Although lacking an identifiable political ideology, Elias at this time could have been justifiably characterized as a moderate centrist. In American terms, his political philosophy might have made him a Cold War Democrat such as Senator Henry Jackson. He never told Louise that, if participating in the 1960 American election, he probably would have voted for apparent foreign policy hawk Jack Kennedy.
Without asking Louise for help, Elias tried once more to interview Nixon, as he had five years earlier, but again was unsuccessful. In later years, Elias would sometimes look with bitter irony at the 1954 picture of him and Nixon shaking hands.
Also, in 1959, with years having elapsed since the Time-Life fiasco and both Peurifoy and Karamessines long gone, Demetracopoulos decided to check on becoming a stringer or special correspondent for the international edition of the New York Herald Tribune. The “Trib” had a prestigious cachet, similar to Kathimerini under Chourmouzios. And it meant writing for a much larger international audience for serious news. He consulted his friend Barrett McGurn, the Tribune’s Mediterranean Bureau chief, who favored the idea. Others wrote letters on his behalf. One described him as “an energetic, intelligent and ambitious reporter who works hard and has a wide circle of contacts in government and other important fields.”14 The director of the US Operations Mission in Greece said: “Mr. Demetracopoulos is considered one of the best…[whose] hard hitting, intelligent…exclusive ‘scoops’…have gained him a world-wide reputation.”15
Elias also told George Allen, recently departed as US Ambassador to Greece and then director of the United States Information Agency, about his interest. Allen promptly replied that “the Herald Tribune needs an energetic correspondent in Greece,” and wrote to Tribune publisher Ogden Reid, recommending “thoughtful consideration” of Demetracopoulos.16
In September 1959, Elias scheduled a series of job interviews in New York with editors and other newspaper officials, including Reid. On October 7, the Tribune hired Elias as a special correspondent for Greece. This affiliation was a career highlight. And his enemies took notice.
11.Blowback
AMBASSADOR ELLIS ORMSBEE BRIGGS CAME to Greece with an understandable chip on his shoulder. Over more than three decades he had completed six ambassadorships in Latin America. In 1956, he had been appointed Ambassador to Brazil with assurance from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that he could remain there for the duration of the Eisenhower Administration. It was a plum diplomatic assignment, and would be the capstone of his career. On February 1, 1959, however, he was informed that Clare Boothe Luce, the powerful wife of Time-Life publisher Henry Luce and the US ambassador to Italy, coveted his post, and Briggs was reassigned. Uprooting his family again, he went to Greece, where he thought serving as ambassador “ought to have been 80 percent picnic and 20 percent work.” Instead, he found Greece to be “one of the most arduous assignments” of his life, because of “the Greek character and the hordes of supernumerary [American] official personnel.”1
Briggs took up his Athens post on July 15, his top priority to rein in the rapidly growing American presence. Elias, whose beat had been the American community in Greece and who was always eager to uncover a good story, could have helped the new ambassador make his views known. He had played that role, to varying degrees, with the previous three ambassadors. But, other than sharing a December 1 birthdate, the two men had little in common.
Elias was gregarious. Briggs, nearly twenty years his senior, was known as a curmudgeon. The new ambassador resisted all forms of unconventional behavior and did not believe it was his role to be popular in the host country.
At first Briggs treated Elias no differently than other reporters who found Briggs insular and remote. Briggs was even helpful when Demetracopoulos applied for a US visa in 1959 to report on the impact of Khrushchev’s American visit and latest developments on Greek-American relations, writing to the secretary of state that he saw no legal grounds for excludability and that refusing him a visa “would react to our disadvantage.”2
This attitude changed after Elias returned from his early autumn trip and wrote a series of articles that displeased Briggs. The ambassador objected to Elias’s gathering stories from State Department and military officials without prior embassy clearance. Elias also returned with press credentials from the New York Herald Tribune News Service, which put Briggs on notice that Demetracopoulos’s stories would be reaching a far wider audience—notably Briggs’s superiors in Washington. And if Briggs thought Demetracopoulos was beyond his control, the first state visit to Greece of a sitting US president confirmed it. Briggs, who didn’t have much respect for Eisenhower or his staff, opposed the December 1959 trip, and was irked to see Demetracopoulos repeatedly included in presidential ceremonies.
