According to another eyewitness account printed in the conservative newspaper Estia, a group of officials managed to get between the two men, stopping further hostilities. Elias reportedly “maintained his calmness and with a straight face said to Karamanlis that his sources were trustworthy.”30 A CIA report on the confrontation said: “Ilias [sic] was given unshirted hell by Karamanlis at the ambassador’s party for a recent article in which [Elias] quoted NATO Commander Norstad expressing outrage at being uninformed about important matters in Greece: ‘How can they expect me to know what’s going on behind the Iron Curtain when such things occur right under my nose.’ At the party Ambassador Riddleberger confirmed…the fact that the Norstad quote was accurate.”31 Estia said that almost everybody was astonished at Karamanlis’s behavior. The US Embassy was completely silent on this incident in all its contemporaneous transmissions to Washington.
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DESPITE GREEK QUEASINESS about the stationing of nuclear missiles, American influence was still at its height. Greeks tended to assume that Americans were the most important people to know and that nothing happened without them. Elias cultivated his image of being close to Americans as a strategy for newsgathering. He permitted wild rumors to spread, even to the point of being characterized as America’s “boy” whose articles and statements should be viewed as an accurate portrayal of American plans and policies.32
In exasperation, the CIA prepared a memorandum called “Perpetuation of the Dimitrakopoulos [sic] Myth by the American Element.” The heavily redacted document noted that, Elias “is still very much in evidence at their official functions, witness the ambassador’s Fourth of July party. Wherever prominent Americans congregate, there is Ilias [sic]…Thus the myth of Dimitrakopoulos and his fantastic American connections.”33
The CIA criticism, presumably prepared by its station chief John Richardson, was sent to the ambassador, who shared it with his staff. In response, press officer Robert Lawrence sent a memorandum to the ambassador with an opposite viewpoint. Enclosing a series of clippings on a Demetracopoulos front page article concerning US military aid to Greece, Lawrence compared the positive coverage “on this one story [as probably amounting] to a normal six months of output of USIS on this sheltered subject,” and pointed “out the many services he has rendered us in the past”:
These have ranged all the way from being the trusted [US and Makarios] go-between…to spearheading the local drive for Greek donations when our library was destroyed. He has suggested ideas which have resulted in USIS projects, like the “open skies” photography of the Acropolis which helped our local publicity on Eisenhower’s disarmament program. He has been a confidant of embassy officials and his letters of credence from Americans in high office are very impressive.
Although at times his persistence has been somewhat time consuming, I have admired his way of digging hard for news which is in the best traditions of American newspaper reporting. I have never known him to violate a confidence “off the record,” either directly or through leaking to colleagues…I have known only one instance when they were “uncomfortable.”…This is the first time I have written a tribute about one of our press contacts, but Mr. Demetracopoulos has been outstanding and I thought it would be helpful to pass this information along.34
THE CIA’S OFFICE in Athens responded by asking the Agency’s director, Allen Dulles, to prepare a full “trace” of Elias Demetracopoulos, starting from “his birth 1 Dec 1918”—a decade before he was actually born.35
10.“I Don’t Sit at My Desk”
IF THE FALLOUT FROM THE May election results loomed as Greece’s biggest domestic political issue of 1958, continued turmoil concerning Cyprus was the most important international concern. To break the Greek-UK diplomatic impasse, Britain proposed to internationalize the island, providing a tripartite arrangement that gave Turkey, which had earlier ceded all its claims, an equal voice in decisions. In September, Makarios, furious with this drastic British move, concluded that independence for Cyprus was preferable to union with Greece. With the help of the United Nations, he believed, both Greece and Turkey could be sidelined. This incensed Greek generals who were unalterably committed to enosis. General Grivas, furious with what he characterized as incompetent governments in Athens and Nicosia, stepped up violence on the island.
On the evening of October 21, 1958, Elias attended an Athens reception given by the Italian counselor for a delegation of visiting Yugoslav generals. During the event, Veselin Martinovic, the Yugoslav counselor, informed Elias that some Greek generals had told him that the only solution for the Cyprus problem was a military dictatorship in Greece that would also maintain its membership in NATO. Elias learned that the possible leaders of the plan included the Greek ambassador to Yugoslavia (retired General Thrasyvoulos Tsakalotos), the minister of public works (retired General Solon Gkikas), and the present head of the Athens military command (Major General Ioannis Pipilis). Gkikas and Pipilis, longtime plotters, were active in IDEA (The Sacred Band of Greek Officers).
