In the first seven parts of this series we examined the circumstances leading to the outbreak of the 1969 Greco-Turkishwar; the early battles of the war itself; the catastrophic defeatsTurkey suffered in its failed attempt to seize control of Greece’sAegean islands; the ill-fated Turkish bid to mount an overlandinvasion of Greece in the final days of the war; the Vienna cease-fire negotiations which eventually ended the war; the formation ofTurkey’s National Reform Alliance Party as dissatisfaction with thethe Demeriel regime in Ankara escalated in the war’s aftermath; thepolitical turmoil that swept Greece in the early months of the postwar era; and the United Nations’ efforts to avert civil war inGreece in early 1971. In this installment we’ll look back at howthe long-running dispute over control of Cyprus pushed Greece and Turkey to the brink of another Aegean war.

For Western diplomats stationed in Athens in the summer of 1974, the headlines in the newspapers being sold on the streets of the Greek capital had a distinct and comfortable air of déjà vu about them. Many of those same headlines had appeared on the papers’ front pages in the days and weeks just before the start of the September War; the accusations of Turkish perfidy, the lurid accounts of violence against Greek citizens, the pledges of swift retaliation against Turkish aggression, and so on. One staunchly pro-Papadopolous broadsheet even reprinted one of his old speeches from the September War’s early days as a means of rallying support behind the government.

But even without such prompting the majority of Greeks were siding with Athens in the face of what Papadopolous and most of his inner circle were convinced was an imminent threat by Turkey to the safety of Greek nationals living on Cyprus. In late June of 1974, as the Nixon presidency in the United States was collapsing in the face of the latest revelations about the Watergate scandal, a crowd of nearly 3000 people gathered in Salonika’s main square to denounce Turkish nationalist gang attacks on their fellow countrymen living in Cyprus’ capital city Nicosia. Turkish flags were burned and the respective chiefs of staff of the Turkish army, navy, and air force were all hanged in effigy-- another echo of the September War.

Conversely, Turkish citizens in Istanbul and Ankara were holding rallies of their own blasting what they saw as a Greek-orchestrated pogrom in Cyprus aimed at driving the Turkish Cypriot community out of their rightful homes. At least twice the Greek embassy in Ankara came under attack by rioters throwing stones and Molotov ocktails; a Greek cultural attaché stationed in Izmir was assaulted by extremists and recalled to Athens for his own safety. Ambulances were kept busy around the clock rushing injured bystanders to Ankara’s hospitals as these riots steadily escalated. One Red Cross official sent to assess the extent of the casualties incurred in these disturbances concluded that if they kept up long enough, the Turkish capital was eventually going to become a “ghost town”, as he put it. And things weren’t that much calmer in the rest of Turkey for that matter; in the town of Menemen two Egyptian tourists were shot and seriously wounded after being mistaken for Greek officials, and an NBC News camera crew visiting Eregli for a report on the protests in Turkey over the Cyprus situation needed a police escort to get out of town after they were accused of spying for the Greek government.

In Moscow the Soviet foreign ministry read with growing alarm the letters and telegrams arriving on their desks from members of the Greek and Turkish Communist parties(who used aliases and codes in order to conceal their identities from those nations’ respective security forces). Individually the messages were disturbing enough;
collectively, they painted a picture of a crisis situation that if not resolved soon could pose a grave threat to Soviet interests in the Black Sea and Mediterranean regions. In hopes of defusing this geopolitical minefield before Moscow got caught in the shrapnel, Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev drafted a letter to the Turkish and Greek foreign ministers in July of 1974 offering to help mediate in the Cyprus dispute as a means of-- in Brezhnev’s words --“maintaining peace and stability for all the people of Europe”.

Predictably, his words fell on deaf ears. U.S. Vice-President Gerald Ford, who shortly would assume the Presidency after Nixon’s resignation, had made a similar offer to Ankara and Athens and been turned down; if their strongest NATO ally couldn’t persuade them to work things out at the conference table, what chance did their main Communist adversary have? So it was with a heavy heart-- and great anxiety for the future of his country’s interests in the Aegean -- that Brezhnev put the mediation proposal on the back burner for the time being and hoped the two sides would have a change of heart.

One of his fellow Marxist oligarchs, Marshal Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, had his own concerns about the growing escalation of tensions between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus. Greece and Yugoslavia were back-fence neighbors, opening up the distinct if as yet slim possibility Belgrade could get sucked into the fighting if a new Greco-Turkish war broke out. Indeed, the previous year the Yugoslav army’s general staff had drafted three separate contingency plans for handling just such an eventuality. Having personally witnessed the hell of combat as an anti-Nazi partisan during the Second World War, and being keenly aware of the relative strengths and weaknesses of his country’s military, Tito understandably disliked the prospect of being involved with a shooting war against the Greeks-- or the Turks.

So on July 13th he instructed the Yugoslav embassies in Athens and Ankara to contact the Greek and Turkish foreign ministries with an eye towards laying the groundwork for a three-way summit between himself and the respective prime ministers of Greece and Turkey to try and find a peaceful resolution to the Cyprus crisis. It took them at least three days to get a reply from the Greek or Turkish governments, and when a response finally did come it was a decidedly disappointing one for Tito: both countries flatly rejected the Yugoslavian premier’s mediation offer.

Once the Yugoslav peace feeler had been turned down, war between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus seemed not only possible but inevitable. And a naval skirmish between Greek and Turkish vessels off the Cypriot coast on July 30th only exacerbated the tension; within hours of that confrontation, foreign tourists started to flee Greece and Turkey in droves for fear they might get caught in the crossfire of the imminent conflict over Cyprus. In Washington, President Nixon ordered the U.S. Sixth Fleet to go to DefCon 3 and the State Department to evacuate all dependents and non-essential personnel from U.S. diplomatic outposts in Greece and Turkey; in Moscow Soviet intelligence analysts monitored the latest dispatches from their Ankara and Athens station chiefs with growing unease; in Rome, the Italian navy put its Mediterranean bases on standby alert and Pope Paul VI worked late into the night drafting a homily calling on the antagonists to step back from the brink.

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Within less than 36 hours after the Cypriot coast naval incident, NATO’s executive council had convened in emergency session in a last- ditch attempt to pull Greece and Turkey away from the verge of another Aegean war. Few if any of the ministers in attendance had any hope the emergency session would produce any concrete results; the meeting was intended mainly as a framework for shaping NATO policy on what looked like an unavoidable confrontation. The British defense minister was in a particularly pessimistic mood about the chances for maintaining the peace in the Aegean; as he told a BBC-TV News correspondent six years after the fact, he’d arrived at NATO headquarters sure that Turkey and Greece would start shooting at each other before the executive council was adjourned.

His pessimism wasn’t entirely unjustified; even as the meeting was coming to order there’d been a confrontation between Turkish and Greek air force jets east of the coast of the island of Lemnos, and about a half-hour into the conference NATO’s Secretary General grimly informed his colleagues that warships were beginning to deploy in the vicinity of the Greco-Turkish border. The commander-in-chief for the U.N. peacekeeping forces along that border phoned Secretary General U Thant and requested instructions as to what his troops should do if Greek or Turkish military personnel attempted to cross the frontier to mount an invasion of Cyprus. It was anybody’s guess at this point whether Greece and Turkey could pull back from the brink of war over Cyprus. Or if they even wanted to....

To Be Continued