In Chapter 3 (Dragon’s Teeth: Cyprus and the Greek junta) of his Cyprus: Hostage to History, Christopher Hitchens shows how the Greek junta, which usurped power in Athens, in 1967, came to see the violent overthrow of Cyprus’ democracy and the division of the island with Turkey as a means to justify its illegitimate rule internally and serve the interests of its main ally, the USA, which had since 1964 decided that the optimum ‘settlement’ for Cyprus was to abolish the Republic of Cyprus and partition the island between NATO allies, Turkey and Greece. What stood in the way of this outcome, Athens, Ankara and Washington believed, was President Makarios.
6. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 3: Dragon’s Teeth: Cyprus and the Greek junta.
Something from Cyprus as I may divine… It is a business of some heat
William Shakespeare, Othello
In 1964 George Papandreou was the Prime Minister of Greece. In June he paid a visit to President Lyndon Johnson in Washington, (where there was an abortive attempt at a summit meeting with Prime Minister Ismet Inonu of Turkey). The visit was not a success. The Acheson Plan for the partition of Cyprus was not acceptable to Greek opinion. Johnson did more than hint that NATO aid might be withdrawn from Greece if it persisted in its obduracy, and that the United States might not defend Greece from a Turkish incursion into the Aegean. The elder Papandreou countered that, ‘in that case, Greece might have to rethink the advisability of belonging to NATO’. Johnson struck a fresh note when he riposted that, ‘maybe Greece should rethink the value of a parliament which could not take the right decision’. This was an astonishing way for the President of the United States to address the Prime Minister of a sovereign allied nation. But it was to be surpassed by the outburst to which LBJ treated Alexander Matsas, the Greek ambassador, a short time afterwards. The ambassador had told the President that, ‘No Greek government could accept such a plan.’ Johnson retorted:
‘Fuck your parliament and your constitution. America is an elephant, Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If these two fellows continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant’s trunk, whacked good… If your Prime Minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament and constitution, he, his parliament and his constitution may not last very long.’
In order to rub in his point, and the contempt that lay behind it, Johnson added, ‘Don’t forget to tell old Papa-what’s-his-name what I told you – you hear?’
In July 1965 King Constantine of Greece, backed by the traditional Right in the army and in politics, perverted the Greek constitution and dismissed George Papandreou as Premier. It was, yet again, General George Grivas who provided the pivot between these forces by his decisive position in Cyprus. Grivas was hostile to Archbishop Makarios and, as we have seen, very friendly with Washington. He was also much more ‘understanding’ of the Turkish position than his ultra nationalist rhetoric would have suggested. When Andreas Papandreou, in concert with Makarios, rejected the Acheson Plan, Grivas retaliated swiftly. He circulated documents, later established even before a military court as blatant forgeries, which alleged that there was a revolutionary conspiracy within the Greek army, owing its allegiance to Andreas Papandreou. The reactionary Defence Minister Petros Garoufalias, who was later to become an apologist for the real military conspiracy, gave currency to the allegations, which became known, after the name of the fictitious conspiracy, as the ‘Aspida’ affair. It was for seeking the resignation of Garoufalias, and for seeking to uncover his connection with Grivas in Cyprus, that the elder Papandreou came into conflict with King Constantine and was forced from office himself. As the younger Papandreou put it in his book Democracy at Gunpoint, written in exile in 1971, ‘Cyprus lies at the heart of the tragic political developments that have led to the death of democracy in Greece.’
After the King’s unconstitutional putsch, there followed an undignified two years of caretaking and powerbroking, but it proved impossible to sanctify a legitimate pseudo-conservative government in office. But there was, in fact, a conspiracy being prepared in the armed forces. I have interviewed General George Koumanakos, Greece’s most decorated officer, and then of the Military Staff College, who told me how in 1965 he was approached by a senior official of the United States embassy (whose name he gave me). Koumanakos had been a commander of Greek forces in the Korean war, and had many American friends. He was known as a strong anti-Communist. What his visitor wanted to know was, ‘George, why are you not coming in with us?’ Koumanakos suspected that there was a group of officers preparing to take political power, but he did not realize until then why they seemed so sure of themselves.
New elections were called for 28 May 1967, and Papandreou père et fils campaigned strenuously for a new mandate. They promised to keep the King within constitutional limits, to put the army under genuine civilian control, and to reduce Greek dependence on the favour of the United States.
They openly challenged the unelected ‘para-state’ that had ruled Greece since the end of the civil war in 1949. The principal institutions of the ‘para-state’ were the Palace, the General Staff, elements of the Church hierarchy and the American embassy. Their ancillaries were the KYP (the Greek subsidiary of the CIA) and the Joint US Military Aid Group Greece (JUSMAGG). The ‘para-state’ had shown its power before, in the 1961 elections, characterized by extensive violence and fraud, which resulted in the return of Constantine Karamanlis and his centre-right National Radical Union (ERE). It had shown its fangs in the murder of the Socialist deputy Gregory Lambrakis in Salonika in 1963, and in the attempts to protect the culprits in that murder. Soon thereafter, even Karamanlis himself had felt the force of the ‘para-state’ when he tangled with the ex-Nazi Queen Frederika, whose relations with the American embassy and with extreme conservative politicians were famously intimate. (There had even been protests from staff at the embassy who had had to spend official time planning for her shopping needs.) In that confrontation, it was Karamanlis who had to abdicate.
On 21 April 1967, the ‘para-state’ decided that it could no longer coexist with formal democracy, and decided to forestall a Papandreou election victory by seizing power. Historians and analysts have argued since about American complicity in the military coup, but they have argued only about the extent of it. Many authoritative writers assert that the United States was preparing to support a later, more ‘respectable’ coup, commanded by generals rather than by the undistinguished colonels who actually struck on 21 April. The evidence for this opinion is mainly negative – there was ‘surprise’ at senior levels of the State Department and the American embassy, and many senior intelligence operatives claimed to have been caught napping. Evidence for direct American complicity is also somewhat suggestive. Colonel George Papadopoulos, who led the coup had been on the payroll of the CIA since 1952 and acted as the chief liaison officer between the Greek KYP and its senior partner in Langley, Virginia. Moreover, he had used a NATO contingency plan, designed to counter unrest in the event of ; ‘hot’ war in the Balkans, to activate his putsch.
In his book, Prescriptions for Prosperity (1983), Lyndon Johnson’s former friend and confidant Eliot Janeway describes a visit to Athens with Senator Vance Hartke in the autumn of 1966: ‘To our surprise, our visit coincided with the preliminaries for the Greek military putsch, sponsored by the CIA and the DIA (the undercover Defense Intelligence Agency, an arm of the Department of Defense).’ Janeway recounts Johnson’s rage at his disclosure of this in a confidential bulletin. The elephant’s trunk was getting ready to strike.
The dispute about the United States’ complicity in the junta is, in any case, based on a false antithesis. The United States administration had sown the dragon’s teeth that sprang up in the shape of the junta. The administration gave encouragement, training and materials to the anti-constitutional forces before the coup, and it became their patron and protector for seven years afterwards.
Cyprus, and the person of General Grivas, continued to form an important element in the junta’s plan. Grivas had made it known publicly that he considered himself to be under orders from Athens while he commanded the Cyprus National Guard. He might bellow for enosis but he was working for partition all the same. The junta’s own Cyprus strategy confirmed this rather tortuous analysis. It spoke continually of a cleansed and reborn country: ‘a Greece for Christian Greeks’. It inveighed against all weakness and decadence, and it flirted with ideas of a greater (which is to say larger) Greece. But, like all similar Fascist systems, it was fundamentally unpatriotic, and engaged in furtive mortgaging of Greek interests to outsiders. The nationalist trumpetings were for mass consumption only – a task made easier by the forcible monopoly of Greek press and media which the junta now enjoyed.
Papadopoulos, the new strong man, went to a meeting with the Turkish mainland leadership on the border between the two countries at the Evros river. The meeting was intended to consummate a secret Paris meeting held between the Greek Admiral Toumbas and the Turkish minister Ihsan Caglayangil. It would have proclaimed enosis while conceding the basis for partition, and would have made the junta appear ‘statesmanlike’. This grandiose démarche got Papadopoulos nowhere. The Turks knew that extra Greek forces had been secretly placed on Cyprus under previous governments and demanded their withdrawal. Only with this proviso would the Turks agree to the Acheson proposal for a carve-up between the two countries. They sensed an advantage with the untried Greek government and were determined to press it home. Next month, in November 1967, General Grivas launched attacks on two Turkish Cypriot villages – Ayios Theodoros and Kophinou. The Turks once more threatened invasion, and the Greek government had to admit that it, rather than the Cypriot government, was responsible for Grivas’s action. No better excuse could be found for the withdrawal of the 12,000 extra Greek troops from Cyprus, as well as of Grivas himself. With the good offices of Cyrus Vance, this was done. Henceforth, whether a Turkish invasion of the island took place on a good pretext or a bad one, it would be substantially unopposed. And the Turks had another justification for pointing to Greek perfidy.
