Greece and NATO: why Athens left in 1974 and came back in 1980

Greece joined NATO on 18 February 1952, left the Alliance’s integrated military command in August 1974 after Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus, and returned on 20 October 1980 under a formula brokered by Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Bernard Rogers. The 28 years between the first date and the last explain why Aegean command and control still matters in Athens today.

Key points

• Greece and Turkey were welcomed into NATO together in February 1952; the Alliance created a joint command in Izmir for the south-eastern flank within months.
• Greece pulled its forces out of the integrated command in August 1974. A U.S. intelligence memorandum says Athens left “reluctantly”, because the Alliance was perceived as unwilling to prevent Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus.
• The 1978 Haig-Davos understanding on return was approved by every ally except Turkey, according to the same memorandum.
• Reintegration took four years of talks and was agreed on 17 to 20 October 1980, once Ankara accepted the Rogers formula.
• The European Court of Human Rights has since found Turkey responsible for violations arising from its 1974 operations in Cyprus.

How and why Greece joined NATO in 1952

According to NATO’s own history page on Greece, Greece was one of the first battlefields of the early Cold War: the Truman Doctrine of 1947 brought American aid during the civil war, and in 1950, a year after that war ended, Greek troops went to Korea under the United Nations flag. NATO describes membership as a security guarantee that Athens welcomed, in particular against the threat on its 1,200 km northern frontier with Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.

King Paul I signed the instrument of accession in Athens on 11 February 1952, and Greece and Turkey were formally welcomed on 18 February. Two days later, at the North Atlantic Council in Lisbon, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sophocles Venizelos told allies that Greece was convinced a “truly efficient system of collective security” was the best way to preserve peace and justice. For what the Treaty itself promises, see our explainer NATO Article 5 explained: what it covers and why Greece joined.

A shared command with Turkey: Izmir, 1952 to 1953

NATO’s account says one of the first bodies it created for the new members was Allied Land Forces Southeastern Europe (LANDSOUTHEAST), set up in June 1952 and based in Izmir. It was commanded by an American, with one Greek and one Turkish deputy, and was responsible for operational control of Greek and Turkish land forces if a crisis broke out. In October 1953 the Sixth Allied Tactical Air Force was established, also near Izmir, to ensure the air defence of Greece and Turkey. In 1953 Athens and Washington signed a bilateral agreement for American bases on Greek territory.

Greece also hosted one of the Alliance’s key meetings of the period. On 3 to 6 May 1962 NATO foreign and defence ministers gathered in Athens, at the Parliament building and the Zappeion, to discuss political control of nuclear weapons. The talks produced what NATO calls the “Athens Guidelines”, a first attempt to temper the policy of massive retaliation by submitting the use of nuclear weapons to consultation. In 1964, NATO adds, Bulgaria officially dropped all territorial claims over Greece.

The same NATO page is candid about the strain. It records that deep-rooted differences between Greece and Turkey over the Aegean and Cyprus appeared in the mid-1950s and peaked in 1964 and 1974, and that Athens did not consider Washington’s reactions to those crises sufficiently neutral.

August 1974: why Greece left the integrated command

The CIA intelligence memorandum of March 1980, reproduced in the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States series, states that Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis’s government “only reluctantly left NATO in August 1974”, in response to political pressures arising from the Alliance’s perceived unwillingness to prevent Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus. Greece remained a member of the Alliance; what it withdrew was its armed forces from the integrated military structure.

The Cyprus background matters for the rest of the story. The European Court of Human Rights, in its Grand Chamber judgment of 10 May 2001, found numerous violations of the Convention by Turkey arising from the military operations it conducted in northern Cyprus in July and August 1974, the continuing division of the island and the activities of the self-declared regime in the occupied north. In the 2014 just-satisfaction judgment, the Court ordered Turkey to pay Cyprus EUR 30,000,000 for the relatives of missing persons and EUR 60,000,000 for the enclaved Greek Cypriot residents of the Karpas peninsula, according to the Court’s press release on the Grand Chamber judgment of 12 May 2014. It noted that the Cypriot claim covered 1,456 missing persons.

Four years of talks: Haig-Davos, Rogers and the Turkish veto

Greece launched the effort to relink itself with the integrated command in January 1977, according to the Greek defence minister, Evangelos Averoff-Tossizza, in a letter to U.S. Defense Secretary Harold Brown dated 26 September 1980. In spring 1978 General Alexander Haig, then SACEUR, and General Ioannis Davos, then chief of the Hellenic Defence Staff, reached an understanding. Averoff wrote that it “was aborted owing to the opposition of one member of the Alliance”. The CIA memorandum is explicit that the formula was approved at military level by all allies save Turkey.

As the memorandum describes it, the Haig-Davos formula would have created Greek air and ground commands comparable to Turkey’s in Izmir, reactivated a Greek-led NATO naval command and allowed Greek air responsibility over the Aegean on an interim basis. The analysts wrote that Turkish governments did not object to Greek reintegration as such but insisted on a new division of responsibilities in the Aegean first.

In autumn 1979 General Rogers, the new SACEUR, put forward a plan under which naval units in the Aegean would be controlled by a task-force commander rather than a national one, and a NATO air defence headquarters at Larissa, commanded by an officer who was neither Greek nor Turkish, would control the international airspace over the Aegean. Athens rejected it as unworkable, the memorandum says, partly because it left open that Turkish aircraft could be assigned to defend Greek airspace. A slightly revised version was also rejected publicly by the Greeks.

Averoff’s letter shows how Athens framed the dispute. Greece, he wrote, was ready to return with the rights and responsibilities of the NATO documents and procedures in force in 1974, while Turkey was setting a “legal vacuum” as a prior condition for lifting its veto. NATO could adapt, he argued, but not “by way of a re-entry fee to be exacted in advance”. He added that many in Greece felt national dignity hurt after being left to “cool our heels for four years”.

October 1980: the return

A small thaw came on 22 February 1980, when Turkey rescinded NOTAM 714, its demand that civil aircraft entering the eastern Aegean report to Turkish air control, and Greece lifted NOTAM 1157, which had declared the Aegean air corridors danger areas, according to the CIA memorandum. The final breakthrough came in October. In a U.S. Embassy telegram from Athens of 18 October 1980, Ambassador Robert McCloskey reported that Foreign Minister Konstantinos Mitsotakis had told him on 17 October that Greece and Turkey had agreed a formula: Hellenic Chief of Staff General Gratsios had conveyed Greece’s answer to General Rogers in Naples, and Rogers then went to Ankara, where he obtained final Turkish acceptance.

A footnote in the same document records that the NATO Defense Planning Committee agreed on 20 October to reintegrate Greek military forces into the NATO command structure. The text of the final arrangement is not reproduced in the sources read for this article, so its detailed command provisions are not described here.

Why it still matters

The 1974 to 1980 episode shows a pattern that Greek diplomacy still invokes: Greece accepts Alliance arrangements that follow established law and procedure, while, in Averoff’s reading, Turkey used its veto to extract a new balance in the Aegean as the price of return. It also explains why NATO membership has never settled the underlying disputes. Allied consultation is available when a member feels threatened, as we set out in NATO Article 4 explained: how the consultation clause works, but it does not decide questions of sovereignty. For the present balance of forces, see Greece vs Turkey military spending: what NATO and SIPRI data show.

Sources

NATO’s own history page on Greece; CIA intelligence memorandum of March 1980; letter to U.S. Defense Secretary Harold Brown; U.S. Embassy telegram from Athens of 18 October 1980; the Court’s press release on the Grand Chamber judgment of 12 May 2014.