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[boomerang]

PRELUDE TO PARTITION

In Cyprus, during the late 1950s a Turkish Cypriot paramilitary organisation known as Turk Mukavemet Teskilati (TMT) was formed. It was armed and supported by Turkey and it had an extreme pro-partition agenda.

The great difficulty with TMT’s programme was that it required the uprooting of a quarter of a million people - both Greek and Turkish Cypriots - and their removal from their historic and ancestral lands. It is not surprising therefore that it was opposed by the vast majority of the island’s population. It would only have been possible to do this forcibly. The Turkish invasion can therefore be traced back to the formation of TMT and the need to forcibly separate the populations.


TURKISH INCITEMENT

TMT emerged with Ankara’s support as a powerful force, and exercised a crucial influence over the affairs of the Turkish-Cypriot community. One of its founders was Rauf Denktash, the current Turkish Cypriot political spokesman in occupied Cyprus.

The decision to create TMT was taken at the highest levels of the Turkish Menderes Government in Ankara. While facing mounting pressure from public opinion, the Turkish Government decided to use the Cyprus question as a diversion to keep the Turkish military quiet, an ever present factor in Turkish politics: that is how TMT was conceived. TMT fighters were trained, armed and led by a small group of well-disciplined Turkish officers. It established cells in towns and villages throughout Cyprus, and it selected personnel who were to be sent to Turkey for military training. It was also to become the organisational tool through which the geo-political partitionist policy of Turkey was to be enforced in Cyprus. It was a policy which aimed at segregating the Turkish and Greek Cypriots from each other as a prelude to the physical division of the island.

During the course of 1957, TMT pressured the Turkish Cypriots into withdrawing from any co-operative ties they had with the Greek Cypriots and, on the whole, they were successful; this policy later became known as the `from Turk to Turk policy’. Such encouragement was entirely alien to the co-operation and quiet existence which had always prevailed between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, but was necessary to sow the seeds of partition. A similar policy was followed in Istanbul, organised by the Turkish National Student Federation, which had worked closely with Kibris Turktur in its planning of the anti-Greek riots there back in 1955.

In Cyprus this crude policy of enforced segregation did not go unopposed amongst the Turkish Cypriots. TMT’s answer to criticism was however rapid and brutal. It assassinated prominent Turkish Cypriots who dared to publicly voice opposition or advocated co-operation between Greeks and Turks. The most widely known such murders were those of Fazil Ondur, the chief editor of the weekly newspaper Inkilapci, who was killed on 29 May 1959; and Ahmet Yahaya, a committee member of the Turkish Cypriot Athletic and Culture centre, who was killed on 5 June 1958. An attempt was also made on the life of Arif Barudi on 3 July 1958, and another one on Ahmet Sadi, the director of the Turkish office of the Pancypriot Labour Federation who, soon after the attempt against his life, left Cyprus to settle in England. The same policy continues today with the assassination in July 1996 of Kutlu Adali, the Turkish Cypriot journalist, who had the courage to condemn the partitionist project of the Turkish military establishment which leads the foreign policy of Ankara, and who advocated closer co-operation between Greek and Turkish Cypriots.

TMT’s strategy was one of incitement in the hope of provoking inter-ethnic conflict with the aim of securing the separation of the two communities. It did so without any consideration to likely casualties amongst innocent Greek and Turkish Cypriots. The first such serious inter-communal fighting began in June 1958 and was the result of such incitement which the Turkish authorities have subsequently been candid on a number of occasions. Mr Emin Dirvana, a former Turkish diplomat, said: `I was informed that on 7 June 1958 a bomb had been planted in the Turkish press office in Nicosia by persons who, as was later established, had nothing to do with the Greek Cypriots. The Turks of Nicosia were then incited to be overwhelmed by holy indignation and perpetrated acts similar to those committed on 6 and 7 September 1955 in Istanbul.’

In the ITN documentary `Cyprus, Britain’s Grim Legacy’ the account continues:

`The explosion sparked off a night of riot in Nicosia. Turkish Cypriots burned and looted Greek shops and homes. Soon came counter attacks and the fighting spread around the island. A friend of mine, whose name must still be kept secret, was to confess to me that he had put this little bomb in the doorway in order to create an atmosphere of tension so that people would know that the Turkish Cypriots mattered.’

In fact, nobody had ever claimed that the Turkish Cypriots did not matter. This reveals the essence of the matter, that the Turkish Cypriot leadership, first in Ottoman times and then during the British administration, had always occupied a position of political privilege as an ally of the occupying power. These privileges were not something the leadership were willing to give up. During early British rule, the alliance with the Turkish minority became clear in the legislative council. It worked on the principle that the British and Turkish members at least equalled or outnumbered by one vote the Greeks.

The tactics of TMT, to provoke ethnic conflict when none would otherwise have arisen, were soon to be successful. On 12 June 1958, following the press office bomb explosion, British security forces rounded up eight Greek Cypriots from the village of Kondemenos and subsequently released them near the Turkish Cypriot village of Guenyeli, approximately seven miles from where they were arrested, and a good distance from the nearest Greek villages; the released Greek Cypriots were subsequently massacred by Turkish Cypriots acting on the orders of TMT. These were the first reported inter-communal killings. These killings were carried out in the certain knowledge that Greek Cypriots would also carry out revenge attacks.

Turkey rushed to put forward a formal protest to Britain the day following the press office bomb, alleging that the Cyprus administration had failed to give the Turkish minority adequate protection. `Cyprus, partition or death, was the slogan constantly repeated by Turkish leaders and the armed paramilitaries. The claim was that Turkish Cypriots could not think of themselves as being integrated into Cypriot society. The fact that they already were, necessitated a strategy of tension and forced separation.

The principle of partition was not based on the realities of Cypriot society at the time, but on Turkey’s perceived security requirements alone. In the Summer of 1958, in the mixed suburb of Omorphita in Nicosia, TMT evicted 700 Greeks from their homes. By the end of July 1958 a much clearer line had been drawn between the Greek and Turkish quarters. The reluctance of British authorities to deal even-handedly with the violence became clearer when the partisan decisions made by the Courts at the time is taken into account. Whereas Turks arrested for participating in the riots were released, Greeks received custodial sentences for minor offences.

Sixteen Turks were, for example, arrested by the British authorities for complicity in the Nicosia riots, but they were released on condition that they stayed in at night. A Turkish policeman, sergeant Tuna, was charged with possessing a bomb and ammunition for which the mandatory penalty was clearly the death penalty. He was released and left immediately for Turkey. The only official piece of evidence that Turkish policeman were involved in bomb attacks had conveniently `disappeared’. By contrast, two Greeks who pulled down a Union Jack were each given 18 months prison sentences, whilst those subsequently involved with the possession of fire arms were hanged. In hindsight, it is hardly surprising that Greek Cypriots saw a conspiracy against their struggle for self-determination from British and Turkish Cypriot sources.

The riots in Nicosia caused by the bomb in the Turkish press office, resulted in the deaths of 56 Greek and 53 Turkish Cypriots. The higher number of Greek casualties demonstrates that the Turkish Cypriots (who of course were outnumbered in Cyprus 5:1 by Greek Cypriots) had, on the orders of TMT, pre-arranged strongholds and were thus able to fight from a much stronger position than their numerical inferiority would suggest. Clearly, by the end of 1958 the Greek Cypriot demand for self-determination was still unacceptable to both Britain and Turkey, although a new compromise needed to be worked out.

The London-Zurich agreements of 1959 finally set up the Republic of Cyprus with Archbishop Makarios III being duly elected its first President, and Dr Fazil Kutcuk its Turkish Cypriot Vice President, by their respective communities in December 1959. The Republic of Cyprus officially came into being on 16 August 1960.

Under the terms of the 1960 constitution, there was to be a fixed ratio of 70 Greek Cypriot employees for every 30 Turkish Cypriots employed by government agencies. The Turkish Cypriot leadership demanded that this parity of employment be attained within five months of independence. The public service commission pointed to the numerous difficulties of drawing 30% of the civil service including the police force from just 18% of the population. As a result, numerous posts remained unfulfilled in the search for suitably qualified Turkish Cypriot candidates.

Since a majority vote of the Turkish Cypriot deputies in the house was needed to pass tax legislation, the Turkish Cypriots used it as a bargaining tool to force compliance over the 70:30 ratio and various other issues which had as their objective the continued segregation of the two ethnic groups. For example, colonial laws had to be extended eight times while both communities discussed legislation relating to separate municipalities. This provision had been the greatest victory for Turkey in this settlement. The President offered the Turks compensating safeguards, but was not prepared to implement provisions which opened the way to partition. Deadlock inevitably resulted again and again in a number of other areas.

Already by the end of the 1961 the Turkish language press was calling for intervention by the powers, meaning the UK and the US. In essence, there was a fundamental belief on the part of the Turkish Cypriots in the eventual intervention of Turkey to establish the partition of Cyprus. This belief underpinned their unco-operative attitude towards the Greek Cypriots and, not surprisingly, created the cycle of mistrust amongst Turkish Cypriots which culminated in the crisis of 1963. Indeed, one of the starkest indications of the Turkish Cypriot mistrust were the brutal political murders of Ayhan Hikmet and Ahmet Gurkhan in 1962 by TMT. Both Hikmet and Gurkhan were publishers who advocated closer association and co-operation between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. TMT was again in action to ensure that the genuine voice of the Turkish Cypriots was silenced, and this applied not only to journalists and publishers, but to many political activists and ordinary people too.

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THE CRISIS OF 1963

From independence to 1963, it proved impossible to construct any basis of trust, and many areas of government were unable to function. The Cypriots found themselves in the position of not even being able to execute simple tax laws due to the way in which legislation was being used by the Turkish Cypriot leadership and their political mentors in Turkey. The Greek Cypriots claimed with some justification that the Turkish Cypriots were using partitionist and non co-operative tactics, which was made possible by the constitution itself.

It was against this background that the Akritas plan emerged as a political strategy to remove the restrictions imposed by the 1960 constitution, and to abrogate both the Treaty of Guarantee and the Treaty of Alliance, which allowed for armed intervention in Cyprus by Britain, Greece and Turkey, not unilateral intervention (but not by military action by any one state). President Makarios sought a way of breaking the deadlock in the administration and submitted for discussion, in accordance with the Akritas plan, 13 possible constitutional amendments. Copies of the proposed amendments were sent to Ankara for information purposes only since Turkey was a guarantor power. Yet even before the Turkish Cypriot leadership could reply, Ankara rejected the proposals as impossible, even as a basis for discussion, though the opinion of Turkish Cypriots had not been sought and this effectively ended the Akritas plan. Makarios had not referred to Athens before making his proposals, but was acting quite properly as the head of state of what was, after all, an independent state. Turkish Cypriot propagandists, however, cite the Akritas plan as proof of a Greek Cypriot plot to commit genocide against them, by somehow equating enosis, the subject of the plan, with genocide. This is clearly a nonsense; it was simply a constitutional framework devised to break a constituted social cohesion.

The inter-communal violence that followed was triggered on 21 December 1963 by an incident in Nicosia involving the shooting of a policeman. A police patrol car with Greek Cypriot officers driving down Hermes Street in the old city of Nicosia stopped a car for a routine check. Shots were fired and a young Turk was killed. The dispute that had been going on for the past three years relating to the way in which the constitution was operating, and the resultant tensions (all entirely of a political nature), now exploded into a spate of shootings which spread right across the island. On 22 December 1963 all Turkish Cypriot Government officials and politicians left their posts in a mass political protest. Overnight, all these individuals quit their jobs before any investigation had taken place. This organised reaction suggests that their actions were part of a pre-planned strategy in accordance with the tactics followed during the last few years.

Between 21 and 26 December 1963 the conflict was again centred in the Omorphita suburb of Nicosia, which had been an area of tension back in 1958. The participants now were Greek Cypriot irregulars and Turkish Cypriot paramilitaries, and numbers of civilians who were caught in the crossfire and chaos that ensued over the Christmas week. Both President Makarios and Dr Kutcuk issued calls of peace, but they were ignored. The two leaders met for the last time on 24 December 1963. Meanwhile, within a week of the violence flaring up, the Turkish army contingent had moved out of its barracks and seized the most strategic position on the island across the Nicosia to Kyrenia road, the historic jugular vein of the island. So crucial was this road to Turkish strategic thinking that they retained control of that road until 1974, at which time it acted as a crucial link in Turkey’s military invasion. From 1963 up to the point of the Turkish invasion of 20 July 1974, Greek Cypriots who wanted to use the road could only do so if accompanied by a UN convoy. It was, however, a baffling strategy for protecting the Turkish Cypriot minority. Again, this demonstrated the true motivation of Turkey.