Coup speculation in Greece was almost as common as the sound of clicking komboloi (worry beads). Elias didn’t follow every alleged plot, but IDEA and its highly conspiratorial, deeply conservative, nationalist, royalist, and virulently anti-Communist right-wing army officers, who deemed themselves to be the true guardians of the Greek state, were different. IDEA was an expanded version of a secret society formed in 1944 by Greek officers serving in the Middle East. Apparently co-opted by the Papagos government and inactive under Karamanlis, it surfaced in the wake of the May 1958 elections during which EDA, the Communist-front party, made its shockingly strong showing.
Demetracopoulos was sufficiently concerned to have a conversation the next day with the US Army military attaché, Colonel Joseph McChristian. Elias thought it important that the Americans, who were indirectly engaged in the Cyprus negotiations, be aware of the “keen pessimism and dissatisfaction” within the Greek government over Cyprus that could encourage sympathy for a military dictatorship.1 However critical he was of Karamanlis, Elias was infinitely more troubled by the specter of a military dictatorship. A passionate democrat since his days studying Periclean Greece, Demetracopoulos believed that anti-democratic activities should be monitored and scotched before they festered or went underground. Colonel McChristian had a long career in military intelligence, and he passed along Elias’s information confidentially to the political section of the US Embassy. They shared it with the Athens CIA station, which dismissed it as valueless.2
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FROM PARIS TO Zurich and London, negotiations to resolve the situation in Cyprus proceeded during 1958 and 1959, with outside pressure from Britain and the United States. In February 1959, settlement talks finally led to an agreement to form an independent republic. The complex constitution called for a Greek Cypriot president and a Turkish Cypriot vice president, and allowed Turkish Cypriots disproportionately powerful representation given their minority status. A Treaty of Guarantee prohibited either enosis or taksim (partition) and, if common action proved ineffective, permitted each of the three Guaranteeing Powers (Greece, Turkey, and the UK) to take unilateral action to reestablish the state of affairs. Elias thought the terms were inherently unworkable and would inevitably lead to more conflict.
Makarios returned to Cyprus on March 1 to a hero’s welcome and prepared for elections. Elias remained troubled. General Grivas had come out of the shadows to be toasted in Athens. Elias disagreed with those who characterized IDEA as a quiescent relic and was especially concerned that IDEA had expanded its outreach to junior officers with their own clandestine cadre, the National Union of Young Greek Officers (EENA).
He increased his tracking of IDEA adherents, such as the Greek ambassador to Yugoslavia, obtaining a Greek Third Army Corps secret memorandum that discussed an IDEA plot to overthrow the Karamanlis government and replace it with one that was “more efficient and less corrupt” and would reduce the King to “a puppet.”
Elias viewed the plot as more than just talk. Rather than writing about it, he quietly showed his copy of the memo to the American political-affairs counselor. Embassy personnel were often the last to know about intelligence matters, but Elias felt they were more committed to democratic norms than the local CIA staff—especially the Greek-Americans, who were very protective of KYP leaders and their confederates. The embassy filed away Demetracopoulos’s tip without action. The CIA and KYP, hearing about Elias’s report, disregarded it. Instead, they used Elias’s tip as evidence that he was secretly working for the Yugoslavs.3
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DEMETRACOPOULOS WAS ALSO a debonair man about town. Nearly thirty, impeccably dressed in conservative British attire, wearing a splash of cologne, his now-thinning well-trimmed black hair parted and combed back, he developed a personal brand of sophisticated politesse, charming others by paying attention to their opinions. He was simultaneously a proud egotist and an inveterate name-dropper, giving the impression that he had contacts everywhere in the world—though he carefully cultivated an air of mystery by withholding specifics. Wherever people went—from cocktail parties to diplomatic receptions to national days and commemorative events, to airport arrivals and departures involving notables, there was Elias Demetracopoulos, often the center of attention.
To admirers he was a highly intelligent, well-informed man of influence, generous in doing favors, and a loyal friend. To critics he was an unctuous and opportunistic courtier who would play his role at whatever court presented itself. To still others, especially some women, his suave mannerisms were a sign of cultured refinement. Elias had a reputation for being a ladies’ man whose little black book contained telephone numbers of starlets, cabaret singers, airline stewardesses, and daughters of shipping magnates.