Among the officers and men withdrawn to Greece that year were many democrats and patriots, who were gradually to be purged from the army altogether. Their replacements (because a small, legal Greek contingent still remained, as did a Turkish one) were to be hand-picked for their fanaticism and their indoctrination. The Acheson Plan, like many United States policies, might look superficially rational even if a bit crude, but those chosen to execute it were anything but rational.
While the balance was shifting against him in Athens and in other capitals, Archbishop Makarios had been consolidating his position in Cyprus. He had won almost unanimous political support from all the civilian parties. And two international developments had strengthened his position.
The first of these had come in 1965, with the report of the United Nations special mediator in Cyprus, Senor Galo Plaza of Ecuador. In his report to the UN Secretary-General, U Thant, Galo Plaza rejected the idea of partition and affirmed the right of the island to remain united and independent. He also opposed the physical separation of the two communities within the island, and strongly implied that the Turkish leadership was practising a form of self-segregation with partitionist objectives in mind. He called for a charter of rights for the Turkish Cypriots, to be supervised and enforced by the United Nations presence. And he called (rather more vaguely since he had no jurisdiction over the British bases) for the island to be ‘demilitarized’. Most of this was at least acceptable to the majority of the Greek Cypriots (Andreas Papandreou in his Democracy at Gunpoint described Makarios as ‘jubilant’ about it, Robert Stephens in his Cyprus: A Place of Arms, as less than that). In any event, the Cyprus government officially welcomed the report.
Makarios thought that he had also kept the Turks at bay in the larger context. When President Ismet Inonu had threatened to invade Cyprus, he had been told to refrain in almost intolerably brusque terms by President Johnson. Johnson told Inonu that if he sent his invasion fleet to the island, the United States would not feel obliged to guarantee his country against any Soviet response. Humiliated, Inonu climbed down. From this episode can be dated a Greek Cypriot superstition that somehow the United States would ‘never allow’ a Turkish invasion.
By 1968, it is probably fair to say that Makarios enjoyed general support in Cyprus for his policy of independence. True, most Greek Cypriots still felt Greek, and celebrated Greek national holidays with feeling as they had done for centuries past. But the economy was doing well out of independence, and a class of specifically Cypriot entrepreneurs was emerging. The reputation of Makarios abroad was high; higher than if he had been a prelate or regional chieftain in Greece itself. At home he was perhaps the only political leader in the world who could genuinely gain ninety per cent of the votes in an unfettered election.
Yet all of these gains were under threat. The Turkish government rejected the Galo Plaza report (again, Ankara announced its rejection before the Turkish Cypriots had said anything) and succeeded finally in securing Plaza’s resignation. There were people in Makarios’s own entourage, notably the Interior Minister, Polycarpos Georgadjis, who disliked the renunciation of enosis which acceptance of the report implied. In Athens the junta was crushing all opposition even from the feeble King Constantine. And, by the end of 1968, Richard Nixon had been elected President of the United States. The Nixon administration and the junta both detested Makarios, and both owed each other favours.
Students of the art of coup-making have had a great deal of field-research experience in the last decade or so. It is now quite well understood that those who wish to replace a popular government by force must proceed carefully. There must be pretexts, there must be uncertainty, there must be a good cause in which the deed is apparently done. Meanwhile there are newspapers to be ‘influenced’ and politicians to be ‘brought over’. There are ugly elements – assassins, smugglers and the like – who are indispensable but who must be, in the argot of the trade, ‘deniable’. There are backers who must be protected; their investment becomes worthless if it is disclosed.
In its campaign to remove Makarios and to achieve ‘enosis by partition’, the Greek junta had several major allies. It did not, however, have them operating in harmony. It enjoyed a monopoly of force in Greece, and a sizeable presence in Cyprus. It had the Greek flag, with which to confuse simple- minded patriots. It had the allegiance of disparate Cypriot forces who felt that Makarios had reneged on enosis, but these were volatile. It had the Turkish and Turkish Cypriot leadership, who officially detested all Greek aspirations but who might hope for something if the seemingly impregnable Makarios were removed. And it had the Americans, who regarded Makarios as a pest, who had not forgiven him his obduracy in 1964, and who had an interest in removing Cyprus from the grasp of a professed ‘neutralist’.
Not all of these forces wanted the same thing for the same reasons, and few of them could be seen to act at the behest of, or even in concert with, western Europe’s most brutal and unpopular government. It was, all the same, a formidable list of enemies for the agile Makarios to confront – whether separately, in sequence or all at once.
All of these enemies conducted their policy on two levels. The Greek junta had to affect concern for the Greek Cypriots and for ‘Hellenism’. It maintained formally correct relations with the Republic of Cyprus, though it suspected its government (correctly) of sheltering anti-junta Greeks from the mainland. The Turkish government, which was undergoing frequent changes and experiencing painful political upheavals at home, and which was moving towards its own experience of military rule, continued with its long-established policy. That is to say it presented itself internationally as the guarantor of a threatened minority. And it persisted with its long-term advocacy of partition. Under United Nations auspices, both sides on the island paid lip-service to the intercommunal talks; a long-running and patient but generally disappointing exercise conducted by Glafkos Clerides, a senior Greek Cypriot lawyer and parliamentarian, on the one side and Rauf Denktash, of whom more later, on the other. Both men were political conservatives, with British legal backgrounds. Beneath their politesse the basic differences lay unresolved. Progress on the intercommunal front was indeed being made, but it was made, as Galo Plaza had pointed out, because of the decency of the Cypriot people and their long, if not now unbroken, history of village-level friendship.
The United States administration also operated on what Washington jargon nowadays calls a ‘two-track’ system. Although it was not a formal or legal guarantor, America had extensive treaty commitments to Greece and Turkey, and maintained a large embassy in Cyprus. It was also using the British ‘sovereign’ bases, with the tacit approval of Makarios, to overfly the Middle East with U-2 and other aircraft. In theory, its official policy was that of a powerful mediator with friends in all camps. In fact, it was becoming increasingly committed to the Fascist-minded junta in Athens. Here, a peculiar symbiosis emerged. The junta needed, for its own reasons, to do something about Cyprus that would vindicate its claim to have renewed Greek life and Greek pride. And the United States needed to use Cyprus to fortify its position in both Ankara and Athens. In this imperfect relationship, both sides thought that they could exploit the other. It was an understanding that was to have dismal consequences, based as it was on American complicity with the dictators, and the cynicism of the dictators about American aid.
This had severe results for Greece, as is now universally acknowledged. But it had appalling consequences for Cyprus. Beginning in 1970, the Colonels began a sustained campaign against President Makarios. The campaign was supposed to employ violence only as a last resort, after measures of political isolation had been taken. But, the Greek junta being what it was, the campaign was crude and violent from the start.
The first instrument of the Colonels was Polycarpos Georgadjis, the aforementioned Minister of the Interior. He had a record as an EOKA man, and also as a violent and conspiratorial individual. His position as minister, with its police links and secretive possibilities, had made him an over-mighty subject and had led Makarios to dismiss him in 1969. His willingness to accept outside commissions to ‘deal with’ local radicals, and his abuse of power, had made him intolerable as a member of an independent government. Out of office, Georgadjis agreed to work for Colonel Papapostolou, a Greek junta officer, in an early attempt to eliminate Makarios. In a conversation with his successor at the Interior Ministry, Mr Anastasiou, he boasted that, ‘the Americans are behind us’ and thus became the first of many naive conspirators to believe that he enjoyed an actual guarantee of immunity – ‘protection’ – from the most powerful country in the world. The American embassy in Nicosia, which under its ambassador David Popper was officially concerned with maintaining cordial relations, either did not know or did not care about CIA connections with Papapostolou and Georgadjis. At any rate, it warned Makarios of something that only the CIA could have known – the existence of a junta-backed assassination plot. It is no disrespect to Ambassador Popper to say that his warning raised as many questions as it answered. His CIA chief of station, Eric Neff, had close contacts with Georgadjis and with other anti-Makarios and junta agents (a legacy of that ‘underground contact’ established by George Ball). Neff would regale diplomatic circles with his opinion, which was that Makarios was a menace and should ‘go’. In the end it was Neff who went; recalled at the request of the Cyprus government. But before that, the friend and client of the loud American had made his move.
It was on 8 March 1970, almost a fortnight after Makarios received Popper’s warning, that his helicopter was shot down as it lifted off from the roof of the Presidential Palace. Though the pilot was horribly injured by the shots, the President was able to walk unscathed from the wreck and to set a precedent for many future narrow escapes. Georgadjis was detained while trying to board a flight in some haste, but was not held on condition that he did not try to leave the island. Ten days after the assassination attempt, he went to a night-time rendezvous with Colonel Papapostolou and another Greek officer. The promise to get him out of Cyprus was not kept. Instead, he was shot through the head. The CIA station in Athens overruled all calls for an inquiry. It was the Greek junta which planned both the assassination and, according to eye-witnesses, the silencing of the assassin.
