Man Hunt

One evening last week commandos of the Royal Marines waited silently on the darkening slopes of Cyprus' 6,000-ft. Troodos Mountains. Peering through binoculars they watched a village woman .slowly climb a pine-covered hillside, drop her bulky load and return the way she had come. Sten guns at the ready, the marines in camouflaged battledress leaped swiftly from their lookout and arrived just in time to round up seven E.O.K.A. terrorists who had moved down to collect their supplies.

It was one episode in a campaign dubbed Operation Lucky Alphonso, involving 5,000 British troops in the biggest military undertaking since Malaya. Object of the sweep: to catch George Grivas, the British-trained ex-Greek army officer who reportedly masterminds the E.O.K.A. terrorist underground from a mountain hideout. By week's end the marines had narrowed the squeeze to a last four square miles in the Troodos.

While the search for Grivas went on, the British government continued in public to strike as unrelenting an attitude as ever. In London a detachment of Scotland Yard men rounded up roly-poly Father Kallinikos Macheriotis, Cyprus-born abbot of a Greek Rite church, as he cooked his solitary supper of beef and eggs, and deported him summarily to Greece. The angriest questions of Labor M.P.s failed to wring from government ministers any more than the bare statement that his activities "went beyond any legitimate ecclesiastical duties and were not in the public interest." Despite this unyielding attitude in public there were signs that both the British and the Greeks were increasingly desirous of ending their cold war. The exiled Archbishop Makarios' former secretary and right-hand man, Nikos Kranidiotis, showed up in London with a proposal that he and the other five members of the archbishop's advisory council would be glad to relay any new British offers to Makarios, and Makarios himself wrote a letter suggesting that the gap between him and the British before his exile last March "was not wide." Still, if the British could only get their hands on Grivas, they would feel in a much stronger bargaining position.

At week's end violence claimed the first American life on Cyprus. Terrorists tossed two bombs into a tiny Nicosia restaurant, killed U.S. Vice Consul William P. Boteler, 26, wounded three other American members of the consular staff in Nicosia as they sat at dinner.

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