The Kremlin's Confidant, page 10
Martin was 32 years old when he left HMS Blake in mid-1963. He had been promoted to Lieutenant Commander and was well thought of by his superiors. His naval career was to last a further five years but he was never again to serve on a ship. His course was increasingly diverting from that he had imagined when, in a flush of prep-school patriotism, he had signed on for the Royal Navy.
Deputy Fleet Intelligence Officer 1963
Martin’s stint at GCHQ, even if short, had interested him in the world of intelligence. In 1961 when he was on HMS Blake, Clutterbuck had commented that Martin was keen to continue working in this field and ‘appears well suited’ to it. The captain repeated his recommendation a year later and Martin was duly offered an intelligence job in Malta as Deputy Fleet Intelligence Officer to C-in-C Med, the commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy Fleet in the Mediterranean.
This was a grand title for a diminished role. By 1964, post-Suez recriminations and defence cuts had led to the British Mediterranean Fleet being reduced to a small escort squadron and some coastal minesweepers. Larger warships would occasionally visit from Britain. But the British naval base remained in Malta, strategically placed to control traffic between the East and West Mediterranean: the nearby Sicilian Channel which separates Sicily from Tunisia is a mere 150km wide. It is a vital channel, and Malta, with its deep harbours, a natural fortress. Its position had not just provided refuge to the Knights of Malta but allowed them to grow rich from the levies they raised on passing shipping. Overconfident, the Knights refused water to Napoleon’s fleet to Egypt, and he retaliated by conquering the island. It then came under the control of the British, proving invaluable during the two world wars. Hitler’s last moment cancellation of an air-landing on Malta planned in spring 1942 would contribute to his eventual loss of North Africa.17
The heart of British activities was the Lascaris Battery, a Victorian bastion looking out across the Grand Harbour of Valletta. During the Second World War, the Lascaris War Rooms, dug out close to the battery, served as Britain’s headquarters for the defence of the island and for the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943. It was here that Martin was to work, his job being to read the intelligence associated with the Mediterranean, overt and covert. He had to go through every newspaper and magazine he could obtain as well as all the reporting from the US CIA, Britain’s MI6 and other government agencies. Out of these, he had to distil a short brief for the regular daily staff meeting and a one-hour briefing for the Friday meeting, expanding on these and on what was happening around and influencing the Mediterranean basin.
Technically, he was the number two analyst, but his boss savoured sitting in the bar and left Martin to write all the analyses, which would go out in his name. For Martin, it was an ideal job. He liked his commander, Admiral Sir Deric Holland-Martin, replaced in 1964 by Admiral John Hamilton – the ninetieth and last commander-in-chief Mediterranean Fleet. His own quarters were a cabin on Manoel Island next to the magnificent star fort built there in the 1720s. Separated from Kitty, he lived a bachelor’s life. He would drive in each day to Fort Lascaris in his MG saloon, and was able to refocus on playing squash. But his idyll was about to end.
Getting it Wrong on Cyprus
Flying three flags
At the end of 1963, while in Athens for Christmas, Martin was contacted by the British Embassy and told to report for duty with the British forces in Cyprus. He used the week before flying to Nicosia to visit Greek politicians and journalists. They painted a grim picture of what awaited him, but none foresaw that in the weeks ahead the island would be at a tipping point in its history.
For centuries, the Christians and Muslims – Greeks and Ottomans then Turks – had lived side by side. Greek calls for union with their recreated motherland had shattered the harmony. Martin was soon to find himself fighting a Quixotic battle for peace. His family had presented him with a Quaker treatise on mediation. ‘My father,’ Packard explains, ‘was an ecumenical parson whose acceptance of libertarian theology and whose belief in a Quaker approach to inter-personal contact were influential in my formative years.’1 This Quaker dedication to peace was soon to be tested as Martin sought to apply it to co-operation between Greek and Turkish Cypriots.
Earlier navy appraisals had found him ‘insipid’. Later ones considered him ‘conscientious and hard working’. All his commanders had respected his abilities on the squash court. But there was little to indicate the mark he was to make on the island – nor the conflicts that would explode with the Foreign Office – turning his life to date into a golden age of innocence.