Frustrated in its effort to get its way by a single stroke of murder, the junta began a broader campaign of subversion. It helped General Grivas to return secretly to the island, in violation of the 1967 agreement with Turkey. Grivas set about building a long-term terrorist underground, which he christened EOKA-B. This time, its targets were to be Greek Cypriots, especially Makarios supporters and the Communist and Socialist parties. At the more respectable level, but also with the connivance of Athens, a Co-ordination Committee for the Enosis Struggle (ESEA) was launched. It contained jurists and politicians, and was supported by newspapers receiving subventions from the junta.
While subversion and terror were being prepared underground, with Greek officers directly arming and training the members of EOKA-B and spreading its message among the young recruits of the National Guard, clumsy attempts were made to overthrow Makarios at the ‘political' level as well. After their narrow escape from exposure in the Georgadjis affair, neither the junta nor its patrons wanted to resort to force if they could avoid it. But Makarios, at the political level, could always out-general them. He easily survived a farcical attempt at an ‘ecclesiastical coup’, when three obscurantist Cypriot bishops (of Kition, Kyrenia and Paphos) made the astonishing discovery that he should resign because he was violating Canon Law. The clerics, all of whom were enosis fanatics closely linked to the Athens dictatorship, affected the belief that religion and politics did not mix. This was more than hypocrisy on their part; it was in conflict with the Church’s long role as spokesman for national aspirations. Makarios could not be beaten in his own synod, and it was the three bishops who ended up defrocked.
Defeated at the medieval, theological level, the junta switched to Cold War tactics in an effort to isolate and overthrow Makarios. In January and February 1972 it protested at his importing arms from Czechoslovakia to equip his police and security forces. Makarios was trying to build up a cadre that would be free of the taint of Athens and impervious to its infiltration. He was confronted by an arrogant letter from the Greek dictator George Papadopoulos, which demanded that he turn over the Czech weapons to the junta-officered National Guard, crack down on the Cypriot Left, and dismiss the Foreign Minister Spiros Kyprianou (now President of the Republic). Even as the letter was being delivered, junta and EOKA-B units were put on stand-by for a coup, in anticipation of Makarios’s refusal of the démarche. Significantly, the Turkish government supported the Greek junta in this exertion of pressure. At a NATO meeting in Lisbon, there had been a confidential meeting between the Greek and Turkish foreign ministers, Panayiotis Pipinelis and Ihsan Caglayangil, where the Turkish minister had given the junta a deadline to come up with a ‘final solution’ to the Cyprus problem.
Again, Makarios managed to outwit his foes by an adroit mixture of concessions and defiance. Spiros Kyprianou resigned without waiting to be sacked, which took some wind out of the junta’s sails. And the Cypriot police made surprise raids on EOKA-B hideouts (many Makarios loyalists were ex-members of the original EOKA, and knew the ropes). Unmistakable preparations for a coup were discovered, which Makarios boldly presented to the American embassy. Ambassador David Popper relayed the concern to Washington and to Athens, and Papadopoulos, caught off balance, was persuaded to stay his hand. But, in the course of his meeting with Makarios’s envoys, Popper uttered a sentence which has never been forgotten by Cypriots. Confronted with the evidence of a coup to be mounted by a foreign government enjoying warm relations with the United States, he said, ‘I am not authorized to tell you anything.’ This raised the inescapable question: if the United States government could get a coup called off, could it not also authorize one?
The patience, if that is the word, of the Athens junta was becoming exhausted. It wished, if at all possible, to present the coup as a rising by patriotic Cypriots against the ‘Red Priest’, whom it now referred to contemptuously by his baptismal name of ‘Mouskos’. But, with declining support in Cyprus, it had to rely increasingly on its own strength, and that of its backers. In early 1972 Leslie Finer visited Cyprus. He is a commentator with a well-earned reputation for expertise in Greek affairs, and a no less well-earned reputation for political moderation. As the correspondent for the BBC in Athens, he had originated reports and broadcasts considered authoritative and prescient. His report on this occasion, ‘The Colonels’ Bid for Cyprus’, appeared in the New Statesman of 10 March 1972, and deserves to be quoted at some length:
‘It is impossible, unless you see it with your own eyes, to imagine the extent to which this secret army of junta officers have penetrated the fabric of public life in Cyprus. Lavishly paid, enjoying all kinds of tax and customs privileges… and handling large sums of money for oiling the machine and winning friends, these mercenaries have firmly planted the flag of the Colonels in Cyprus.’
‘For the Colonels,’ wrote Finer, ‘Grivas provides the ideal fuse to ignite a conflict which would enable the Athens regime to intervene to “restore order” and finally close their grip on the island.’ He went on:
‘Is Grivas, then, so unsophisticated that he is unaware of his passive role as a tool of Athens, believing that he is fighting for his beloved enosis cause, yet actually helping towards the hated solution of partition? It would seem impossible. Yet, having collaborated painfully with the man for months over the English edition of his memoirs, I can testify that he is quite capable of that degree of obtuseness.’
George Ball had not then made public the secret agreement between Grivas and the CIA, so Mr Finer had to work from specialist knowledge and induction to write the following crucial sentences:
‘It is impossible to grasp what is happening in Cyprus now except on the basis that the Athens regime is paying for its keep by serving long-term American design: the removal of Makarios… It is, in other words, very far from a coincidence that the latest episode in the Cyprus crisis occurs simultaneously with the indecently hasty decision of President Nixon to override the Congress ban on arms shipments to Greece, and the continuing negotiations for a giant home base in the Piraeus for the United States’ Sixth Fleet.’
The American design was not, of course, limited to Cyprus. But during the two Nixon administrations, the Greek junta was more and more indulged by Washington. The Johnson administration had at least gone through the motions of disapproval, imposing a selective embargo on the shipment of arms and uttering occasional routine pieties about the eventual return of democracy.
On one famous occasion, Lyndon Johnson had even interceded to save Andreas Papandreou. In his memoirs, A Life in Our Times, Professor John Kenneth Galbraith tells how he approached LBJ on behalf of numerous American economists who had known Papandreou professionally while he was teaching in the United States. As Galbraith tells the story:
‘In the early-morning hours my phone rang once again. It was Nicholas Katzenbach, then Under-secretary of State, calling to read with a greatly audible chuckle a message he had just received from the President: “Call up Ken Galbraith and tell him that I’ve told those Greek bastards to lay off that son-of-a-bitch – whoever he is”.’
To the last, Johnson persisted in pretending not to know how to pronounce a perfectly easy Greek name. And, mutatis mutandis, the same suspicion applies to him as later applied to ambassador David Popper and the Nixon administration. If he could stop ‘those Greek bastards’ he could also start them.
However close American-Greek relations were under Johnson, with Nixon they became warm, rotten and corrupt. The extent of the intimacy between the junta and Washington has become better understood with the passage of time. It was only in 1983 that Seymour Hersh was able to reveal in his book The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House that the junta had directly contributed money to the Nixon-Agnew election campaign in 1968. Nixon’s ambassador to Athens, Henry Tasca, confirmed the transaction to a House of Representatives Intelligence Committee investigation. But this symbiotic relationship, involving arms sales, political favours and influence peddling, was possible only because of a pre-existing and durable ‘understanding’ between conservative military and political forces in both countries.
With Nixon, the practices of the junta, whether internal or external, were no further obstacle to American military aid. Vice President Agnew and Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans, among others, visited Athens and publicly praised the dictatorship. A senior American officer publicly compared the rule of the junta to the age of Pericles. Arms shipments, disguised as the sale of ‘surplus’ hardware, increased by $10 million each year until, on 22 September 1970, the embargo was formally lifted. National Security Decision Memorandum (NSDM) number 67, which found its way into Seymour Hersh’s hands, explicitly stated that the Nixon administration would take, ‘at face value and accept without reservation’ any assurances about democratic reform that Papadopoulos cared to make. This consummated the advice given a year earlier by Nixon to Henry Tasca: ‘We’ve got to restore military aid; as far as the rest is concerned, make it look as good as you can.’
