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Russian design.) On another occasion, following the downing of a US plane, he was in favor of
bombing North Korea and not excluding the nuclear option. The Ends of Power was
Haldeman's title; it is only one of many testimonies showing Kissinger's unsleeping attention
to potential sources of trouble, and therefore of possible distinction for himself.
This is a necessary preface to a consideration of his self-exculpation in the Cyprus matter,
an apologia which depends for its credibility on our willingness to believe that Kissinger was
wholly incompetent and impotent and above all uninformed. The energy with which he
presses this self-abnegating case is revealing. It is also important, because if Kissinger did
have any knowledge of the events he describes, then he is guilty of collusion in an
assassination attempt on a foreign head of state, in a fascist military coup, in a serious
violation of American law (the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits the use of US military
aid and materiel for non-defensive purposes), in two invasions which flouted international
law, and in the murder and dispossession of many thousands of noncombatant civilians.
In seeking to fend off this conclusion, and its implications, Kissinger gives one hostage to
fortune in Years of Upheaval and another in Years of Renewal. In the former volume he says
plainly, "I had always taken it for granted that the next intercommunal crisis in Cyprus would
provoke Turkish intervention," that is, it would at least risk the prospect of a war within
NATO between Greece and Turkey and would certainly involve the partition of the island.
That this was indeed common knowledge may not be doubted by any person even lightly
acquainted with Cypriot affairs. In the latter volume, where he finally takes up the challenge
implicitly refused in the former, he repeatedly asks the reader why anyone (such as himself, so
burdened with Watergate) would have sought "a crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean between
two NATO allies."
These two disingenuous statements need to be qualified in the light of a third, which
appears on page 199 of Years of Renewal. Here, President Makarios of Cyprus is described
without adornment as "the proximate cause of most of Cyprus's tensions." Makarios was the
democratically elected leader of a virtually unarmed republic, which was at the time an
associate member of the European Economic Community (EEC), the United Nations and the
Commonwealth. His rule was challenged, and the independence of Cyprus was threatened, by
a military dictatorship in Athens and a highly militarized government in Turkey, both of
which sponsored right-wing gangster organizations on the island, and both of which had plans
to annex the greater or lesser part of it. In spite of this, "intercommunal" violence had been on
the decline in Cyprus throughout the 1970s. Most killings were in fact "intramural": of Greek
and Turkish democrats or internationalists by their respective nationalist and authoritarian
rivals. Several attempts, by Greek and Greek-Cypriot fanatics, had been made on the life of
President Makarios himself. To describe his person as "the proximate cause" of most of the
tensions is to make a wildly aberrant moral judgment.
This same aberrant judgment, however, supplies the key that unlocks the lie at the heart of
Kissinger's presentation. If the elected civilian authority (and spiritual leader of the Greek
Orthodox community) is the "proximate cause" of the tensions, then his removal from the
scene is self-evidently the cure for them. If one can demonstrate that there was such a removal
plan, and that Kissinger knew about it in advance, then it follows logically and naturally that
he was not ostensibly looking for a crisis - as he self-pityingly asks us to disbelieve - but for a
solution. The fact that he got a crisis, which was also a hideous calamity for Cyprus and the
region, does not change the equation or undo the syllogism. It is attributable to the other
observable fact that the scheme to remove Makarios, on which the "solution" depended, was
in practice a failure. But those who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved
from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.
It is, from Kissinger's own record and recollection, as well as from the record of the
subsequent official inquiry, quite easy to demonstrate that he did have advance knowledge of
the plan to depose and kill Makarios. He admits as much himself, by noting that the Greek
dictator Dimitrios Ioannides, head of the secret police, was determined to mount a coup in
Cyprus and bring the island under the control of Athens. This was one of the better-known
facts of the situation, as was the more embarrassing fact that Brigadier Ioannides was
dependent on US military aid and political sympathy. His police state had been expelled from
the Council of Europe and blocked from joining the EEC, and it was largely the advantage
conferred by his agreement to "home port" the US Sixth Fleet, and host a string of US air and
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