Anthropologists, Topographers, Diplomats, and Spies: Royal Air Force Intelligence Officers in South Arabia 1954–1959

Abstract

Recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have reawakened interest as well as controversies over how Western militaries tried to engage, with varying degrees of success, with the ‘Human Terrain’. These debates are far from new. This article explores the role played by a handful of Royal Air Force Intelligence Officers across the Aden Protectorates in the 1950s. Undoubtedly, they enjoyed notable success, not least in countering the immediate territorial avarice of Yemen and Saudi Arabia. But they remained agents of an empire in retreat, their effectiveness in harnessing a granular knowledge of the tribal landscape to the delivery of aerial violence being buffeted by an environment that they could not shape and over which, despite their best endeavours, Aden could exercise little control.