The restoration of American arms sales was closely tied to another decision – the decision to ‘home-port’ the United States’ Sixth Fleet in Greece. The home-porting plan was ‘prematurely’ disclosed, to the press and to Congress, on 21 January 1972. The Pentagon and the State Department both expressed extreme annoyance. But, by September 1972, all formalities had been completed, and United States destroyers were dropping anchor in Phaliron Bay, outside Athens. A carrier task force soon followed. The architect of the home-porting agreement, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the Chief of Naval Operations, had to overcome sustained objections from Greek democrats and their supporters in Congress, led by Congress man Ben Rosenthal of New York. The administration attempted to evade the holding of hearings, but was outmanoeuvred and had to put its case in public. The result was not edifying. In an interview with Thomas Keagy and Yiannis Roubatis, authors of the definitive study of home-porting, Admiral Zumwalt made it clear that he ‘viewed the presence of a military government in Athens as an opportunity rather than a liability’. He also professed to believe that the Greek junta’s promises of a move to democracy, at some future indefinite time, were genuine. Rodger Davies of the State Department (who, as ambassador to Cyprus, was later to be killed during the violence created by the junta’s 1974 coup) took the same line, naive or cynical according to taste. He told Congress that, ‘a continuous, quiet diplomatic dialogue between the government of Greece and its allies is more conducive to the end [of restoring democracy] than open criticism and challenge’. This early exponent of ‘quiet diplomacy’ mistook, in his belief that ‘the only question is one of timing’, the real relationship between the two governments, and the real nature of the dictatorship. By home-porting its fleet under junta auspices, the United States became almost as dependent on the dictators as the dictators already were on the United States. A vested American interest in the survival of the junta had now been created. The description of the state of affairs which now became current – that the United States was ‘in bed’ with the Greek despots – was crude but unhappily accurate.
As in many similar cases, American leniency with the regime did not have the effect of mellowing, let alone of reforming it. Quite the contrary. Secure in its role as little Greek brother, the junta became markedly worse. In the summer of 1973, units of the Greek navy mutinied against the junta. This revolt, which challenged its claim to be a loyal and reliable defender of the West, caused the dictatorship to lash out even at conservative and monarchist officers whom it suspected of insufficient enthusiasm.
In November 1973 the students of the Athens Polytechnic, joined by numerous young members of the working class and the unemployed, rose against the Papadopoulos regime. Their protest was met with tanks and infantry and resulted in a heavy loss of life. But it put an end to a period of suspended animation in Greek politics. Exile and underground movements were galvanized. So was the hard core of the junta. Brigadier Dimitrios Ioannides, the head of the Greek Military Police (ESA) and a man long identified as the most ruthless member of the Papadopoulos junta, moved to replace his boss on 21 November. (It was Ioannides, it will be recalled, who had proposed the extermination of the Turkish Cypriots to Archbishop Makarios in 1964.) He could be reasonably certain that the American embassy, which occupied the building opposite his headquarters, would not object. For one thing, it had never protested about the torture which was known to go on in ESA’s basements, and which had been verified by the Council of Europe. For another, the Americans had been disappointed by the failure of Papadopoulos, one month earlier, to allow United States aircraft to use Greek airspace to resupply Israel during the Yom Kippur war. For another, numerous members of the Papadopoulos entourage had be come an embarrassment because of their corruption. The United States, as far as can be determined, did not involve itself in the fall of Papadopoulos. But nor did it try to keep him from being replaced. And it established a ‘business-as-usual’ relationship with his successor.
If Papadopoulos was a Fascist in the Mussolini mould, Ioannides was more like an authentic Nazi. He despised the laxness and corruption of his former associates; he was a sadist and a believer in extreme military cultism; he did not seek the love of his subjects as long as they feared him. He had been formed within a very narrow compass, knowing only Greece and Cyprus and those mainly through his experience in uniform. His genocidal proposal to Makarios was typical of him rather than exceptional. Having put Papadopoulos under house arrest and unleashed his secret police on all manifestations of dissent, Ioannides began to speed up the war on Makarios. Gone was the crafty policy of undermining Cyprus in unspoken concert with Turkey. The new dictator wanted ruthless, rapid results. And he still had the weapons bequeathed to him by his predecessors and by the Pentagon.
Conciliation was, for Ioannides, synonymous with cowardice. He now knew that Makarios was sheltering a number of anti-junta Greeks on Cyprus. He suspected Cypriot Leftists of involving themselves with the Polytechnic revolt. He had a bigoted antipathy to deals with Turkey, though some of his General Staff still felt that an agreement with Ankara was the only risk-free way to a version of enosis. One might say that Ioannides thought any enosis was better than none, and the United States thought that any partition was better than none. That belief in a workable coincidence of interests was to prove not just cynical but lethal. Within a year, it brought disaster to Cyprus and near-disaster to Greece and Turkey.
Kissinger
To concede to Henry Kissinger an omnipotence in decision making during the year 1974 is tempting but misleading. For one thing, it is to take him at his own valuation, and the valuation of his many admirers. As is customary in the case of ‘great statesmen’, when things go well they claim full credit. And when things do not go well, ineluctable and uncontrolled forces can be blamed. So it was with Kissinger over Cyprus. The Secretary of State, who normally loved to pose in front of the press and the public as a man on top of his brief and at ease with international affairs, preferred in this case to claim that it was all too complicated for him. A few days after the Greek junta threw all pretence aside and attacked the government of Cyprus in strength with tanks and artillery, Dr Kissinger told a press conference that, ‘The information was not lying around in the streets.’ Some years afterwards, he told Time magazine that, ‘If I had ever had twelve hours and been able to pick out an intelligence report, I would have seen that the situation needed attention.’
In as much as these and other statements represent a claim by Kissinger to have been taken off guard by the July 1974 coup, they are direct lies.
In the broadest possible sense, he cannot, as National Security Advisor or as Secretary of State have been unaware of United States policy favouring the partition of Cyprus since 1964. In a sense hardly less broad, he cannot, as Secretary of State, have been unaware of American commitments to the Greek junta, or of that junta’s commitment to the removal or overthrow of Makarios. In the specific sense of day-to-day policy, he may have ignored but cannot have forgotten the many warnings that he was given as early as March 1974.
Here, one must be pedantic. The United States administration knew of the impending coup against President Makarios and, at the very least, did nothing to prevent it. To be specific:
1. On 7 June 1974, the National Intelligence Daily, essential breakfast reading for all senior State Department, Pentagon and national security officials, quoted an American field report dated 3 June which stated that:
‘Ioannides claimed that Greece is capable of removing Makarios and his key supporters from power in twenty-four hours with little if any blood being shed and without EOKA assistance. The Turks would quietly acquiesce to the removal of Makarios, a key enemy… Ioannides stated that if Makarios decided on some type of extreme provocation against Greece to obtain a tactical advantage, he is not sure whether he should merely pull the Greek troops out of Cyprus and let Makarios fend for himself, or remove Makarios once and for all and have Greece deal directly with Turkey over Cyprus’s future. [This statement and its contents have since been authenticated before Congress by CIA Athens staff serving at the relevant time.]
2. It still took until 29 June for Kissinger to respond to this alert. He approved a ‘for-the-record’ cable to the US ambassador, Henry Tasca, instructing him to tell Brigadier Ioannides that America opposed any adventure in Cyprus. ‘The instruction, drily noted the House Select Committee on Intelligence in 1976, was only partially heeded.’ To be exact, ambassador Tasca refused to pass it on. Ioannides had no constitutional standing except as head of the Military Police. Why should a dignified ambassador of a Great Power deal with him? The fact that Ioannides was effective ruler of Greece was not deemed relevant, and might not have been except that the United States had helped to put him there and keep him there. No other admonition to Ioannides is on record.
3. As the House Select Committee on Intelligence observed in its 1976 report:
‘Tasca, assured by the CIA station chief that Ioannides would continue to to deal only with CIA, and not sharing the State Department Desk Officer’s alarm, was content to pass a message to the Greek leader indirectly… It is clear, however, that the embassy took no steps to underscore for Ioannides the depth of concern over a Cyprus coup attempt. This episode, the exclusive CIA access to Ioannides, Tasca’s indications that he may not have seen all important messages to and from the CIA station, Ioannides’s suggestions of US acquiescence, and Washington’s well-known coolness to Makarios have led to public speculation that either US officials were inattentive to the reports of the developing crisis or simply allowed it to happen.’
4. Thomas Boyatt, who was then the Cyprus desk officer in the State Department, whose ’alarm’ is the alarm referred to to above, and who had served as a diplomat on the island, warned consistently of a coup and of the inevitable Turkish response to it. He confirmed that the junta was planning an attack on Cyprus. Boyatt recapitulated the long involvement of the junta in plots against Makarios. His pre-coup memoranda were classified as secret and have never been released. After the invasion, he was at first forbidden by Kissinger to testify before Congress, and was finally allowed to do so in order to avoid being cited for contempt. His evidence was taken in ‘Executive Session’, with the room cleared of staff, reporters and visitors.
5. On 1 July, 1974 three senior officials fo the Greek Foreign Ministry, all of them known be moderate on the Cyprus issue, publicly tended their resignations.