In February 1958, not long after Ambassador James Riddleberger assumed his post, Elias invited to dinner his beautiful daughter Antonia, in Athens on an after-college holiday. Before she went out, Toni recalled, her father warned her that Demetracopoulos was a clever journalist who would pump her for information. The two went to a taverna and she sat there, extra-careful not to blab about anything important.
“I needn’t have worried,” she remembered. “Elias spent the whole evening telling me about his fascinating life, starting from being a teenage resistance fighter.”4 At one point during the meal, he offered to open his shirt to show his scars from the whippings and raised his pant leg to show the bullet hole. Toni, a sophisticated observer who married Monteagle Stearns (later a highly regarded ambassador to Greece), thought Elias’s approach was to worm his way into the listener’s confidence with spellbinding personal stories, then ferret out whatever intelligence he could use, though perhaps he did that more with women than men. Asked about the episode decades later, Elias acknowledged with a smile that Toni’s recollection was correct. He remembered her as radiant and recalled being more interested in impressing than interrogating her.
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ELIAS WAS SO ardent in his anti-Communism that he reportedly once told an American official that, given a choice of living under Communism or fascism, he’d choose fascism, because fascists “only took people’s freedom but left their souls alone, whereas Communism took freedom and souls too.”5 This attitude never translated into an actual sympathy for fascism. He carried with him the physical and emotional scars of his years in the resistance and fervidly denounced the behavior of Greeks who used their anti-Communism as an excuse for having collaborated with the Nazis.
Elias understood the American rationale for supporting the reintegration of wartime collaborationists into the police agencies to help battle the Communist insurgency and the international politics behind Karamanlis’s 1959 decision to put an end to Greek trials of Germans involved in war crimes in Greece by transferring to the West German government any responsibility for such prosecutions.6 But it offended his sense of justice. He told Greeks and Americans, including CIA officials, that the Nazi utilization program shaped by CIA director Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner, Chief of CIA Clandestine Operations, that involved falsifying war records to cover up loathsome pasts could have serious unintended consequences.7 One person whose collaboration with the Germans during World War II disturbed Demetracopoulos was George Papadopoulos, a right-wing field officer who had helped form the Nazi-armed Greek Security Battalions that fought against the Communist-led resistance. Papadopoulos, a longtime IDEA leader, worked assiduously to whitewash members’ collaborationist activities.
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OVER THE NEARLY ten years that Elias Demetracopoulos had been a journalist, embassy officials, CIA agents, Greek ministers, politicians, and other journalists frequently discussed what made him run. He seemed to have no identifiable partisan fervor and was difficult to pigeonhole. Some press colleagues dismissed him for having no goal larger than self-promotion but were astonished that he was so successful in getting stories that others didn’t. Intelligence services repeatedly alleged that he must be in the pay of some foreign power, though they could never confirm which one.
Demetracopoulos seemed to have well-placed sources everywhere. They shared sensitive information with him because they knew their identities would be protected. He tried to confirm his scoops with second- and third-source corroboration but was not reticent about using unnamed single sources if the story was juicy and he thought his informant trustworthy. Elias believed in his own instinct to quickly size up a person’s truthfulness, a skill honed during his teenage years in the resistance.
Elias made clear that in addition to knowing “a great many people,” he was always out making contacts, asking questions, “always working hard…I don’t sit at my desk.”8 He said he didn’t measure himself against other reporters but delighted in scooping them. His own standards prized unrelenting persistence. His happiness came from making the extra phone calls that yielded disparate nuggets of information that he could connect, from ferreting out classified documents to rushing to the airport in the wee hours of the morning to meet people departing for flights who would give him the material for exclusive stories.
Well-informed, he could usually calculate what an official might do in a given situation. He would go to that person directly or a reliable source nearby and get confirmation or denial of his hunches. Either response could make a “scoop.”9
On occasion, Demetracopoulos would grudgingly concede his mistakes, but overall, he was proud of the quality of the information he gathered and reported. He once took exception when the wife of a diplomat complimented him on his writing style. “What about the content of the story, that’s much more important than style,” he asserted.10 Elias was a terrible typist, but he always turned in clean copy to both his English-language and Greek-language publications. This led to a churlish rumor that in lieu of writing his own material he was submitting articles provided by mysterious sources with nefarious agendas.
