The evidence, which continues to accumulate, is so extensive as to be impossible to recapitulate here. It derives principally from the War Diaries of British units involved, and eyewitness accounts by those present, including numerous British soldiers. Much of this was set out at length in Lord Bethell's book The Last Secret and my Victims of Yalta, and so far as I am aware has never until now been disputed. In view of the extraordinary amount of publicity which this disgraceful event has generated over the past quarter of a century, I fear you must be lying when you claim that you are, 'not aware of any evidence to support such allegations'. If there be an alternative explanation, I am sure you will provide it.

'This matter has been investigated thoroughly in the past'
What has this to do with my request?

I note that you are careful not to specify what constituted the 'thorough investigation'. Since the Foreign Office discounts the evidence published in Lord Bethell's and my books, I presume that the reference can only be to the 'Cowgill Report' commissioned by the Foreign Office in 1986, initially in order to clear the name of Harold Macmillan, and subsequently to assist Lord Aldington in his libel action against me. The most prominent member of the 'Cowgill Committee' was as you will know the former Permanent Under-Secretary, Lord Brimelow, who was in 1945 one of the most ruthless advocates of forced repatriation. As his close friend Tam Daizell ND noted in his obituary of 4^th August 1995 in the Independent:

Count Nikolai Tolstoy published a book, The Minister and the Massacre (1986), bitterly criticising Lord Aldington and others. A committee was set up by the Foreign Office, under the Chairmanship of Brigadier Anthony Cowgill, including the journalist Christopher Booker and Brimelow. They published a properly thought-out report on the whole horrible business, "The Repatriation from Austria in 1945"'.

If this is not the 'thorough investigation' to which you refer, are you able to reveal what it was?

In seeking to justify the atrocities, you write:

'The members of the 15^th (Cossack) Cavalry Corps and their dependents were resident within the internationally recognised boundaries of the USSR at the start of WWII'.

While this is true of many of that body, it is notorious that a minority were demonstrably not, being emigrants who had never lived in the USSR, and consequently bore passports of Western European countries or League of Nations (Nansen) certificates as stateless persons. You will also be aware that nearly 1,000 German and Austrian officers and NCOs of the 15^th Cossack Cavalry Corps were delivered to the Soviets at the same time, most of whom died in Soviet slave labour camps. Do I take it that it is now the official Foreign Office policy view that they too 'were resident within the internationally recognised boundaries of the USSR at the start of WWII'?

In seeking to establish against all the evidence that every Russian handed over in Austria was a Soviet citizen, you are careful to confine your comments to the Cossack Cavalry Corps, the majority of whom were Soviet nationals. May I enquire why you so carefully omit mention of the entirely separate body of 25,000

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