The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2008

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 re- forms he instituted have never been challenged, either by the Christian Democrats or the Socialists, to this day. And Chile is by far the most ad- vanced 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-lan- guage 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 compli- cated and challenging problem. FSJ: You received AFSA’s Christ- ian 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 recom- mendations 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 supe- riors — eventually including Secre- tary of State Henry Kissinger — that 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 cour- age, 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 terror- ists seized the plane. After several 18 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 Amb. Boyatt with Secretary of State George Shultz, back left, accompanying President Ronald Reagan in Bogota. Amb. Boyatt, center in coat and tie, with members of Embassy Ouagadougou’s softball team, “Sahel’s Angels.”