The fighting over Christmas week 1963 saw numerous civilian casualties. Hostage taking emerged on both sides, as did acts of arson and murder. Although many hostages were returned, many remained missing, presumed dead. The worst incidents yet again occurred in Omorphita. False rumours were spread that some Turkish Cypriot patients were taken from Nicosia general hospital and killed by paramilitaries in order to provoke revenge. In Ayios Vasilios, on 12 January 1964, a mass grave was discovered which contained the bodies of 21 Turkish Cypriots who were presumed to have been killed in or near Ayios Vasilios on 24 December 1963. One of the most tragic acts of the period was the killing of the wife and children of a Major, Nihat Ilhan, attached to the Turkish army contingent. Their bodies were later discovered in the bath of their home. Hasan Kudum who was hurt but survived the carnage, when asked by his friends if those that came to kill them spoke between them Greek or Turkish stated: There were persons who spoke Greek and there were persons who spoke Turkish. Nihat Ilhan, believing that the Turkish nationalist MHP Grey Wolves were responsible went to Kenan Coskun, known as Bozkurt (or Grey wolf) and asked him: Has the organisation killed my family in order to secure the intervention of Turkey in the island? The answer given by Kenan Coskun and which bothered Nihat Ilhan was the following: Go and take revenge. He did not tell him from where to take revenge, writes journalist Sener Levent (Africa 28/8/2007). The tactics of TMT were now fully reaping their rewards. The casualty figures over that Christmas week in 1963 vary. British military sources on the ground estimate about 100 dead on each side.

Considerable fear was felt throughout the island and about 20,000 Turkish Cypriots left their homes. Much of this movement was spontaneous and hasty following some local incident of violence. However, once they had moved, many Turkish Cypriots were placed under heavy pressure by TMT not to return to their homes. Clearly, the necessary territorial basis for partition was being established.

Both Greek and Turkish Cypriots were displaced during the period of inter-communal strife in 1963 and 1964. A Liaison Committee was established, comprising of representatives of the three guarantor powers and the two communities. This established that in February 1964 5,500 Turkish Cypriots and 1,600 Greek Cypriots had been displaced because of the fighting. The UN Secretary General estimated that eventually 25,000 Turkish Cypriots moved from their homes to nearby villages/towns. It therefore appears that 5,500 Turkish Cypriots were displaced, and that a further 19,500 were moved on the directions of the Turkish military and Turkish Cypriot leadership.

A number of points are worth noting. The Liaison Committee consisted of representatives of Britain, Greece and Turkey and the Greek and Turkish communities. The first session took place on 29 December 1963, and was chaired by Duncan Sandys, Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, and subsequent meetings were chaired by the British High Commissioner Sir Arthur Clark. A sub-committee was given the task to examine the number of displaced persons, in its report of 1 February 1964, found that there were 5,500 Turkish Cypriots and 1,600 Greek Cypriots displaced. Yet, the UN Secretary General’s Report to the Security Council (15/6/64 Doc. S/5764) found that: `a large number of Turkish Cypriot villages from some villages with a mixed population, and from some very small Turkish Cypriot villages, moved out into more predominantly Turkish villages and towns.’ It appears that most of the Turkish Cypriots displaced were moved from their villages by the Turkish Cypriot leadership in order to back their policy of partitioning the island.

The partitioning of the island was not possible without segregation and movement of population, because Greek, Turkish and mixed villages were scattered around the island, with few concentrations of homogeneous population.

Fighting in Nicosia ended when British forces intervened at the request of President Makarios. The Green line was established between the Greek and Turkish quarters of Nicosia and became a permanent feature of the city. The demarcation of the capital was followed by the eviction of the entire Armenian community which happened to fall in the Turkish sector. The Turks believed that the Armenians were politically aligned with the Greeks and used this as justification for their forced expulsion. However, it was also a necessity in the long term goal of creating an ethnically pure Turkish zone.

Between January and August 1964 much of the violence that took place was of a sporadic nature. The size of Cyprus, with its customs and strong traditions, the news of an incident in one village would spread fear and apprehension to neighbouring villages. The most innocuous incident was capable of sparking off confrontation in this highly charged atmosphere. Two examples serve to illustrate this point. The first occurred in Ayios Sozomenos, an ethnically mixed village in the district of Nicosia. On 6 February 1964 the Greeks were attacked and two were killed. Retaliation followed by the Greeks, and seven Turks were killed in further clashes, as well as a further nine Greeks.

The second incident was triggered in Paphos where a Turk was killed by a sniper. The Turks retaliated and a heated exchange followed. Six Greeks and a Turk were killed. Further violence flared on the nights of 8/9 March when 14 Turks and 11 Greeks were killed. These incidents demonstrate that in an atmosphere as highly charged as that of Cyprus in 1964, shootings were triggered by the slightest prompting and could quickly escalate.

Most incidents were local and retaliatory in nature, usually a specific response to a particular incident. This is, for example, illustrated by the hostage exchange that took place in March 1964. Following numerous kidnappings and hostage taking, an exchange was organised on 7 March. About 225 Turkish hostages had been seized by Greek paramilitaries, of which around 175 had never returned, while about 41 Greeks remained missing. The exchange was designed to reduce tension, but in fact it had the opposite effect. Within 24 hours of the exchange a number of shooting incidents occurred throughout Cyprus. Again, revenge appears to have been the main motivating factor.

In Ktima, Turkish Cypriots took as hostages hundreds of Greek Cypriots who were shopping in the local market. The Turkish Cypriots claimed that their action was prompted by the reports of the Turkish Cypriot hostages who had gone missing. In total, 14 Turks and 11 Greeks lost their lives in Ktima. Inter-communal contact within Ktima virtually ceased. However, such confrontations, far from being a Greek Cypriot strategy to annihilate the Turks, were symptomatic of the fear which had spread all over the island. There is no evidence to suggest that there was anything pre-meditated about any of this conflict.

In mid-February 1964, inter-communal fighting intensified in Limassol which looked like provoking a Turkish invasion. This prompted Britain to appeal to the Security Council of the UN. Subsequently, on 4 March 1964, the Security Council passed a resolution to establish a peace keeping force in Cyprus.

By 27 March 1964 the first UN units arrived to take up official duties. Their arrival did not prevent the procurement of arms to Cyprus for both sides. Evidently, Turkish Cypriot nationalists were trying to increase the temperature. The Greek Cypriots formed a National Guard, and on 4 April 1964 launched an attack on the north Western coastal villages of Kokkina and Mansoura, where the Turks had established a bridgehead for the importation of arms and the landing of heavily armed troops from Turkey.

There was a violence pattern which was repeated throughout the island: arming Turkish nationalists and securing strategic positions for them; in the meantime, armed Greeks were bound to respond with force. Although Turkish Cypriots were sparse in the Kokkina area, they had nevertheless allegedly been led there in order to provide safety. The clear intention, however, was to establish an enclave to justify the opening of a salient within easy reach of Turkey. In the meantime, the most significant consequence of the conflict on the island was the return of General Grivas to head the newly formed National Guard, and to bring discipline to the Greek paramilitary irregulars. From this point on, Grivas and Makarios were increasingly at odds over policy matters. Grivas had always put loyalty to Greece above that of a commitment to Cyprus as an independent republic.

In August 1964, another major battle took place in the Kokkina Mansoura area. Fighting broke out on 3 August and continued until 6 August, during which the Turkish air force bombed Greek villages indiscriminately with napalm. The clash at Kokkina drew sharp attention to the realities of Cypriot vulnerability to the power politics of Turkey. A cease-fire was reached on 9 August and drew to a close this latest serious outbreak of violence.

The resulting casualties, however, give an interesting insight into these events. According to Turkish sources, the fights at Kokkina resulted in 53 Greek Cypriots dead and 125 injured. On the Turkish side, only 12 fatalities and 32 wounded are recorded. These figures reflect the degree of military preparedness on the Turkish side and again emphasise that the Turkish Cypriot strategy was one of occupying strategic positions to facilitate territorial gain through armed rebellion, although camouflaged in the language of minority protection.

By the time that the cease-fire was achieved, every Turkish enclave in Cyprus had become an entrenched position, protected by UNFICYP forces. Enclaves now existed in every major town except Kyrenia. In the Lefka area there were 8,000 well-armed Turkish Cypriots and 1,000 TMT fighters strategically positioned to join up with any landing near Xeros. The big enclave north of Nicosia almost reached the sea at Temblos in the Kyrenia district. At Ktima, the Turkish position overlooked the coast from a strong defensive position. The Larnaca enclave commanded a piece of coast ideal for the use of light landing craft. At Kophinou in the Larnaca region, Turkish positions controlled the main roads from Nicosia to Limassol and Larnaca. The Castle at St Hilarion to the Pentadactylos mountain which dominates the main road from Nicosia to the northern port of Kyrenia, was another strategic position where skirmishes occurred and which became a crucial Turkish stronghold. Military analysis suggests that on instructions from Turkey, Turkish Cypriots began deliberately to occupy these strategic areas in preparation for further conflict.

The creation of enclaves was also a flagrant violation of land property rights at the expense of Greek Cypriots.

Land Ownership by Ethnic Group:

Greek/Armenian/Maronite Cypriots 4,123,813 -> 60.9%
Turkish Cypriots 848,858 -> 12.3%
Others 32,120 -> 0.5%
State Land -> 26.3%


Source:Department of Lands and Surveys (refer to Annex 14 in Volume II of the"Memorandum by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cyprus" submitted to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, 27 February 1987.

The table demonstrates in fact that the withdrawal of the Turkish Cypriots into enclaves was inconsistent with their ownership of land on the island. During this period of prolonged crisis in Cyprus, the Turkish Government forcibly expelled Greeks from Constantinople. The Greek Government, on the contrary, took no retaliatory measures against the Moslem minority in Greek Western Thrace. However, this did not stop the Turkish air force from harassing the Dodecanese (Rhodes) and Greek islands lying closest to the Turkish Aegean coast.

In Cyprus, the total reported number of casualties over the period 21 December 1963 to 9 August 1964 vary only slightly. Turkish sources estimate about 350 Turkish deaths and about 200 Greek fatalities. The numbers include deaths resulting from rogue paramilitary action, as well as from exclusively military confrontations.

Below is a set of rules issued by the Turkish Cypriot leadership to the Turkish Cypriots on 18 December 1964:



Turkish Cypriots not in possession of a permit are prohibited to enter the Greek sector.

1. Those who disobey the order with a view to trading with Greek Cypriots should pay a fine of £25 or be punished with imprisonment.

2. A fine will be imposed on:-

(a) Those who converse or enter into negotiations with Greek Cypriots or accompany any stranger into our sector.

(b) Those who come into contact with Greek Cypriots for any official work.

(c) Those who appear before Greek Cypriot courts.

(d) Those who visit the Greek Cypriot hospitals for examination or in order to obtain pharmaceuticals ....

3. A fine of £25 or other severe punishment and one months imprisonment or whipping should be imposed on those who enter the Greek Cypriot sector:-

(a) For Promenade.

(b) For friendly association with Greek Cypriots.

(c) For amusement....





This remarkable quarantining of the Turkish Cypriots from the Greek Cypriots was effected entirely by the Turkish nationalist leadership, since such a separation was needed in order to pave the way for the eventual partition of the island.

The murder of Dervis Kavazoglu in 1965 further illustrates the point. Kavazoglu was a Turkish Cypriot journalist and trade unionist who had criticised the enforced separation of the Turkish Cypriots and also the leadership’s policies. He and his Greek Cypriot friend, Costas Michaoulis, were on their way to Larnaca when they were both killed near the Turkish village of Lourougina. The are allegations that these murders were carried out on the instructions of the Turkish leadership. This again demonstrates that Turkish strategy was to divide the Greeks from the Turks.

Yet, by 1972 about 7,000 Turkish Cypriots, or 15% of the 46,000 strong Turkish Cypriot work force, worked outside the enclaves. The employment of Turkish Cypriots was closely controlled by the Turkish leadership and Turkish Cypriots needed a work permit. The stagnant Turkish Cypriot economy and rising unemployment in the enclaves were the main reasons for the decision to allow this policy. This demonstrates that the "from Turk to Turk" policy was never viable, but was simply a political nationalist ploy. It seems that Cypriots could work together amicably when it suited economic interests; but it was not possible when adopted for nationalist arguments by Turkey to advance the cause of partition.

The political significance of the enclaves far exceeded their size. The Turkish officers who were the real power behind the Turkish Cypriot throne, developed a highly militarised and rigid regime. The Turkish Cypriot leadership’s policies helped fuel the fear and suspicion which was necessary to maintain their position of authority. The UN Secretary General, U. Thant, was critical of the self-isolation policy of the Turkish Cypriot leadership. In effect, the Turkish Cypriots became hostages to the imposed policy of cessation dictated by TMT. It is now impossible to know what the true position of the majority of Turkish Cypriots was since their views were not sought and never publicly debated by their leaders. This treatment of the Turkish Cypriots by Turks as a political irrelevance continues to date. The lack of a genuine Turkish Cypriot voice, with the ability to put forward its own voice, rather than that of Turkey, is probably the greatest cause of the inability to resolve the Cyprus problem over the last three years.

