t 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