6. On 3 July President Makarios issued an open letter to General Phaidon Gizikis, the puppet President of Ioannides’ regime. The letter, which sent a shock through western Europe as well as Greece and Cyprus, was extremely audacious and unambiguous. Its decisive paragraph, rounding off a litany of complaints against the junta, read as follows:
‘In order to be absolutely clear, I say that the cadres of the military regime of Greece support and direct the activities of the EOKA-B terrorists… It is also known, and an undeniable fact, that the opposition Cyprus press, which supports the criminal activities of EOKA-B and which has its source of financing in Athens, receives guidance from those in charge of the General Staff office and the branch; of the Greek Central Intelligence Agency in Cyprus.’
Makarios did not believe in using silky ambivalence unless he really had to. He therefore added that: ‘I have more than once so far felt, and in some cases I have touched, a hand invisibly extending from Athens and seeking to liquidate my human existence.’
He ended his open letter in spirited fashion, calling for the withdrawal of the Greek officers who had been subverting and poisoning the National Guard. Here was the ‘type of extreme provocation’ which Ioannides knew, when he talked to the CIA in Athens, that his own Cyprus policy was inviting and even necessitating.
All this is to say that Kissinger lied both by suppressio veri and suggestio falsi. The information was not just ‘lying around on the streets’ of Athens and Nicosia, it was also littering the corridors of the State Department. Yet at no stage was the Greek ambassador to Washington summoned, and at no stage did Kissinger display anything but an unpleasant insouciance when presented with warnings. (He told one senior staffer who protested at his callous indifference that: ‘I don’t want any goddamn social science lectures.’) The Greek Cypriot daily Apogevmatini (Afternoon) outdid the mighty Secretary of State in its edition on 5 July. It stated confidently in an editorial that the Greek junta was planning:
‘A broad coupist action to take place in the next few days supported by certain military circles in co-operation with units of the National Guard and EOKA-B groups, for the purpose of seizing power. This coupist action has been planned in such a way that it formally releases senior military personnel or Greek army circles from any responsibility…. If the plan succeeds, the government will be taken over by a certain person who has already been chosen and who, in substance, will be the puppet for a transitional period. Naturally, it is understood that the partition of Cyprus will be achieved through the coup plan with the understanding that the Turks have their plans prepared for such a golden opportunity.’
Did the Cypriot journalist who penned that editorial really know more than Henry Kissinger – or less?
The date of 15 July 1974 was the ninth anniversary of the constitutional coup which ousted George Papandreou from the Prime Ministership of Greece – at least in part because he defended Makarios from the extreme Right. The irony was unintended. The junta was in a hurry, and had once again been caught unawares by the Archbishop’s ‘going public’. This had given him time in the past; granted him a stay of execution. On this occasion, it panicked his foes into an earlier strike than they had planned. But, when it came, it was no less ghastly for having been anticipated.
The Coup
A writer should be careful about using the well-worn metaphor of ‘Greek tragedy’. Many superficial accounts of the Cyprus crisis have used the term ineptly or incorrectly, satisfied with the resonance of the word in any Hellenic context and glad of the opportunity to employ it. The coup in Cyprus was not a ‘classic’ tragedy. It was not the outcome of rash human acts, misunderstood by their authors but monitored by the Fates. It was the result of human design, the consequences of which were perfectly understood by at least some of the actors. But it is true to say that, from the moment the first salvoes were fired at the Presidential Palace, every other ‘tragic’ consequence was more or less assured.
The consequences were not precisely those which the rattled putschists had intended. This was one of those moments in history where the life or death of one individual make all the difference. The junta men banked on their ability to kill Makarios and to offer his cadaver as a symbol of goodwill to Turkey and to the United States. A relatively orderly division of the spoils would then follow, with something for everybody. But, for that to work even on the best prognosis, the executors of the coup would have to be rational. And rational they were not. The luckless footsoldiers of the operation had been told that they were fighting for enosis and, once out of their cages, behaved as if that was their objective. This, in itself, was enough to give the ordinary Turkish Cypriots vivid memories of 1963. But two other developments put events beyond the control of their originators.
The first of these was the least predictable. In spite of everything, including heavy and vicious shelling of the Presidential Palace, Makarios survived. Not only did he survive, he escaped. His supporters put up quite a resistance to cover his flight, while the new junta-controlled Cyprus radio broadcast gloating announcements of his death. With Makarios alive, the junta could not move to its next stage.
The second miscalculation was just as telling. The junta installed, as President, Nicos Sampson. Sampson, a well-known thug and killer; a man devoid of education or culture and, as we have seen, a relentless hater of Turks. His name alone was enough to send a frisson through the Turkish Cypriot quarter, which remembered him from 1963 and which had been frightened since by the lurid and violent tone of his newspapers. The British, too, had no cause to love him. His exploits, even as a ‘freedom-fighter’ in the 1950s, had not been savoury. There was thus no chance that either of the other two guarantor powers would contemplate recognizing such a person in office.
All the evidence points to Sampson’s having been a last-minute choice. He was, after all, more likely to provoke an angry Turkish invasion than an ‘understanding’ about partition. He lacked polish and had no experience in government. Many other Greek Cypriot Rightists of the more respectable kind were approached (the law of libel forbids direct mention of names; Cyprus still has a British legal system). But Makarios’s open letter had shaken their nerve, and the frenzy of Ioannides was not to their taste. By bringing forward the date of the coup, and by appearing so obviously responsible for it, the junta was forced to find somebody cast more in its own image – someone, in fact, who would be regarded even by quite entrenched conservatives with plain horror. The option of General Grivas was closed to them – he had died of a heart attack a few weeks previously. Sampson was chosen faute de mieux – the bottom of the barrel.
Dr Kissinger, however, treated him with respect and almost with courtesy. Compare, for instance, the different receptions accorded to the two Dimitrious. Nicos Dimitriou was the ambassador of Cyprus to Washington. His brother Dimis became Nicos Sampson’s ‘Foreign Minister’ on the day of the coup. Dr Kissinger received the ambassador on the first day of the Emergency, and insulted him with jokes while failing to offer any condolences on the reported death of his President. In Nicosia, ambassador Rodger Davies received Dimis Dimitriou as ‘Foreign Minister’– the only envoy to do so. In Washington, as day succeeded day, Kissinger’s press spokesman, ambassador Robert Anderson, reflected his employer’s readiness to do business with the new regime, and his refusal to admit what was obvious to everyone else.
For example, Kissinger’s State Department never agreed that the coup in Cyprus, which had been carried out with tanks and heavy artillery under the command of Greek officers, was an interference by Athens. ‘No. In our view there has been no outside intervention,’ was the official Anderson statement when challenged on this very point. At the same time, most of the governments in western Europe were stating what was clear – that the Greek Colonels had mounted an unpardonable intrusion into the affairs of another state. The death of Grivas meant that not even EOKA-B had a token Cypriot commander.
This hypocrisy on Kissinger’s part was deplorable for three reasons. First, he and the State Department were well aware that the Greek junta was responsible for the coup; and they had also been aware of the planning for it. Even if one takes Dr Kissinger’s tepid cable of 29 June at its face value, it makes an official lie out of his later disclaimers. The cable had, after all, explicitly recognized that Athens was preparing to move against Makarios.
Second, Kissinger could only, by his pretended innocence, have given the badly worried Greek dictators the feeling that they were not alone in the world, and might get away with it. Third, it made it much easier for Turkey to act unilaterally and to claim that the situation gave her no choice but to do so. A concerted move by the Western democracies to isolate the junta would have made such a Turkish attack very hard to justify. And, perhaps for that reason, no such move was ever made. The Turkish card was to be kept in reserve.
Collusion
For the remainder of July and August 1974, the Cypriots yet again had no choice but to let others be the actors in the drama of their own country. There was a brief and heroic resistance to the Sampson coup, in which members of Makarios’s security forces and the militants of the Socialist Party distinguished themselves. The fighting, as Mr Denktash admitted at the time, was confined to the Greek Cypriots: Sampson’s forces left the Turks alone for the time being and many Greek Cypriot dissidents took shelter with their Turkish neighbours in a gratifying moment of fraternity. But the Turkish Cypriots could not be expected to believe that Sampson was their friend; they had to ask what, if he could do this to Greeks, would he do to them? They withdrew, in large numbers, into their enclaves and turned on the Turkish radio.
For the remainder of July and August 1974, the Cypriots yet again had no choice but to let others be the actors in the drama of their own country. There was a brief and heroic resistance to the Sampson coup, in which members of Makarios’s security forces and the militants of the Socialist Party distinguished themselves. The fighting, as Mr Denktash admitted at the time, was confined to the Greek Cypriots: Sampson’s forces left the Turks alone for the time being and many Greek Cypriot dissidents took shelter with their Turkish neighbours in a gratifying moment of fraternity. But the Turkish Cypriots could not be expected to believe that Sampson was their friend; they had to ask what, if he could do this to Greeks, would he do to them? They withdrew, in large numbers, into their enclaves and turned on the Turkish radio.