[boomerang]

1964 - 1966

Following the crisis of 1963 the island returned to general normality. The worst of the violence was over. The Turkish Cypriot paramilitaries had taken their positions and were determined to defend them, while the Greek Cypriot National Guard was obliged to take defensive positions in an attempt to prevent further no-go areas being created by the Turkish Cypriots. The Turkish Cypriot enclaves by now covered about 2% of the island’s total area. Never at any time prior to the Turkish invasion Turkish Cypriots had occupied more than 12% of the total land of Cyprus. The Turkish Cypriots, however, declared their own administration and refused to recognise the Government of Cyprus as legitimate. Not surprisingly, the Government of Cyprus regarded the Turkish Cypriot position as one of rebellion.

The atmosphere on the island can be illustrated by the kind of incidents that occurred during these years. In 1965 there occurred 550 technical breaches of the cease-fire. However, a closer look reveals a total of only 26 casualties. 1966 saw far less shooting, and therefore even fewer casualties.

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THE CRISIS OF 1967

The most significant event of 1967 in the SE-mediterranean was the downfall of democracy in Greece and its replacement by a military junta. It has frequently been alleged that George Papadopoulos, who led the coup, had been on the CIA pay-roll since 1952 and had acted as chief liaison officer between the KYP (the Greek subsidiary of the American CIA) and the USA. The US administration provided training and material to the anti-constitutional forces before the coup and became their protector for seven years after.

For Cyprus, however, the consequences were to prove catastrophic. The emergence of the junta marked the beginning of a severe deterioration in relations between Athens and Nicosia, a sad affair that culminated in the military coup against Makarios in July 1974.

Since the Second World War, the US had funded an enormous military complex in Greece, and almost the entire Greek officer corp received US training. Greece was at the hub of CIA activity for the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. The Greek military even named their headquarters in Athens (the Pentagon) as a gesture of admiration.

Athens was the switching centre for all communications east and south of Greece, which had been received from the Middle East and Africa and then relayed to Washington. As a consequence, it was Washington who wished the Cyprus issue resolved, especially following the six day Arab-Israeli war, which acted as a timely reminder of how essential US facilities in Greece and Turkey were for the defence of Israel, as well as of NATO. The colonels agreed to meet officials of the Turkish Government, but no solution was found. In Turkey anti-Greek propaganda was yet again deliberately and cynically fuelled using protests over the alleged maltreatment of the Muslim minority in (Greek) Western Thrace. It is significant that the status of the Turkish Cypriots had improved to such an extent that Turkey was unable to continue to use this pretext. The enosis issue, however, became the chosen tool of the junta in its efforts to destabilise the Cypriot Government.

Against this background, a second major clash occurred in Cyprus on 15 November 1967. The Turkish Cypriot village of Kophinou is situated in the Larnaca area and sits on the junction where the road from Larnaca joins the road from Limassol. If cut, road communications would be disrupted and freedom of movement would be denied between the South-west and the remainder of the island. The appointment of a new Turkish officer in January 1967 to head the Turkish Cypriot paramilitaries heightened tension in the area. Known by his nom de guerre, Mehmet, a campaign of stopping traffic, altering road signs and a generally belligerent attitude aimed quite often at the local UN contingent was adopted by his paramilitaries. It was calculated to annoy, intimidate, and precipitate all but the Turkish Cypriots.

Turkish paramilitaries occupied positions on the high ground above Ayios Theodoros, the neighbouring village to Kophinou. By the Summer of 1967, the Greeks of Ayios Theodoros began to experience difficulties getting to their part of the village which could only be reached by travelling through the occupied Turkish sector. Whilst this was going on, the Greek Cypriot police decided to suspend their patrols in order to avoid any increase in tension. In September, Mehmet assaulted a UN major and was relieved of his command. The police then sought to resume their patrols, but were prevented from doing so by the Turkish paramilitaries. The tension imported by Mehmet, however, did not leave with him.

There followed two months of protracted negotiations in an attempt to restart the patrols which had taken place since the early 1960s and had only temporarily been stopped. UNFICYP agreed on the resumption of the patrols, and by mid October the UN Secretary General himself was becoming impatient at Turkish prevarication, which was clearly emanating from the Turkish leadership, and complained bitterly at Turkish Cypriot behaviour. The possibility of another no go area was unacceptable to the Cypriot Government, especially in view of the strategic significance of the junction of the Larnaca-Limassol road.

On 27 October 1967, the UN Secretary General was therefore driven to make a personal appeal to the Turkish Government, asking them to co-operate with the UN authorities in Cyprus in order to restore freedom of movement in the Kophinou area. However, his pleas were met with an obstinateness and stubbornness that has characterised Turkey’s involvement in Cyprus ever since. There followed more prevarication and on 13 November 1967 the UN met with the Cyprus government, followed on 14 November by two police patrols moving through the area. They completed their patrol unhindered. The following day, however, another police patrol following the same route was shot at by Turkish-Cypriot nationalists.

The National Guard, by this time joined by Grivas, retaliated, as the Turks knew they would, and the result was a battle which went on through the night. On 16 March, inevitably, the National Guard and the police were withdrawn. However, by then the death toll amounted to 22 Turkish casualties and one Greek. This event was isolated and did not escalate into island wide violence, as had been the case in 1963/64. This episode has since been described by Turkish propagandists as a "genocide" committed against the Turkish Cypriots. The sad reality is that it had been deliberately instigated by Turkey, who was by now playing with the lives of the Turkish Cypriots. The Turkish response was immediate and pre-meditated. Turkish war planes made sorties over Greek Thrace and troops were concentrated on the Greco-Turkish border. Yet again, the threat of war and a danger to the cohesion of NATO’s southern flank emerged.

There followed an intense period of American shuttle diplomacy by President Lyndon Johnson’s envoy Cyrus Vance. The outcome was the presentation of a set of stiff demands on the Greek Junta by the Turkish Government. The result was the Junta’s agreement to virtually every Turkish demand. The colonels agreed to withdraw Grivas and all their excess troops who had entered Cyprus. Significantly, no Turkish troops from the inestimable number who had also joined the Turkish contingent since 1959 left the island. Any economic restrictions were also withdrawn from the Turkish enclaves, a gesture not reciprocated by the Turkish side, who continued to maintain their road blocades.

The political repercussions were devastating for the Greek Cypriots. The island was now virtually undefended and any threat of invasion could only be met by token resistance. The Turks could see that the Greeks were unable to use their numerical strength to establish government control over the whole island, and that Greece was unwilling to risk a war, whatever the outcome. This assured, the Turkish Cypriots proceeded to declare their "separate Turkish administration" on 29 December 1967 over those areas under their control. A few Turkish Cypriot lives had given Turkey the perfect pretext to begin its incremental annexation of Northern Cyprus.

Although the crisis had now passed, the relationship between Athens and Nicosia had irrevocably changed. From this point on the Greek military junta became convinced that the `Cyprus problem’ could only be solved by eliminating Makarios, because the price of a settlement with the Turks would inevitably be beyond anything Makarios would accept. The junta, anxious to appeal to its US masters, wanted a solution acceptable to Turkey, and this would involve some form of partition. On 12 January 1968, Makarios declared enosis officially no longer feasible. The tilt towards the acceptance of independence as the new reality was now given unambiguous official approval. Makarios followed this declaration by an election victory, in which he received 96% of the vote, an increase of 32% over the 1960 election due to communist support.

The political problem now emerging was how to present an agenda which could deal effectively with democratic imperative (Cyprus had had a legitimate communist party and a new socialist party) while making clear Cyprus’s disinterest to the Greek dictatorship.

Cyprus knew, however, that it was only a matter of time before Turkey chose to invade and complete its objectives. The primary function of the officer corp was to erode the authority of the Cyprus Government, rather than to plan for the defence of the island against the expected Turkish invasion. Indeed, given the seven year notice Cyprus had of Turkey’s intention to invade, it is remarkable that no coherent defence strategy was adopted. The Greek colonels saw this as the achievement of a common front with its NATO ally Turkey against communism. Any resistance on the part of the Cypriots to preserve the unity and territorial integrity of their state was branded anti-enosist and anti-Hellenist.

[boomerang]

THE COUP D’ETAT AND THE TURKISH INVASION OF CYPRUS JULY 1974

On 15 July 1974 extreme elements nationalist of the National Guard led by its Greek officers launched a military coup with the objective of overthrowing the Government. The Presidential Palace was bombed but, for the third time Makarios escaped and was flown out of Cyprus by British forces. Nicos Sampson was installed as President. Sampson was well known for his paramilitary involvement, and as the owner of a news paper, with fanatical pro-Greek nationalistic leanings. The coup was, in essence, a short term civil war between Greek factions and was completely unrelated to the inter-communal issue which had been dormant for seven years. Indeed, the perpetrators of the coup went out of their way to tell the world that this was an internal Greek matter. The situation was now quite different to that of 1963/64. The coup involved only the Greek Cypriots and, as Denktash had acknowledged, the Turkish Cypriots were mere spectators.

Between 1967 and 1974 relations between Greek and Turkish Cypriots had much improved, with no further incidents of violence by either government or paramilitary groups. The Turks moved freely around the island. The enclaves existed only to sustain the argument for separation, although about 6,000 Turkish Cypriots had drifted back to their homes outside of the enclaves by the early 1970s. Only four months before the coup, Denktash was invited to speak at a Greek Cypriot gathering of businessmen and professionals. There was a readiness on the part of various groups of both communities to take part in seminars organised to promote inter-ethnic understanding. The improvement in relations between Greek and Turkish Cypriots is acknowledged, even by the most partisan of Turcophile commentators. It is therefore extremely difficult to identify a legitimate fear on the part of the Turkish Cypriot as a result of the coup. The only human victims of the coup were the Greek Cypriots.

Having received reports of an impending coup, the US State Department and Kissinger in particular chose not to prevent it, fuelling the allegations that it had tacitly supported it. Thomas Boyatt, the Cyprus Desk officer in the State Department warned consistently of a coup and the inevitable Turkish response. Boyatt had served as a diplomat on the island. He confirmed that the Junta was planning an attack on Cyprus. His pre-coup memoranda were classified as secret and have never been released. Indeed, after the invasion Boyatt was forbidden by Kissinger to testify before Congress, and finally did so only in order to avoid being cited for contempt. Evidence was only taken in executive session of Congress, so sensitive was it considered to be. In July 1974, even the Greek Cypriot daily Apogevmatini described in its editorial the impending coup to be carried out by EOKA-B. The US responded with a wait and see policy. After all, the outcome could well suit them, and it did. Five days after the coup Turkey invaded, and unlike 1964, there was no urging of restraint by the US State Department. There was now no need because the US-backed Junta would not go to war against Turkey without American consent. Turkish troops landed in Kyrenia in the early hours of 20 July 1974.

From 1967 until the time of the coup in 1974, there had been no further recorded incidents of inter-communal violence in Cyprus. Turkey’s alleged legal justification for her invasion in 1974 was founded under article (iv) of the Treaty of Guarantee which permits intervention, but for the sole purpose of restoring the constitutional arrangements as laid down in the London-Zurich agreements of 1959, not for the purpose of over-throwing them altogether. The article is also silent about the use of armed force in this restoration as a result of unilateral intervention. The British, who had imposed themselves as one of the three guarantor powers, and in the defence of many having caused an inter-communal problem where one had existed by abusing the status of the Turkish-Cypriot minority, now decided to avoid their obligations under the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee. Having insisted on the treaty in 1960, Britain’s Foreign Secretary in 1974, James Callaghan, although greatly dissapointed by Kissinger’s attitude, abdicated all responsibility to US Secretary of State.

In response to the Turkish invasion, the Greek army attempted to mobilise, but the mobilisation never really got off the ground. In addition, in Cyprus Greek troops were repeatedly withdrawn by the officers from the front-line offering an unfettered line of advance to the Turks. It was almost as if the partition of the island was pre-arranged. The corruption and incompetence of the junta over the previous six years had taken its toll. Within a few days of the invasion, the junta in Athens collapsed, followed by its puppet regime in Nicosia. Power returned to civilians under Constantine Karamalis in Greece, while the Greek Presidency went to Glafkos Clerides, Makarios’ deputy. Constitutional order, under which Turkey attempted to justify her invasion, was now restored. The cease-fire arranged by the UN now simply acted as a respite to give Turkey an opportunity to consolidate her gains and bringing in massive reinforcements to complete her strategic contingent.

