Greek Military Intelligence and the Crescent. Dr. Panagiotis Dimitrakis

This ebook edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2013 by University of Plymouth Press, Portland Square, Drake Circus, Plymouth, Devon, PL4 8AA, United Kingdom.

eBook ISBN 978-1-84102-337-3

The rights of Panagiotis Dimitrakis of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A paperback CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library 978-1-84102-192-8

Publisher: Paul Honeywill

Publishing Assistant: Charlotte Carey

Production Assistant: Rebecca Drees

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of UPP. Any person who carries out any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Cover and images throughout © Courtesy of the Hellenic Navy General Staff 2010

Acknowledgments

I owe special thanks to Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman and Dr Joseph Maiolo, of the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, my PhD supervisors for their advice and support. I would like to thank all of my interviewees who provided me with a rare insight into the Greek-Turkish relations and intelligence estimating. Without their personal interest and patience this research would have never been completed. Special thanks go to Olympia Wood, John Wood and Peter Barnes for their help in copy-editing. My publisher Paul Honeywill of the University of Plymouth Press deserves special credit for bringing into life this book.

Finally, I owe a great debt to my family, Yiannis Dimitrakis, Dimitra-Mimi Petropoulou-Dimitrakis and Timos Dimitrakis, for their moral and material support, for the insightful foreign-policy and history-oriented conversations we have, and for believing all these years in my work. This book is dedicated to them.

Author

Resulting from a doctorate submitted to the Department of War Studies, King’s College, London this is the first scholarly attempt to assess the role of Greek military intelligence in the strained relations between Turkey and Greece.

Panagiotis Dimitrakis is an historian and obtained his PhD in War Studies from King’s College, London. He is the author of Greece and the English: British Diplomacy and the Kings of Greece and Military Intelligence in Cyprus: From the Great War to Middle East Crises.

Abbreviations

CFE Conventional Forces Europe Treaty

CIA Central Intelligence Agency (US)

COMINT Communications Intelligence

FIR Flight Information Region

HUMINT Human Intelligence

ICAO International Civil Aviation Organisation

IMINT Image Intelligence

MFA Ministry for Foreign Affairs (Greece)

MIT National Intelligence Service (Turkey)

MI6/SIS British Secret Intelligence Service (UK)

MoD Ministry of Defence (Greece)

MoA Ministry of the Aegean (Greece)

MoI Ministry of Industry (Greece)

ND Nea Dimokratia Party (Greece)

NIMA National Imagery ad Mapping Agency (US)

NIS National Intelligence Service (Greece)

NOTAM Notice to Air Men

KYP/K Central Intelligence Service/Cyprus Republic

LOK Mountain Rangers/Greek Special Forces

PASOK Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement Party (Greece)

PKK Kurdish Workers’ Party

SIGINT Signals Intelligence

TGS Turkish General Staff

TRNC Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus

Foreword Lawrence Freedman

With one step, Panagiotis Dimitrakis has extended the study of contemporary intelligence and crisis management into the Aegean, providing a unique account of how Greek policymakers forged their assessments of the Turkish threat during a tense two decades following the Turkish occupation of half of Cyprus. He draws on the conceptual literature on intelligence and surprise attack, largely developed in the AngloSaxon world with some notable Israeli contributions and uses it as a template against which to evaluate the performance of successive Greek governments. It soon becomes apparent that while the familiar dilemmas concerning the relationship between intelligence and policy may take on distinctive forms in quite different political cultures in many respects they are all too recognisable. In the process fascinating light is thrown on how Greece has sought to manage its relations with Turkey. Even during the Cold War these two NATO allies were as prepared to fight each other as they were the Warsaw Pact, creating great anxiety among their alliance partners.

It is important to keep in mind that until well into the 1960s, intelligence did not seem a suitable subject for serious study. Apart from a few pioneers, who did what they could with memoirs, snippets of gossip, occasional leaks to newspapers and the sparse information released by governments, it seemed much easier to concentrate on areas where the government was relatively transparent, the archives were plentiful and past practitioners were not muzzled by vows of silence. In the United States, where government was less tight-lipped than in other countries, gradually headway began to be made. As it became apparent that the cover of secrecy had made possible dubious enterprises and misleading assessments, demands for more information grew. Even in the United Kingdom, where the culture of secrecy has deep roots, the roles, structure and leadership of the relevant agencies are now openly discussed and past assessments are subjected to critical appraisals. Yet even in the AngloSaxon countries, where the field of intelligence studies is now quite mature, it is still poses challenges for scholarship. Dr Dimitakis has been

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