The book shows an extremely clear pattern about Kissinger’s goals and about how he goes about achieving his goals. He, of course, works towards his goals with a seemingly limitless amount of money behind him - supporting him. Kissinger’s actions tell the public absolutely everything we need to know about him and about the extremely wealthy individuals who have hijacked authority
Christopher Hitchens continues:
Thus it was understood in general that the Greek dictatorship, a US client, wished to see Makarios overthrown and had already tried to kill him or have him killed. (Overthrow and assassination, incidentally, are effectively coterminous in this account; there was no possibility of leaving such a charismatic leader alive, and those who sought his removal invariably intended his death.)
This was also understood in particular. The most salient proof is this. In May of 1974, two months before the coup in Nicosia which Kissinger later claimed was a shock, he received a memorandum from the head of his State Department Cyprus desk, Thomas Boyatt.
Charismatic populist leaders are regularly killed throughout the course of this narrative.
Boyatt summarized all the cumulative and persuasive reasons for believing that a Greek junta attack on Cyprus and Makarios was imminent.
He further argued that, in the absence of a US demarche to Athens, warning the dictators to desist, it might be assumed that the United States was indifferent to this. And he added what everybody knew-that such a coup, if it went forward, would beyond doubt trigger a Turkish invasion.
Murderers were sent to kill Napoleon until finally they found a way how to get away with murdering him.
Then they trashed his reputation up until the present day. I talk about this so you will see this is the modus operandi of the current regime.
Prescient memos are a dime a dozen in Washington after a crisis; they are often then read for the first time, or leaked to the press or Congress in order to enhance (or protect) some bureaucratic reputation.
But Kissinger now admits that he saw this document in real time, while engaged in his shuttle between Syria and Israel (both of them within half an hour's flying time of Cyprus).
No one stops the systematic murder of charismatic populist leaders.
Yet no demarche bearing his name or carrying his authority was issued to the Greek junta. A short while afterward, on 7 June 1974, the National Intelligence Daily, which is the breakfast/bible reading of all senior State Department, Pentagon and national security officials, quoted a US field report dated 3 June which stated the views of the dictator in Athens: Ioannides claimed that Greece is capable of removing Makarios and his key supporters from power in twenty-four hours with little if any blood being shed and without EOKA assistance.
The Turks would quietly acquiesce to the removal of Makarios, a key enemy.... Ioannides stated that if Makarios decided on some type of extreme provocation against Greece to obtain a tactical advantage, he is not sure whether he should merely pull the Greek troops out of Cyprus and let Makarios fend for himself, or remove Makarios once and for all and have Greece deal directly with Turkey over Cyprus's future.
This report and its contents were later authenticated before Congress by CIA staff who had served in Athens at the relevant time. The fact that it made Brigadier Ioannides seem bombastic and delusional-both of which he was-should have underlined the obvious and imminent danger. (EOKA was a Greek-Cypriot fascist underground, armed and paid by the junta.)
William Fulbright
At about the same time, Kissinger received a call from Senator J. William Fulbright, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senator Fulbright had been briefed about the impending coup by a senior Greek dissident journalist in Washington named Elias P. Demetracopoulos.
He told Kissinger that steps should be taken to avert the planned Greek action, and he gave three reasons. The first was that it would repair some of the moral damage done by the US government's indulgence of the junta.
Elias Demetracopoulos
The second was that it would head off a confrontation between Greece and Turkey in the Mediterranean. The third was that it would enhance US prestige on the island. Kissinger declined to take the recommended steps, on the bizarre grounds that he could not intervene in Greek "internal affairs" at a time when the Nixon administration was resisting pressure from Senator Henry Jackson to link US-Soviet trade to the free emigration of Russian Jewry.
However odd this line of argument, it still makes it impossible for Kissinger to claim, as he still does, that he had had no warning.
Dimitrios Ioannides
So there was still no high-level US concern registered with Athens. The difficulty is sometimes presented as one of protocol or etiquette, as if Kissinger's regular custom was to whisper and tread lightly.
Ioannides was the de facto head of the regime but technically only its secret police chief.
For the US ambassador, Henry Tasca, it was awkward to make diplomatic approaches to a man he described as "a cop."
Dimitrios Ioannides
But again I remind you that Henry Kissinger, in addition to his formal diplomatic eminence, was also head of the Forty Committee, and supervisor of covert action, and was dealing in private with an Athens regime that had long-standing CIA ties.
The 1976 House Committee on Intelligence later phrased the problem rather deftly in its report: Tasca, assured by the CIA station chief that Ioannides would continue to deal only with the CIA, and not sharing the State Department Desk Officer's alarm, was content to pass a message to the Greek leader indirectly....
It is clear, however, that the embassy took no steps to underscore for Ioannides the depth of concern over a Cyprus coup attempt. This episode, the exclusive CIA access to Ioannides, Tasca's indications that he may not have seen all important messages to and from the CIA station, Ioannides' suggestions of US acquiescence, and Washington's well-known coolness to Makarios have led to public speculation that either US officials were inattentive to the reports of the developing crisis or simply allowed it to happen.