Three bullets snapped through the sultry Cyprus air. Dead on the pavement lay Police Superintendent Donald Murray Thompson, a crumpled symbol of the decision last week by the rebel EOKA to end its jittery truce with the British military government. Next day, on the streets of ancient, walled Nicosia (pop. 60,000), the only unarmed Britons abroad were those who had to be: reporters for the jaunty Times of Cyprus (circ. 5,400).
For better than three years, dark-haired, dynamic Editor-Publisher Charles Foley has shaped his Times into a trimly edited, headline-splashed eight-column paper that generally has islanders choking on their breakfast. He thinks, and says, that British policy is a mess. He loudly deplores Greek terrorism for destroying all chance of peace. He blasts the island's Turkish leader for stirring up racial hatred.
But Foley is not exclusively a knuckle-rapper. "I have sympathy," he says, "for the Cypriots as a civilized people who have for generations been denied the ordinary rights of self-rule and freedom. If we Englishmen can't settle a simple matter like Cyprus without getting in deeper every day, we might as well get out of business as leader of the Commonwealth." Foley thinks Cyprus eventually ought to go under U.N. trusteeship.
"Alarm & Despondency?" With such forthrightness in a tippy-toes, security-conscious situation, the Times within a year zoomed past its only rival, the stodgy, pro-government Cyprus Mail, in circulation and influence. To prove army inefficiency, Foley printed stories on how his reporters had bluffed their way past guards into top-secret areas. When stern former Governor Sir John Harding put out a law giving him the right to suspend any newspaper without cause, Foley sent 150 protest telegrams to editors and such political leaders as Churchill and Attlee. In retaliation, the government fined him for publishing news likely to cause "alarm and despondency." Foley's fuss got the law revoked three months later.
Last year Foley greeted new Governor Sir Hugh Foot with quiet approval—until he became convinced that Colonial Office blimps were directing Foot into the same clumsy repression that undid his predecessor. One recent battle: a successful fight for the release of the editor of the island's largest Greek-language newspaper, jailed for refusing to kill a story.
"A Quiet Place." India-born and London-educated, Foley, 49, got his first job on the Chicago Tribune's famed Paris Tribune, later worked 15 years as foreign editor on Lord Beaverbrook's giant (circ. 4,116,157) Daily Express. After World War II, Foley wrote a bestselling book on Hitler's daredevil Handyman Otto Skorzeny and guerrilla warfare, quit the Beaver and sailed to Cyprus in 1955. "It seemed a quiet place," he says.
Chain-smoking Cypriot cigarettes, Foley puts in 80 hours a week at the Times office, drives his editorial staff (four Britons, six Foley-trained Cypriots) with querulous sarcasm. ("How many Cypriots," he is likely to cry, "care enough about the British cricket test matches to want to be told they've been rained off in one-inch type?") Foley will order replates by phone from his bed to keep up with the island's latest explosion, blithely ignoring groans from his Greek printing staff.