Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XVI, Cyprus; Greece; Turkey

111. Telephone Conversation Between President Johnson and the Under Secretary of State (Ball)¹

August 9, 1964, 6:50 a.m.

LBJ: Yes?

GWB: Hello.

LBJ: Hello.

GWB: Hello, Mr. President. We’ve been watching the Cyprus situation all through the night. We thought we had it stabilized last night, but this morning the Turks resumed their air strikes using napalm and 750-pound bombs. They’ve got maybe 65 planes that they’re using. And the Makarios government has just told our people in Nicosia that unless they stop within a half an hour, they’re going to turn on the whole Turk Cypriot population on the island and attack them all over the island with just a general massacre.² Now, we’ve gotten the stiffest kind of notes—of messages—both to Makarios and to Inonu,³ telling them they’ve got to stop immediately while this is all sorted out. But what I wanted to suggest was that I’m not at all sure that this thing is going to be held, and it may blow up within the next few hours into one of the bloodiest events we’ve seen in modern times, and I just wondered if your people shouldn’t be making preparations so you could get back here fast if you have to do so.

LBJ: Alright.

GWB: Now, I may, if it’s agreeable with you, I may have to use your name to Inonu in order to stop this. I don’t think it will be necessary, but if we can’t get them to stand down, I’d like to be—have authority to do it.

LBJ: Sure, sure. I wouldn’t think it would do much good, though.

GWB: Well, I’m not sure. This is the one hope we’ve got to get this thing stopped before it turns into a general massacre. But these people are all so bloodthirsty there’s just no telling. And the military may be out from under control, as far as Inonu is concerned, in Turkey which is the other matter that we don’t know about.

LBJ: What did it look like last night?

GWB: Well, last night the bombing had been limited. And, actually, the attack had been limited. They didn’t use bombs. They used only rockets and machine guns. And it looked as though the incident were closed. And this was the impression that the Turks gave. But the Greek Cypriots continued the fighting in these villages, apparently through the night, and that was enough to set—give the Turk military an excuse to go forward again today, and this time they’re armored differently and with napalm and 750-pound bombs, it’s become a very serious business. They’ve got a lot of the—a number of the villages are in flames, so that now the one recourse that Makarios has is to threaten to use the Turk Cypriots on the island—all hundred thousand of them—as his hostages and just massacre them unless this thing stops. So that we’ve gotten, as they say, the toughest messages to both sides. But whether they’ll stop now with this bloodbath stuff, I can’t tell. It’s very questionable. So that the thing may be out of control. But, we’re—doing my best. But in the meantime, I just have the feeling that someone—the way the world will look at it, that there ought to be preparations so you could move.

LBJ: I was planning to go to a funeral and come in immediately after the funeral in the middle of the afternoon.⁴

GWB: Well, that may be alright if this doesn’t get out of hand. But if it does, I would just want to raise the question with you as something to consider.

LBJ: Where’s Dean?

GWB: He’s on his way down now. I’ve been here all night. I’ve been in touch with him through the night.

LBJ: Bob’s in town too.

GWB: Bob’s in town; I’ve been in touch with him. And with Bus Wheeler and so on and so on.

LBJ: What are the possibilities—what else could we do?

GWB: Not much more, unless we wanted to intervene militarily, and I don’t think anybody wants to do that. We’re going to get the Sixth Fleet moved over closer, at least—just got a call in to Bob to talk to him about it now. We’ve got destroyers standing off Cyprus to take our own people off—there are about 350 Americans on the island—if it comes to that. But beyond that I don’t know what we could do. The Security Council was in emergency session until 1:30 this morning but adjourned without coming to any decision. At that time, it looked as though the Turks were going to quit and this was an incident which we could then use to sort things out diplomatically. But the Turks have overplayed their hand and apparently the military may be out of control, so that it’s going to be very hard to do anything. The Greek Cypriots called in or advised our fellow late last night, which was 2:30 o’clock over there, that they had asked the Soviet Union to intervene militarily.⁵ Now, the Soviet Union hasn’t done anything. I’m quite sure it isn’t going to do anything other than to help them in the Security Council. But, we let—I let Moscow know right away last night, to put them on guard, and we’ll have to watch this during the day, so we’re alerting the fleets to be on guard.

LBJ: What’d we say to Moscow?

GWB: I just notified the Embassy there to find out everything they could, but we didn’t want to take any strong line because there was no indication of any favorable response on Moscow’s part.

LBJ: What do the British say?

GWB: Well, the British are in the position of taking orders from us. We’re really getting nothing from them of a substantive kind, although we’re keeping them on—of course, they’ve all gone away for a weekend over in London, as usual. Butler is out on an island somewhere, and I think Home is away from London, too. And they are partly inaccessible. But we’re keeping the government informed, and, actually, I made use of the government planes last night to get them scrambled up off the island to have a look around to see what Turkish forces were in the vicinity. There’s nothing, so far, of sea forces except about half a dozen destroyers that they have standing off. But there’s no question that they’re all loaded and ready to go as far as a land invasion is concerned. They’ve been making preparations for the last 24 hours, and this is a culmination of several weeks ago.

LBJ: What does Acheson say?