Here it ought to be stressed that the Greek junta planned to share Cyprus with Turkey. It had never had a policy for the Turkish Cypriots, and its own demented logic had forced it to rely on the most chauvinistic Greeks; the ones least likely to convince Turkish Cypriots, as opposed to Turkish generals, of anything. So, before considering the disastrous course that matters actually took, one ought to remember that there was the possibility for Greeks and Turks to coexist, as Cypriots, in spite of all the years of intrigue and foreign meddling.
In his book The Road to Bellapais, which is generally speaking the most naively pro-Turkish account of the Cyprus problem yet to be published, Professor Pierre Oberling has the following rather striking passage:
‘Already by 1969, relations between the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots had so dramatically improved that when a tornado struck the Turkish Cypriot quarter of Limassol, Makarios inspected the damage and promised the victims that his government would provide them with all that was necessary to rebuild their homes. However, while relations between the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots were improving, those between the Greek Cypriot and Greek governments were steadily deteriorating… The junta was determined to achieve enosis; the acquisition of Cyprus would crown its rule with glory and legitimize its continued existence. But Makarios now seemed determined to barter it away for the sake of achieving a rapprochement with the Turkish Cypriots and restoring the unity of his long-divided nation.’
This generous observation by Professor Oberling (the acknowledgements of whose book contain only official Turkish sources and not a single Greek) is one that must be borne in mind. In describing the second stage of the 1974 catastrophe, one has to employ the shorthand of ‘Greeks’ and Turks’. But the crisis did not grow out of tension between them, which was slowly waning. It grew out of the policies of those who did not want Cypriot harmony, and who feared that it would lead to Communism. The Greek junta provided all the vindication that Turkish extremists could reasonably have wished. All the enemies of Cypriot independence now saw their chance.
The events of the next few days are somewhat kaleidoscopic. They can best be understood if they are considered capital by capital: Washington, London, Athens, Ankara and Geneva.
Invasion and Evasions
Washington: Dr Kissinger’s romance with the Sampson junta, and with its Athenian parent, became more difficult to conduct once it was obvious that Makarios had survived. There was undisguised gloom on the fifth floor of the State Department. when it became known that he had escaped and been flown, by British military plane, to Malta and then to London. It also became obvious that Turkey would be anxious to take advantage of the vacuum, even to fill it by invasion. Makarios had very few friends or defenders in Washington, because of his obdurate independence down the years. Moreover, the Greek-American leadership had been wooed by Nixon and (often very willingly) exploited in its patriotism by the ‘Hellenic’ slogans of the junta. There were very few people, in this most crucial capital, who were prepared to intercede for the Archbishop.
Washington: Dr Kissinger’s romance with the Sampson junta, and with its Athenian parent, became more difficult to conduct once it was obvious that Makarios had survived. There was undisguised gloom on the fifth floor of the State Department. when it became known that he had escaped and been flown, by British military plane, to Malta and then to London. It also became obvious that Turkey would be anxious to take advantage of the vacuum, even to fill it by invasion. Makarios had very few friends or defenders in Washington, because of his obdurate independence down the years. Moreover, the Greek-American leadership had been wooed by Nixon and (often very willingly) exploited in its patriotism by the ‘Hellenic’ slogans of the junta. There were very few people, in this most crucial capital, who were prepared to intercede for the Archbishop.
However, I have the testimony of Elias P. Demetracopoulos, who was at all material times in touch with the State Department and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Demetracopoulos. a distinguished Greek journalist, had warned of the coup in Greece before 1967, and had left Athens after his predictions came true. He established himself in Washington, becoming a major one- man crusade against the dictatorship. He survived several attempts to deport and kidnap him and to blacken his name, with allegations of subversive intent, by a deliberate campaign of disinformation. (In one of the few happy footnotes to this story, a full retraction of all the allegations made against hm by Nixon’s Watergate plumbers and the CIA. See the New York Times of 29 September 1983 and the Washington Post of 20 October 1983.)
Demetracopoulos, whose sources in his native Greece were good and who had a reputation for shrewd prognostication, got wind of the Cyprus coup in early June 1974. He took his evidence to Senator William Fulbright, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a close friend and defender of Kissinger, and perhaps the most powerful man in Congress at that time. Fulbright agreed to approach Dr Kissinger with a plan to avert the coup. This would serve American interest, he argued with the help of a Demetracopoulos briefing, because it would restore the prestige that had been tarnished by association with the junta. It would also enhance American influence in Cyprus, and might forestall a war in the eastern Mediterranean. Kissinger refused to act, on the peculiar grounds that he could not intervene in Greek internal affairs while the Nixon administration was resisting pressure to link US-Soviet trade to the free emigration of Russian Jewry.
So, having failed to head off the coup (and having incidentally made further nonsense of Kissinger’s later protestations of surprise at it), Demetracopoulos attempted to minimize its consequences. Again with the co-operation of Senator Fulbright, he sought to have the escaped Makarios invited to Washington as President of Cyprus. At the time, Kissinger and his spokesman Robert Anderson were steadily refusing to say whether or not they recognized the Makarios government. On 18 July, ambassador Anderson was asked directly if the United States was moving to recognize Nicos Sampson, as had been repeatedly reported and as seemed likely. Anderson declined to deny the reports. He was then asked about Makarios’s forthcoming visit to Washington. Was Kissinger seeing Makarios on the following Monday 22 July ‘as a private citizen, as Archbishop, or as President of Cyprus?’ Came the answer, with all the gravity of the State Department, ‘He’s meeting with Archbishop Makarios on Monday.’ At least there was no question of challenging his ecclesiastical authority.
This was precisely the ambiguity against which Demetracopoulos and Fulbright were contending. Having telephoned Kissinger on 17 July (the transcript of the call is retained by Kissinger; a move which is being disputed in the American courts) they arranged for Makarios to be invited, as President of Cyprus, by both the Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs Committees. After this, Kissinger could hardly do otherwise than extend the same courtesy. And then came another suggestion, even more audacious. It was made by Demetracopoulos and conveyed personally to Kissinger by Senator Fulbright. How would the Secretary of State react if Makarios were to invite the Sixth Fleet to pay a goodwill visit to the ports of Cyprus? After all the controversy over home-porting the fleet in Athens, how could Kissinger refuse an unsolicited invitation? Such a move, of course, would have the effect of repudiating the Greek junta and obviating the need for a Turkish military invasion.
Kissinger’s reply was not long delayed. He would not hear of the Sixth Fleet going to Cyprus, but he would agree to receive Makarios. He would not say whether or not it would be as President (at the last moment, it was). Interestingly enough, it was never objected that it would be technically difficult to deploy the Sixth Fleet on a goodwill visit. After all the fuss about home-porting and the need for a quick reaction in the Levant, that would have been ridiculous.
With Makarios alive, and as the Greek junta’s position eroded, there came definite symptoms of a shift towards Turkey on the part of the administration. Once again, there was the peculiar spectacle of intelligence agencies saying that they knew nothing, and of military headquarters saying that they could do nothing. This was not the standard Nixon-Kissinger style. Even when caught in the thickets of Watergate, they had managed quite complex interventions in Chile and Indochina. To act in the case of Cyprus, however, seemed beyond them.
Robert Ellsworth, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, told Demetracopoulos, and others who expressed concern that the Greek attack on Cyprus would be followed by a Turkish one, that Turkey did not have the capacity to invade. She was, he claimed, short of landing craft. This claim is made transparently absurd with hindsight, but it was in fact absurd even at the time. Turkey had been readying an invasion force since before the 15 July coup. John ‘Jack’ Maury, who had been CIA station chief in Athens during the 1967 coup, and who was in 1974 Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs, knew of these preparations. Even as far back as 1964, a decade previously, when they issued their stern warning to President Inonu, Lyndon Johnson and his advisers had not doubted the ability of the Turks to invade. A sentence from Johnson’s famous letter of June 1964 looked more significant than it had then:
‘Your government is required to obtain the United States’ consent in the use of military assistance for purposes other than those for which such assistance was intended… I must tell you in all candor that the United States cannot agree to the use of any United States-supplied military equipment for a Turkish intervention in Cyprus under present circumstances.’ [italics mine]
In 1964 LBJ had been concerned about the possibility that the Soviet Union would intervene against Turkey. In 1974 there was no such concern. Ankara took care to keep Moscow informed of its intentions. And, given Soviet hostility to the Greek junta and its American backers, there could be scant grounds for their opposing an operation ostensibly designed to thwart their immediate objectives. The opportunity to exploit a fissure within NATO also presented itself. This was one crisis which the Soviet Union was happy to sit out. Or, as a Turkish diplomat in Washington translated the changed situation, ‘We could no longer be scared off by threats of the Soviet bogeyman.’
