AYIOS NIKOLAOS• 29New York, which operated under the cover ofBritish Security Co-
ordination. Ayer arrived in November 1941 and spent 18 months in
Manhattan collating agents’ reports from South America. In mid-
1943 he returned to SOE’s headquarters inBaker Streetin the hope
of playing a more active role in the war, but he was instead assigned
to SOE’s mission in Accra as transport officer, an appointment not
without irony considering that Ayer had never learned to drive. Pre-
dictably, this posting proved unsuccessful and Ayer returned to Lon-
don work in the SOE’sF Sectionunder the regional controller, Robin
Brook, ‘‘reading and analyzing the wireless messages, reports and
other documents that were constantly reaching us from France.’’ In
autumn 1943, Ayer was dispatched to Algiers, where he came in con-
tact withMalcolm Muggeridge, who was in the same city working
for SIS.
Late in 1944 Ayer was brought back to London and was switched
to SIS. Initially he was placed in the same section as Clive, but in
January 1945 he was attached to the SIS station in Paris. This ap-
pointment lasted just a few months and, by November 1945, he was
back at Oxford to establish his reputation as one of the great philoso-
phers of the century. Although Ayer gave a full account of his activi-
ties on behalf of SOE in his autobiographyPart of My Life(1977),
he never admitted his SIS connections. He died in June 1989.AYIOS NIKOLAOS.Above the village of Ayios Nikolaos in western
Cyprus, perched high in the Troodos Mountains, is aGCHQinter-
cept site managed by theComposite Signals Organisation. A for-
merIntelligence Corpscorporal,John Berry, disclosed its role,
monitoring Iraqi wireless traffic, in an article published inTime Out
in May 1976, resulting in his prosecution. During the Cold War,
about 1,000 civilian and military personnel from 9 Signal Regiment
manned the base and its outstation on Mount Olympus.
In June 1985 several young airmen and three soldiers from 9 Sig-
nal Regiment were charged under theOfficial Secrets Actwith hav-
ing disclosed vast quantities of information about the base to Soviet
intelligence officers, supposedly entrapped and blackmailed after at-
tending homosexual orgies. The prosecution was almost wholly de-
pendent on confessions extracted by the Royal Air Force provost
police, and after a trial lasting 115 days—the longest and most ex-