It is, however, very hard to find any legal justification for Turkey’s appalling violations of human rights in Cyprus as witnessed by the findings of the Council of Europe. We know today that thousands of Cypriot civilians were murdered or tortured. Many women and children still remain missing. Over 1,000 women were raped. How can this appalling brutality be justified by an attempt to restore a constitution?

Further support for the argument that the Turkish Government’s real goal was not the restoration of constitutional order but sheer order, becomes apparent when looking at the Geneva peace conference called in the wake of the original July invasion.

On 9 August 1974, when Turkey held only the narrow Kyrenia-Nicosia corridor, the Turkish foreign minister handed an ultimatum to the Greek Cypriot negotiator Glafkos Clerides demanding the immediate cessation of 35% of Cypriot territory to the Turkish army. When Clerides requested 36 hours to discuss it with his Government, not a wholly unreasonably request given the circumstances, his request was denied.

As regards Gunes, Turkish negotiator, the demand was non-negotiable. Turkey then launched a second invasion on 14 August 1974, this time conquering 37% of the territory of the Republic of Cyprus. By then the Sampson regime had fallen, as had the Greek Junta. Following this second offensive begun on 14 August, Greek-Cypriot retaliatory action began against the Turks after the ethnic cleansing of Greek Cypriots from their homes had occurred, and the majority of the human rights violations were becoming known. In the village of Tokni, 69 Turkish Cypriots were killed and later found in a mass grave. In Aloa, 57 Turkish Cypriots were killed, while in Maratha a further 88 corpses were discovered in a mass grave.

Following the invasion a report was prepared by the Commission of the Council of Europe as a result of a complaint by the Cyprus Government. The report examines alleged breaches of the articles of the Convention of Human Rights of which each member of the Council of Europe (including Turkey) is a signatory. The following is the summary as printed by the "Sunday Times" on 23 January 1977:



KILLING Relevant Article of Human Rights Convention:- Everyone’s right to life shall be protected by law.

Charge made by Greek Cypriots: The Turkey army embarked on a systematic course of mass killings of civilians unconnected with any war activity.

Evidence given to the Commission: Witness Mrs K said that on 21 July 1974, the second day of the Turkish invasion, she and a group of villages from Elia were captured when, fleeing from bombardment, they tried to reach a range of mountains. All 12 men arrested were civilians. They were separated from the women and shot in front of the women, under orders of a Turkish officer. Some of the men were holding children, three of whom were wounded.

Written statements referred to two more group killings: at Trimithi, eye-witnesses told of the deaths of five men (two shepherds aged 60 and 70, two masons of 20 and 60, and a 19 year-old plumber). At Palekythron 30 Greek Cypriot soldiers being held prisoner were killed by their captors, according to the second statement.

Witness S gave evidence of two other mass killings at Palekythron. In each case, between 30 and 40 soldiers who had surrendered to the advancing Turks were shot. In the second case, the witness said: "the soldiers were transferred to the kilns of the village where they were shot dead and burnt in order not to leave details of what had happened".

Seventeen members of two neighbouring families, including 10 women and five children aged between two and nine were also killed in cold blood at Palekythron, reported witness H, a doctor. Further killings described in the doctor’s notes, recording evidence related to him by patients (either eye-witnesses or victims), included;

· Execution of eight civilians taken prisoner by Turkish soldiers in the area of Prastio, one day after the cease-fire on 16 August 1974.

· Killing by Turkish soldiers of five unarmed Greek Cypriot soldiers who had sought refuge in a house at Voni.

· Shooting of four women, one of whom survived by pretending she was dead.

Further evidence, taken in refugee camps and in the form of written statements, described killings of civilians in homes, streets or fields, as well as the killing of people under arrest or in detention. Eight statements described the killing of soldiers not in combat; five statements referred to a mass grave found in Dherynia.

Commission’s verdict: By 14 votes to one, the Commission considered there were "very strong indications" of violation of Article 2 and killings "committed on a substantial scale".

RAPE Relevant Article:- No one shall be subjected to torture or to in-human or degrading treatment or punishment.

Charge:- Turkish troops were responsible for wholesale and repeated rapes of women of all ages from 12 to 71. Sometimes to such an extent that the victims suffered haemorrhages or became mental wrecks. In some areas, enforced prostitution was practised, all women and girls of a village being collected and put into separate rooms in empty houses where they were raped repeatedly.

In certain cases members of the same family were repeatedly raped, some of them in front of their own children. In other cases women were brutally raped in public.

Rapes were on many occasions accompanied by brutality such as violent biting of the victims, causing severe wounding, banging their heads on the floor and wringing their throats almost to the point of suffocation. In some cases attempts to rape were followed by the stabbing or killing of the victims, including pregnant and mentally-retarded women.

Evidence given to Commission:- Testimony of doctors C and H, who examined the victims. Eye-witnesses and hearsay witnesses also gave evidence, and the Commission had before it written statements from 41 alleged victims.

Dr H said he had confirmed rape in 70 cases, including:-

· A mentally-retarded girl of 24 was raped in her house by 20 soldiers. When she started screaming they threw her from the second floor window. She fractured her spine and was paralysed.

· One day after their arrival at Voni, Turks took girls to a nearby house and raped them. ? One woman from Voni was raped on three occasions by four persons each time. She became pregnant.

· One girl, from Palekythrou, who was held with others in a house, was taken out at gun point and raped.

· At Tanvu, Turkish soldiers tried to rape a 17 year-old girl. She resisted and was shot dead.

· A woman from Gypsou told Dr H that 25 girls were kept by Turks at Marathouvouno as prostitutes.

Another witness said his wife was raped in front of their children. Witness S told of 25 girls who complained to Turkish officers about being raped and were raped again by the officers. A man (name withheld) reported that his wife was stabbed in the neck while resisting rape. His grand-daughter, aged six, had been stabbed and killed by Turkish soldiers attempting to rape her.

A Red Cross witness said that in August 1974, while the island’s telephones were still working, the Red Cross Society received calls from Palekythrou and Kaponti reporting rapes. The Red Cross also took care of 38 women released from Voni and Gypsou detention camps; all had been raped, some in front of their husbands and children. Others had been raped repeatedly, or put in houses frequented with Turkish soldiers.

These women were taken to Akrotiri hospital, in the British Sovereign Base Area, where they were treated. Three were found to be pregnant. Reference was also made to several abortions performed at the base.

Commission’s verdict:- By 12 votes to one the Commission found "that the incidents of rape described in the cases referred to and regarded as established constitute "in-human treatment" and thus violations of Article 3 for which Turkey is responsible under the Convention."

TORTURE Relevant article:- see above under Rape.

Charge: Hundreds of people, including children, women and pensioners, were victims of systematic torture and savage and humiliating treatment during their detention by the Turkish army. They were beaten, according to the allegations, sometimes to the extent of being incapacitated. Many were subjected to whipping, breaking of their teeth, knocking their heads against walls, beating with electrified clubs, stubbing of cigarettes on their skin, jumping and stepping on their chests and hands, pouring dirty liquids on them, piercing them with bayonets, etc.

Many, it was said, were ill-treated to such an extent that they became mental and physical wrecks. The brutalities complained of reached their climax after the cease-fire agreements; in fact, most of the acts described were committed at a time when Turkish armed forces were not engaged in any war activities.

Evidence to Commission: Main witness was a school teacher, one of 2,000 Greek Cypriot men deported to Turkey. He stated that he and his fellow detainees were repeatedly beaten after their arrest, on their way to Adana (in Turkey), in jail at Adana and in prison camp at Amasya.

On ship to Turkey:- "That was another moment of terrible beating again. We were tied all the time. I lost the sense of touch. I could not feel anything for about two or three months. Every time we asked for water or spoke we were beaten."

Arriving at Adana:- "... then, one by one, they led us to prisons, through a long corridor .. Going through that corridor was another terrible experience. There were about 100 soldiers from both sides with sticks, clubs and with their fists beating every one of us while going to the other end of the corridor. I was beaten at least 50 times until I reached the other end.

"In Adana anyone who said he wanted to see a doctor was beaten.

"Beating was on the agenda every day. There were one or two very good, very nice people, but they were afraid to show their kindness, as they told us."

Witness P spoke of:-

· A fellow prisoner who was kicked in the mouth. He lost several teeth "and his lower jaw came off in pieces".

· A Turkish officer, a karate student, who exercised every day by hitting prisoners.

· Fellow prisoners who were hung by the feet over the hole of a lavatory for hours.

· A Turkish second lieutenant who used to prick all prisoners with a pin when they were taken into a yard.

Evidence from Dr H said that prisoners were in an emaciated condition on their return to Cyprus. On nine occasions he had found signs of wounds.

The doctor gave a general description of conditions in Adana and in detention camps in Cyprus (at Pavlides Garage and the Saray Prison in the Turkish quarter of Nicosia) as reported to him by former detainees. Food, he said, consisted of one-eight of a loaf of bread a day, with occasional olives; there were about two buckets of water and two mugs which were never cleaned, from which about 1,000 people had to drink; toilets were filthy, with faeces rising over the basins; floors were covered with faeces and urine; in jail in Adana prisoners were kept 76 to a cell with three towels between them and one block of soap per eight persons per month to wash themselves and their clothes.

One man, it was alleged, had to amputate his own toes with a razor blade as a consequence of ill-treatment. Caught in Achna with another man, they had been beaten up with hard objects. When he asked for a glass of water he was given a glass full of urine. His toes were then stepped on until they became blue, swollen and eventually gangrenous (the other man was said to have been taken to hospital in Nicosia, where he agreed to have his legs amputated. He did not survive the operation).

According to witness S:- "hundreds of Greek Cypriots were beaten and dozens were executed. They have cut off their ears in some cases, like the case of Palekythron and Trahoni ..." (verbatim record).

Verdict by Commission: By 12 votes to one, the Commission concluded that prisoners were in a number of cases physically ill-treated by Turkish soldiers.

"These acts of ill-treatment caused considerable injuries and in at least one case, death of a victim. By their severity they constitute "in-human treatment" in the sense of Article 3, for which Turkey is responsible under the Convention."

LOOTING Relevant article:- Every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions.

Charge: In all Turkish-occupied areas the Turkish army systematically looted houses and businesses of Greek Cypriots.

Evidence to Commission: Looting in Kyrenia was described by witness C:- "... The first days of looting of the shops was done by the army of heavy things like refrigerators, laundry machines, television sets" (verbatim record).

For weeks after the invasion, he said, he had watched Turkish naval ships taking on board the looted goods.

Witness K, a barrister, described the pillage of Famagusta:- "At two o’clock an organised, systematic, terrifying, shocking, unbelievable looting started ... We heard the breaking of doors, some of them iron doors, smashing of glass, and we were waiting for them any minute to enter the house. This lasted for about four hours."

Written statements by eye-witnesses of looting were corroborated by several reports by the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Verdict of Commission: The Commission accepted that looting and robbery on an extensive scale, by Turkish troops and Turkish Cypriots, had taken place. By 12 votes to one, it established that there had been deprivation of possessions of Greek Cypriots on a large scale.

OTHER CHARGES

On four counts:- the Commission concluded that Turkey had also violated an Article of the Convention asserting the right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence. The Commission also decided that Turkey was continuing to violate the Article by refusing to allow the return of more than 170,000 Greek Cypriot refugees to their homes in the north.

On three counts:- the Commission said Turkey had breached an Article laying down the right to liberty and security of persons by confining more than 2,000 Greek Cypriots in schools and churches.

Finally, the Commission said Turkey had violated two more articles that specify that the rights and freedoms in the Convention shall be secured without discrimination on any grounds, and that anyone whose rights are violated "shall have an effective remedy before a national authority."

The European Commission on Human Rights has outlined in great detail the actions of the Turkish armed forces and the treatment that it handed out to those Greek Cypriot civilians with whom it came into contact. 5,000 Greek Cypriot civilians were murdered, over 1,000 women were raped. Over 1,619 Greek Cypriots were abducted and remain missing, their whereabouts never disclosed by the Turkish authorities. The brutality the Turkish army brought with it was specifically designed to terrify the local Greek Cypriot creating 200,000 refugees.

By 18 August the Turkish army had drawn a line (aptly called the Attila line) across the island, which remains to this day and follows the proposed line suggested in 1957 very closely. The long cherished aims of Kibris Turktur were partly fulfilled and there have been numerous calls since 1974 from Turkish nationalist groups to go on and "finish the job".

An ethnic group, which in 1964 owned about 12% of the land of Cyprus, had managed, by means of violence and manipulation, in gaining control of over 37%

[boomerang]

U.S. MILITARY AND CIA INTERVENTIONS SINCE WORLD WAR II

"Fuck your parliament and your constitution," said the President of the United States


"It's the best damn Government since Pericles," the American two-star General declared. [1] (The news report did not mention whether he was chewing on a big fat cigar.)

