In 1958, Grivas stepped up his guerrilla campaign in an effort to thwart the determined efforts to achieve a political solution being made by the new Governor, Sir Hugh Foot. The Army launched another massive search for Grivas, this time in the Paphos mountains, but once again he slipped through the net. Foot continued to press for a political solution, but agreed to call in MI5 as the situation was rapidly deteriorating. From the start we were in a race: could we find Grivas before the Colonial Office stitched up a ramshackle deal?
Magan was convinced that sufficient intelligence about Grivas' location must exist in the files of the local Special Branch, and that it had just not been interpreted correctly. The problem was how to get at it. EOKA had thoroughly penetrated the local Special Branch, and studying the files would be a dangerous business once an MI5 man's identity became known. One of our officers had already been shot in the high street of Nicosia.
Magan was a remarkable man who had spent a great deal of time on the North-West Frontier and in Persia, where he lived by himself with the natives in tents, speaking their languages and cooking his meals on cow dung fires. He knew at first hand the dangers of terrorism, and rather than delegate the dangerous mission to a junior officer, he insisted that he go himself, supported by the local Cyprus liaison officer, Colonel Philip Kirby Green, a tall soldierly officer of boundless courage and rectitude who was also a distinguished painter in his spare time. I was to follow shortly afterward to plan and execute the technical side of the operation, which was given the code name SUNSHINE.
It would be too crude to say that SUNSHINE was an assassination operation. But it amounted to the same thing. The plan was simple: to locate Grivas, and bring up a massive concentration of soldiers. We knew he would never surrender, and like two of his trusted lieutenants who had recently been cornered by the Army, he would die in the shoot-out.
I arrived in Nicosia on January 17, 1959, and went to Special Branch headquarters to study Magan's analysis of the files. Grivas' campaign was clearly well organized. There were numerous examples of well-coordinated terrorist strikes and civil disturbances across the whole island. He had therefore to be in regular communication with his field officers. It was unlikely that EOKA would use either the telephone or the postal system for these, even though they had both been thoroughly penetrated. Communications rested on a system of couriers, and from studying the files it was obvious these were mainly women, traveling on the public transport system. We plotted each sighting and interception, and the overall pattern showed Limassol to be the hub of the EOKA communications network. There were also clusters of sightings in the Yerasa and Polodhia villages, several miles from Limassol. The best hypothesis was that Grivas maintained headquarters in each of these villages.
The first step was to place a secure telephone tap on Makarios' palace. We were certain that Makarios, and probably EOKA at certain times, used the line secure in the knowledge that their post office spies would automatically alert them to the presence of a tap.
We decided to place a concealed tap on one of the overhead cables leading into the palace, using a radio transmitter which took power from the telephone circuit to radiate the signal out to our waiting receiver a mile or two away. John Wyke, MI6's best technical operator, and the man who actually placed the taps inside the Berlin Tunnel, with the Vopos' feet just inches above his head, came out to help me. The whole operation was fraught with danger. Wyke had to climb a telephone pole in total darkness, in full view of the road, which was constantly patrolled by Makarios' armed bodyguards and EOKA guerrillas. He bored a hole in the top of the pole to conceal the electronics, and made a concealed connection to the telephone cable. Down at the bottom I selected his tools and relayed them up to him. Every five minutes we froze as a patrol came past, expecting at any moment to hear rifle fire. Two hours later, our nerves frayed, the tap was successfully installed, and gave us the essential base coverage of Makarios.
But the real purpose of SUNSHINE was to find Grivas. I was sure he must be using radio receivers to monitor British Army communications, and was aware every time an effort was mounted to search for him. I decided on a two-pronged attack. Firstly we would search intensively for the aerial which he used with his receiver. Then, simultaneously, I planned to plant a radio receiver on him containing a radio beacon, which would lead us right to him. We knew Grivas obtained a great deal of his military supplies from the Egyptians, who were selling off British equipment they had confiscated after the Suez war at knockdown prices. MI6 recruited a Greek Cypriot arms dealer, who purchased a consignment of receivers in Egypt which I modified to include a beacon, and we set about trying to feed it into Grivas' headquarters.
The first part of Operation SUNSHINE went well. K.G., as Kirby Green was universally known in the Service, Magan and I made a series of dawn reconnoiters of the Limassol area looking for the aerial. It was dangerous work, meandering down dusty side streets and across the sunbaked market squares, pretending to be casual visitors. Old men under wicker shades looked at us as we passed. Small boys eyed us suspiciously and disappeared down alleys. I felt the sweat dripping down my back, and the uncanny sensation of an unseen rifle permanently trained on me from somewhere behind the terra-cotta roofs and ancient flint walls.
In Yerasa I noticed a spike on the peak of the pyramid-shaped roof of a church. It appeared, at first sight, to be a lightning conductor, mounted on an insulator going through the roof. There was also a metallic strip going down into the ground, but when I scrutinized the conductor carefully through field glasses, I could see that the strip was disconnected from the spike. It was obviously modified to act as an aerial. Rather foolishly, we tried to get closer, and, from nowhere, an angry crowd of local children emerged and began to stone us. We beat a hasty retreat, and made our way over to Polodhia, where there was a similar setup. I was sure then that we had been right to pinpoint the two villages as the center of Grivas' operations.
I began to work feverishly on the radio beacons. We estimated that SUNSHINE would take six months to complete, but just as we moved into top gear, in late February 1959, the Colonial Office hurriedly settled the Cyprus problem at a Constitutional Conference at Lancaster House. The carpet was roughly pulled from under our feet, and the entire SUNSHINE plan aborted overnight. Magan was furious, particularly when Grivas emerged from the precise area we had foreseen and was flown to Greece, ready to continue to exert a baleful influence on the island. Magan felt the settlement was at best temporary, and that few of the outstanding problems had been resolved. In his view, Colonial Office short-term expediency would lead to long-term misery. He has been proved right.
Shortly before we left Cyprus, Magan and I had a strained encounter with the Governor, Sir Hugh Foot. He was pleased that at last he was extricated, and made it clear that he had always seen SUNSHINE as a last resort solution, to be implemented only in the event of the failure of diplomacy. He seemed incapable of understanding that intelligence, to be effective, has to be built into diplomacy from the start. Looking back, I am certain that, had we been allowed to implement Operation SUNSHINE when we first lobbied for it, in 1956, we could have neutralized Grivas at the outset. The Colonial Office, rather than EOKA, would then have been able to dictate the terms of the peace, and the history of that tragic but beautiful island might have taken a different course over the past thirty years.