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33Washington. The Vulcans we had just given to the USAF; they hadprobes on, didn%u2019t they? Yes, they did. What followed was veryembarrassing. A small team of RAF technicians hurried across theAtlantic. They arrived in civilian clothes and went sneaking aroundUSAF museums, surreptitiously removing the Vulcan probes. At the endof the war, I got a signal from Castle AFB Museum congratulating us onour success and demanding the immediate return of stolen property.Forgive me if I now digress even further from our central theme andtell you a story which has absolutely nothing to do with Anglo-Americanrelations, but is, I think, worth the telling. In that first week after Mrs Thad said the fleet would sail south, I had to go up to the UN to chair ameeting of the United Nations Military Staff Committee %u2013 the mostmoribund committee ever devised by man. Before leaving for New York,I was told that the Buenos Aires newspapers had been headlining a reportthat a British nuclear submarine had been detected operating off thecoast of Argentina. I knew that to be wrong, but it was good newsbecause, if they even thought a nuclear submarine was in the offing itwas almost as good as having one there. Back in the UN, we draggedourselves through the motions of our dreary meeting and I then stoppedto speak to my French colleague near the conference room door. TheSoviet representative that day happened to be an admiral and he brushedmy shoulder on his way out. He did not stop or even look at me. He justkept going through the doorway, but a question floated back over hisshoulder: %u2018Are our submarines being of any help?%u2019.Soviet admirals were not the only ones whose behaviour wasperplexing. One particular thorn in our sides for most of the war wasAdmiral Stansfield Turner, USN retired and ex-CIA, whose dailybriefing on morning television we watched with bated breath. Thetrouble was that he was much too good. His predictions about what theBrits would do next were often too close to the truth for comfort. It waspossible to imagine that our opponents were sitting around taking notes.We never managed to think of a way to restrain the phenomenon of theretired military analyst, but it is something that allies need to be awareof.In the real war, one problem proved to be that of providing aircrewwith reasonable living conditions. It soon became obvious that thecombination of a vast increase in flying hours and rough livingconditions on Ascension (tents on lava next to generators running day