In 1989 Lord Aldington initiated and won a record £1.5 million (plus £500,000 costs) in a libel case against Nikolai Tolstoy and Nigel Watts, who had accused him of war crimes in Austria during his involvement in the Repatriation of Cossacks at Lienz, part of Operation Keelhaul at the end of the Second World War. Tolstoy had written several books ("Victims of Yalta" in 1977, "Stalin's Secret War" in 1981, "The Minister and the Massacres" in 1986) about the alleged complicity of British politicians and officers with Stalin's forces in the murder of White Russian exiles from Soviet Rule, Cossacks, Croatian paramilitaries and collaborationist fugitives from Tito, as well as 11,000 Slovenian anti-communist fighters.