Cypriot sector, perhaps taking a page from the Israelis after the 1967 Six-Day War—that is, use land as leverage to achieve acceptance of a new status quo. (Whatever their original intentions, the boundaries have remained fixed since that time.)
Many more thousands of Greek Cypriots became refugees. Large numbers of Turkish Cypriots, who lived on the wrong side of the front lines were uprooted as well. Some of the latter ended up seeking shelter on the British air bases at Akrotiri and Dhekelia. This was a sad fate for an island population that had enjoyed a higher standard of living than either the Greeks or the Turks prior to the coup d’etat and the Turkish invasion.7
The Karamanlis government immediately withdrew Greece from the military structure of NATO, much as Charles de Gaulle had done with France in 1966. The prime minister was protesting an apparent lack of support by the members of the military alliance, including the United States. He had expected them to take firmer action against Turkey for its invasion of Cyprus.
The Turkish government seemed to agree with Karamanlis that the United States supported its attempt to resolve the Cyprus problem. Even the Turkish media praised the United States for following “the wisest policy among the Western powers despite the opium issue.” The United States took Turkey’s side, it was said, because it recognized Turkey’s greater importance relative to Greece. One major paper, Cumhuriyet, announced that the United States understood the Turkish point of view.8
In private, Turkish leaders admitted that the United States had tried to be evenhanded, in contrast to the anti-Turkish sentiments expressed by most Western governments. This sensitivity was appreciated in Ankara, and the newly installed Ford administration might have been able to negotiate with the Ecevit government and actually be listened to.9 Unfortunately, American policymakers did not take advantage of this opportunity in the interim between the initial invasion on July 20 and the dramatic expansion twenty-five days later.
Kissinger’s response puzzled observers at the time and has confounded scholars ever since. It seems that he misjudged the Turkish prime minister, who proved to be more of a risk taker than any of his recent predecessors. How else can we account for the secretary of state’s apparent lack of preparedness to engage the looming crisis with his arsenal of diplomatic skills? At other points in his tenure, Kissinger might have taken control and set out in person for the eastern Mediterranean, rather than sending a deputy. His sudden appearance in Athens or Ankara would have conveyed a sense of urgency to the respective parties. He was, of course, facing a major crisis at home as the Nixon presidency unraveled. With the US government in disarray—Nixon was holed up in California when the first invasion took place, and Gerald Ford had been in the White House less than a week when stage two of Attila was launched—perhaps he felt that he could not leave Washington.
Historians reflecting on these developments have concluded that the United States—that is, Henry Kissinger—could have done more to forestall the Turkish attack. Perhaps he underestimated the influence Washington could exert on Ankara or feared that the Turks would leave NATO altogether if Washington pressed too hard. Although the secretary of state might have leaned on Athens to be more flexible or could have joined the British at Geneva, the Americans were unwilling to tip too much in either direction, lest they destroy their bona fides if they were asked to mediate the dispute.
One cannot dismiss the possibility that Kissinger welcomed Turkey’s cutting of the Gordian knot, ending once and for all the troubled island’s periodic eruptions. After all, Dean Acheson, for whom Kissinger had the greatest respect, had concluded in 1964, after his failed mission to resolve an earlier crisis, that partition of the island might be the only long-term solution. He proposed the Acheson plan, of which his biographer Robert Beisner writes, “Acheson’s visibly pro-Turkish recommendations shaped Washington’s approach to Cyprus for a generation.”10
Greek Americans to Arms
Although Turkey had strength of arms in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean region, the Greeks and Greek Cypriots quickly attracted international sympathy and support. Nowhere was this more evident than in the United States, for Americans had a long history of championing the Greek cause. This began in the early nineteenth century, when the Greeks struggled for independence from the Ottoman Empire. An American journalist at the time referred to American support as “Greek fever.” Rooted in the mistaken belief that modern Greeks were the direct descendants of ancient Greeks and that success against the Turks would restore the glory of Athens and the Greek city-states, many Americans supported the Greek war of independence in the 1820s. At that time, the American press “focused exclusively on Turkish abuses,” feeding sympathy for the Greek side while ignoring the massacre of Muslim civilians during the war.11
More recently, American activists had opposed the rule of the military junta (1967–1974) in Greece. Several members of Congress, including Representatives Donald Fraser (D-MN), Ogden Reid (R-NY), and Donald Edwards (D-CA) and Senator Vance Hartke (D-IN), served on the board of the US Committee for Democracy in Greece. They worked to encourage Congress to cut off military assistance to the Regime of the Colonels in Athens. This passion for Greece would be rekindled in the Cyprus crisis of 1974.12
Greek American associations had been active from the first days of the Cyprus crisis in mid-July. They represented an influential community of an estimated 2 million immigrants and their descendants, most of whom had come to the United States from rural areas of the Ottoman Empire and the Peloponnesus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Predominantly single men arrived at first; they became laborers on the railroads or factory workers on the East Coast, especially in Boston, New York, and Baltimore, and in Detroit and Chicago in the Midwest. Soon they established themselves in small businesses, grocery stores, bakeries, and so forth. A second wave of immigrants came directly from Greece after World War II to escape the devastation and civil war. Members of the Greek American community became quite prosperous and expressed a considerable interest in politics. In the late 1960s they participated in the revival of ethnicity common to other immigrant groups in the United States, encouraging strong attachment to Greek traditions.
Poster showing a Turkish soldier on Cyprus, with Ecevit to the left (English comments by an unknown source). (Courtesy Paul Tsongas Papers, Center for Lowell History, University of Massachusetts, Lowell)
Influential associations, such as the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA), responded even more vociferously once Turkish forces crossed the cease-fire lines on August 14. Unlike the initial invasion, it was difficult to justify the expansion of Operation Attila, and this new offensive was being carried out with US-supplied weapons. One flyer captured the mood at the time. It paired a description of Attila the Hun with a description of this new “Scourge of God”—the Turkish army—which was allegedly committing so many crimes on Cyprus that “the conscience of all civilized men shudders.” How appropriate, wrote the author, that the campaign was named after the king of the Huns. The Turks were likely unaware that, to many Americans, the name “Attila” conjured ancient images of death and destruction. From the American perspective, the Turks could not have chosen a more inappropriate name for their offensive, and by doing so, they provided a propaganda advantage to their enemies.13
The Turks’ opponents frequently presented them as the “Other” and cherry-picked their way through history to make facts conform to strongly held beliefs. In countless letters to government officials, they expressed the depths of their bitterness. In one example, Dr. Daniel Kavadas, a dentist who headed the Columbia, South Carolina, chapter of AHEPA, wrote to Congressman Floyd Spence (R-SC): “What the government of Turkey is striving to achieve today in Cyprus is exactly what Hitler’s Third Reich strove to achieve—and achieved—in the annexation of the whole of Czechoslovakia some thirty-five years ago by using the minority problem as an excuse.” Comparisons with the Nazis appeared repeatedly
