Political Changes: 1967-1970 • 339penetration bombing raids. Nasir flew to Moscow to get the USSR to send
Egypt more guns, tanks, planes, missiles, and advisers. By the summer of
1970, Israeli fighter pilots engaging in dogfights high above the Suez Canal
found that not only the MiGs but also some of their pilots came from the
USSR. Israel did not want American intervention, but the danger of a su¬
perpower confrontation loomed.
POLITICAL CHANGES: 1967-1970
What else was happening during the War of Attrition? We wrote earlier
that no Arab government was overthrown as a result of the 1967 defeat.
Nevertheless, leadership changes did occur. Alignments of Arab govern¬
ments remained kaleidoscopic.
The Two Yemens
During the 1967 Khartum summit, Egypt and Saudi Arabia agreed to
wind down the five-year-old civil war in Yemen. Soon after Nasir pulled
out his troops, the republican regime he had backed fell from power. Its
successor edged toward accommodation with the imam, his tribal backers,
and the Saudis. Yemen remained a republic, but in 1970 its government
became a coalition that included royalists. Farther south, the British had
long tried to combine the urban and politicized citizens of Aden Colony
with the tribal shaykhs and sultans of the southern Arabian Peninsula (the
portion known as the Aden Protectorate). The combination was to be
called the South Arabian Federation. The tribal leaders, most of them pro-
British, were supposed to balance the urban radicals, who gained strength
in the 1960s as nationalist groups arose among the unionized workers in
Aden's port. This outpost of empire was becoming too costly to Britain, so
the Labour government decided in 1966 to let it go. Once it had an¬
nounced its intention to pull all troops out of southern Arabia, the federa¬
tion's Arab backers became disenchanted, and the two leading nationalist
groups began competing for control of the entire area. In late 1967 Britain
handed over southern Arabia to the victorious faction, the National (Lib¬
eration) Front. The new country was renamed the People's Republic of
Southern Yemen. As its leaders hoped that it might someday be reunited
with North Yemen, it later became the People's Democratic Republic of
Yemen (PDRY), the sole Marxist state in the Arab world. Its politics con¬
tinued to interact with those of North Yemen; in 1978 both countries'
leaders were assassinated within two days, possibly by the same man. The