From his Makedonia connections Elias learned details of the case of journalist Gregoris Staktopoulos, who, after a forced confession and show trial, had been sentenced to death for his role in the 1948 assassination of CBS reporter George Polk.22 When Gregoris Staktopoulos was finally released from jail in 1960, after twelve years, and was looking for a job, Elias urged that Makedonia hire him. Staktopoulos’s story was a painful reminder of how easily an innocent reporter could have his life destroyed in a society in which the civil rights of journalists were not protected. It was eye-opening to learn how little truth, logic, and fairness mattered to both the Greek and American governments in their quest for so-called justice. But, for Elias, the most sobering lesson was discovering how celebrated leaders of his chosen profession, exemplars of the so-called free press, allowed themselves to be used in a cover-up of the murder of one colleague and the scapegoating and framing of another.23
9.Elias and Ethnarch Makarios
IN THE MID-1950S, ELIAS MAY have remained a bête noire to several CIA and State Department officials, but he was held in high regard by both American and Greek military officers. The head of the Plans and Intelligence Division of the Greek National Defense General Staff, Theodosis Papathanassiadis, wrote that Elias had the “complete respect and confidence” of the defense minister and defense staff and, as a military correspondent, had been granted “secret” security clearance.1 That access helped him interview American and European military and political leaders on changing foreign policies in a nuclear age.
At this time, Elias learned about the work of a Harvard professor and private advisor to Nelson Rockefeller named Henry Kissinger, who reportedly opposed Eisenhower’s policy of massive retaliation as the deterrent to Soviet aggression in favor of a combination of conventional arms and tactical nuclear weapons. Anticipating a 1956 Kissinger visit to Athens, CIA station chief John Richardson suggested to Elias that the journalist take the future diplomat to lunch to exchange views.2 Separately, General Konstantinos Dovas, made the same request, adding presciently, “He’s not important now, but he will be. Get to know him.”
Arrangements were made for Elias to take Kissinger to the Grande Bretagne hotel, but things didn’t turn out as planned. Unexpectedly, Kissinger brought with him his first wife, Ann, and their two young children, Elizabeth and David. “It was not a setting conducive to a serious discussion,” recalled Elias.
Although Demetracopoulos’s Kathimerini beat had increasingly become more military, he was still one of its top diplomatic correspondents. His articles were carefully monitored by both the State Department and the CIA and occasionally even earned plaudits. In June 1956, the American chargé d’affaires in Athens wrote to the American ambassador in London that Demetracopoulos “is extremely well versed on the internal and external aspects of Greek life and has ready access to many of the leading personalities here. Although sharing, I am sure, the general Greek sentiments about the Cyprus question, he has always shown with me a very well-balanced attitude toward that difficult question.”3 That November, Demetracopoulos broke the story of the Greek government’s decision to extend its territorial waters to twelve miles if the reported Turkish intention to extend its territorial limit to twelve miles were carried out. Warning that such a decision would turn the Aegean into a “closed sea” with serious international consequences, he added the observation that only a decisive American intervention in Ankara could avert this problem. In its review, the American Embassy widely circulated his article, describing Elias as Kathimerini’s “diplomatic correspondent,” without any qualifications or snide remarks.4
—
IF THE BRITISH thought putting Makarios under house arrest in the Seychelles would provide an opening for a more moderate Cypriot alternative, they were wrong. Even Eisenhower asked that the archbishop be freed. Moreover, Britain’s October 1956 invasion of Egypt during the Suez Canal nationalization crisis encouraged an anti-British backlash at the United Nations. After about a year, London released Makarios in exchange for “an ambiguous statement deploring violence” and the prelate’s agreement not to return to Cyprus.5
Although many in Greece were prepared to give Makarios a hero’s welcome, political leaders there debated privately how they should respond. After delicate discussions with Great Britain and the United States, both the King and Prime Minister Karamanlis—fearful of hurting relations with Turkey—decided not to send a welcoming party for his release or to greet him in public ceremonies in Athens. Instead, politically influential shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis redirected one of his freighters to pick up the Ethnarch and bring him to Nairobi. Hearing this news, Kathimerini sent Demetracopoulos to meet and interview the Cypriot leader. This plum assignment pleased Elias enormously and made some of his colleagues quite jealous.6 Elias left on an arduous journey, taking planes from Athens to Paris to Casablanca to Nairobi to Madagascar and then catching a boat to meet the Olympic Thunder carrying the archbishop and his entourage from the Seychelles.7
Kathimerini announced Elias’s historic role on the front page of the paper’s April 5, 1957 special edition that later carried the first exclusive interview, wired from Madagascar, along with a photo of the two men sitting side by side aboard the ship. For days, Chourmouzios ran front-page stories with interviews and descriptions of the public outpouring in Kenya, a country struggling for its own independence from Britain and quite responsive to Makarios’s statements about freedom and justice.8