On 19-20 July, the first Turkish shock troops landed on the northern shore of Cyprus. On 22 July, the day Kissinger met with President Makarios, the Athens junta began to collapse. And when it began to collapse, it collapsed very quickly; disproving in the process seven years of Panglossian American propaganda about its durability and popularity. In his study of a much more impressive structure of rule, Montesquieu wrote in 1734 that, ‘if a particular cause, like the accidental result of a battle, has ruined a state, there was a general cause which made the downfall of this state ensue from a single battle’. The Greek junta was hated, and was corrupt to the bones. It would have fallen anyway, and probably in a year or two. But Cyprus was at least the proximate cause of its ruin. The Greek dictators, caught in a trap of their own making, expired as cynically as they had ruled. They dumped the entire crisis into the lap of the civilians they had excoriated so long, agreed to the return of Constantine Karamanlis from his exile in Paris, and surrendered power. From the warped perspective of Dr Kissinger, the restoration of democracy to Greece was a nuisance and a distraction. But it did simplify matters. He no longer had to deal with rival clients. The way to agreement with Turkey, so long the Cinderella of his statecraft, now lay open and relatively unimpeded.
London: The late Richard Crossman, a distinguished politician and essayist and something of a specialist on British cabinet government, made a small but interesting entry in his Diaries of a Cabinet Minister for 28 July 1967. As Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons, he had attended a meeting of the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee of the cabinet:
‘We then turned to an astonishing paper on Cyprus, a copy of which I had discovered among the huge mass of bumf which was provided for this meeting of the committee. This paper advised that if on the instructions of the Greek government the Greek army in Cyprus staged a coup against Makarios in order to achieve enosis, we should dissent from it but prevent our troops from getting engaged in any hostilities. Denis Healey and I were the only two people there who had noticed this extraordinary proposal. A Commonwealth country is attacked by a Fascist dictatorship which tries to upset its constitutional government and though we have 15,000 armed men there we stand aside… What made it even more astonishing was that this proposal was part of a huge paper recommending that we should make our presence in Cyprus virtually permanent. I suppose it’s explained by the fact that authority is divided between the Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Office, but when I asked the Foreign Secretary afterwards he said, “After all, the Cypriots have got a very bad record of voting with the Russians in all UN matters” – as though that settled the issue.’
Seven years later, when the predictions implied in that exchange finally came true, the British government (which contained the same senior personnel as had the 1967 one, including Harold Wilson, Denis Healey and James Callaghan) affected complete surprise. They also sought to avoid their obligations under the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee; a treaty, be it noted, which the British rather than the Cypriots had insisted upon. Arnold Smith, then Secretary General of the Commonwealth, recalled in his 1981 memoir, Stitches in Time, how the evasion was justified:
‘When I heard the news of the coup, I was in Ghana lunching with General Acheampong, and actually had an appointment to fly overnight to Cyprus for a working lunch with Makarios the next day. Instead, I flew back to London and at once urged the British government to press a resolution in the UN Security Council calling for the immediate resignation of Sampson and restoration of Makarios, with a swift deadline for the UN peacekeeping forces already on the island to act in support. No UN peacekeeping operation could have been easier. The Soviet Union was opposed to the Greek junta, the US Sixth Fleet was nearby; the British also had bases on the island. The junta would have fallen, to the joy of the Greek people; the Turks would have been placated, Cyprus would have been restored to peace, and the West would have gained some credit. The British told me they would not act in the Security Council unless Kissinger agreed in advance. Instead, they hesitated while Kissinger sent his envoy to talk with the Greek Colonels and the Turkish government. The opportunity was lost, for within five days the Turkish army invaded Cyprus. The Greek junta fell, Sampson resigned – and Makarios was eventually restored – but at the fearful cost of dividing Cyprus far more deeply than before.’
These two quotations from senior participants more or less sum up the British role in the betrayal of Cyprus. Ever since they had surrendered sovereignty over the island in 1960, the British had sought to pass on the responsibility to the United States. A declining imperial power which had, until a few years previously, insisted that Cyprus was its exclusive preserve, now sought to dispose of it by any means.
Three days after the Sampson coup, the Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit flew to London. He was joined there by Joseph Sisco, Kissinger’s luckless understrapper in a ‘shuttle diplomacy’ which the great man did not wish, for reasons of his own, to embark upon himself. Under-secretary Sisco discovered what Ecevit and Arnold Smith had already found – that the British government was not prepared to meet its obligations as a guarantor power. This, as has since been established, was because Kissinger had told them to leave it to him. (I shall not easily forget how James Callaghan, then Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, told me that his guiding policy was the belief in Kissinger’s ability to bring about peace.)
Bulent Ecevit had two motives in flying to London. The first was the need to demonstrate that Turkey had exhausted every option short of war. The second was to contain his eager and anxious General Staff who, once authorized, might slip the leash of civilian authority altogether. He succeeded in the first much better than the second. But, with Greece exposed as an aggressor and Britain studiously copying the Kissinger line of ‘see no evil’, he got his green light.
Athens: The scene in Greece’s capital, meanwhile, was one of appalling squalor and chaos. In Washington a State Department official, who learned from a Greek diplomat of the escape of Makarios, had remarked on the telephone, ‘How inconvenient.’ He could afford to be laconic. At the headquarters of the junta, there was something more closely resembling hysteria. The Greek embassy in London later supplied me with the transcript of a telephone conversation between Brigadier Ioannides and Nicos Sampson. It took place the day after the coup in Nicosia.
Ioannides: I see that the old s- - - has escaped. Where could he be now?
Sampson: On the mountains, heading towards Kykkos [site of he monastic headquarters of the Cypriot Orthodox Church]. I hope to have him arrested within two or three hours.
Ioannides: Nicky, I want his head.You shall bring it to me yourself, OK Nicky?
After this Mafia chat, the two defenders of the West got off the line. Within twenty-four hours, their subordinates were in touch again. The nervous Cypriots at one end of the telephone had to confess that ‘the old s—’ was still at large. They needed perhaps one day to finish him. ‘You haven’t got a day!’ shrieked the voice from Athens, ‘we’re under great pressure from outside.’ The Greek word employed for ‘outside’ was apexo, which means ‘abroad’.
There is no absolutely watertight proof that Brigadier Ioannides had guarantees from apexo. We are, after all, recounting the behaviour of a near-madman. But it is certain that he thought that he had such guarantees. There was, too, some method in his madness. American policy, as Professor Theodore Couloumbis has so elegantly put it, was concerned that Greece and Turkey not wage an intra-NATO war. American policy, on the other hand, did nothing to prevent and something to facilitate a Greek military move on Cyprus. Ergo, as the professor writes:
‘A war could have been excluded with certainty only through a prearrangement of Greeks (the junta) and Turks to eliminate Makarios and to partition Cyprus. If such an agreement did not exist (and there is no contrary evidence to date), then one can speculate that Ioannides was somehow led to ‘assume’ that the Turks would not have reacted to his anti-Makarios putsch, and that he naively went along with such a presumption.’
That is to put it mildly, but firmly. Brigadier Ioannides has stated many times, through his trial lawyers and through other conduits, that he held such an ‘assumption’. Since such testimony tends to incriminate him more rather than less (he is currently serving a life sentence for his many crimes), it may at least be placed in evidence. It also explains his extreme anxiety that the Sampson coup be a ‘success’, at least in the sense that it physically destroyed Makarios. Without the head of ‘the old s—’, the usefulness of the gallant Ioannides was at an end.
For a brief moment, like the namesake of his deputy Sampson, Ioannides considered bringing the roof down with him. Realizing that the Turks were not going to co-operate in his fiasco, and seeing that the Kissinger faction was in the process of shifting its allegiance to the ascendant power, he ordered a general, kamikaze attack on Turkey. At this, like Prussian Junkers belatedly disdainful of an Austrian corporal, the Greek senior officers baulked. Fighting unarmed civilians was one thing. Fighting the Turks in a losing cause was another. Moreover, Joseph Sisco had been in town, seeking to dampen the enthusiasm his chief had helped to encourage. His mission had been an abject failure, in that it had been launched after rather than before the coup. But it had the effect of opening an escape route for the less committedly ideological military men. They took it with tremendous gratitude.
It hardly needs to be added that the Cyprus junta fell on the same day as the Greek one. How could it have been otherwise? It does need to be added, however, (because the obvious is so often overlooked) that Brigadier Ioannides resigned only temporarily. Disgusted with the near-mutinous cowardice of his Chiefs of Staff, and contemptuous of the civilian rule which they proposed as a means of saving their own skins, he stamped out of their councils. He was sure that the resulting disorder would bring him back, and he did make one or two attempts to return. But they were fruitless, because without American backing Ioannides was a stringless marionette. Greek democracy was thereby partially restored, but at the cost of a bloodbath in Cyprus.