Fighting between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots had broken out in the six major cities of the island. There were kidnappings, killings and atrocities. The proximate cause was the attempt by the president, Archbishop Makarios, to revise the constitution of the fledgling republic. Makarios claimed this constitution, agreed three years earlier, was unworkable. On 30 November 1963, he proposed thirteen changes. These would have ended the Turkish Cypriots’ veto on legislation on defence, security, foreign affairs, elections, municipal government and taxation. They would also have ended the separate Turkish Cypriot municipalities, the 70:30 ratio of Greek and Turkish Cypriots in public services and the 60:40 ratio in the armed forces. In short, they would have destroyed the power-sharing principle behind the agreements of Zurich and London under which the Republic of Cyprus had been born.
Even before the Turkish Cypriots had time to reject Makarios’s demands, Ankara had done so. Turkey’s veteran prime minister, General İsmet İnönü, warned Britain and Greece that Turkey would intervene unless they, as co-guarantor powers of the new republic, took action to protect the beleaguered Turkish Cypriots. On Christmas Day, five Turkish jets buzzed Nicosia and there were reports that a Turkish invasion force had set sail. The threats brought the Greek and Turkish Cypriots to the negotiating table. That night they announced a cessation of hostilities and invited Britain to lead a peacekeeping initiative. Three days later, on 28 December, a liaison committee of Britain, Greece, Turkey, the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots met to discuss ceasefire arrangements. The next day, Major General Peter Young, the General Officer Commanding Cyprus District, put forward what is still known as the Green Line – the truce line originally traced on a map by a corporal of the King’s Hussars using a blunt green chinagraph pencil and still valid over half a century later. The following day, the ‘Agreement “Green Line’” was signed and Young stationed troops along various parts of this new disposition.
Martin had used his last days in Athens to talk with Costas Kalligas, a journalist on the respected daily Kathimerini and one of Kiki’s closest friends. Makarios appeared to trust him more than other Greek reporters and had discussed at length the revision of the constitution, stating that the British high commissioner, Sir Arthur Clark, was 100 per cent behind it and that he was acting with the encouragement of Clark.
Clark seems to have engaged in some bizarre extra-curricular activity as, at this point, Foreign Office policy was to act as ‘honest broker’ for ‘reasonable proposals for modifications of the more troublesome points of the constitution’, not to advocate them.2 Clark had known of Makarios’s intentions since August and on 12 November made handwritten suggestions on Makarios’s first draft.3 For seventeen days, he delayed sending this draft to London and even afterwards he hid his editing role. Nobody there seems to have picked up on the remark by the Greek Foreign Minister, Sophoclis Venizelos, to R. A. Butler, then Foreign Secretary, on 17 December that he ‘understood that the United Kingdom representative in Cyprus had been of much help to the archbishop in working out his proposed changes’.
Clark, ill and exhausted, temporarily left the island at the end of 1963,4 with Cyril Pickard, a high flyer at the Commonwealth Relations Office, sent to take his place. Duncan Sandys, then Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, mused whether they would need to have Clark certified as mentally upset so as to distance London in case the Turks obtained documentary evidence of his ‘subterfuge’ with Makarios.5 Official British policy was thus to defuse tension, and General Young considered that a central role in this could be played by Joint Patrols, tripartite units comprising a British officer supported by a Greek officer and a Turkish officer. Article 5 of the Agreement ‘Green Line’ authorised him ‘to send patrols at any time without further consultation anywhere in Nicosia and the surrounding area’.
