took one look at the length of our hair and turned us away. So we retreated to Ceuta and were shorn of our locks and tried again, but without success. By now the barber would be closed, so we waited at the border until the staff shifts changed and this time passed muster. However another hopeful visitor we met in the barber shop was still turned away as he had really long hair in his passport photo!

We had exactly the same issue a couple of years earlier - one of our van trip group had a 'shade tree' haircut with a kitchen knife, with just enough hacked away to convince the authorities, and, with that experience in mind, the following year (1970) I plastered my 'long haired hippy' hair down with engine oil and kept my (open face) crash helmet on while formalities were being conducted. Looking back at the photographs I have from back then my hair wasn't that long but standards were different.

Originally Posted by Tim Cullis

Well 5kg was an absolutely ginormous sack and when I reentered Spain the customs naturally suspected I was smuggling cannabis in the middle of the bundle, so took it apart and examined every leaf. It would have been really serious as mere possession (as opposed to supply) was said to be punished at that time with six years in prison.

When we reentered Spain in 1970 they put everyone off the ship into a large walled compound, let us stew there for a while and then released a couple of 'drug dogs' (large Alsatians as I remember them). They ran around sniffing at everything for a while and then, little by little, we were let out. I guess the dogs didn't find anything as nobody seemed to be arrested. The whole process took about two hours, but there were fewer boats in those days so presumably they had a while before the next lot arrived.

[Turbofurball]

What fantastic adventures, thank you for sharing

[badou24]

I have just read some of "tims " adventures in Morocco and i must admit they are good !
The pace of change there is fast , and i can recall my first time there about 20 years ago , when it was still under developed , and the roads were ,,,, well a bit rough ,!
So after 55 times and about 4 years of travelling it still floats my boat , There is just something about the country and the people that makes you want to go back again and again !
Nothing stops the same in life , so try and get there and travel in a very small group and see the real Morocco or go on your own !!! .............