The frustrated ambassador also resented Sixth Fleet admirals for making political speeches involving Greece without embassy clearance. He seemed to think himself at war with the US Navy, accusing the admirals of operating with “the pomp of a viceroy of India in the days of Queen Victoria.”3 Whenever Elias had access troubles with State Department personnel, he turned to his friends in the military for stories. In doing so, he stepped directly into the line of fire between the Pentagon and Briggs’s colleagues in Foggy Bottom.
In January 1960, shortly after Eisenhower’s visit, Elias asked for an on-the-record interview with Vice Admiral Charles B. Brown, Commander in Chief, Allied Forces Southern Europe and former commander of the Sixth Fleet. The admiral agreed to answer two pages of questions Elias sent him and routed his responses by diplomatic pouch to the naval attaché in Athens. The attaché then showed the text to Briggs, who killed the entire interview, claiming that the publicity would benefit Demetracopoulos more than “our broad objectives.”4 Admiral Brown did not work for Briggs, and felt the embassy had no authority to intercept, edit, or veto his remarks. He was so incensed that he went straight to his superior Admiral Arleigh Burke, then Chief of Naval Operations. Burke protested to both acting Secretary of State Christian Herter and President Eisenhower. Although there is no apparent record of a response, in Pentagon–Foggy Bottom confrontations during that era, the Pentagon usually came out on top.
Briggs, however, was not finished. Believing that Demetracopoulos should never have tried to circumvent the embassy in arranging his interview but hesitant to intervene with Elias’s Greek newspaper affiliations, he instead attacked the journalist’s new relationship with the Herald Tribune. When Briggs turned to the CIA station chief and his recently arrived public-affairs officer, Leonard Greenup, to forward his concerns to CIA headquarters, he found willing attack dogs. Heretofore Demetracopoulos had been able to rely on the positive attitude of embassy press officers as a counterbalance to the CIA. During a dinner with visiting Washington Post executive editor Jim Wiggins sometime after his return from the US, Elias criticized the current performance of the USIS under Greenup, without realizing that Wiggins was on the Washington-based USIA Oversight Board. Word of Elias’s critique made its way back to Greenup.5
The immediate consequence was a summons to CIA headquarters of the Tribune’s Washington bureau chief, Robert J. Donovan. After this meeting Donovan wrote a letter to his boss in New York, managing editor Fendall W. Yerxa, including an unsigned, unsourced blind memo that repeated defamatory falsehoods about Demetracopoulos. According to Donovan, this screed had been handed him “by a C.I.A. man in the presence of Allen Dulles,” director of the CIA, whom Donovan described as “a great friend of the paper” who “wouldn’t pass anything like this on to us frivolously.”6 He added that the CIA man—who, Elias later learned, was Dulles’s chief press aide Stanley Grogan—had characterized Demetracopoulos as “vicious.” The memo warned he would use his role with the Herald Tribune as an international forum from which to embarrass the US, ominously adding “he…seems to live well beyond his income from writing activities.”7 Though clearly the CIA wanted Elias fired, nothing in Donovan’s letter implies that Grogan had made that explicit request. Initially, Yerxa did nothing but file the memo.