Martin, drawn in because he spoke Greek, flew in to meet Young on the evening of 5 January, noting in his diary that the general was ‘Welcoming; patrician; sympathetic; accessible; compassionate; inspirational; very tired’. The next morning, they took a helicopter to Paphos to persuade the Greek Cypriots there to stand down their forces, and then back to the Cornaro Hotel, requisitioned by the British peacekeeping force as a temporary headquarters. There, Young told his officers of the problems they faced from the hard men on both sides who had never accepted the Zurich and London agreements, of the militias which these had established, and of the provocative role being played by the Greek Cypriot police. Martin, in his vivid account of this period, records him saying:
We don’t have much time and our legal position is tenuous … The agenda is now being set not by the government but ad hoc by secret organisations on both sides; by army officers from Greece or Turkey; by the leaders of private armies, including Nikos Sampson and Vassos Lyssarides, and by the heads of the police and the gendarmerie. Additionally, the Greek and Turkish intelligence agencies are pushing things along, the former working through Sampson and other ex-EOKA rightists and the latter linked with TMT [the Turkish Resistance Organisation, Türk Mukavemet Teşkilatı], the Turkish Cypriots’ military wing.6
Young said that he and the High Commissioner would deal with the politicians and that the joint patrols would focus on the countryside, where most of the population lived and worked. There would be an initial two patrols, with Packard heading that for Nicosia and the northern tranche of the island, and two more patrols to be added to cover Larnaca and Paphos. Young authorised the patrols to liaise directly with the offices of Makarios and Fazil Küçük, the vice president and leader of the Turkish Cypriot minority, and to establish a dialogue with the paramilitaries and whatever private armies came into play:
I have a strong affection for both communities and a real sympathy for their feelings and I don’t want you acting as though we have some God-given imperial right to dictate their future. In the end, it’s they who have to find a way forward together. It’s our job to help create an atmosphere in which they can do that peaceably.’
The patrols’ instructions were brief: ‘To act as necessary to re-establish normal relations between the Greek and Turkish communities in the rural areas.’
Martin recalls he said to Young, ‘You’ve confirmed that a lot is going to come down to our discretion. We’re to regard ourselves as seconded to the Cypriot political leadership. That suggests to me that our first loyalty is going to have to be the people for whom we’re mediating.’ Young responded, ‘I’ll go along with that.’7
Martin’s first full day with Young ended with him and Colonel Abdullah Gündeş, the Turkish officer allocated to the joint patrols, being sent to the offices of Küçük. Their aim was to ensure that the Turkish Cypriots distributed the agreement, signed that day between the two communities, for the restoration of freedom of movement and communications, dismantling of road blocks and barricades, dispersal of armed bands and end of arms carrying by civilians. Martin was directed to discuss the matter with Küçük’s deputy, Rauf Denktaş, the founder and reportedly the leader of the covert Turkish paramilitary TMT. Denktaş already knew Martin had a Greek wife, but none the less helped him to establish a dialogue with the TMT and other hidden actors among the Turkish Cypriots.
It was a pivotal moment for the oft-tormented island. From the nineteenth century, the Orthodox Christian majority of the island had hoped to follow the example of other Greek-populated islands in being united with Greece. In 1931, their demands again rebuffed, they burnt down the British governor’s house. In the mid-1950s, Lawrence Durrell, after a period helping the governor, Field Marshal Lord Harding, wrote: ‘I could not help reflecting wryly that had we been honest enough to admit the Greek nature of Cyprus at the beginning, it might not have been necessary to abandon the island or to fight for it. Now, it was too late!’8 Indeed, in 1956, during the Suez build-up and invasion, Britain lost more troops on Cyprus to the Greek Cypriots’ Nationalist Organisation of Cypriot Resistance (Ethnikí Orgánosis Kypríon Agonistón, EOKA), than in Egypt.9
As the Greek Cypriots’ campaign for enosis (union with Greece) grew so did Turkey’s concerns for the Muslims who made up between one-sixth and one-fifth of the population and looked to Turkey for protection. The struggle by EOKA led to the Turkish Cypriots establishing TMT as their counterpart. Both motherlands sent teachers who stoked the fires of national chauvinism and both sides increasingly smuggled soldiers and arms into the island.10 December 1963 saw the two communities set aside the vestigial co-existence of centuries and reach for each other’s throats. The ceasefire between them only came into force as the Greek Cypriots feared a Turkish invasion while the Turkish Cypriots wished to regroup and arm their villagers.