Elias had never met Makarios before and found him to be a difficult interview. The prelate sometimes sounded more like an evasive Delphic oracle than a newsmaker, with such replies as “You should never mix people with politics.” The archbishop acknowledged the role of the United Nations in his release and said that the Cypriots desired enosis. He talked about his interest in going to London to meet with the British Labour Party and opinion-makers, and that he didn’t want to negotiate until he was permitted to return to Cyprus.9
Makarios asked Elias for his insights about how American attitudes might influence British behavior. It was clear to Elias that Makarios had been out of touch with international news and opinion during his incarceration. The Ethnarch tended to downplay, if not dismiss, the “Turkish factor.” And when bishops accompanying the archbishop made some incendiary remarks, Elias ignored them, restraining his newsman’s impulse to wire that story for publication.10 As a CIA report noted, Elias believed that Makarios could bring down the Greek government “almost overnight,” so it was vital that he be careful in his reporting.11
Amidst the international press scrum in Nairobi, Makarios invited Elias to accompany him on a visit to the zoo. They went together, obliging British photographers who asked them to pose for a picture. A day later, Elias received a call from an outraged Greek ambassador in London berating him for allowing the two men to be placed in a photo under a sign warning: “Danger, Wild Animals.” Only years later did the Greek newsman think the image funny.
Demetracopoulos continued to file stories, but for the rest of the trip he largely stood back from Makarios and the crowds. He sent Celia a warm, newsy postcard, unaware that American intelligence operators had been monitoring his trip and adding more fabrications to his dossier—including rumors that Elias had been flashing a large roll of US currency around the streets of Nairobi, allegedly a payment from the Americans, and showing off “his American passport” to reporters with the offer of special discounts for those who wanted their own.12 These baseless lies, he later scoffed, were designed to hamper his ability to gather news.
—
Elias returned to the Greek capital on April 16, 1957, taking a different plane than the archbishop’s. He arrived in time to watch Makarios’s triumphant motorcade from the airport into the city.13 But he was distracted by some devastating news. His mother was in the hospital and had been there since just after he’d left. She had advanced cancer and only a short time to live. There was no person in the world he loved more. He anxiously discussed finding new doctors and moving her to another hospital where care might be better. It was too late for surgery. He reached out to Celia, asking her to write to his mother as soon as possible, without mentioning the gravity of the diagnosis.14 On May 14, 1957, he telegrammed his ex-wife: “Mother passed away today. Many thanks for letter. God bless you.” His mother was dead at 59, less than a month after his return. She had said nothing about her health before he left for Nairobi, and nor had his father. Elias berated himself for not knowing of her condition sooner, for going on the Makarios trip instead of spending every possible remaining day with her.
In the following weeks, Makarios asked Elias for private briefings during which he asked the reporter to tell the American ambassador, George Allen, with whom Elias had a good relationship, that the archbishop was worried about threats on his life and wanted Americans at the highest levels to know that they should not try to scare Greeks into making concessions on Cyprus. Allen was noncommittal and urged that Makarios go to London to negotiate.15
In the Greek Orthodox religion, the most important memorial service is ta saranta, marking the ascent of the soul into heaven and held on the Saturday or Sunday closest to the fortieth day after the death. Arrangements were made with the priest at the venerable Proto Nekrotafeio, the First Cemetery in Athens, for a mid-June memorial. When the day arrived, the Bokolas and Demetracopoulos families and their friends walked along a park-like pathway of monuments shaded by pine, cypress, and olive trees. They lit candles as they entered the chapel, moving toward the large photograph of Panagiota on an easel at the front. To the surprise of all, especially Elias, the unannounced officiant was Archbishop Makarios. That the archbishop had cleared his calendar to perform this role touched Elias greatly, and would come to color his reportorial objectivity—though not, he believed, the fairness of his coverage of Makarios.
—
ELIAS’S SCOOPS AROUSED the envy of many colleagues in competing newspapers, who passed around scurrilous rumors, even to the point of telling outright lies to CIA investigators. Demetracopoulos, in turn, treated most of them with undiluted disdain. In September 1957, after months of individual complaints from a variety of publications, representatives of Acropolis, Naftemboriki, To Vima, and Ta Nea together protested to the embassy’s public-affairs and press officers what they described as a pattern of USIS favoring Kathimerini on breaking news. According to their list of grievances, (1) the embassy and USIS were unethically discriminating; (2) their professional status was being impaired because of Kathimerini’s many scoops; (3) they had strictly followed the rules of channeling their requests through the press office, but Demetracopoulos did not; (4) they published many pro-American articles, while Kathimerini had been hard-hitting; and (5) Elias received invitations to embassy functions, and they didn’t.
