city of Trieste while Britain supported retaining Trieste within Italy. As Yugoslavia was a Soviet ally in 1945, there were very real fears at the time that an Anglo-Yugoslav war could easily escalate into an Anglo-Soviet war. Knight argued that the forced repatriations in Austria undertaken in May 1945 were at least in part an effort to calm down a very tense situation. Knight maintained that the British wanted to clear Austria of all the vast number of prisoners they had taken to free up soldiers now struck guarding the prisoners for a possible war with Yugoslavia and to improve relations by returning peoples who were the enemies of the Yugoslav and Soviet governments. Both the Yugoslav and Soviet governments believed the British were intending to use Axis collaborationist forces such as the Cossack corps against them. To help resolve the raging controversy, Brigadier Anthony Cowgill formed a committee consisting of himself; a former diplomat and "Russia hand" Lord Brimelow, and Christopher Booker, a journalist well known for his conservative views. Cowgill believed that the honour of the British Army had been smeared, but Booker was a supporter of Tolstoy when he joined the committee in 1986. Between 2 October-30 November 1989, the much publicised libel trial of Tolstoy vs. Aldington took place and ended with the jury ruling in the favour of the latter and awarding him £1.5 million. The judgement, which forced Tolstoy into bankruptcy, was widely criticized as excessive and unfair. The way in which the Ministry of Defence supplied Aldington with certain documents that were denied to Tolstoy has been an especially controversial aspect of the trial, and Tolstoy continues to maintain that he was a victim of "the Establishment". Tolstoy retained a loyal set of defenders consisting of the Conservative MP Bernard Braine, the philosopher Roger Scruton, the journalist Chapman Pincher, the writer Nigel Nicolson, Lord Cranborne and from farther afield Solzhenitsyn, who was living in exile in the United States at the time. The Tolstoy vs. Aldington case attracted much publicity as the British journalist Hugo de Burgh wrote: "From 1989 to 1993 a historical investigation became news in tabloid and broadsheet media alike as argument raged over the merits of combatants in a struggle over who might have done what over a few days in 1945. The case of "the Cossacks" has been perhaps the single most prominent example of historical investigation to