be turned into journalism, not only in acres of newsprint devoted to the story and based upon several books on the subject, but also in a programme in the BBC historical series, Timewatch". After four years of investigation, in October 1990 the Cowgill committee published its report, The Repatriations from Austria in 1945 whose conclusions largely echoed those reached by Knight in 1986 that British policy in Austria was largely governed by preparations for a possible war with Yugoslavia and perhaps the Soviet Union as well. About Tolstoy's allegations that Macmillan was a major war criminal, the Cowgill committee concluded that Macmillan's role in the repatriations was very small and largely dictated by military considerations. During its investigation, the Cowgill committee found copies of British documents that were not available in the Public Record Office among the personal papers of Alexander Comstock Kirk, a gay American diplomat who donated all of his personal papers from his death to the National Archives in Washington. In a column published in the Sunday Times on 21 October 1990, Robert Harris accused the Cowgill committee of a "whitewash", and maintained that Tolstoy's claims that Britain had willfully sent thousands of people to their deaths in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia was still correct. Cowgill sued Harris and the Times for libel and the case was settled out of court with the Times agreeing to donate to a charity of Cowgill's choice, in this case the Army Benevolent Fund. By contrast, the journalist Daniel Johnson wrote on 19 October 1990: "As Cowgill shows, Macmillan was telling the truth; that he had merely advised officers on the ground that Allied policy under the Yalta agreement was to hand back the Cossacks and he had, like everybody else, had been unaware that a large number of them were Russian emigres." In 1992, Sir Carol Mather, a veteran turned Conservative MP wrote in his memoirs Aftermath of War: Everyone Must Go Home that the overwhelming feeling shared by himself and other British Army officers in Austria in 1945 was that the Cossacks had willingly fought for Nazi Germany and had committed terrible atrocities against Italian civilians while fighting against Italian partisans in 1944–1945, meaning no-one had any sympathy for them. By contrast, Major Harold Lunghi who served as part of the British Military Mission in Moscow during World War Two and was closely involved in the talks to