Press officer Robert Lawrence pointed out that none of Elias’s stories had come from official American sources and told the newspapers that the embassy tried to be impartial to all, but that there were “times when an especially enterprising reporter like Demetrakopoulos [sic] will, by digging deeper, come up with exclusive stories.”16 In the case of a coveted exclusive interview with a Sixth Fleet admiral, the press officer said, the interview had been arranged without embassy knowledge, causing Lawrence some embarrassment when, while taking the assembled press corps aboard the Salem for the regular press conference, he “met Demetrakopoulos [sic] on the deck returning from [his] exclusive interview.”17
Elias tried to work through his grief by throwing himself into his work. He spent time with his father, and for much of that year was uninterested in socializing. The exception was Persa Metaxas [no relation to the dictator], a statuesque brunette reminiscent of movie star Ava Gardner, whom he met aboard a visiting Sixth Fleet American warship later that year. Elias had come for interviews; Persa was there to visit some of the same officials, family friends she had come to know in London during the civil war. Her great-grandmother was English, and Persa had grown up bilingual.18
Persa’s stepfather had been active in the resistance, hiding New Zealand and Australian soldiers in their home in Athens, then helping them escape. He did the same for Jews targeted by the Nazis. He became an important contact for the British in Cairo and London, evading German attempts to arrest him, and arriving safely in the Middle East at precisely the same time the Nazis were ransacking the family house in Athens. Before leaving, he had arranged false papers for his seventeen-year-old stepdaughter to connect with royalist insurgent groups in the mountains, where she served as an interpreter between allied officials and antartes. On one of her trips a British colonel, fearful for her safety, helped her flee to London, where she reunited with her family. She spent the civil-war years there, became a nurse, and later continued her nursing studies in the United States.
Elias wanted to date her, but was disappointed to learn she was married, had a young son, and was not one to play around. Three years older than he, Persa Metaxas would become his dearest and longest-standing friend.
—
DURING THE SPRING and summer of 1957, Cyprus policy disagreements caused major problems for Prime Minister Karamanlis’s fractious governing majority in Parliament. That fall, the Russian launch of Sputnik made things even worse for his conservative government. The October space shot triggered widespread anxiety among Americans and Europeans that Soviet missile technology now credibly threatened both Europe and the American mainland with nuclear annihilation. Some grassroots groups, in Greece and elsewhere, advocated nuclear disarmament or neutralist political positions. But in major NATO capitals, discussions turned in earnest to strategic responses, including plans for placing missiles in countries well-positioned to counter Russian nuclear capabilities.
The Russians, eager to weaken Greek ties to NATO, amplified rumors that NATO was planning on placing nuclear missiles in Greek Macedonia, Prime Minister Karamanlis’s home region. To head off political damage from this issue and allay public concerns regarding intermediate-range Jupiter and Thor missiles with nuclear warheads on Greek soil, the Karamanlis government denied the reports.
Demetracopoulos, however, had been following the issue for months and had a different story to tell. Contrary to Karamanlis’s denials, Italy, Britain, Turkey, and Greece were indeed all under serious consideration as bases from which to point warheads toward the Soviet Union.19 Among the sources from which Elias had learned this was General Konstantinos Dovas, the chief of the Hellenic National Defense General Staff, upon his return from NATO’s November meetings in Malta, where alliance members showed a preference toward Greece as a nuclear missile facility. Dovas added that he saw no point in resisting the NATO plans, which would be formally made during the alliance’s December summit.20
Elias prepared what he thought was a restrained, yet blockbuster, story for the front page of Kathimerini’s widely read Sunday paper. Then things got ugly. His two-column article was placed on the back-news page of the Saturday edition, and without a byline. As the paper’s chief political reporter, he was insulted. He submitted the same article to Makedonia, which printed it the same day on its front page. Headlined “Training Center for Missiles to be Installed in Southern Crete?” the November 23 story described NATO’s plans for a guided-missile testing site on Greek soil, to be reviewed by the Greek government with the goal of installing “special” nuclear weapons and training Greek, Italian, and Turkish personnel how to fire them.