The governmnet, about which the good General was so ebulient, was that of the Colonels' junta which came to power in a military coup in April 1967, followed immediately by the traditional martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, torture, and killings, the victims totaling some 8,000 in the first month. This was accompanied by the equally traditional declaration that this was all being done to save a nation from a "communist takeover". Corrupting and subversive influences in Greek life were to be removed. Among these were the miniskirts, long hair, and foreign newspapers; church attendance for the young would be compulsory. [2]

So brutal and so swift was the repression, that by September, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands were before the European Comission of Human Rights to accuse Greece of violating most of the Commission's conventions. Before the year was over, Amnesty International had sent representatives to Greece to investigate the situation. From this came a report which asserted that "Torture as a deliberate practice is carried out by the Security Police and the Military Police." [3]

The coup had taken place two days before the campaign for national elections was to begin, elections which appeared certain to bring the veteran liberal leader George Papandreou back as prime minister. Papandreou had been elected in February 1964 with the only outright majority in the history of modern Greek elections. The successful machinations to unseat him had begun immediately, a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek military, and the American military and CIA stationed in Greece.

Philip Deane (the pen name of Gerasimos Gigantes) is a Greek, a former UN official, who worked during this period both for King Constantine and as an envoy to Washington for the Papandreou government. He has written an intimate account of the subleties and the grossness of this conspiracy to undermine the government and enhance the position of the military plotters, and of the raw power exercised by the CIA in his country [4]. We saw earlier how Greece was looked upon much as a piece of property to be developed according to Washington's needs. A story related by Deane illustrates how this attitude was little changed, and thus the precariousness of Papandreou's position: During one of the perennial disputes between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus, which was now spilling over onto NATO, President Johnson summoned the Greek ambassador to tell him of Washington's "solution". The ambassador protested that it would be unacceptable to the Greek parliament and contrary to the Greek constitution.

"Then listen to me, Mr. Ambassador," said the President of the United States, "fuck your Parliament and your Constitution. America, is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant's trunk, whacked good . . . We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your Prime Minister gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament and Constitutions, he, his Parliament and his Constitution may not last very long." [5]

In July 1965, George Papandreou was finally maneuvered out of office by royal prerogative. The king had a coalition of breakaway Centre Union Deputies (Papandreou's party) and rightists waiting in the wings to form a new government. It was later revealed by a State Department official that the CIA Chief-of-Station in Athens, John Maury, had "worked in behalf of the palace in 1965. He helped King Constantine buy Centre Union Deputies so that the George Papandreou Government was toppled." [6]

For nearly two years thereafter, various short-lived cabinets ruled until it was no longer possible to avoid holding the elections prescribed by the constitution.

What concerned the opponents of George Papandreou most about him was his son. Andreas Papandreou, who had been head of the economics department at the University of California at Berkeley and a minister in his father's cabinet, was destined for a leading role in the new government. But he was by no means the wide-eyed radical. In the United States, Andreas had been an active supporter of such quintessential moderate liberals as Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey. [7] His economic views, wrote 'Washington Post' columnist Marquis Childs, were "those of the American New Deal". [8]

But Andreas Papandreou did not disguise his wish to take Greece out of the cold war. He publicly questioned the wisdom of the country remaining in NATO, or at least ramaining in it as a satellite of the United States. He leaned toward opening relations with the Soviet Union and other Communist countries on Greece's border. He argued that the swollen American military and intelligence teams in Greece compromised the nation's freedom of action. And he viewed the Greek Army as a threat to democracy, wishing to purge it of its most dictatorial-and royalist-minded senior officers. [9]

Andreas Papandreou's bark was worse than his bite, as his later presidency was to simply demonstrate. (He did not, for example, pull Greece out of NATO or US bases out of Greece.) But in Lyndon johnson's Washingon, if you were not totally and unquestionably with us, you were agin' us. Johnson felt hat Andreas, who had become a naturalized US citizen, had betrayed America". Said LBJ:

We gave the son of a bitch American citizenship, didn't we? He was an American, with all the rights and privileges. And he had sworn allegiance to the flag. And then he gave up his American citizenship. He went back to just being a Greek. You can't trust a man who breaks his oath of allegiance to the flag of the United States. [10]

What, then, are we to make of the fact that Andreas Papandreou was later reported to have worked with the CIA in the early 1960s? (He criticized publication of the report, but did not deny the charge.) [11] If true, it would not have been incompatible with being a liberal, particularly at that time. It was incompatible, as he susequently learned, only with his commitment to a Greece independent from US foreign policy.

As for the elder Papandreou, his anti-communist credentials were impeccable, dating back to his role as a Brtitsh-installed prime-minister during the civil war against the left in 1944-45. But he, too, showed stirrings of independence from the Western superpower. He refused to buckle under Johnson's pressure to compromise with Turkey over Cyprus. He accepted an invitation to visit Moscow, and when his government said it would accept Soviet aid in preparation for a possible war with Turkey, the US Embassy 'demanded' an explanation. Moreover, in an attempt to heal the old wounds of the civil war, Papandreoubegan to reintroduce certain civil liberties and to readmit into Greece some of those who had fought against the government in the civil war peroid. [12]

When Andreas Papandreou assumed his ministerial duties in 1964 he was shocked to discover what was becoming a fact of life for every techno-industrial state in the world: an intelligence service gone wild, a shadow government with powers beyond the control of the nation's nominal leaders. This, thought Papandreou, accounted for many of the obstacles the government was encountering in trying to carry out its policies. [13]

The Greek intelligence service, KYP, as we have seen, was created by the OSS/CIA in the course of the civil war, with hundreds of its officers receiving training in the United States. One of these men, George Papadopoulos, was the leader of the junta that seized power in 1967. Andreas Papandreou found that the KYP routinely bugged ministerial converstaions and turned the data over to the CIA. (Many Western intelligence agencies have long provided the CIA with information about their own government and citizens, and the CIA has reciprocated on occasion. The nature of much of this information has been such that if a private citizen were to pass it to a foreign power he could be charged with treason.)

As a result of his discovery, the younger Papandreou dismissed the two top KYP men and replaced them with reliable officers. The new director was ordered to protect the cabinet from surveillance. "He came back apologetically," recalls Papandreou, "to say he couldn't do it. All the equipment was American, controlled by the CIA or Greeks under CIA supervision. There was no kind of distinction between the two services. They duplicated functions in a counterpart relationship. In effect, they were a single agency." [14]

Andreas Papandreou's order to abolish the bugging of the cabinet inspired the Deputy Chief of Mission of the US Embassy, Norbert Anshutz (or Anschuetz), to visit him.

Anshutz, who has been linked to the CIA, demanded that Papandreou rescind the order. Andreas demanded that the American leave his office, which he did, but not before warning that "there would be consequences". [15]

Papandreou then requested that a thorough search be made of his home and office for electronic devices by the new KYP deputy director. "It wasn't until much later," says Andreas, "that we discovered he'd simply planted a lot of new bugs. Lo and behold, we'd brought in another American-paid operative as our No. 2." [16]

An endeavor by Andreas to end the practice of KYP's funds coming directly from the CIA without passing through any Greek ministry also met with failure, but he did succeed in transferring the man who had been liaison between the two agencies for sevearl years. This was George Papadopoulos. The change in his position, however, appears to have amounted to little more than a formality, for the organization still took orders from him; even afterwards, Greek "opposition politicians who sought the ear (or the purse) of James Potts, CIA [deputy] chief in Athens before the coup, were often told: 'See George -- he's my boy'."

In mid-February 1967, a meeting took place in the White House, reported Marquis Childs to discuss CIA reports which "left no doubt that a military coup was in the making ... It could hardly have been secret. Since 1947 the Greek army and the American military aid group in Athens, numbering several hundred, have worked as part of the same team ... The solemn question was whether by some subtle political intervention the coup could be prevented" and thus preserve parliamentary government. It was decided that no course of action was feasible. As one of the senior civilians present recalls it, Walt Rostow, the President's adviser on national security affairs, closed the meeting with these words: I hope you understand, gentlemen, that what we have concluded here, or rather have failed to conclude, makes the future course of events in Greece inevitable. [18]

A CIA report dated 23 January 1967 had specifically named the Papadopoulos group as one plotting the coup, and was apparently one of the reports discussed at the February meeting. [19]

Of the cabal of five officers which took power in April four, reportedly, were intimately connected to the American military or to the CIA in Greece. The fifth man had been brought in becasue of the armored units he commanded. [20] George Papadopoulos emerged as the 'de facto' leader, taking the title of prime minister later in the year.

The catchword amongst old hands at the US military mission in Greece was that Papadopoulos was "the first CIA agent to become Premier of a European country". "Many Greeks consider this to be the simple truth," reported Charles Foley in 'The Observer' of London. [21]

At the time of the coup, Papadopoulos had been on the CIA payroll for some 15 years. [22] One reason for the success of their marriage may have been Colonel Papadopoulos's World War II record. When the Germans invaded Greece, Papadopoulos served as a captain in the Nazi's Security Battalions whose main task was to track down Greek resistance fighters. [23] He was, it is said, a great believer in Hitler's "new order", and his later record in power did little to cast doubt upon that claim. Foley writes that when he mentioned the junta leader's pro-German background to an American military adviser he met at a party in Athens, the American hinted that it was related to Papadopoulos's subservience to US wishes: "George gives good value," he smiled, "because there are documents in Washington he wouldn't like let out." [24]

Foley relates that under Papadopoulos:

intense official propaganda portrayed Communism as the only enemy Greece had ever had and minimized the German occupation until even Nazi atrocities were seen as provoked by the Communists. This rewriting of history clearly reflects the dictator's concern at the danger that the gap in his official biography may some day be filled in. [25]

As part of the rewriting, members of the Security Battalions became "heroes of the resistance". [26]

It was torture, however, which most indelibly marked the seven-year Greek nightmare. James Becket, an American attorney sent to Greece by Amnesty International, wrote in December 1969 that a "conservative estimate would place at not less than two thousand" the number of people tortured. [27] It was an odious task for Beckett to talk to some of the victims:

People had been mercilessly tortured simply for being in possession of a leaflet criticizing the regime. Brutality and cruelty on one side, frustration and helplessness on the other. They were being tortured and there was nothing to be done. It was like listening to a friend who has cancer. What comfort, what wise reflection can someone who is comfortable give? Torture might last a short time, but the person will never be the same. [28].

Becket reported that some torturers had told prisoners that some of their equipment had come as US military aid: a special "thick white double cable" whip was one item; another was the headscrew, known as an "iron wreath", which was progressively tightened around the head or ears. [29]

The Amnesty delegation desribed a number of the other torture methods commonly employed. Among these were:

a) Beating the soles of the feet with a stick or pipe. After four months of this, the soles of one prisoner were covered with thick scar tissue. Another was crippled by broken bones.

b) Numerous incidents of sexually-oriented torture: shoving fingers or an object into the vagina and twisting and tearing and brutally; also done with the anus; or a tube is inserted into the anus and water driven in under very high pressure.

c) Techniques of gagging: the throat is grasped in such a way that the windpipe is cut off, or a filthy rag, often soaked in urine, and sometimes excrement, is shoved down the throat.

d) Tearing out the hair from the head and the pubic region.

e) Jumping on the stomach.

f) Pulling out toe nails and finger nails. [30]

These were not the worst. The worst is what one reads in the many individual testimonies. But these are simply too lengthy to be repeated here. [31]

The junta's response to the first Amnesty report was to declare that it was comprised of charges emanating from "International Communism" and to hire public relations firms in New York and London to improve its image. [32]

In 1969, the European Commission of Human Rights found Greece guilty of torture, murder and other violations. For these reasons and particularly for the junta's abolition of parliamentary democracy, The Council of Europe -- a consultative body of, at that time, 18 European States, under which the Commission falls -- was preparing to expel Greece. The council rejected categorically Greece's claim that it had been in danger of a communist takeover. Amnesty International later reported that the United States, though not a member of the Council, actively applied diplomatic pressure on member states not to vote for the expulsion. (Nonetheless, while the Council was deliberating, the 'New York Times' reported that "The State Department said today that the United States had deliberately avoided taking any position on the question of continued Greek membership in the Council of Europe.") The European members, said Amnesty, believed that only the United Sates had the power to bring about changes in Greece, yet it chose only to defend the junta. [33]

On the specific issue of torture, Amnesty's report concluded that:

American policy on the torture question as expressed in the official testimony has been to deny it where possible and minize it where denial was not possible. This policy flowed naturally from general support for the military regime. [34]

As matters transpired, Greece walked out before the Council could formalize the expulsion.

