F OCUS - American Foreign Service Association

Pinochet to form a political party and
stand for election as president. And
to this day, I still think he would have
won, because his economic reforms
were so powerful and so successful.
After all, when he did finally allow a
plebiscite in 1988, after 15 years of
dictatorship, he got 44 percent of the
vote. Furthermore, the economic reforms
he instituted have never been
challenged, either by the Christian
Democrats or the Socialists, to this
day. And Chile is by far the most advanced
country in Latin America.
FSJ: Cyprus has also figured
prominently in your Foreign Service
career. From 1967 to 1970 you served
as political counselor in Nicosia, and
you were director of Cypriot affairs
from 1971 to 1974. Was this a case of
a country you were already fascinated
with, or did you come to feel that way
once you served there?
TDB: I volunteered for hard-language
training in the mid-1960s, and
took Greek. After that, I knew I was
either going to Cyprus or Greece, so I
read a lot about both. And what’s not
to love about Cyprus? Beautiful place,
great people, wonderful food and
drink, Cypriot dancing, and a complicated
and challenging problem.
18 FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL/JULY-AUGUST 2008
Amb. Boyatt, center in coat and tie, with members of Embassy
Ouagadougou’s softball team, “Sahel’s Angels.”
FSJ: You received AFSA’s Christian
A. Herter Award for constructive
dissent by a mid-level FSO in 1975.
That was about U.S. policy toward
Cyprus, correct?
TDB: Yes, it came out of recommendations
I made in 1974, when I
was head of the Cyprus office. I
believed the evidence indicated that
the Greek junta was backing a coup
by the Cypriots favoring a union with
Greece against President Makarios,
with the intention of annexing the
island to Greece. I warned my superiors
— eventually including Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger — that
Amb. Boyatt with Secretary of State George Shultz, back left, accompanying
President Ronald Reagan in Bogota.
if such a coup went forward, the Turks
would seize that pretext to invade.
The Greeks would not be able to stop
them and the two forces would divide
the island, leaving a bone in our
throat for as far ahead as one could
see. Therefore, we had to use our
influence to stop the Greeks.
Unfortunately, Kissinger didn’t see
it that way. The U.S. government did
not do what was necessary to stop the
junta. If we had prevented the coup,
we wouldn’t have had the refugees,
the rapes, the torture, the killing, the
disaster that flowed after the Turks
did invade. And our ambassador in
Nicosia, Roger Davies, probably
would have died a natural death
instead of being assassinated.
FSJ: You were also one of the first
recipients of AFSA’s William R.
Rivkin Award “for intellectual courage,
creativity, disciplined dissent
and taking bureaucratic and physical
risks for peace,” receiving it in 1970.
What was the basis for that award?
TDB: It was mainly in recognition
of my role in dealing with the 1969
hijacking of a TWA 707 on which I
was a passenger. We had taken off
from Dulles, bound for Tel Aviv.
Somewhere between Rome and
Athens, a group of Palestinian terrorists
seized the plane. After several