Late night tip-off led to TV news scoop of ‘74 invasion

In a career spanning five decades, journalist Michael Nicholson made his reputation covering wars from Vietnam to Rwanda, but few scoops were as bittersweet as the one he clinched on this day 40 years ago.

His report is ubiquitous. We’ve all seen it. Nicholson, standing on the dusty plains outside Nicosia points to the sky and announces “It’s 4 minutes past 6 and the first of the Turkish troops have landed in Cyprus. About five of these aircraft passed over in the last five minutes, they were guided in by jet fighters and the very first paratroopers are now hitting Cyprus soil.”

The footage, filmed on the morning of July 20, 1974 remains the most famous visual document of the moment the invasion was launched.

In an interview with the Cyprus Mail, Nicholson recalled six defining days which saw a reckless coup, a strongman installed as puppet president and the Turkish invasion.

His story begins on Friday, July 12, 1974, when he arrived in Nicosia to interview Archbishop Makarios about a reported build-up of Greek National Guard on the island.

“I’d met him a couple of times before, as you know he was a very laconic man, he spoke very slowly and very carefully. He gave no impression at all that there was anything about to happen to him,” Nicholson recalled.

“I interviewed him on the Friday, and during that interview I said, ‘Do you think I should stay the weekend? In case anything happens?’ And he said, ‘Nothing’s going to happen, I’m perfectly safe here. I would advise you to go home’.

“There was no nervousness about him. All the nervousness was in the people around him.”

With that presidential assurance, Nicholson returned to London on the Saturday, only to receive a phone call early Monday from a foreign editor at ITN.

“I hope you’re sitting down,” he said, “Because we’ve just heard that President Makarios has been killed.”

The editor was citing early wire reports claiming that Makarios had died during the coup on July 15, but soon after the United Nations confirmed that he was still alive.

Within hours, Nicholson and distinguished cameramen Alan Downes were on a plane to Tel Aviv, but with chaos on the ground in Cyprus, it took three days before they were finally given permission to land in Nicosia.

“Eventually, on the Wednesday, we were allowed to land and by that time Nicos Sampson was in power. I interviewed him and we thought that was the end of the story,” said Nicholson.

At this point – three days after the coup – there was a deceptive air of tranquillity. Sampson had promised elections within a year and religious freedom for Cyprus.

Even with the situation apparently cooling, the Ledra Palace hotel remained jam packed with frustrated reporters looking for any new angle on the story, as their editors dropped Cyprus out of the headlines.

For Nicholson his job was done. He packed his bags again and was set to return to London – but an unexpected phone call to his room at 3am on July 20, 1974 changed his plans.

“I was feeling pretty grotty after too much booze, when the phone rang and Peter Snow, who was our diplomatic correspondent said to me in very hushed tones, obviously not wanting to be heard by people around him, he said, ‘They,’ and he repeated ‘they’, ‘are coming in from the north at dawn.’

“I couldn’t make head or tail of what he was getting at. But then something must have rung in my mind and I thought, wait, who are they? Wow, it must be the Turks; maybe they are coming to invade the island. Where would they be coming from?”

Armed with the new information, Nicholson and Downes slipped away from the hotel – careful to avoid waking rival journalists.

They silently pushed their car out of the hotel forecourt and set off for their scoop. But then fate played a strange hand, as in a small village ten miles outside the capital near the Kyrenia range their car ran out of petrol.

“That happened because I thought I was going home the following day, so I hadn’t bothered to fill it up, and there we were stranded. But, as we started to walk back from that small village, Alan and I suddenly heard a very familiar sound. And Alan and I had worked in Vietnam for a very long time, and so we knew the sound of C130s. And we looked up and sure enough they were coming from Turkey.”

What happened next provided the incredible climax of a week, which was about to get far more complicated.

“Suddenly we saw these ‘pop poppoppoppop’s’ and all the parachutes started coming out. We rushed towards them, got as close as we could, but not close enough. Then one of those astonishing things happened, when I tell it people don’t believe me, but it’s absolutely true, suddenly somebody in the village opened his window in his pyjamas and said, ‘Ah, News at Ten,’ because we had our logo on the side of our film camera.

He said: ‘Do you want to go over there?’”

With the invasion unfolding before their eyes, the man in pyjamas offered Nicholson and Downes a lift to the newly emerging enemy front lines.

“He came down, opened up his garage and there was a Volkswagen inside and we jumped into it and off we went, thinking we are going to be the only people filming the invasion. Well, when we stopped at the very first Turkish army roadblock, they pointed their rifles at us and said, ‘No you can’t go on, you come with us’.”

Desperate to get his story and avoid being detained by Turks, memories of an old Hollywood film gave Nicholson the idea for his next steps.

“I think it was Alan Ladd or Robert Mitchum, I forget now, but the film was about Nazi Germany. And the same thing happened there. They were on their way to a story, they were stopped by the Germans who said, ‘You follow us,’ and off we went following this Turkish lorry with the guys pointing their rifles at us.

“Remembering this film I said to our driver, ‘Let them get slightly ahead, and when we get through the village and the bend stop, we’ll jump out, you carry on, they won’t see there’s nobody in the back seats.’ So that’s what we did. We jumped out, he carried on, and the story was ours. I went into the parachute forest as they came down. And I remember the first guy landing close to me, he must have thought I was mad, I rushed up to him and I said, ‘I’m Michael Nicholson of ITN, and welcome to Cyprus’.”

Over the years the footage shot by Alan Downes and the reporting of Michael Nicholson have become a crucial part of countless documentaries and have been burned onto the national consciousness, remaining a haunting reminder of events 40 years ago today.

A small clip of the famous footage can be viewed here

This is a reprinted Cyprus Mail article from July 20, 2014. Michael Nicholson died on December 11, 2016