Lecture by: Geraint Hughes, Reader in the Diplomatic and Military History at KCL. Hosted by: Gill Bennett, former FCO Chief Historian.
Event description:
The insurgency in Dhofar, Oman (c.1963 to 1976) is one of the forgotten conflicts in Middle Eastern and Cold War history. Throughout this war, the Sultanate of Oman received clandestine support from the United Kingdom, which included the provision of intelligence assistance which enabled the royal regime’s eventual victory. This presentation examines the contribution of British intelligence support to Oman’s absolute monarchy, arguing that it not only helped save it from overthrow in a revolution, but also created the Sultanate’s intelligence and security structure, and was shaped to influence Omani strategy, particularly by trying to mitigate the risks of escalation between Oman and its neighbour – the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen – into an inter-state war. This talk should be of interest to students of intelligence, of the history of British military intervention in the Middle East, and of the history of the Cold War.
Geraint Hughes' bio:
Geraint Hughes is a Reader in Diplomatic and Military History in the Defence Studies Department, King’s College London. He studied History at the University of Durham (1994-1997) and then for an MA and a PhD at the Department of War Studies (1997-2002). Geraint has taught at the UK Joint Services Command and Staff College at Shrivenham since July 2005, and is the author of three books; Harold Wilson’s Cold War: The Labour Government and East-West Politics, 1964-1970 (2009), My Enemy’s Enemy: Proxy Warfare in International Politics (2012), and Britain and the Dhofar War in Oman, 1963-1976: A Covert War in Arabia (2024). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and the Secretary of the British International History Group, which has been established to support the study of international history in UK academia. He is also a former Territorial Army soldier, an Iraq veteran, and a frustrated supporter of the Welsh Rugby Team.
Gill Bennett's bio:
Gill Bennett is a Senior Associate Fellow of RUSI. She was Chief Historian of the Foreign Office from 1995-2005, and Senior Editor of its official history of British foreign policy, Documents on British Policy Overseas. She has worked as a historian in Whitehall for over forty years and provided historical advice to twelve Foreign Secretaries under six Prime Ministers, from Edward Heath to Tony Blair.
A specialist in the history of secret intelligence, she published a ground-breaking biography, Churchill’s Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence, in 2006. She was also part of the research team working on the official history of the Secret Intelligence Service by the late Professor Keith Jeffery, published in 2010.
Gill continues to work on a part-time basis with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office Historians, and is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London. Publications include Six Moments of Crisis: Inside British Foreign Policy (2013), and her most recent book, The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy That Never Dies (2018).