Overflying the Invasion Area

On the night of July 19 - July 20 I was tasked to fly out a group of German tourists who wished to leave the island following the violent and bloody coup d'etat which had toppled the island's President, Archbishop Makarios, a few days previously.

On our return from Düsseldorf, in the very early hours of 20th July, we were using the aircraft's radar to scan the surface of the Mediterranean, searching for any sign of ships. As we approached the west coast we could see the unmistakeable "blips" on our radar screen of two groups of ships.
One lying off the coast of Paphos and the other close to Kyrenia. From the size of the "blips" it was obvious that these were something larger than fishing boats and so we reported these facts to Nicosia air traffic control.
The information seemed to produce little interest and we landed at Nicosia airport at about three o'clock in the morning of 20th July.

There was a strong contingent of Greek Cypriot National Guard troops at the airport but although we told a number of them what we had seen on the radar they too showed only slight interest. One assured us that it was part of a "NATO exercise" and none seemed keen to pass our observations on to higher authority.

We set off to drive back to Kyrenia through the Turkish-Cypriot enclave which straddled the Nicosia-Kyrenia road north of the capital. As usual, we were stopped by a Turkish-Cypriot policeman as we entered the "forbidden zone". We told him what we had seen and asked whether he knew if Turkish mainland forces were planning to land. He was obviously surprised by our account but waved us on our way.

A few miles north of Nicosia lay the large Turkish Army camp at Geunyeli. As we passed it nothing was moving. As we were about to leave the Turkish-Cypriot zone we were stopped by a high-ranking police officer who had been alerted by the first policeman to whom we had spoken. This senior officer expressed much interest in our sighting and said that although he knew of no plan to invade he would certainly pass on what we had seen to higher authority.

Close to my house near Snake Island (west of Kyrenia) was a National Guard tank training school. The sentry was asleep by the gate. We woke him and suggested that he should rouse the unit as it was quite possible that an invasion was imminent.
He was unimpressed with the idea and told us that we should go and get some sleep as we had had a long night!