GWB: I talked to him last night⁶ and he was fairly relaxed, but, of course, that was before this last attack. Now, I sent—I got a plane through Bob and sent Harry Labouisse up late last night to have a talk with Acheson so that Acheson, I mean Labouisse could come back to see Papandreou with a strong note from Acheson about the possibility of settling and the need to settle immediately. Labouisse is back in Athens now. The Greek Government so far has behaved quite well. Papandreou called on Makarios to stop the fighting last night but, apparently, without success. He has now summoned Grivas to come back to Athens. And it was our hope in the earlier hours this morning that he would work out some kind of a means of getting rid of Makarios so that this matter could be settled between the Greek and Turk Governments. But the Turks are overplaying their hand so badly that it may be very hard to put it back together now. But we’ll keep working on it.

LBJ: Now what are the one or two possible alternatives? Our intervention would be one. You can rule that out. Any—what else?

GWB: I don’t think from a military intervention point of view, there’s anything that can be done because there’s no United Nations force that could be gotten together for this purpose. Of course, if the Soviet Union—

LBJ: Well now, why not? Why not? Why couldn’t the United Nations—why wouldn’t that be something to at least pursue or hold out hope on?

GWB: Well, I think—

LBJ: you mean, just realistically, they don’t have them, but couldn’t we—?

GWB: They simply won’t do it. That’s all I mean. There are 6,000 UN troops in there now, but the orders that all the component governments have given to their own elements is that if an invasion should start, they would retire into the British bases and not stop it, because with 6,000 men they are not capable of stopping a Turkish invasion. And anyway, there isn’t a one of the United Nations forces that’s in there that’s prepared to fight the Turks.

LBJ: Well, is there any possibility that we could get the governments to agree to do that, and we could tell the Turks that we’re going—that the United Nations is going to be fighting you if you don’t stay away?

GWB: Well, realistically with the experience we’ve had in the UN of even getting the 6,000 and the nervous—the Canadians calling us every hour and saying they want to pull out, and the Swedes threatening to pull out, there’s no member of the UN, I think, that’s going to be willing to put up any forces against a Turkish invasion. I think the best bet there is just to use the biggest, the toughest leverage we have on the Turks. If we can’t stop them, why we’ll just have to cordon off the island and let the thing settle down itself. Because I don’t think there’s any way of putting outside forces between the Turks and the Greeks if they really get at it, without—I don’t think there’s anybody prepared to put forces into a situation like that.

LBJ: Well, UN intervention, our intervention—what else is conceivable?

GWB: On the military side, I think that the best thing we could do is to make sure that the Soviet Union doesn’t do anything. But as far as trying to stop it, the only other way to stop it then is just to tell the Turk Government, which I already have, that they’re going to be condemned in the eyes of the world by all civilized nations if they go ahead, in the face of the threat of a massacre, and precipitate it. And I’ve told the Government of Cyprus that if they go ahead with a massacre of this kind, they will be condemned as murderers by all civilized people. That we are working very hard with both governments—with the Turkish Government that gets the planes stood down. And if there’s any civilian control left in the Turkish Government, I think we could probably do it. It’s—but apart from that, there’s no way we can stop this fighting because there’s no available force that can go in and get in the middle of it. And, actually, for an outside force to come in—once this massacre starts, it’s hopeless. I mean, if you had 50,000 men and put them in, you couldn’t stop the bloodshed, because it’s going on and it will go on in every little village all over the place. And a major force would only exacerbate it, actually, if they came in from outside. We just have to live through it and pick up the pieces. But it’s a mess.

LBJ: Well, UN intervention, our intervention—I guess you’ve got to consider the likelihood of Soviet intervention, haven’t you?

GWB: We’ve considered it very hard and we’ve looked at it very long and we don’t think at all it’s going to happen. But, nevertheless, we’re going to try—we’re going to get some fleet units up there just to be on guard if anything should occur. It would be very hard for them to intervene, almost impossible—except by air. They couldn’t put enough ashore by submarine to do it and they can’t get their—any naval units out there. They would just be exposing themselves in a way they never would. I don’t think—they have told the Turks, within the last week, that if the Turks intervened they wouldn’t do anything about it. And I don’t, for a minute, think that they’re going to respond to Makarios’ call. We’re going to take every prudent act to make sure that they don’t, but I just don’t see any serious possibility of it.

LBJ: Now, what are we waiting on to take our people off?

GWB: Well, I think we—

LBJ: Do we have the facilities there to do it now?

GWB: Yeah, We’ve got a destroyer standing offshore. We’ve got the airlifts all set up. The best way to evacuate them is by air. I’m—I hope that—we’ve got about a half an hour to play with here—and I hope that we won’t have to pull them off in a wholesale way because it could even make the—it might trigger the thing. But they’re pretty secure. I mean, it’s as badly an exposed situation as it is [inaudible].

LBJ: Not very secure when you got 65 planes bombing an island, are you?

GWB: Well, we can get the Turks to stay away from our people, I think. They know where they are.

[Here follows discussion of military operations in Southeast Asia.]

1. Source: Johnson Library, Recordings and Transcripts, Recording of a Telephone Conversation Between President Johnson and Ball, August 9, 1964, 6:50 a.m., Tape 64.01, Side B, PNO 1. No classification marking. The President was at the LBJ Ranch in Texas; Ball was in Washington. This transcript was prepared by the Office of the Historian specifically for this volume.
2. See Document 113.
3. See Document 108.
4. The President attended the service for Mrs. Bess Beeman and departed for Washington at 3:15 p.m. (Johnson Library, President’s Daily Diary)
5. In telegram 219 from Nicosia, August 9, received in the Department of State at 12:11 a.m., the Embassy reported that the Cyprus Government had requested Soviet military intervention. (Department of State, Central Files, POL 23–8 CYP)
6. A memorandum of this conversation is in the Johnson Library, Ball Papers, Cyprus.