97499 St.S.
NOTHING TO BE WRITTEN IN THIS MARGIN
L
Registry No.
Top Secret. Secret.
Confidential. Restricted.
Unclassified.
DRAFT
To:-
Type 1 +
From
Telephone No. & Ext.
Department
we thought-we
we should
Shether agreed to continuing
it has now two days to god,
Peking
એ
made a protest to Mr. Hopson or publicised the
authering him
be
incident, should to offer a short
and straightforward explanation of what actually
happened. At the same time,
incident was under further investigation.
could say the
the remainder of the current exercis
(No. 4
On
we were
exercise we
advised by the Ministry of Defence and the
Commonwealth Office representatives that this
was a routine training exercise within the
discretion of the C. in C. F.E.,
by the Govern of Hong Kong.
as advised
They said
that it would be impracticable to exercise
close control of such exercises from London
and undesirable to prevent the troops exercising
an visits to Hong Kong with their equipment. The helicopters in
particular had to be frequently flown, other-
wise they ceased to be operative. Our view
was that, in the present tense atmosphere in
Hong Kong and with the ever present possibility
of provoking Peking, it would have been desirable
not to have held even these routine exercises
which involv
the
use of helicopters which, as
involvingise
has been shown, can make navigational errors.
howwers
ed that as this exercise was now under
We agreed, that
way and had already been publicised as purely.
routine, to cancel it at this stage would
appear to be a climb-down and might, therefore, have a harmful effect on public morale in the Colony.
1
/Ministry
')