AUTONOMOUS• 27This in turn irritatedWinston Churchill, who had not been fully
briefed aboutautonomous. Perhaps confusing Tom Masterson, the
head of SOE’s Romanian section inCairowho had played an active
part in sabotaging the Romanian oilfields during World War I, with
Ivor Porter, Churchill wroteAnthony Edenin May:
Why were these two... important oil men picked? It does seem to me that
SOE barges in an ignorant manner into all sorts of delicate situations....
It is a very dangerous thing that the relations of two mighty forces like the
British Empire and the USSR should be disturbed by these little pinpricks
interchanged by obscure persons playing the fool below the surface.autonomousbecame a major embarrassment to the government at
a very delicate moment, whenEdward Boxshall’s father-in-law,
Prince Barbu Stirbey, had arrived in Cairo to secretly negotiate an
armistice on behalf of Marshal Antonescu, another development that
was bound to alienate the Soviets. The solution was to invite the Rus-
sians to participate in the secret discussions, and Ambassador Novi-
kov helped settle the terms of the Romanian surrender. These were
conveyed to Bucharest over theautonomouswireless link, but
when Antonescu read the Soviet conditions, he rejected them. De
Chastelain dutifully reported this to Cairo but unwisely used rather
undiplomatic language, not realizing that SOE’s telegrams were
being shown to the Russians as a belated demonstration of good faith.
De Chastelain’s candor in supporting Romanian objections to what
amounted to a Soviet occupation was not appreciated by the Kremlin,
and once again Foreign Minister Molotov berated Churchill, who re-
sponded by suspending all of SOE’s operations into the Balkans. In
May the Foreign Office instructed de Chastelain to cease transmit-
ting.
The impasse continued until the end of August 1944 when a Roy-
alist coup swept Antonescu from power and theautonomousmis-
sion found itself released from captivity—and the only British
representation in Bucharest. In the absence of any working radio
transmitters, de Chastelain was flown to Istanbul by the new regime,
of which Rica Georgescu happened to be a leading member, to ex-
plain the situation, leaving Porter as the sole British representative in
the capital. He was later absorbed into the new British diplomatic