In a world grown increasingly hostile, the support of the world's most powerful nation was 'sine qua non' for the Greek junta. The two governments thrived upon each other. Said the American ambassador to Greece, Henry Tasca, "This is the most anti-communist group you'll find anywhere. There is just no place like Greece to offer these facilities with the back up of the kind of Government you have got here." ("You", not "we", noted the reporter, was the only pretense.) [35]

The facilities the ambassador was referring to were dozens of US military installations, from nuclear missile bases to major communication sites, housing tens of thousands of American servicemen. The United States, in turn, provided the junta with ample military hardware despite an official congressional embargo, as well as the police equipment required by the Greek authorities to maintain their rigid control.

In an attempt to formally end the embargo, the Nixon administration asked Papadopoulos to make some gesture towards constitutional government which the White House could then point to. The Greek prime minister was to be assured, said a secret White House document, that the administration would take "at face value and accept without reservation" any such gesture. [36]

US Vice-president Spiro Agnew, on a visit to the land of his ancestors, was moved to exalt the "achievements" of the Greek government and its "constant co-operation with US needs and wishes". [37] One of the satisfied needs Agnew may have had in mind was the contribution of $549,000 made by the junta to the 1968 Nixon-Agnew election campaign. Apart from any other consideration, it was suspected that this was money given to the junta by the CIA finding its way back to Washington. A Senate investigation of this question was abruptly canceled at the direct request of Henry Kissinger. [38]

Perhaps nothing better captures the mystique of the bond felt by the Greeks to their American guardians than the story related about the Chief Inspector Basil Lambrou, one of Athens' well-known torturers:

Hundreds of prisoners have listened to the little speech given by Inspector Basil Lambrou, who sits behind his desk which displays the red, white, and blue clasped-hand symbol of American aid. He tries to show the prisoner the absolute fultility of resistance: "You make yourself ridiculous by thinking you can do anything. The world is divided in two. There are the communists on that side and on this side the free world. The Russians and the Americans, no one else. What are we? Americans. Behind me there is the government, behind the government is NATO, behind NATO is the U.S. You can't fight us, we are Americans." [39]

Amnesty International adds that some torturers would tell their victims things like: "The Human Rights Commission can't help you now ... The Red Cross can do nothing for you ... Tell them all, it will do no good, you are helpless." "The torturers from the start," said Amnesty, "had said that the United States supported them and that was what counted." [40]

In November 1973, a falling-out within the Greek inner circle culminated in the ousting of Papadopoulos and his replacement by Col. Demetrios Ioannidis, Commander of the Military Police, torturer, graduate of american training in anti-subversive techniques, confidant of the CIA. [41] Ioannidis named as prime-minister a Greek-American, A. Androutsopoulos, who came to Greece after the Second World War as an official employee of the CIA, a fact of which Androutsopoulos had often boasted. [42]

Eight months later, the Ioannidis regime overthrew the government. It was a fatal miscalculation. Turkey invaded Cyprus and the reverberations in Athens resulted in the military giving way to a civilian government. The Greek nightmare had come to an end.

Much of the story of American complicity in the 1967 coup and its aftermath may never be known. At the trials held in 1975 of junta members and torturers, many witnesses made reference to the American role. This may have been the reason a separate investigation of this aspect was scheduled to be undertaken by the Greek Court of Appeals. [43] But it appears that no information resulting from this inquiry, if it actually took place, was ever announced. Philip Deane, upon returning to Greece several months after the civilian government took over, was told by leading politicians that "for the sake of preserving good relations with the US, the evidence of US complicity will not be made fully public". [44]

Andreas Papndreou had been arrested at the time of the coup and held in prison for eight months. Shortly after his release, he and his wife Margaret visited the American ambassador, Phillips Talbot, in Athens. Papandreou related the following:

I asked Talbot whether America could have intervened the night of the coup, to prevent the death of democracy in Greece. He denied that they could have done anything about it. Then Margaret asked a critical question: What if the coup had been a Communist or a Leftist coup? Talbot answered without hesitation. Then, of course, they would have intervened, and they would have crushed the coup. [45]

by William Blum

[boomerang]

Duplicity over Cyprus survives to this day

by Michael Jansen

The Daily Star 20/07/99

Twenty-five years ago, the Turkish Army invaded Cyprus. Ankara claimed that it was obliged to act to protect the Turkish Cypriot community following a coup against President Makarios mounted on July 15th by the faltering Greek junta in Athens. The colonels had named as president Nicos Sampson, a Greek Cypriot right-winger with a reputation as a Turk fighter. This provocative appointment presented Turkey with a perfect propaganda ploy to justify intervention under the Treaty of Guarantee which empowered Greece, Turkey and Britain to take action if the communal balance on the island were disturbed. Britain, also obliged to intervene, was instructed to stay out by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Under the treaty, the two should have used force to counter the coup and re-establish the legal government of the republic. Instead Turkey, acting on its own, occupied the northern 37 percent of the island and expelled 125,000 Greek Cypriots from their homes and villages. Later Ankara used its military muscle to compel Turkish Cypriots still living in the south to move north. The island where the Greek and Turkish communities once lived together in mixed towns and villages was divided into two ethnic zones.

Cyprus remains divided, its people separated by the worlds first Green Line, so named because during an earlier round of troubles a British officer drew a line in green ink to divide the capital, Nicosia, into two sectors. After Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, the term Green Line was used to refer to the 1948 cease-fire line in Palestine and, of course, Beirut acquired its own Green Line during the civil war.

The Turkish side says that the Cyprus problem has been solved. The Greek side argues that the occupation and de facto partition of Cyprus are illegal and that the presence of 35,000 Turkish troops on the island poses a threat to the stability of the eastern Mediterranean. The international community agrees that the status quo is not acceptable and has called for an end to the arms race which has turned the island of Aphrodite into one of the most heavily militarized pieces of real estate in the world.

The Cyprus problem­ which had repeatedly threatened to precipitate Greco-Turkish warfare ­ was supposed to be resolved in 1974. But the men in Athens, Ankara and Washington (yes, Washington) who planned the summer scenario miscalculated. Instead of solving the Cyprus problem, they perpetuated it, deepening Greco-Turkish antagonism.

Two British journalists, Brendan O'Malley, foreign editor of the Times Educational Supplement in London, and Ian Craig, political editor of the Manchester Evening News, have, on the 25th anniversary of the events, brought out a book entitled The Cyprus Conspiracy: America, Espionage and the Turkish Invasion (published by I.B. Taurus in London).

But the conspiracy theory is nothing new. The conspiracy was revealed as those events unfolded. Elements of the plot came out in the British press and many politicians who disapproved of the Cyprus affair soon spoke out. I used this material and interviews with Cypriots and U.S. sources for a book entitled The Aphrodite Plot written during the spring and summer of 1976, sitting in a house in Chemlan with shells from a 75-millimeter howitzer positioned on the ridge above Ainab soaring overhead and crashing into targets in East Beirut.

Lawrence Stern of The Washington Post wrote about the plot at the same time (The Wrong Horse); Peter Murtagh, formerly of the Guardian and now with the Irish Times, added details in a book about the colonels published in 1994 (The Rape of Greece). There were, of course, many other books which referred to the plot.

The object of the plot was to solve the Cyprus problem once and for all. A general outline of a deal had been thrashed out during clandestine conversations between Greek and Turkish ministers meeting privately during NATO conferences in the early 1970s. The deal itself involved the establishment of a Turkish base on the Karpass Peninsula and arrangements for the protection of the Turkish Cypriots while most of the island ­ and the Greek Cypriots who made up 82 percent of the population ­ would be granted union, Enosis, with the Greek motherland.

Since the Cyprus troubles began in 1963-64, the U.S. had been determined to get rid of President Makarios, seen by Washington as the major obstacle to such a deal. The U.S., a country based on the separation of church and state, had a visceral dislike for Archbishop Makarios because he was a cleric in politics. He also drew electoral support from the communist Akel Party while the Cold War raged on the international scene. He was non-aligned, thus immoral in Washington’s eyes. He was a friend of the Arabs, while the U.S. backed Israel. And Makarios was an enemy of Washington s junta friends in Athens who, according to Peter Murtagh, had allowed Israeli planes to use a U.S. base in Crete to launch the air strikes on Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian air fields that decided the outcome of the 1967 war before Arab and Israeli troops came together on the ground.

After the October War in 1973, the U.S. became increasingly eager to get rid of Makarios and secure a strategic foothold on the island by installing its Greek and Turkish allies on Cyprus. Britain had denied Washington the use of Cyprus-based communications facilities which might have enabled the U.S. to warn Israel of the Arabs pre-emptive attack. And Washington was not allowed to use British bases as staging posts for resupplying Israel with the weaponry which enabled it to win the war.

The timing of the coup was crucial. By late 1973, Greek and Turkish Cypriot negotiators had reached a constitutional agreement which would have settled the Cyprus problem within the context of the existing unitary state. Turkish Cypriots were leaving the communal enclaves they inhabited since 1963 to work and to settle back in their old homes.

Athens and Ankara took steps to block the accord. Then Athens began to make arrangements to overthrow Makarios. He knew full well what was going on and demanded the withdrawal of mainland Greek officers of the Cyprus National Guard who were instructed to mount the coup on behalf of Athens. Makarios warned everybody who would listen, even journalists like my husband and myself during an interview a few months before the plot was mounted.

The July 1974 coup was the last of several attempts. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s chief of station in Athens had been fully informed of the plots development since early in the year. The State Department was also aware of what was going on and told the U.S. ambassador in Athens to warn off the colonels. But he did not make a forceful statement in time to stop them from going ahead. Which they did. And they botched it.

Just after 8am on the morning of July 15th, Greek-commanded units of the National Guard rolled up the curving drive to the presidential palace in armored cars. They were held off by bodyguards and policemen expecting such a bid. President Makarios was receiving Greek schoolchildren from Egypt. He led them to safety in the garden behind the palace, escaped down a path and caught a taxi which took him to safety. The coup had failed in its first objective.

But not in its second ­ which was to give Ankara a military foothold on the island. On July 20th, Turkish troops were parachuted onto the island and landed on the tourist beaches near the pretty port of Kyrenia. Although Greek Army officers commanding the National Guard were ordered not to resist, those who did fought well but could not prevent the Turks from occupying, in two stages, the entire northern part of the island. But instead of sticking to the deal which gave Turkey a base in the Karpass, Ankara had decided to implement its own plan for the partition of the country along a line first put forward in the mid-1950s.

The Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus precipitated the collapse of the Greek junta, the CIA’s Athens asset, but this did not worry the State Department ­which had reached the conclusion that the junta was no longer an acceptable partner. Although Kissinger said later that Washington was too preoccupied with Watergate to function effectively as the crisis on the island was building, his excuses must not be taken seriously. It was reported in the press at the time that Kissinger first discouraged Britain from mounting a joint intervention with Turkey with the object of restoring the legitimate government and then told the British foreign secretary, James Callaghan, not to be a boy scout when he suggested that Britain stage a naval operation to prevent Turkish landings on Cyprus. Kissinger’s “nos” speak complicity.

Like many other well-laid plots, the Cyprus conspiracy went astray. It solved nothing. But it is important to know that there was a plot. Today, after 25 years of fruitless settlement talks, Washington, the only power on earth which might press Turkey to agree to a UN-drafted federal solution, refuses to do so. The U.S. secretary of defense, William Cohen, stated as much during his recent visit to Ankara. Why should Washington intervene to reverse the outcome of the

[boomerang]

Callaghan says US vetoed 74 intervention to protect spy facilities

Cyprus Mail: 13th November 1999

By Jean Christou

THE UNITED States vetoed Britain's intervention in the Turkish invasion to protect its spying bases in northern Cyprus, former British Prime Minister Lord Callaghan has revealed in an interview to a British paper.

This is the first time that America's use of spy bases in Cyprus has ever been confirmed, and the issue is to be raised in the British House of Commons.

In the interview, published yesterday in the Times Higher Education Supplement, Lord Callaghan confirmed that Britain had almost gone to war with Turkey over Cyprus.

He said that although Britain had sent a task force in 1974, the Americans vetoed any military action that might have deterred Turkey.

He implied that this was because the US did not want to jeopardise its electronic spying facilities in northern Cyprus and admitted the invasion left the US free to continue spying on Russia and the Middle East from a 'state' it did not recognise.

"The Turks were willing to let the Americans carry on operating because their presence was a political safeguard against the Russians," he said.

Callaghan was interviewed for the Times by Brendan O'Malley, co-author with Ian Craig of The Cyprus Conspiracy: American Espionage and the Turkish Invasion.

O'Malley said that when researching the book, Callaghan had privately admitted that Britain had sent the task force. "It was the most frightening moment of my career," he said. "We nearly went to war with Turkey. But the Americans stopped us."

The author said that, although Callaghan has in the past shunned interviews about Cyprus, he relented last month.

Callaghan disputed the authors' conclusion that the division of Cyprus was an international plot at a time when the US was embroiled in the Watergate scandal that toppled the Nixon presidency.

