THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

Chapter 7:  CYPRUS

IN THE SECOND volume of his trilogy of memoirs, which is entitled Years of
Upheaval, 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.

This argued a certain nervousness on his part, if only because the subjects
of Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East, Angola, Chile, China and the
SALT negotiations all bear legacies that are "unresolved today" and were
unresolved then. (To say that these matters "stretched into the Ford admin-
istration" is to say, in effect, nothing at all except that this pallid
interregnum did, historically speaking, occur.)

In most of his writing about himself ( and, one presumes, in most of his
presentations to his clients) 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, and ill-
prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him
something in point of self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often
adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledge-
able, and when knowledge or foreknowledge would also confront him with
charges of responsibility or complicity.

Cyprus in 1974 is just such a case. 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 deliquescence of the Nixon
presidency, from taking a timely or informed interest in the crucial trian-
gle of force between Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. This is a bizarre
disclaimer: the phrase "southern flank of NATO" was then a geopolitical
commonplace of the first importance, and the proximity of Cyprus to the
Middle East was a factor never absent from us strategic thinking. 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 own absence of mind, in fact bestowed extraordi-
nary powers upon him. To restate the obvious once more: when he became
secretary of state in 1973, he took care to retain his post as Special Assistant
to the President for National Security Affairs or, as we now say, National
Security Advisor. This made him the first and only secretary of state to hold
the chairmanship of the elite and secretive Forty Committee, which con-
sidered and approved covert actions by the CIA. Meanwhile, 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."

We know from other sources that Kissinger was not only a micro-
manager with an eye to detail, but a man with a taste for intervention and
rapid response. In the White House memoir of one of his closest associates,
Nixon's chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, we learn of an occasion when
Kissinger nearly precipitated a crisis because he became excited by some
aerial photographs of Cuba. (The pictures showed soccer fields under con-
struction, which he took -believing the Cubans to be exclusively interested
in baseball as the sign of a new and sinister Russian design. ) On another
occasion, following the downing of a US plane, he was in favor of bombing
North Korea and not excluding the nuclear option. The Ends of Power was
Haldeman's title; it is only one of many testimonies showing Kissinger's
unsleeping attention to potential sources of trouble, and therefore of pos-
sible distinction for himself.

This is a necessary preface to a consideration of his self-exculpation in
the Cyprus matter, an apologia which depends for its credibility on our
willingness to believe that Kissinger was wholly incompetent and impotent
and above all uninformed. The energy with which he presses this self-abne-
gating case is revealing. It is also important, because if Kissinger did have any
knowledge of the events he describes, then he is guilty of collusion in an
assassination attempt on a foreign head of state, in a fascist military coup, in
a serious violation of American law ( the Foreign Assistance Act, which pro-
hibits the use of US military aid and materiel for non-defensive purposes),
in two invasions which flouted international law, and in the murder and dis-
possession of many thousands of noncombatant civilians.

In seeking to fend off this conclusion, and its implications, Kissinger
gives one hostage to fortune in Years of Upheaval and another in Years of
Renewal. In the former volume 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 indeed common knowledge may not
be doubted by any person even lightly acquainted with Cypriot affairs. In
the latter volume, where he finally takes up the challenge implicitly refused
in the former, he 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, which was at the time an
associate member of the European Economic Community (EEC), the
United Nations and the Commonwealth. His rule was challenged, and the
independence of Cyprus was threatened, by a military dictatorship in
Athens and a highly militarized government in Turkey, both of which
sponsored right-wing gangster organizations on the island, and both of
which had plans to annex the greater or lesser part of it. In spite of this,
"intercommunal" violence had been on the decline in Cyprus throughout
the 1970s. Most killings were in fact "intramural": of Greek and Turkish
democrats or internationalists by their respective nationalist and authori-
tarian rivals. Several attempts, by Greek and Greek-Cypriot fanatics, had
been made on the life of President Makarios himself. To describe his person
as "the proximate cause" of most of the tensions is to make a wildly aber-
rant moral judgment.

This same aberrant judgment, however, supplies the key that unlocks
the lie at the heart of Kissinger's presentation. If the elected civilian author-
ity (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 and naturally 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 Cyprus and the region, does
not change the equation or undo the syllogism. 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 and recollection, as well as from the
record of the subsequent official inquiry, quite easy to demonstrate that he
did have advance knowledge of the plan to depose and kill 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 con-
ferred 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 lenient
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 the
Watergate drama.

Thus it was understood in general that the Greek dictatorship, a US
client, wished to see Makarios overthrown and had already tried to kill him
or have him killed. (Overthrow and assassination, incidentally, are effec-
tively 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 of 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
summarized all the cumulative and persuasive reasons for believing that a
Greek junta attack on Cyprus and Makarios was imminent. He further
argued that, in the absence of a US demarche to Athens, warning the dic-
tators 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 in
order to enhance ( or protect) some bureaucratic reputation. 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 demarche bearing his name or carrying his author-
ity was issued. to the Greek junta.

A short while afterwards, on 7 June 1974, the National Intelligence Daily,
which is the breakfast/bible reading of all senior State Department,
Pentagon and national security officials, quoted a US field report dated 3
June which stated the views of the dictator in Athens:

Ioannides claimed that Greece is capable of removing Makarios and his key
supporters from power in twenty-four hours with little if any blood being
shed and without EOKA assistance. The Turks would quietly acquiesce to the
removal of Makarios, a key enemy. ... Ioannides stated that if Makarios
decided on some type of extreme provocation against Greece to obtain a tac-
tical advantage, he is not sure whether he should merely pull the Greek
troops out of Cyprus and let Makarios fend for himself, or remove Makarios
once and for all and have Greece deal directly with Turkey over Cyprus's
future.

