Abstract
Cyprus became a British colony in 1878, having previously been a part of the Ottoman Empire. Its value lay in its strategic location close to the Suez Canal and in its provision of bases suited both to intervention in the Middle East and to fighting the Soviet Union. As it was described in a secret 1955 report, ‘This is the place where we have decided to erect a base which is to be the key to the Eastern Mediterranean, and on which the defence policy not only of the United Kingdom but of the West hinges’.1 The island also had great significance in the intelligence field. It was well positioned for listening to the primary missile test sites in the southern USSR and was home to the regional Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6) headquarters. Richard Aldrich describes the island’s signals intelligence capabilities as ‘immense’. In addition to the original presence of 800–900 Royal Air Force (RAF) personnel at Ayios Nikolaos— which increased after 1958—and 9 Signals Regiment, the United States also had several sites and a growing presence.2 Britain therefore looked likely to hold on to Cyprus for the foreseeable future. In 1954, Henry Hopkinson, Minister of State at the Colonial Office, told the Commons that ‘there can be no question of any change of sovereignty in Cyprus’, continuing that ‘it has always been understood and agreed that there are certain territories in the Commonwealth which, owing to their particular circumstances, can never expect to be fully independent’.3
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Notes
General Sir Gerald Templar, Report on Colonial Security, 23 April 1955, quoted in A. Edwards, Defending the Realm? The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars since 1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 126.
R. J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001), pp. 567–70.
C. M. Woodhouse, British Foreign Policy since the Second World War (London: Hutchinson, 1961), pp. 192–3.
P. M. Kitromilides, ‘From Coexistence to Confrontation: The Dynamics of Ethnic Conflict in Cyprus’, in M. A. Attalides (ed.), Cyprus Reviewed: The Result of a Seminar on the Cyprus Problem Held in June 3–6 1976 by the Jus Cypri Association and the Coordinating Committee of Scientific and Cultural Organizations (Nicosia: The Jus Cypri Association, in cooperation with the Coordinating Committee of Scientific and Cultural Organizations, 1977), p. 61, Table I.
D. Hannay, Cyprus: The Search for a Solution (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), p. 2.
D. R. Thorpe, Alec Douglas-Home (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1997), p. 350.
Memorandum of conversation, 4.30 p. m., 12 February 1964, United Kingdom—PM Home Visit, Box 213, NSF Country File, NLLBJ; Lord Home, The Way the Wind Blows: An Autobiography (London: Collins, 1976), p. 242.
Quoted in K. Young, Sir Alec Douglas-Home (London: Dent, 1970), p. 101.
N. Henderson, The Private Office Revisited (London: Profile, 2001), p. 99.
See B. O’Malley and I. Craig, The Cyprus Conspiracy: America, Espionage and the Turkish Invasion (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999).
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© 2014 Andrew Holt
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Holt, A. (2014). The Cyprus Crisis. In: The Foreign Policy of the Douglas-Home Government. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284419_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284419_7
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