A democratic Greece did not mean a Greece that had lost all sense of commitment to Cyprus. Shortly after Constantine Karamanlis had returned to Athens, and during the volatile period when, because of the fear of a Ioannides counter-coup, he had to sleep in a different place every night, he telephoned Evangelos Averoff. Averoff, his Defence Minister, (and today the leader of the opposition in parliament) had been the conservative politician closest to the junta but had always refused to endorse it. It was at his initiative that Karamanlis had been recalled to rescue the situation. The telephone call was a serious one. Did Averoff believe, asked Karamanlis, that Cyprus could still be saved? To be exact, did he believe that if the two of them embarked for the island from Crete, and announced in advance that they were doing so, the Turks would bomb the ship? It emerged, as Averoff was later to tell the Greek parliament, that Karamanlis was prepared to risk their lives to go, with Cretan troops, to save what could be saved from the junta’s folly. Averoff advised against the move, because of Turkey’s command of the air and her ingrained suspicion of Greek motives. But the very notion illustrated the intensity of feeling, even among conservative Greeks, for the island and the people that had been so callously expended. That concern, among others, has been vital in the political radicalization that has taken place in Greece since 1974.
Ankara: In his book Thirty Hot Days in Cyprus, which describes the Turkish view of the Cyprus crisis, the Establishment journalist Mehmet Ali Birand describes a conversation between Bulent Ecevit and his naval commander-in-chief. The Turkish invasion fleet had put to sea from the ports of Alexandretta and Mersin, as it had done on previous occasions, such as 1967. At a special meeting, the General Staff had shown Ecevit contingency plans for invading Cyprus. There was one for every month of the year, allowing for changes in weather, and there were two alternative bridgehead sites at Famagusta and Kyrenia. Unlike in the past, there was a power vacuum in Greece and disorder among the Greek Cypriots. Most crucially, there was the fact that Washington no longer had any pressing reason to oppose an invasion. This was the moment for which the Turkish General Staff had been planning, and waiting, for years. Would Bulent Ecevit, the poet manqué and social democrat, who had quarrelled with their domestic political ambitions in the past, hesitate to implement the plan? As Birand tells it, four days after the Sampson coup Ecevit’s naval commander, Admiral Karacan, said to him: ‘Mr Prime Minister, if we turn back from Cyprus as before I won’t be able to remain naval commander-in-chief – and you won’t be able to remain Prime Minister.’
This remark, and its implications, more or less encapsulate the Turkish position. The state of affairs in Ankara was far less complicated than it was in any of the other capitals concerned. For the previous decade and a half, Turkish military preponderance had been offset by political and diplomatic weakness. Now, these constraints were dissolved. Moreover Ecevit, as leader of a centre-left party, depended on the indulgence of his conservative coalition partners, and of the generals who had surrendered power to him only some two years previously. The outcome was never in doubt, although among some of the more seasoned elder statesmen there was concern that Turkey might isolate herself internationally. But, once the first invasion was ordered, the generals knew that a second, decisive invasion would have to follow.
Joseph Sisco might just as well have stayed in Washington. His visit to Ankara, which took place between 19 and 20 July, was utterly fruitless. His efforts to implore restraint were lame, and he was not empowered even to hint of any United States disapproval of, let alone retaliation for, an invasion. Back in Athens, Mr Sisco found that his employer Dr Kissinger had left him with no leverage there either. All he could do was bleat that if Greece showed restraint, then Turkey might be induced to do the same. There were three objections to this double bluff. One: Turkey had already begun, on 20 July, to bombard Cyprus and to land formations of parachutists. Two: the Greek junta was collapsing in a welter of mania. Three: because American policy was so wanting in skill, in principle and in synchronization, nobody any longer trusted the good offices of Kissinger’s emissaries. He had managed to offend or alarm all participant nations in the dispute – even a few timorous British spokesmen felt safe enough to say in private that they regretted his alternating energy and indifference. The question became – what could he salvage? The answer was – at least an understanding with the Turks. The site of the understanding was to be Geneva.
In preparing for such an outcome Mr Ecevit was, it must be said, very scrupulous. ‘His’ forces landed in Cyprus with the ostensible justification of the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee. Article Four of the said treaty provides that, ‘In so far as common or concerted action may not prove possible, each of the three Guaranteeing Powers reserves the right to take action with the sole aim of re-establishing the state of affairs created by the present treaty.’ This permission for unilateral action (inserted, significantly, at Turkish insistence in 1960) is, however, governed by another article which states that if the Republic of Cyprus can no longer ensure, ‘the maintenance of its independence, territorial integrity and security, as well as respect for its Constitution’, the three guarantors must consult together ‘with respect to the representations or measures necessary to secure observance’. It might be argued that Turkey was free under Article Four, given that the Greek junta had subverted Makarios and that Britain had opted to abstain. What cannot be argued is that Turkey had as its objective the larger aim – independence and territorial integrity – which the treaty expressly stipulates. Geneva, where so many essays in international understanding and so many efforts against international piracy have come to grief, was to be the setting for this distinction to be made plain.
Geneva: There were two Geneva conferences, both of them foredoomed. The first, which took place at the request of the United Nations Security Council, involved only the foreign ministers of Greece, Turkey and Great Britain, respectively Mr George Mavros, Mr Turan Gunes, and Mr James Callaghan. It took place between 25 and 30 July 1974, during a very questionable ‘ceasefire’ on the island. It determined that the ceasefire should be observed, that negotiations should be carried on, and that both Greek and Turkish forces should desist from bullying or occupying the territory of, respectively, Turkish and Greek Cypriots. Finally, it determined on another meeting, at which Greek and Turkish Cypriot representatives should also be present. The second meeting was set for 8 August. The Turkish army employed the intervening week by shipping in heavy reinforcements to its salient on the north coast of the island, and by favourably adjusting the edges of that salient. By the time of the second Geneva conference, then, a certain amount of Turkish ‘fact-creating’ had already been accomplished.
Geneva II took place under the permanent threat of another Turkish advance. The United States government, which was not formally represented at the conference but which exerted the largest influence on all the governments which were represented there, made its own position known at a critical stage. On 13 August 1974 Dr Kissinger conveyed to the deadlocked participants the following message: ‘We recognize that the position of the Turkish community requires considerable improvement and protection. We have supported a greater degree of autonomy for them. The parties are negotiating on one or more Turkish autonomous areas.’
There followed some pieties about the inadvisability of military action by any party. But note the rapidity and the significance of the change of tone. Until one month previously, the Nixon administration had been a close ally of the Greek junta and of the EOKA-B bandits. It had refused to condemn the Sampson coup, which was carried out by the most extreme, anti-Turkish elements. It had declined to charge the Greek junta with engineering it. A similarly bold statement about Turkish Cypriot rights, made on the day of the Sampson coup, could have contributed to the junta’s isolation and could even have allowed for the concerted international action called for by the Commonwealth and Arnold Smith. Instead, the United States chose to invoke Turkish rights only when Turkey, not Greece, had become the aggressor. Washington also made clear, as the British Foreign Secretary James Callaghan reported to Geneva, that it would not oppose Turkish military action with any sanctions, and that it would not view with favour any British or Greek opposition to it. No Turkish government could have been expected to ignore this change in policy and style, or to miss the opportunity which it presented. On the morning after the Kissinger statement, the Turkish army burst out of its northern salient and began, effectively unopposed, to set about the occupation of all of northern Cyprus. The Acheson Plan was to be achieved after a fashion, but not under the conditions or by the instruments which Acheson had envisaged.
It was during the Geneva Conference that Thomas Boyatt (then Director of Cypriot Affairs, State Department) wrote a memorandum which was later classified as secret by Kissinger. A crucial extract reads:
‘Then on 18 July the CIA station [in Athens] with the concurrence of ambassador Tasca reported that “The Greek military are now solidly behind strongman Brigadier General Ioannides’’ “what Ioannides has achieved for Greece on the island is parity with the Turks”; and “any Turkish invasion of the island would unite all the Greek nationals behind Ioannides”.
‘How wrong can you be? Within days, the Greek army had thrown out Ioannides and brought in civilians; the Turkish army had conquered northern Cyprus and the remains of the Greek army were thrown out; Greek nationals put Ioannides in jail and united behind a civilian government.’
At the time of the Geneva Conference, no less than at other times previous to it, the position of the Turkish Cypriot community did indeed ‘require improvement’. So did that of the Greek Cypriot population, which was not mentioned in the Kissinger memorandum. The position of both began to require urgent improvement within twenty-four hours. Until 14 August 1974, Cyprus had known every kind of medieval war, including siege and investment and crusade. It had also experienced conquest, colonization and exploitation. In living memory it had undergone guerrilla war, subversion and near-civil war. It was now to see twentieth-century war – the real thing.
1. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the Second Edition.
2. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Preface to the First Edition.
3. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Introduction.
8. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens. Chapter 5: Consequences
9. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 6: Conclusion.
9. Cyprus: Hostage to History, by Christopher Hitchens: Chapter 6: Conclusion.
