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.

__________________
"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

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.

__________________
"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

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

__________________
"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

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!