The Turkish Arms Embargo. James F. Goode
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 in flyers and various other publications.14
These characterizations might have seemed tame compared with the telegram from one activist referring to “the Turkish insane animals.” In a letter to President Ford, another concerned American, Basil Rodes, noted that history was replete with examples of “the death and destruction visited upon peoples in Asia Minor, Europe, and North Africa by the Turks. The Turks are repeating the same practice of death and destruction in Cyprus today. The Turks had contributed nothing to the human race and its civilization, but they have spread death and destruction throughout the ages.” Another wrote to Secretary Kissinger, emphasizing a common theme: “The major portion of Turkey today is a barren wasteland … buildings and monuments created by their ‘restless minorities’ now lie in ruins, further desiccated by the indolent and feckless peasants [Turks] who carry off pieces of building stone as needed, to reinforce their own dilapidated, shanty-like dwellings.”15
Occasionally, such vitriol made its way into the publications of the major Greek American organizations. An article in the Ahepan stated, “From the very first day that the battle started, the Turks displayed that they are still the same savage people.” A recounting of Greek-Turkish relations recalled all the harm done to the Greeks in World War I, including the massacres of Greeks and Armenians and the forced resettlement of Greeks from Asia Minor to Greece. The article was silent on the Greek invasion of Anatolia after the war (1919–1922) and on the repatriation of a smaller Turkish population from Greece to the Republic of Turkey.16
One of the most troubling developments was repeated charges of atrocities on both sides. These were more numerous coming from Greek Americans, who had more outlets to present their arguments to the American public. There were tales of looting, rape, and intentional destruction of churches in the area under Turkish army control. The Cypriot embassy in Washington circulated an information sheet in mid-November 1974, claiming to provide ”factual evidence” that the Turks were guilty of the greatest crime of all, “GENOCIDE,” against the Greek population, murdering in cold blood hundreds of innocent women and children and crippled and old men. They had allowed “repeated and continual rapes of women from the age of twelve onwards on an organized basis by the officers and men of the Turkish army, reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps.” Even Archbishop Iakovos added to the charges. In a letter to Congressman John Brademas (D-IN), the archbishop’s office claimed that, among other crimes, “priests have been beaten to death, one priest attempting to rescue his daughter from being raped was savagely beheaded.”17
Yet there was little incontrovertible evidence to support these lurid tales. When an AHEPA delegation to Cyprus met with Dr. Vasos Vasilopoulos of the Ministry of Health, he disputed reports that Cypriot women’s breasts had been cut off or that boys had been emasculated. There were enough real problems, he explained, resulting from the destructiveness of modern warfare. Still, the exaggerated accounts did not subside.18
The government of Turkey also publicized questionable claims of atrocities, in spite of advice from the US embassy not to do so. A UN report concluded that, after an investigation of thirty alleged cases of so-called Greek atrocities against Turkish Cypriots, none had been verified. The UN did verify, however, a massacre of Turkish Cypriot civilians at the village of Tokhni, between Limassol and