At the same time, the Labour government had come to power in Britain determined to slash defence spending at a period when spying in Cyprus was increasingly important.

"We took a decision to cut down on defence and closing one or two of the major bases on Cyprus was a strong runner," Callaghan said, adding that the US military and senior State Department officials repeatedly asked for the bases to be saved, primarily because they could not have taken them over themselves.

"Cyprus had extreme value as a centre for electronic surveillance of the Soviet Union's nuclear activities," Callaghan said. "So the American's didn't want us to go."

[boomerang]

A nation betrayed

Christopher Hitchens, The Guardian

Monday February 26, 2001



In his explosive new book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens argues that the former US secretary of state should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Here, in our second exclusive extract, he explains why Kissinger should be held responsible for the bloody invasion of Cyprus.



In Years of Upheaval, the second volume of his trilogy of memoirs, Henry Kissinger found the subject of the 1974 Cyprus catastrophe so awkward that he decided to postpone consideration of it: "I must leave a full discussion of the Cyprus episode to another occasion, for it stretched into the Ford presidency and its legacy exists unresolved today."



In most of his writing about himself, Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide: naive, ill- prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him some self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable, and when knowledge or foreknowledge would confront him with charges of responsibility or complicity.



Kissinger now argues, in the long-delayed third volume of his memoirs, Years of Renewal, that he was prevented and distracted, by Watergate and the meltdown of the Nixon presidency, from taking an interest in the crucial triangle of force between Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. This is a bizarre disclaimer: the proximity of Cyprus to the Middle East was a factor never absent from US strategic thinking, and there was no reason of domestic policy to prevent the region from engaging his attention. Furthermore, the very implosion of Nixonian authority, cited as a reason for Kissinger's absence of mind, in fact bestowed extraordinary powers upon him.



When he became secretary of state in 1973, Kissinger took care to retain his post as special assistant to the president for national security affairs, or national security adviser. This made him the first and only secretary of state to hold the chairmanship of the elite and secretive Forty Committee, which considered and approved covert actions by the CIA. Mean while, as chairman of the National Security Council, he held a position where every important intelligence plan passed across his desk. His former NSC aide, Roger Morris, was not exaggerating by much, if at all, when he said that Kissinger's dual position, plus Nixon's eroded status, made him "no less than acting chief of state for national security".



Kissinger gives one hostage to fortune in Years of Upheaval and another in Years of Renewal. In the former, he says plainly: "I had always taken it for granted that the next intercommunal crisis in Cyprus would provoke Turkish intervention." That is, it would at least risk the prospect of a war within Nato between Greece and Turkey, and would certainly involve the partition of the island. That this was common knowledge may not be doubted by any person even lightly acquainted with Cypriot affairs. In the latter volume, Kissinger repeatedly asks the reader why anyone (such as himself, so burdened with Watergate) would have sought "a crisis in the eastern Mediterranean between two Nato allies".



These two disingenuous statements need to be qualified in the light of a third, which appears on page 199 of Years of Renewal. Here, President Makarios of Cyprus is described without adornment as "the proximate cause of most of Cyprus's tensions". Makarios was the democratically elected leader of a virtually unarmed republic. His rule was challenged, and the independence of Cyprus was threatened, by a military dictatorship in Athens and a highly militarised government in Turkey, both of which sponsored rightwing gangster organisations on the island, and both of which had plans to annex the greater or lesser part of it. Several attempts had been made on Makarios's life. To describe him as "the proximate cause" of the tensions is to make a wildly aberrant moral judgment.



This same judgment, however, supplies the key that unlocks the lie at the heart of Kissinger's presentation. If the elected civilian authority (and spiritual leader of the Greek Orthodox community) is the "proximate cause" of the tensions, then his removal from the scene is self-evidently the cure for them. If one can demonstrate that there was such a removal plan, and that Kissinger knew about it in advance, then it follows logically that he was not ostensibly looking for a crisis - as he self-pityingly asks us to disbelieve - but for a solution. The fact that he got a crisis, which was also a hideous calamity for the region, does not change the equation. It is attributable to the other observable fact that the scheme to remove Makarios, on which the "solution" depended, was in practice a failure. But those who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.



It is, from Kissinger's own record, as well as from the record of the subsequent official inquiry, easy to demonstrate that he did have advance knowledge of the plan to depose Makarios. He admits as much himself, by noting that the Greek dictator Dimitrios Ioannides, head of the secret police, was determined to mount a coup in Cyprus and bring the island under the control of Athens. This was one of the better-known facts of the situation, as was the more embarrassing fact that Brigadier Ioannides was dependent on US military aid and political sympathy. His police state had been expelled from the Council of Europe and blocked from joining the EEC, and it was largely the advantage conferred by his agreement to "home port" the US Sixth Fleet, and host a string of US air and intelligence bases, that kept him in power. This policy was highly controversial in Congress and in the American press, and the argument over it was part of Kissinger's daily bread long before Watergate.



Thus it was understood in general that the Greek dictatorship, a US client, wished to see Makarios overthrown and had already tried to have him killed. (Overthrow and assassination, incidentally, are effectively coterminous in this account; there was no possibility of leaving such a charismatic leader alive, and those who sought his removal invariably intended his death.) This was also understood in particular . The most salient proof is this. In May 1974, two months before the coup in Nicosia, which Kissinger later claimed was a shock, he received a memorandum from the head of his state department Cyprus desk, Thomas Boyatt. Boyatt summarised the reasons for believing that a Greek junta attack on Cyprus was imminent. He further argued that, in the absence of a US representation to Athens, warning the dictators to desist, it might be assumed that the United States was indifferent to this. And he added what everybody knew - that such a coup, if it went forward, would beyond doubt trigger a Turkish invasion.



Prescient memos are a dime a dozen in Washington after a crisis; they are often then read for the first time, or leaked to the press or Congress. But Kissinger now admits that he saw this document in real time, while engaged in his shuttle between Syria and Israel (both of them within half an hour's flying time of Cyprus). Yet no dιmarche bearing his name or carrying his authority was issued to the Greek junta.



A short while afterwards, Kissinger received a call from Senator J William Fulbright, the chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee. Senator Fulbright had been briefed about the impending coup by a senior Greek dissident journalist in Washington named Elias P Demetracopoulos. He told Kissinger that steps should be taken to avert the planned Greek action, and he gave three reasons. The first was that it would repair some of the moral damage done by the US governments indulgence of the junta. The second was that it would head off a confrontation between Greece and Turkey in the Mediterranean. The third was that it would enhance US prestige on the island. Kissinger declined to take the recommended steps, on the bizarre grounds that he could not intervene in Greek "internal affairs" at a time when the Nixon administration was resisting pressure from Senator Henry Jackson to link US-Soviet trade to the free emigration of Russian Jewry. However odd this line of argument, it still makes it impossible for Kissinger to claim, as he still does, that he had had no warning.



So there was still no high-level US concern registered with Athens. The difficulty is sometimes presented as one of protocol or etiquette, as if Kissinger's regular custom was to whisper and tread lightly. But again I remind you that Henry Kissinger, in addition to his formal diplomatic eminence, was also head of the Forty Committee, and supervisor of covert action, and was dealing in private with an Athens regime that had long-standing CIA ties. Boyatt's memoranda, warning of what was to happen, were classified as secret and have still never been released. Asked to testify to a Congressional hearing, he was at first forbidden by Kissinger to appear. He was only finally permitted to do so in order that he might avoid a citation for contempt. His evidence was taken in "executive session", with the hearing room cleared of staff, reporters and visitors.



Events continued to gather pace. On July 1 1974, three senior officials of the Greek foreign ministry, all known for their moderate views on the Cyprus question, publicly tendered their resignations. On July 3, President Makarios made public an open letter to the Greek junta, which made the direct accusation of foreign interference and subversion. He called for the withdrawal from Cyprus of the officers responsible.



Some days after the coup, which eventually occurred on July 15 1974, when challenged at a press conference about his apparent failure to foresee or avert it, Kissinger replied that "the information was not lying around in the streets". Actually, it almost was in the streets. But more importantly, it had been available to him round the clock, in both his diplomatic and his intelligence capacities. His decision to do nothing was therefore a direct decision to do something, or to let something be done.



To the rest of the world, two things were obvious about the coup. The first was that it had been instigated from Athens and carried out with the help of regular Greek forces, and was thus a direct intervention in the internal affairs of one country by another. The second was that it violated all the existing treaties governing the status of Cyprus. The obvious and unsavoury illegality was luridly emphasised by the junta itself, which chose a notorious chauvinist gunman named Nicos Sampson to be its proxy "president".



Sampson must have been well known to the chairman of the Forty Committee as a long-standing recipient of financial support from the CIA; he also received money for his fanatical Nicosia newspaper Makhi (Combat) from a pro-junta CIA proxy in Athens, Savvas Constantopoulos, the publisher of the pro-junta organ Eleftheros Kosmos (Free World). No European government treated Sampson as anything but a pariah, for the brief nine days in which he held power and launched a campaign of murder against his democratic Greek opponents. But Kissinger told the US envoy in Nicosia to receive Sampson's "foreign minister" as foreign minister, thus making the United States the first and only government to extend de facto recognition. (At this point, it might be emphasised, the whereabouts of Makarios were unknown. His palace had been shelled and his death announced on the junta's radio. He had in fact made his escape, and was able to broadcast the fact a few days afterwards - to the irritation of certain well-placed persons.) In his 1986 memoir The Truth, published in Athens in 1986, the then head of the Greek armed forces, General Grigorios Bonanos, records that the junta's attack on Cyprus brought a message of approval and support, delivered to its intelligence service by no less a man than Thomas A Pappas - the chosen intermediary between the junta and the Nixon-Kissinger administration.



In Washington, Kissinger's press spokesman Robert Anderson flatly denied that the coup - later described by Makarios from the podium of the United Nations as "an invasion" - constituted foreign intervention. "No," he replied to a direct question on this point. "In our view there has been no outside intervention." This surreal position was not contradicted by Kissinger when he met with the ambassador of Cyprus and failed to offer the customary condolences on the reported death of his president - the "proximate cause", we now learn from him, of all the unpleasantness. When asked if he still recognised the elected Makarios government as the legal one, Kissinger doggedly and astonishingly refused to answer. When asked if the United States was moving towards recognition of the Sampson regime, his spokesman declined to deny it. When Makarios came to Washington on July 22, the state department was asked whether he would be received by Kissinger "as a private citizen, as Archbishop, or as President of Cyprus?" The answer? "He [Kissinger] is meeting with Archbishop Makarios on Monday." Every other government in the world, save the collapsing Greek dictatorship, recognised Makarios as the legitimate head of the Cyprus republic. Kissinger's unilateralism on the point is without diplomatic precedent, and argues strongly for his collusion and sympathy with the armed handful of thugs who felt the same way.



It is worth emphasising that Makarios was invited to Washington in the first place, as elected and legal president of Cyprus, by Senator J William Fulbright of the Senate foreign relations committee, and by his counterpart Congressman Thomas Morgan, chairman of the house foreign affairs committee. Credit for this invitation belongs to Elias Demetracopoulos, the Washington-based dissident journalist, who had long warned of the coup. He it was who conveyed the invitation to Makarios, who was then in London meeting the British foreign secretary. This initiative crowned a series of anti-junta activities by this journalist, who had already profoundly irritated Kissinger and become a special object of his spite. At the very last moment, and with very poor grace, Kissinger was compelled to announce that he was receiving Makarios in his presidential and not his episcopal capacity.



Since Kissinger himself tells us that he had always known or assumed that another outbreak of violence in Cyprus would trigger a Turkish military intervention, we can assume in our turn that he was not surprised when such an intervention came. Nor does he seem to have been very much disconcerted. While the Greek junta remained in power, his efforts were principally directed to shielding it from retaliation. He was opposed to the return of Makarios to the island, and strongly opposed to Turkish or British use of force (Britain being a guarantor power with a treaty obligation and troops in place on Cyprus) to undo the Greek coup. This same counsel of inertia or inaction - amply testified to in his own memoirs - translated later into strict and repeated admonitions against any measures to block a Turkish invasion. Sir Tom McNally, then the chief political adviser to Britain's then foreign secretary and future prime minister, James Callaghan, has since disclosed that Kissinger "vetoed" at least one British military action to pre-empt a Turkish landing.



This may seem paradoxical, but the long-standing sympathy for a partition of Cyprus, repeatedly expressed by the state and defence departments, makes it seem much less so. The demographic composition of the island (82% Greek to 18% Turkish) made it more logical for the partition to be imposed by Greece. But a second-best was to have it imposed by Turkey. And, once Turkey had conducted two brutal invasions and occupied almost 40% of Cypriot territory, Kissinger exerted himself very strongly to protect Ankara from any congressional reprisal for this outright violation of international law, and promiscuous and illegal misuse of US weaponry. He became so pro-Turkish, indeed, that it was as if he had never heard of the Greek colonels. (Though his expressed dislike of the returned Greek democratic leaders supplied an occasional reminder.)



