Kastellorizo part of 1964 US proposal on Cyprus

Greece was prepared to turn over the eastern Aegean island of Kastellorizo as a Turkish base in 1964 in exchange for a solution to the Cyprus problem, then prime minister Georgios Papandreou said in confidential talks with former US ambassador in Athens Henry R. Labouisse, according to declassified CIA documents.

According to a US proposal for the separation of Greek and Turkish populations on Cyprus drafted in the same year, Turkish Cypriots would be exchanged for Aegean Greeks with possible annexation of the Dodecanese islands by Turkey and Cyprus by Greece.   

In a telegram sent to the State Department in July 1964, Labouisse said that Papandreou had hinted “that some other concession might be possible,” while stressing that he wanted to avoid a Greek-Turkish clash at all costs. “War [is] one hundred times more serious for Greece than for the US,” Papanderou was quoted as saying.