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330 TURBULENCE AND TERROR
'given the global importance of working closely with the
Americans' .40 1\vo weeks later, Foreign Secretary Jim Callaghan
formally assured Kissinger that 'We shall not in the present
circumstances proceed with our preferred policy of withdrawing
from the Sovereign Base Area altogether.'41
But everything was not as it appeared. Cabinet Ministers
believed that Hunt had been sent to Washington to tell the
Americans about the demise of the Cyprus bases. In reality, GCHQ
and the Cabinet Secretary seem to have been involved in an
audacious game of poker with the Americans. The idea was to
persuade them to pay for the presence on Cyprus. On the very
day that Hunt endured the invective of Kissinger, Schlesinger and
Colby in Washington, Derek Tonkin from the Permanent Under­
Secretary's Department was explaining the underlying strategy
'in the strictest confidence' to planners from the BBC monitoring
service. The BBC was about to discuss its own radio monitoring
station on Cyprus with its American associates who performed
the same task for the CIA. Tonkin made it clear that despite the
Cabinet decision to withdraw, nothing should be taken for granted.
'It might be,' he explained, 'that the Americans would offer to
pay for some of the facilities in Cyprus.' Indeed, he was rather
optimistic and hoped the Americans would be willing to provide
'substantial financial assistance'. He lamented that the British
financial position was so bad that the country 'had long passed
the time when we might have felt embarrassed' about asking the
Americans for money. Meanwhile, the BBC was advised to plan
on the basis of a continued British presence on CypruS. 42
America's willingness to pay towards the costs of bases on Cyprus
was connected to the steep deterioration of its relations with Thrkey
during the invasion. Ankara had expected Washington to put pressure
on Athens to stop the coup attempt against Makarios. Kissinger
had not done this, and instead, once the Thrkish invasion began,
the United States suspended military assistance to Thrkey. The
Thrks, already nurturing resentment over American efforts to deter
a Thrkish invasion of Cyprus ten years earlier, retaliated by closing
down the vast complex of American bases that sprawled across