AHIF Fellow Presents Paper on Cyprus Invasion at Conference on the Cold War

WASHINGTON, DC – Gregory Graves, an American Hellenic Institute Foundation (AHIF) research fellow, joined approximately 20 young scholars in Santa Barbara, Calif., for the annual Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War, April 28, 2017, held jointly by The George Washington University, University of California at Santa Barbara, and the London School of Economics. Graves participated as a panelist on the conference’s second panel, focusing on the global 1970s.  He presented a paper titled, “Five Days in July: Tilting Toward Taksim.”

Graves’ presentation and paper drew upon a wealth of primary source documents that included a number of domestic and foreign archives as well as through the Freedom of Information Act.  They were organized into a collection of 35 binders will be available for research at the American Hellenic Institute Foundation.

“This unique collection is intended to supplement and augment the pre-existing Foreign Relations of the United States volumes, compiled by the State Department’s Office of the Historian, on the Cyprus Crisis,” Graves said.  

According to Graves, the assemblage of binders is comprised mostly of individual binders devoted to a single day or group of days from July 15 to August 31, 1974. Each “Daily Binder” contains: the schedules of the principal U.S. diplomats involved in managing the upheaval; the intelligence items these officials had access too; transcripts of their phone calls and meetings; and the relevant telegrams. In addition to these binders, the collection also features binders devoted solely to topics such as: Greek withdrawal and re-integration into NATO; the Turkish arms embargo; and intelligence studies from the 1960s and 1970s on U.S. and Soviet policy in the Eastern Mediterranean.

While the wide range of documents contained in the collection is designed to allow researchers to form their own opinions, Graves’ research and analysis led him to argue that the crucial, and yet avoidable, diplomatic failures of the United States during the five days following the coup against Archbishop Makarios not only facilitated Turkey’s subsequent invasions but also evidence the fact that key figures were accepting partition as the solution that would best suit American interests.

“We are really proud of Gregory’s research and presentation at the Conference on the Cold War,” AHI President Nick Larigakis said. “His research and paper are important additions to AHIF’s volumes of work on the causes of the Cyprus invasion.  We are pleased to be able to share the collection of source documents to interested visitors to Hellenic House.”  

Larigakis added, “They will be available in early fall after the dedication of the new AHIF John E. & Cleo Rumpakis Library.”

The American Hellenic Institute is a non-profit Greek American think-tank and public policy center that works to strengthen relations between the United States and Greece and Cyprus, and within the Greek American community.

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For additional information, please contact Peter Milios at (202) 785-8430 or atinfo@ahiworld.org. For general information about the activities of AHI, please see our website athttps://www.ahiworld.org and follow us on Twitter @TheAHIinDC.