In the mid-1950s, Cyprus, a British colony since 1878, was convulsed by the campaign of bombings, sabotage, and attacks on British police, soldiers and buildings waged by EOKA guerillas who sought union, ‘enosis’, with Greece. The guerillas, based in the Troodos mountains, operated at night, and moved seemingly at will between a network of hiding places, including artificial caves carved into hillsides and some well-disguised rooms in villages. Tracking the guerillas was the urgent problem for the British. In 1957, the colonial governor of Cyprus, a senior army man, Field Marshal John Harding, sought help from science. Specifically the assistance came from Porton Down, the UK’s chemical warfare laboratory.

Frederick Brundrett, the lead coordinator of British defence research in the mid-1950s¹, replied to Harding’s call in May 1957. It is clear that he had already explored the possibilities and the ethical constraints, such as they were:

I have now talked to all the people who ought to be able to have some ideas … and we all agreed that this is an exceedingly difficult kind of problem and that the only possible feasible type of solution is a chemical warfare one. What I have in mind is the use of persistent tear gas. This should be possible without contravention of the Geneva Convention since no permanent damage would be done to individuals…²

Brundrett envisioned either covering cordoned-off areas with the persistent tear gas, or ‘alternatively, if you know of any hiding places in caves which are used from time to time, going round and fillling all these up with the material’. It was a proposal for denial of land by chemical warfare.

Nevertheless, Brundrett, writing from London, realised that ‘really sensible advice’ was ‘very difficult indeed, without detailed knowledge of the conditions’. he suggested to Harding that he should ‘send somebody out to see the conditions on the spot’, ‘one of our principal chemical experts who really knows his stuff’.

The chemical expert was Mr Titt.

R.A. Titt worked at the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment, Porton Down. His boss considered him a ‘pretty fertile fellow’.³ He spent six days in Cyprus, being briefed in Nicosia, flying low over the Paiphos Forest valleys, and accompanied into the mountains by British security forces personnel.

Titt’s report began with a detailed description of the terrain stressing the difficulties it presented to the British counter-insurgency operations:

The problem of hunting terrorists in mountain country such as the Paiphos Forest is exceedingly complex…

The Paiphos Forest region is one of steep mountains some 4000 ft. high, sparsely covered with conifers and with a substantial cover of evergreen shrubs. This vegetative cover is maintained from the valley bottoms (where it is dense) to the summits. There are extensive areas of scree and slides of shale ranging for many hundreds of feet. Valley bottoms are exceedingly narrow while ridges and spurs are steep and sharp. …

The area is very sparsely populated, roads are few and bad but footpaths and trails occur widely. Perennial streams are infrequent, but small sources of water are very widespread at all altitudes.

The basic rock formations appear to be limestone though formations have been much disturbed by earthquakes.

There is virtually no flat land ground in the whole region and satisfactory landing sites for helicopters are infrequent.⁴

For the troops of the British No. 3 Brigade Group, deployed as platoons in bivouac conditions, searching the one hundred square miles by day and conducting ambushes at night, the object was ‘to find probably one or two men who may be in an exceedingly well concealed hide’. Such mountain hides were typically excavated from the rock face, roofed with corrugated iron, covered with brush wood and scree, just below a good observation point but often far from water. Camouflage was so good it was ‘possible to walk over a hide without detecting its presence’. Village hides were ‘usually in the form of concealed cellars, or extra rooms built into mountain sides’.

Titt ruled out the initial suggestion, of using persistent tear gas: the ‘use of aggressive chemicals to force evacuation of hides, not previously located by other means, is not recommended. The probable siting of the hides, the great area to be engaged, and problems of troop training and security all initiate [sic. indicate] strongly against undertaking what would be a most uncertain operation’.

Instead, Titt, being a pretty fertile fellow, offered many other ways science could assist the British in the three issues of detection of hides, detection of movement across the landscape, and supporting ambushes and ‘chance contacts’. The method to detect hides included:

• using ‘search coils’ mounted on helicopters to detect the corrugated iron roofs of hides
• using infra-red detection of hides in a similar manner (this idea had come from discussion with John Carroll, a leading Admiralty defence scientist)
• using defoliants such as 2-4.D, once the first two methods had narrowed down areas of interest, ‘to strip the leaves of the evergreen Golden Oak’
• sampling streams for the presence of E.coli, which might indicate human excreta disposal
• in the villages, acoustic methods might reveal hidden cavities.

Regarding methods to detect movement, Titt suggested:

• by day, continuously staffed observation points, with troops equipped with binoculars
• spraying belts across suspected routes with ‘material such as castoreum, and using tracker dogs to follow trails of the substance
• doing similar, but with ‘colourless florescent material … which could be detected by inspection under ultra-violet illumination’

Ambushes, meanwhile could be made more effective by using “Sniperscope” (an infra-red sight), smoke grenades to ‘throw the enemy into noisy confusion’, and acoustic techniques (microphones and amplifiers).

