1. It had provided the technical expertise, such as the handling of explosives, without which the major sabotage successes would have been impossible.
2. It had provided the tactical planning and supplied the communications which successfully harnessed the courage of the Greeks to the strategic requirements of the Allied commanders.
3. Most important of all, in the long run, it assured that no armed force in occupied Greece would gain a monopoly of power on the day of liberation. The final aim of the mission was to leave the Greeks with a free choice at the end of the war—a choice between a Monarchy, a Republic or even a Communist regime if they wanted it. But the recent dramatic events in the closing months of 1989 in Poland, the U.S.S.R., Hungary, the East German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and finally Romania have proved that the last choice would have been an unwise one if the Greeks had also opted for Communism.
1946: Following a plebiscite King George II returned to Greece at the end of September and appointed Panayis Tsaldaris as his Prime Minister.
When I returned to Athens in October 1944 on H.H.M.S. AVEROF I had been appointed Radio Monitoring Officer of the Anglo-Greek Information Service (A.G.I.S.) with a staff of about 25 W/T operators and typists to assist me. My unit was a section of the Press Department of the British Embassy. I think the choice of title was a rather unfortunate mistake. The English words 'information' and 'intelligence' have only one equivalent word in Greek pliroforiesq. And most Greeks hold peculiar views about the C.I.A. and the British Intelligence Service. So here I was strutting about in the uniform of a war correspondent bearing the flashes 'I.S.', the butt of many a joke from my friends who accused me of being a master spy. My boss, Colonel Johnson, who had been the British Council representative in Greece prior to the outbreak of war in 1939, came to my office one morning and told me that he had heard a rumour that King George of the Hellenes, who was then in London, was going to broadcast in the Greek service of the B.B.C. I replied I had heard nothing, but would try and find out if the rumour was true. As he left my office I glanced at my watch; it was 11 o'clock in the morning, 9 o'clock in London. I telephoned the General Manager of Cable & Wireless, Mr Briggs, who was a personal friend. I told him I wanted to make use of his facilities to ask an urgent question of the B.B.C. in London. He replied, "Tell McTaggert" (the engineer in charge of the Central Telegraph Office) "that I said he should help you in any way possible."
"Mac," I said over the telephone, "would you get one of your operators to ring the B.B.C. in Bush House (from where the World Service originates) and ask them if they have any plans for a broadcast by King George of the Hellenes." I immediately tuned one of my receivers to the frequency of the London telegraph link, which was carrying high speed morse traffic. In a short while the tape was stopped and an operator, using a hand key, asked my question slowly in plain language, and then the tape was put on again. I waited anxiously for about five minutes. Again the tape was stopped, a single letter 'R' (for received) was sent by hand, and traffic returned to normal. My telephone rang; it was McTaggert. "Nothing doing, old boy. The B.B.C. have no plans for such a broadcast." I thanked him and looked at my watch. It was 11.25, just 25 minutes had elapsed. I called my boss and told him the answer to his question. "How do you know?" he asked. "I asked the B.B.C., sir." "You what?" he shouted at me. "Don't you know there's a war on? I'm coming to see you." He stormed into my office and demanded an explanation, so I told him what I had done. "Good God, what is this going to cost us?". "Nothing at all, sir. There is no provision for anything like that in the operating procedure". "Then I must write a letter to Cable & Wireless to thank them." I thought to myself, why don't you write a letter to Norman and thank him for having friends in the right places. But I kept my mouth shut.
My equipment and my staff of 20 men and 5 girls were housed on the 6th floor of the Metohikon Tamion building. When ELAS marched on Athens, there was constant firing, shelling and bombing throughout the 24 hours of the day and night for three or four weeks. The bombing was by light aircraft of the R.A.F. on the ELAS positions in the suburbs and Beaufighter aircraft straffing them with 20 mm cannon. Then ELAS set up a 75 mm gun in the northern suburb of Aharnon, and started hitting us back. When we had received several hits on and around our H.Q. building, I was ordered to move down to the second floor, to safer accommodation. I extended some of my antenna down-leads, and resumed normal service. One of our assignments was to transcribe, every day, what was said in the Greek transmissions of nineteen different countries about the situation in Greece, and to produce a daily summary in English, for the benefit of the Press Department.
In the summer of 1945 we began having interference on GIN, a station of the British Post Office which operated around 10MHz, transmitting a REUTER news service for Europe on the German Hellschreiber (Hell printer) system. This was a sort of very course TV picture of 49 dots, seven by seven. The letter 'I' for instance came out as seven dots vertically, and the letter 'T' just had another six dots across the top. The letters were very crude but readable, provided there was no interference, or crashes of static. The interference, which made our tape quite unreadable, used to start around 3 in the afternoon and fade slowly away about three hours later, when the tape became readable again. I decided I would try and identify the source. All I had in the way of recorders were office-type Dictaphones using wax cylinders. I removed the three weights from the speed governor, and the cylinder spun round like mad. I managed to record for about three minutes and when I played the recording on another machine at normal speed the cylinder yielded up its secret—it was high speed morse traffic in 5-figure cypher. I typed it all out and noticed that some of the paragraphs began with the letter 'B'. I subsequently found out it was a characteristic of stations carrying Royal Air Force traffic. I sent my text to London, and three weeks later the interference stopped. It was more than a month later that I was told what had happened. The transmitter causing the problem was located in Kandy, Ceylon. It operated with a rhombic antenna beamed to R.A.F. Calcutta. Its frequency was only 500 Hz away from GIN. The department which had allocated the frequency never imagined that it could possibly cause interference in Europe to the REUTER news service. But sunspot cycle 20, which was a good one, had decided otherwise.
In 1947 I was transferred to the British Police Mission to Greece, which was headed by Sir Charles Wickham. My principal duty was to interpret for Sir Charles, and for his second in command Colonel Prosser. My friend Mr Eleftheriou at the Ministry issued me with a special licence and I came on the air again using my pre-war callsign SV1RX. When the Police Mission closed down in 1948 I came to England and got the callsign G3FNJ which I have now held for over 41 years.
8. Wartime Broadcasts from Cairo.