Not all the elements of this partitionist policy can be charged to Kissinger personally; he inherited the Greek junta and the official dislike of Makarios. However, even in the dank obfuscatory prose of his own memoirs, he does admit what can otherwise be concluded from independent sources. Using covert channels, and short-circuiting the democratic process in his own country, he made himself an accomplice in a plan of political assassination which, when it went awry, led to the deaths of thousands of civilians, the violent uprooting of almost 200,000 refugees, and the creation of an unjust and unstable amputation of Cyprus which constitutes a serious threat to peace a full quarter-century later. On July 10 1976, the European Commission on Human Rights adopted a report, prepared by 18 distinguished jurists and chaired by Professor JES Fawcett, resulting from a year's research into the consequences of the Turkish invasion. It found that the Turkish army had engaged in the deliberate killing of civilians, in the execution of prisoners, in the torture and ill-treatment of detainees, in the arbitrary punishment and detention of civilians, and in systematic acts of rape, torture, and looting. A large number of "disappeared" persons, both prisoners of war and civilians, are still "missing" from this period. They include a dozen holders of US passports, which is evidence in itself of an indiscriminate strategy, when conducted by an army dependent on US aid and materiel.



Perhaps it was a reluctance to accept his responsibility for these outrages, as well as his responsibility for the original coup, that led Kissinger to tell a bizarre sequence of lies to his new friends the Chinese. On October 2 1974, he held a high-level meeting in New York with Qiao Guanhua, vice-foreign minister of the People's Republic. It was the first substantive Sino-American meeting since the visit of Deng Xiaoping, and the first order of business was Cyprus. The memorandum, which is headed "Top secret/sensitive/exclusively eyes only", has Kissinger first rejecting China's public claim that he had helped engineer the removal of Makarios. "We did not. We did not oppose Makarios." (This claim is directly belied by his own memoirs.) He says: "When the coup occurred I was in Moscow", which he was not. He says: "My people did not take these intelligence reports [concerning an impending coup] seriously," even though they had. He says that neither did Makarios take them seriously, even though Makarios had publicly denounced the Athens junta for its coup plans. Kissinger then makes the amazing claim: "We knew the Soviets had told the Turks to invade", which would make this the first Soviet-instigated invasion to be conducted by a Nato army and paid for with US aid.



A good liar must have a good memory: Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory. So perhaps some of this hysterical lying is explained by its context - by the need to enlist China's anti-Soviet instincts. But the total of falsity is so impressive that it suggests something additional, something more like denial or delusion, or even a confession by other means.

Extracted from The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens, to be published by Verso, price £15, in May.
© Christopher Hitchens

[boomerang]

Kissinger behind illegal Turkish invasion

New documents link Kissinger to two 1970s coups

Release of CIA’s ‘Family Jewels’ provides insight into political juggernaut and Bush Administration adviser

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger pushed for the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus and allowed arms to be moved to Ankara for an attack on that island in reaction to a coup sponsored by the Greek junta, according to documents and intelligence officers with close knowledge of the event.

Nearly 700 pages of highly classified Central Intelligence Agency reports from the 1970's, known collectively as the "Family Jewels," are slated for public release today.

However, the National Security Archive had previously obtained four related documents through the Freedom of Information Act and made them public Friday.

“In all the world the things that hurt us the most are the CIA business and Turkey aid,” Kissinger declares in one of those documents, a White House memorandum of a conversation from Feb. 20, 1975. On the surface, the comment seems innocuous, but the context as well as the time period suggests Kissinger had abetted illegal financial aid and arms support to Turkey for its 1974 Cyprus invasion.

In July and August of 1974, Turkey staged a military invasion of the island nation of Cyprus, taking over nearly a third of the island and creating a divide between the south and north. Most historians consider that Kissinger – then Secretary of State and National Security Advisor to President Gerald Ford – not only knew about the planned attack on Cyprus, but encouraged it.

Some Greek Cypriots believed then, and still believe, that the invasion was a deliberate plot on the part of Britain and the US to maintain their influence on the island, which was particularly important as a listening post in the Eastern Mediterranean in the wake of the October 1973 War between Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Syria.

According to columnist Christopher Hitchens, author of the book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, "At the time, many Greeks believed that the significant thing was that [Prime Minister Bulent] Ecevit had been a pupil of Kissinger's at Harvard."

Several intelligence sources, who wished to remain anonymous to maintain the security of their identity, confirmed to RAW STORY that Kissinger both pushed for the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and allowed arms to be moved to Ankara.

However, a former CIA officer who was working in Turkey at the time, suggests that Kissinger's statement in the memorandum about Turkish aid likely means the Ford administration, following Kissinger’s advice, conducted business under the table with right-wing ultra-nationalist General Kenan Evren, who later dissolved Parliament and became the dictator of Turkey in a 1980 coup.

“The implication is that the US government was dealing directly with General Evren and circumventing the [democratically elected] Turkish government,” the former CIA officer said. “This was authorized by Kissinger, because they were nervous about Ecevit, who was a Social Democrat.”

“We technically cut off military aid for them,” the officer added, referring to an arms embargo passed by Congress after the invasion. “Technically… technically, but this would imply that the military and/or probably CIA aid continued even after the aid was cut off by Congress. This may substantively be what led to the overthrow eventually of Ecevit.”

According to the former CIA officer, Turkey’s democratically elected President Ecevit had good relations with the Johnson administration, but the Nixon administration, where Kissinger served as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, had issues with Ecevit.

“I don't remember now what all the issues were,” the source said. “But I remember that the White House did not like Ecevit.”

Kissinger could not be reached for comment Monday.

Kissinger, Rumsfeld, and Cheney, then and now

Though no longer a government official, Kissinger remains a powerful force in Washington – particularly within the Bush Administration. Dr. Kissinger was the first choice by President Bush to lead a blue ribbon investigation into the attacks of September 11, 2001. However, he resigned shortly after the 9/11 Family Steering Committee had a private meeting with him at his Kissinger and Associates Inc. New York office and asked him point blank if he had any clients by the name of Bin Laden.

According to Monica Gabrielle, who lost her husband Richard in the attacks and who was present as part of the 12-member 9/11 Family Steering Committee during the private meeting, the White House seems to have overlooked Dr. Kissinger's apparent conflict of interest.

"We had the meeting with him... the whole Steering Committee, all 12 of us. Because we are basically doing our due diligence and asking for his client list to be released to see if there was a conflict of interest between his client list and potential areas of investigation," said Gabrielle during a Tuesday morning phone conversation, recounting the events of December 12, 2002. "We went back and forth with him, discussing his client list... asking him who was on it, if there were conflicts and so forth," she continued.

"Lorie [Van Auken] asked, do you have any Saudi clients on your list? And he got a blank look. Then Lorie asked, do you have any clients by the name of Bin Laden? And he was stuttering and mumbling, and finally said he would maybe, possibly consider releasing the client list to an attorney but not for the public."

Dr. Kissinger did not reveal his client list but withdrew his name the next day without public explanation.

In Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, Kissinger says he met regularly with Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to offer advice about the war in Iraq. “Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy,” Kissinger said.

Cheney, along with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, first came to prominence during the administration of President Ford. Rumsfeld had served in various posts under Nixon before being sent to Europe as the US ambassador to NATO in 1973, a period that included the Cyprus coup. When Ford became president on August 9, 1974, immediately preceding the second wave of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, Rumsfeld returned to Washington to serve as his chief of staff, while Cheney became deputy assistant to the president.

Rumsfeld and Cheney gained increasing influence under Ford, reaching their apex of power in November 1975 with a shakeup that saw Rumsfeld installed as Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney as White House chief of staff, and George H.W. Bush replacing William Colby as CIA director.

Together, Rumsfeld and Cheney created a bubble not unlike the one that has enveloped President George W. Bush’s White House, surrounding Ford with a close knit group of advisors who worked to head off any possibility of openness about past misdeeds and to turn the administration sharply to the right.

The aid to Turkey referenced in Kissinger’s cryptic remark was precisely the subject of Congressional oversight on the Executive Branch in 1974-75. In a foreshadowing of how Iran Contra would play out a decade later, the White House violated both US and international law in providing arms and financing to the Turks for the Cyprus invasion.

The CIA, through various spokespeople, would not comment on how much additional information with regard to Kissinger, the attack on Cyprus, and the events leading up to the 1980 coup in Turkey with US support would be part of the declassified documents to come out this week. The only thing the agency would say is that “this was a different CIA at a different time,” and “people need to remember that.”

The Chile Coup

Around the time of President Nixon's resignation in August 1974, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh started hearing accounts of illegal foreign and domestic CIA activities. On December 20, 1974, Hersh confronted CIA Director William Colby and received confirmation of everything he had learned. Two days later, Hersh went public with the story.

The Family Jewels were described in a New York Times front page article titled “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years.” According to Hersh, James Schlesinger, who served briefly as CIA director in 1973, had ordered the report in response to the crimes collectively known as Watergate.

Hersh's article stated, “An extensive investigation by the New York Times has established that intelligence files on at least 10,000 American citizens were maintained by a special unit of the C.I.A. that was reporting directly to Richard Helms, then the Director of Central Intelligence and now the Ambassador to Iran.”

Then-CIA director William Colby's initial impulse was to reveal everything in order to give the CIA a clean slate, but President Ford and Kissinger disagreed. By January 3, 1975 when Colby was summoned to the White House for a briefing, they had decided to keep the lid on by forming a blue ribbon commission under Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.

The "memorandum of conversation" document released by the National Security Archive, dated January 4, 1975, transcribes portions of a follow-up meeting between Ford and Kissinger the next day.

Kissinger complains to President Ford about Colby's urge to come clean, saying, "You will end up with a CIA that does only reporting, and not operations ... He has turned over to the FBI the whole of his operation."

Former CIA Director Helms "said all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg,” Kissinger continues, adding “If they come out, blood will flow." After offering a few examples, Kissinger concludes by remarking mysteriously, "The Chilean thing -- that is not in any report. That is sort of blackmail on me."

The meaning of this remark is far from clear, suggesting as it does that the 693 pages of the Family Jewels were only "the tip of the iceberg" and that among what was left out was a "Chilean thing" that Kissinger perceived as having the potential for blackmail on himself.

It has been known since the revelations of the 70's that prior to Chile's 1970 presidential elections, President Richard Nixon, Kissinger and Helms actively pursued ways to head off the victory of leftist Salvador Allende, including sponsoring an abortive military coup.

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people,” Kissinger famously said at the time.

After Allende was democratically elected and became president, the US put economic pressure on Chile and encouraged further military plots -- a two-pronged strategy similar to that currently being employed against Iran -- while Kissinger a continued to press for stronger action.

The CIA's Directorate of Operations was particularly active in Chile in 1972-73, the period leading up to Allende's violent overthrow in September 1973 in a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. Following the coup, Kissinger strongly supported the new authoritarian government.

After Helms left the CIA in 1973 to become ambassador to Iran, he offered a series of vague denials when asked about CIA involvement in Chile. Among Helms' claims were "that the CIA hadn't given money directly to Allende's opponents, that the CIA didn't try to fix the vote in the Chilean Congress because investigation had shown it couldn't be arranged, that the CIA didn't try to overthrow the Chilean government because the Agency failed to find anyone who could really do it."

In 1977, Helms was convicted of perjury for his statements and given a two-year suspended sentence and a fine that was paid by his friends from the CIA. As with the more recent perjury of Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff Scooter Libby's concerning the outing of a CIA officer, Helms' had lies served the purpose of protecting his superiors, notably Kissinger.

However, in Prelude to Terror, historian Joseph Trento offers a somewhat different account of Helms' actions, suggesting a deeper Kissinger involvement.

"From Iran, Helms heard enough about the criminal investigation to issue a threat through his old colleague Tom Braden,” Trento writes. “Braden remembered Helms saying, 'If I am going to be charged, then I will reveal Kissinger's role in these operations.'" Trento adds in a footnote that "Helms himself confided to old friend and CIA colleague (from Iran) Tom Braden that he would resort to [revealing embarrassing state secrets] and 'bring down Henry Kissinger' in the process."

Even apart from Trento's assertions, Kissinger's concern with "the Chilean thing -- that is not in any report" hints at involvement in the 1973 coup. But if Trento's claims are accurate, Kissinger might also have been referring to a threat by Helms to bring him down, both in his remark that "Helms said all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg. If they come out, blood will flow," and in his cryptic description of "the Chilean thing" as "sort of blackmail on me."

Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane
The Raw Story
Published: Tuesday June 26, 2007