The scientific methods proposed, therefore, were drawn from across the range of physics, chemistry and biology. Experience in such methods could be sourced from other UK government branches, not only Porton Down (for the chemical tracker, the defoliants), but also the Admiralty (infra-red), Ministry of Defence (infra-red, optics, acoustic techniques) and Air Ministry (helicopters).

Experience (such as with the Sniperscope and with defoliation) was transferred from British military operations in Malaya, where anti-colonial resistance had ignited. Inspiration also came from civil scientific and imperial fields: the idea of acoustic detection of hidden rooms, for example, came from archaeology, drawing from the means deployed to locate Etruscan tombs in Italy.

While the suggestions were mostly welcomed, this response was not universal. At least one defence official, speaking from experience, notably from Malaya, complained:

Most of the proposals contained in this report must be classed as “bright ideas” rather than serious suggestions. I am afraid the writer has in many cases strayed too far from the bounds of his own knowledge, and as he is a professional scientist there is a danger of too much weight being attached to what he says.

Experience has shown that attempts to exploit bright ideas, unless they are first subjected to critical examination, can lead to a lot of wasted effort with no result…⁵

Thus began ‘Operation DEMENTIA’, a plan to first test and then put into practice science-assisted modes of detecting EOKA activity in Cyprus.⁶ E.C. Williams, with Neville Gadsby, a Deputy Scientific Adviser to the Army Council at the War office, took executive lead. The Air Ministry and Ministry of Supply worked together to send ‘to Cyprus for an experiment … Hastings aircraft fitted with the infra-red thermal mapping equipment’⁷  Porton Down sourced castoreum and defoliants, while the Ministry of Supply sorted the helicopters⁸  Even the Road Research Laboratory was approached for help with acoustic measurement. It was a mobilisation of both military and civilian expertise.

Many of the suggestions fell by the wayside. A party sent out to Cyprus from the Royal Radar Establishment, Malvern, quickly determined that thermal mapping of hides failed. (Infra-red film had also been of limited use in Malaya.) Flourescent contamination needed a further round of experiment in which soldiers bivouaced at Lulworth, on the Dorset coast, for several nights, were then surveilled to see how far flourescent material has spread by contact. Nevertheless, other innovations, such as use of the Sniperscope were deemed ‘most useful’⁹. Sycamore helicopters and Land Rovers were equipped with the means to spray castoreum, and staff trained in their use, as was witnessed by Titt on a return visit to Cyprus in May 1958¹⁰. A trial on the southern slopes of the Kyrenian range demonstrated that dogs could follow a new trail (although the dog handler erroneously called the dogs off and it was subsequently found the animals were on track), although it was also realised that false trails of “Titt’s Perfume” (as the soldiers named castoreum) created by the ubiquitous goats, sheep, donkeys and feral dogs on the island were a serious problem¹¹

Operation Dementia was a case of the deployment of Cold War defence research expertise in support on colonial control. Its timing is curious. The immediate cycle of violence in Cyprus had started in 1954-5. On the night of the 31 March 1955, EOKA detonated the broadcasting station above Nicosia, and simultaneously attacked police stations and army camps. In the following months schoolchildren rioted and stoned soldiers, EOKA bombed post offices, the British Institute in Nicosia was burned to the ground in September 1955, and a state of emergency declared in November. The British had cancelled the annual and traditional summer retreat to Mount Troodos, which was now in EOKA control. Greek-Turkish tensions intensified. In March 1956, in a grave mistake that forestalled chances of negotiation, the Greek Cypriot leader and ethnarch Archbishop Makarios was deported to the Seychelles. In May, Michael Karaolis, convicted of the murder of a police officer, was hanged, and brutal reprisals, on both British and Greek Cypriot sides, followed. Field Marshal Harding launched two operations, one of which, Operation LUCKY ALPHONSE, targeted finding the leader of EOKA, Colonel Grivas, in the Troodos mountains ¹². But spring 1957 saw an relative easing of the conflict. Grivas declared a truce (which lasted until August). Makarios returned to Cyprus, to Greek Cypriot jubilation, in March. It is in this period of calm that the request for ‘scientific assistance’ was issued.

While the immediate source of expertise for Operation DEMENTIA was Porton Down, a wide range of UK research establishments and military organisation was mobilised. The problem of locating Grivas’s EOKA terrorists/freedom fighters even prompted members of the British general public, and military veterans, to write to the War Office offering their own “bright ideas” (one Dr Davison of Dunfermline, for example, suggested traceable radioactive isotopes spread on ‘something the terrorist is certain to steal – ammunition or explosives’, while another came across an American idea to deny territory to a ‘potential aggressor by sowing the frontier with atomic waste products’¹³. The usual assumption is that 1957 was turning point, post-Suez, wihen the Sandys defence white paper articulated the policy of reducing military commitments overseas. But Operation DEMENTIA, with its turn to science and technology is,perhaps, also, in a small way, a reminder that decreasing the size of human military forces was accompanied by a doubling-down on the appeal to science and technology.

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