Martin was thus thrown on to a fault line of hatred, and within a week of arrival on the island was required to unpick the complexities of confrontation and, without preparation, become diplomat and psychologist. His diary records that on the one day of 11 January, for instance, his patrol had to deal with communal breakdown and the absconding of two Turkish Cypriots in Dhenia (Martin later learned they had been ‘disposed of’); the fears of a beleaguered Turkish Cypriot community in the mainly Maronite village of Ayia Marina where two other Turkish Cypriots had been kidnapped; the surly guilt of those remaining in Skylloura after the Turkish Cypriots had been forced to flee and their quarter vandalised; a hostile Greek Cypriot police station at Yerralakos; racist diatribes in the Greek Cypriot village of Mammari; feigned innocence at the police station at Kokkini Trimithia where the kidnapped Turkish Cypriots from Dhenia had, at one point, been held; the deceptive calm of the mixed village of Akaki which would shortly be abandoned by the Turkish Cypriots; and the tensions in Peristerona, another mixed village. His message to all was that they should not allow centuries of co-existence to be destroyed by a few extremists. In his opinion, it was a message many wanted to hear.
Martin soon learnt that Gündeş was using his visits as part of the patrol to tell villagers to leave their mixed villages, saying these would be bombed by the Turkish Air Force. Martin complained to Young and the next day arrived at work to find a new assistant, Major Sait Sepici, who Martin remembers as ‘small in size but of huge moral stature’.
As his first month wound on, village by village, his patrol was able to defuse tension on the ground, while building up links with the leaders of the two communities. On the Turkish Cypriot side, Martin could call on Küçük and his assistants. On the Greek Cypriot side, Spiros Kiprianou, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, had refused to meet Martin but had his wife introduce him to Tassos Papadopoulos, then in his twenties, but already Minister of Health, of Labour and Social Security and, on an acting basis, of Agriculture.
Martin hit it off with Papadopoulos and says that he worked almost entirely with or through this later controversial figure:
[His] critical commitment to communal re-engagement made the whole process possible. He was adamant that a failure by the central government to deliver adequate security to the Turkish Cypriots would be catastrophic for both communities. He provided me with access to Makarios and other members of the government whenever that was needed; he helped to defuse incidents reported by me that could have led to serious violence; all the patrol’s efforts to resolve the needs and problems of the Turkish Cypriots were backed by him. My unit went on to act as executor for secret projects, spearheaded by him, to channel public works projects to the Turkish Cypriots, in a specific drive for economic equalisation.11
Martin’s personal experience of working with Papadopoulos was very different from the view of the Foreign Office and of Turkish Cypriots, who considered him a hard liner on intercommunal relations.12
One hour the patrol would be trying to ensure the Cyprus Telecommunications Authority would restore service to Turkish Cypriot villages, the next, they would be seeking to persuade the Greek Cypriots to return a bus confiscated for not having paid its road tax but which was a Turkish Cypriot village’s only link with the markets for food and medical supplies. A third, they would be trying to wind down an arcane water dispute. And another would be spent calming villagers from one community shot at by those from another over grazing rights.
On a number of occasions, Martin and his Greek and Turkish officers came under abuse, physical attack or fire. One particular day in February, as Martin was walking through an evening pasture, a burst of bullets skittered by him. An elderly Greek Cypriot priest hiding under a carob tree said he had seen no one. They set off to have a coffee together, and a Sten gun fell from his cassock. ‘I thought you were a foreigner. I like the Turks in our village.’ When the local Turkish Cypriot hoca (teacher) heard the story, he leant across and patted the priest on his hand. ‘Papa Antoni,’ he said, ‘for so many months we have been telling you to get new glasses.’13 Martin himself made a point of not carrying a gun.
The patrols learnt how to listen to litanies of complaints and how to investigate and often disprove the stories on which they were based. Martin and his colleagues appealed to the history of centuries which bound the communities and helped villages establish communal committees to resolve their differences. They often had to face down hard men from either side, appealing over their heads to Küçük, Papadopoulos and others in Nicosia. They had their successes, but they were swimming against the tide.