One widely circulated tale was that he had once been forced by Kathimerini to sit down and type a story in front of suspicious editors and that what he produced wasn’t as polished as the story he’d turned in previously. This so-called test never happened, snorted Elias. “It was a complete fabrication.” The truth was, he never wanted to take the time to learn how to type, and therefore paid a one-woman secretarial service to type his longhand drafts. Eleni Vlachou herself repeatedly asserted that the anecdote was false, and no witness ever publicly confirmed it. This didn’t stop US agencies from repeating the rumor as fact for more than two decades in their burgeoning classified summary profiles on Elias.
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IN 1959, AFTER not having been in the United States for close to five years, Elias decided it was time for another visit. By then, building a case against Demetracopoulos strong enough to deny him entry had become a cottage industry for more than a few federal agencies. The US Embassy began the year with a “Secret” request to reinvestigate why Elias had never applied for a visa in 1957 after having been put on an approved Exchange Visitor program list: it seems that even when he didn’t do something, Demetracopoulos attracted attention.11 In 1959, he had no trouble securing a visa, but noticed that there were unusual delays in scheduling many of his interviews. In the end, however, he managed to meet with most of his targets.
During his stay in Washington, he became a regular at the Old New Orleans, a popular restaurant and jazz club run by Nick Gaston, a gregarious Greek-American. There he met a tall, attractive blonde with a beehive hairstyle and a hearty laugh who seemed to know everybody. Self-confident, smartly dressed, and big-boned, she reminded him of high-society screen actress Constance Bennett. Her name was Louise Gore, and she was the manager of the Fairfax on Embassy Row, the residence hotel that her family owned.
Louise’s father was Colonel H. Grady Gore, from the Republican side of that illustrious Tennessee family. Born in Leesburg, Virginia, in 1925, she grew up at the family’s thirty-three-room Marwood chateau in Maryland, started college at Bennington, and finished at George Washington University, majoring in international relations. She had a love of fashion and was about to begin work at Vogue in New York in 1950 when her father asked her to drive him to a candidate event in Baltimore. There she caught the political bug. Before long she became the national coordinator of Ladies Clubs for Ike, hosting fundraisers for state and national Republican candidates and giving speeches. In 1959, she planned to be active supporting Richard Nixon’s 1960 presidential campaign.
Louise and Elias had instant chemistry, and over his weeks in Washington they formed a romantic relationship. She introduced him to her family and brought him to Marwood. They discussed her visiting Athens soon. She insisted that on his return he stay at the Fairfax. After he left, they exchanged transatlantic phone calls and she wrote him love letters, telling him how much she and her family missed him. Louise said she yearned to hear him call her “sweet pie.”12 All this passion cooled abruptly when someone told her that Elias not only played around but was still married. Louise had once had a loving relationship with a married man that ended badly. Long distance, Elias explained the “still married” part was not true, and she offered to bribe him with chocolate milkshakes to hear the full story.13 She accepted his explanation and welcomed him back warmly, but their relationship had lost its lust.
Asked decades later why he and Louise never got married, Elias explained simply that “she was Maryland aristocracy.” Those closer to Louise speculate that the two might have been best buddies and confidants but never a successfully married couple. Where Elias’s lifestyle was restrained and abstemious, Louise, who never married, cultivated a robust informality and enjoyed a good drink and a well-played poker hand. And there were other realities. For Louise, being married to Elias Demetracopoulos would have been a drag on her political career. Elias, for his part, had become unwilling to commit to one woman after his short-lived marriage with Celia. From their first encounter in 1959 until her death in 2005, Elias and Louise remained cherished, plain-speaking friends, but led largely separate lives.
In her letters and telephone calls to Elias, Louise Gore shared stories about her travelling the United States in late 1959 and 1960 campaigning for the election of Richard Nixon and the GOP ticket. She sent her Greek friend a copy of Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative that expressed her political philosophy. For his part, Elias did not have a comprehensive political ideology. He was wary of partisan true believers. He had experienced first-hand both the abuse of state power and the possibilities of responsible leadership in trying times. He hated communism and fascism and preferred republicanism to monarchical rule. He believed in the promise of a well-constructed constitutional framework to guide a flourishing representative democracy. But he observed with cynicism the gaps between the normative claims of Western political thought and its actual practice, especially in Greece. Questions of political theory mattered less to him than reporting empirical realities. To do his job well required cultivating sources on all sides, and forgoing allegiances to any single leader, faction, or philosophy. A favorite aphorism was that he never put all his eggs in one basket.
