The British army called it "Operation Lucky Alphonso," but few recent military operations have been less fortunate. In the first place, the 5,000 crack troops combing out the 65 square miles of Cyprus' rugged Troodos Mountains were not quite sure what they were looking for. Intelligence officers had a dog-eared snapshot of a square-shouldered man wearing a beret and with a .45 automatic slung from his Sam Browne belt, and they said it was the likeness of 58-year-old Greek Colonel George Grivas. But was this actually the legendary Dighenis, the man who fought both Nazis and Communists, is now leading the Cypriot revolt against the British? And if so, was he really holed up in the Troodos Mountains?
For nine days the sunburned soldiers dragged through the precipitous valleys and pine-covered mountain slopes, and then, as the area narrowed down, the fugitive Grivas (if indeed it was he) began to take refuge behind brush fires. Suddenly, with a change of wind, the whole area of pine forest took flame, engulfed a platoon of British soldiers.
Sentiments & Sacrifice. Operation Lucky Alphonso was conceived as a means of strengthening the British hand in a resumption of negotiations with the Cypriot nationalists. The tip-off that the Cypriots were ready to talk had come in a letter from Archbishop Makarios to British Labor M.P. Francis Noel-Baker. Speaking of Cyprus Governor Sir John Harding's "pointless decision to exile me," Makarios wrote: "I shall bear no grudge on account of this action. It is possible that the talks will be resumed at the point where they were broken off. But in that case, why the sacrifice of so many human beings, both British and Cypriot? For the sake of prestige, pride and obstinacy? None of these sentiments is worth the sacrifice of even a single human being." At week's end, counting their casualties in Operation Lucky Alphonso (21 dead, 15 badly burned), the British were ready to seek a way out.
Last March, negotiations broke down on Makarios' insistence that he should hand-pick the Greek majority in the Provisional Assembly, and on his demand for an amnesty for all Cypriot terrorists. The real issue was control of the island's security. The British feared that a hostile government in command of the island's police and defense services might act to weaken, even make untenable, their huge military base, intended for the protection of British oil interests in the Middle East.