Hainworth spent five-year stint in Tokyo, which was still devastated by wartime firebombings, then, after a spell in London and 30 months in Bucharest, where he experienced communist dictatorship at its most repressive, he was sent to the Nato defence college in Paris. However, the Suez crisis meant he was dispatched to the office of the political adviser to the commander of British forces in the Middle East, based in Nicosia in Cyprus. During the summer and autumn of 1956 that office was caught up on the one hand with the Greek Cypriot insurgency against British rule, on the other with the Anglo-French planning for the attack on Egypt.