Karamanlis was furious about this disclosure. Public opposition to nuclear weapons on Greek soil was widespread, and an election was coming up.21 He demanded that Eleni Vlachou fire Demetracopoulos. Vlachou asked Elias for his sources. Elias refused. The two had words. Demetracopoulos agreed to take a month off from the paper and Vlachou asked another political reporter to write an article that, using other sources, effectively criticized the points Elias had made. Demetracopoulos was embarrassed to have been suspended from his beat, but not quite ready to move on. He told others that the paper was wavering between pro-West and anti-West stands and was being pressured politically to become neutralist on the nuclear-missiles issue. He claimed he had been targeted because he was too pro-American, and he reportedly said to an American official that he was preparing a resignation letter that would say, in effect, that “even if Sputniks and Bulgarian letters had frightened Kathimerini into a neutral stance, they hadn’t frightened him.”22
When his month-long suspension ended, he still hadn’t decided what he would do. Elias felt he could easily go to work for any of the three leading liberal newspapers, Ethnos, To Vima, or Eleftheria, but he was reluctant to do so because, at least to start with, he wouldn’t have as much say over their editorial policies as he had until recently as Kathimerini’s chief political reporter. But he leaned toward resignation.
The gossip mill was rife with contradictory reasons for why Elias was not writing. He was out because he was too close to “Communist elements,” or had double-crossed his KYP paymaster.23 The American Embassy passed these canards on to the CIA and other intelligence services without seeking corroboration.
George Anastasopoulos, who shared a similar beat at Kathimerini, recalled that even before the blow-up Elias’s stories had been causing “quite a stir,” creating “political problems” for “cautious” editors. Increasingly, he said, important stories that Elias solidly reported never got published.24
Elias decided he had lost too much face at the paper to stay, and resigned in early 1958. Eleni Vlachou never said publicly that he had been fired, and privately only that his employment had ended because he was “such a lone wolf that he could not get along with other people in the office.”25 According to a confidential State Department memorandum, Vlachou promised the Americans that “if you people are not satisfied with [Elias’s replacement], let me know and I’ll put someone else on the job.”26
Elias’s plan was to build a journalistic career weaving together his established contributor roles with Makedonia and the North American News Association (NANA) with new representation at other publications. He discussed augmenting his role with Makedonia to include that of full-time Athens correspondent, but publisher Ioannis Vellidis said such a decision should wait until liberals controlled the government. He had discussions with several newspapers, but they went nowhere. Demetracopoulos heard back that he was too independent, not a team player, and too controversial. He was also told that Karamanlis’s allies, as well as sources at the CIA and the American Embassy, had discouraged papers from hiring him. Then Elias received an offer to supplement his income and audience by creating a newspaper of his own.
George Skouras published a French-language paper in Athens that was failing. He thought he’d do better with an English-language daily that could take advantage of the growing American community. One major hurdle: Skouras himself didn’t speak English and had difficulty reading it. He approached Elias with an offer that he become a partner and that together they would hire a bilingual staff. Skouras would be first in both ownership and management. Elias agreed and, even though the start-up struggled to attract advertising, within a year papers like the Times of London were running news items crediting the Athens Daily Post as its source.27 In addition to the Athens Daily Post, Elias still had his relationship with Makedonia. That summer, he started negotiating arrangements to become a full-time diplomatic and political correspondent for Ethnos, a non-Communist, center-left newspaper, which he regarded as a “serious” publication, his highest praise. Already working well with Vellidis and his Venizelist Makedonia and irked by Karamanlis and some of his conservative zealots, Elias, who at the time regarded himself as a political centrist, felt no discomfort in moving to respectable papers on the moderate left.
—
AS EXPECTED, THE Greek government’s alleged acceptance of US missiles and its failures regarding Cyprus were the leading issues in the May 1958 election. The revised, “reinforced” proportional representation system, which disfavored smaller parties, assured Karamanlis’s conservative National Radical Union Party (ERE) a comfortable majority of seats with 41.2 percent of the vote. However, voter concerns and the fragmentation of centrist and liberal parties enabled a unified Communist-dominated EDA, which ran a successful anti-NATO, anti-Western campaign, to come in second with nearly a quarter of the vote. The results sent chills through the political establishment in Greece and its benefactors in Washington.28 By the end of the year, the CIA had established a covert operation to discredit EDA and its candidates in future elections.
At the American Embassy’s annual Fourth of July reception in 1958, Demetracopoulos’s independent reporting brought serious consequences. It was a warm evening and the throng spilled out onto the lawn, with cool drinks, tasty food, and geniality the order of the day. Elias, dressed in a light-colored silk-and-linen suit, was chatting with a group of diplomats and guests when the prime minister arrived. The usually austere and aloof Karamanlis started with social pleasantries, but when he saw Demetracopoulos he moved quickly toward his nemesis.
The prime minister, who prided himself on his physical fitness and strength, grabbed Elias by the lapels, ripping his suit, and, with his face inches away, snarled in Greek: “Don’t mess with me! Don’t mess with my foreign policy.” Startled, Elias pushed away his country’s highest-ranking political leader. Journalist Mario Modiano remembered that Karamanlis then raised his fist in escalation.29