This report and its contents were later authenticated before Congress by
CIA staff who had served in Athens at the relevant time. The fact that it
made Brigadier Ioannides seem bombastic and delusional both of which
he was -should have underlined the obvious and imminent danger.
(EOKA was a Greek-Cypriot fascist underground, armed and paid by the
junta.)

At about the same time, 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 government's 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 impos-
sible 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. Ioannides was
the de facto head of the regime but technically only its secret police chief.
For the US ambassador, Henry Tasca, it was awkward to make diplomatic
approaches to a man he described as "a cop." 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.
The 1976 House Committee on Intelligence later phrased the problem
rather deftly in its report:

Tasca, assured by the CIA station chief that Ioannides would continue to deal
only with the CIA, and not sharing the State Department Desk Officer's
alarm, was content to pass a message to the Greek leader indirectly. ... It is
clear, however, that the embassy took no steps to underscore for Ioannides
the depth of concern over a Cyprus coup attempt. This episode, the exclusive
CIA access to Ioannides, Tasca's indications that he may not have seen all
important messages to and from the CIA station, Ioannides' suggestions of
us acquiescence, and Washington's well-known coolness to Makarios have
led to public speculation that either US officials were inattentive to the
reports of the developing crisis or simply allowed it to happen.

Thomas Boyatt's memoranda, warning of precisely what was to happen
(and echoing the views of several mid-level officials besides himself), were
classified as secret and have still never been released. Asked to testify at the
above hearings, he was at first forbidden by Kissinger to appear before
Congress. 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 1 July 1974, three senior officials of
the Greek foreign ministry, all of them known for their moderate views on
the Cyprus question, publicly tendered their resignations. On 3 July
President Makarios made public an open letter to the Greek junta, which
made the direct accusation of foreign interference and subversion:

In order to be absolutely clear, I say that the cadres of the military regime of
Greece support and direct the activities of the EOKA-B terrorists. ... I have
more than once so far felt, and in some cases I have touched, a hand invisibly
extending from Athens and seeking to liquidate my human existence.

He called for the withdrawal from Cyprus of the Greek officers responsible.

Some days after the coup, which eventually occurred on 15 July 1974;
and 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 much more
important, and much more material to the case, 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.

The argument can be pushed a little further. If we can show that
Kissinger is speaking falsely when he says he was surprised by the July
coup -and we can show this -and if we assume that foreknowledge
accompanied by inaction is evidence for at least passive approval, then we
would expect to find the coup, when it came, being received with some
show of sympathy or satisfaction. As a matter of fact, that is precisely what
we do find.

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
unsavory illegality was luridly emphasized by the junta itself, which chose
a notorious chauvinist gunman named Nicos Saropson to be its proxy
"president." Saropson 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
(Gorobat) from a pro-junta CIA proxy in Athens, Mr Savvas
Constantopoulos, the publisher of the pro-junta organ Eleftheros Kosmos
(Free World). No European government treated Saropson 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 Saropson's "foreign min-
ister" as foreign minister, thus making the United States the first and only
government to extend de facto recognition. (At this point, it might be
emphasized, the whereabouts of President Makarios were unknown. His
palace had been heavily 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 enormous irritation of certain well-placed
persons.) Incidentally, 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 himself -the chosen intermediary between the
junta and the Nixon-Kissinger administration. (We shall hear more about
Mr Pappas in Chapter 9.)

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 recognized 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
22 July, 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 [emphasis added]." Every other government in the world, save the
rapidly collapsing Greek dictatorship, recognized Makarios as the legitimate
head of the Cyprus republic. Kissinger's unilateralisro on the point is with-
out diplomatic precedent, and argues strongly for his collusion and
sympathy with the armed handful of thugs who felt the same way.

It is worth emphasizing 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 counter-
part Congressman Thomas Morgan, chairman of the House Foreign
Affairs Committee. Credit for this invitation belongs to the above-
mentioned Elias Demetracopoulos, who had long warned of the coup and
who was a friend of Fulbright. He it was who conveyed the invitation to
Makarios, who was by then in London meeting the British Foreign
Secretary. This initiative crowned a series of anti-junta activities by this
guerrilla journalist and one-roan band, who had already profoundly irri-
tated Kissinger and become a special object ofhis spite. (See Chapter 9.) 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 mili-
tary 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 obliga-
tion 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 as
well as in everyone else's -translated later into equally strict and repeated
admonitions against any measures to block a Turkish invasion. Sir Tom
McNally, then the chief political advisor 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 preempt a Turkish
landing. But that was after the Greek colonels had collapsed, and demo-
cracy had been restored to Athens. There was no longer a client regime to
protect.

This may seem paradoxical, but the long-standing sympathy for a par
tition of Cyprus, repeatedly expressed by the State and Defense
departments, make it seem much less so. The demographic composition of
the island (82 percent Greek to 18 percent 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 percent of Cypriot territory, Kissinger exerted
himself very strongly indeed 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 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 mem-
oirs, 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 seri-
ous threat to peace a full quarter-century later. His attempts to keep the
record sealed are significant in themselves; when the relevant files are
opened they will form part of the longer bill of indictment.

On 10 July 1976, the European Commission on Human Rights adopted
a report, prepared by eighteen distinguished jurists and chaired by
Professor J.E.S. Fawcett, resulting from a year's research into the conse-
quences 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 collective
punishment and mass detention of civilians, and in systematic and unpun-
ished 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 United States 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 out-
rages, as well as his responsibility for the original Saropson coup, that led
Kissinger to tell a bizarre sequence of lies to his new friends the Chinese.
On 2 October 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 gone public in a denunciation of 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-insti-
gated 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.

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