'The Cyprus contingency': Crisis, Cold War, and the American concern, 1974--1977

A site of foreign occupation for thousands of years, the island of Cyprus was a strategic military outpost for various empires and nations. Located in the eastern Mediterranean near the intersection of three continents, its value was immediately apparent. Following the granting of independence by Britain in 1960, generations of strife and turmoil came to a head in the crisis of 1974. The Athens junta supported a coup d'etat on Cyprus, and the Turkish government responded with an armed invasion. The United States, picking up the reins from Britain, took a dominant role in trying to negotiate a peace, but a deeply embedded mutual hatred on the Greek and Turkish sides made for one of the more difficult processes of diplomacy in recent history. Beyond situating the conflict in a more general Cold War context, this thesis represents an attempt to uncover the specific motivations of the United States in taking on such an expensive and politically dangerous task. Employing large quantities of very recently declassified documents from the Gerald R. Ford Library, this thesis argues that the American intent on Cyprus involved the practical application of a premeditated national security initiative developed by Henry Kissinger that would see Cyprus used as a strategic military outpost for the United States. An unforeseen and coincidental technological failure of a critical intelligence and communications system provided further impetus for U.S. actions on Cyprus. An embargo of military and economic aid to Turkey imposed by the U.S. Congress -- and fully backed by Greeks everywhere -- effectively hindered a settlement of the Cyprus dispute, however, and the governments of Greece and Turkey further heightened the communications crisis by evicting the U.S. military from its Greek and Turkish facilities. Thus, the American intervention on Cyprus ultimately weakened the U.S. security position.