—
IN 1960, ELIAS broke more exclusive stories. In March, he reported from Paris on NATO-Greek negotiations regarding placement of nuclear missiles. In May, he angered the CIA by publishing in Ethnos classified information on Soviet activity in the Balkans, despite the article’s accuracy and what American officials described as its “pro-Western” tone.8 A day later, he embarrassed the Greek government by publishing information on NATO defense plans for Greece, triggering “an investigation in the highest levels of the Greek armed forces to determine the source of the leak.”9 Athens and Washington became concerned that Demetracopoulos would soon make another Washington trip. The embassy plotted with the Greek Desk at State and the USIA about how to “head him off.”10 Embassy counselor Sam Berger objected that “they perpetuate the myth that he has carefully cultivated here that he has a special ‘in’ with the Americans. No matter how often we deny this to the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, [head of KYP] General [Alexandros] Natsinas, and dozens of others, they persist in stating to me that he is ‘our man,’ and we must do something to curb him.”11 Elias, however, did not go to the United States in 1960. He was too busy elsewhere.
On May 20, Demetracopoulos exposed in Ethnos a classified document the Italian government had submitted to NATO that depicted Greek Epirus as part of Albania.12 Disclosure of this document roiled already-troubled waters, since Greece entertained territorial claims to Northern Epirus that included Albanian land. The article enraged parts of the Greek public, who saw the Italians as still having greedy designs on a Greek province and it prompted a lengthy debate in Parliament as well as anti-Italian street protests in Athens and Thessaloniki. Once again, Karamanlis exploded and, on June 8, 1960, sent a secret order to all Greek embassies instructing them to “avoid any communication whatsoever” with Elias because he is officially deemed a “persona non grata.”13
Despite efforts by both Greeks and Americans to stymie him, Elias astonished both skeptics and critics by conducting an exclusive interview with Raoul Castro, who had been sent abroad by his brother Fidel to build support for the Cuban revolution in the wake of growing conflict with the United States. Between conferring with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in Cairo and returning to Havana, Castro and a party of about twenty stopped in Athens for four and a half hours to hold a meeting at the Cuban Embassy and take a tour of the Acropolis. There were no official Greek welcomers, and only one journalist learned of the visit and managed to speak with Castro. As Ambassador Briggs wrote the secretary of state, “Newspaperman Demetracopoulos on his toes as usual obtained question-and-answer interview. Full text being pouched.”14
Elias managed to get his exclusive interview transcribed by the Cubans, with Castro signing each page. Afterward, proud of his scoop and believing some context could be useful, Elias called the USIS reporting officer to pass along some “inside information.”15 Demetracopoulos disclosed that Castro spoke “only very bad English” and the interview was carried on through Castro’s wife. Elias added that he “was not impressed with the whole group,” that “others in the group were afraid of Castro, including the Chief of Police,” and that he sensed that the Cubans were less than fully satisfied with their visit to Moscow.16
Meanwhile, as part of his wide cultivation of sources, Elias befriended the Israeli legates in Athens, who held the lowest level (“de facto”) of any diplomatic representation in the country and had to contend with an undercurrent of Greek anti-Semitism.17 As part of their role, the representatives tried to arrange familiarization trips for Greeks to learn about Israel, especially journalists and other opinion makers. They found it a tough sell, as several reporters, when invited, explained they were afraid of the personal consequences of visiting a country Greece had not fully recognized. For reasons of state—including needing Arab votes at the UN on Cyprus, and still trying to secure compensation for the expropriation of Greek property in Egypt—Greece did not want to alienate Arab support by elevating Israel’s diplomatic status.18
The Israeli representative who approached Elias in 1960 had been told by his superiors in Jerusalem that Demetracopoulos—who had been decorated by the Egyptian government and had met with Nasser—was unlikely to accept an invitation. Elias, however, accepted without hesitation, saying that “no one is going to deprive me of the right to go where I want to go and when.” The trip was arranged to take place just before Demetracopoulos was scheduled to attend the swearing-in ceremony for Archbishop Makarios on Cyprus’s Independence Day.
Elias became the first Greek journalist to visit Israel. For ten days he traveled the country from north to south, from Haifa and Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, focusing mostly on strategic places near borders. He attended briefings, stayed on a kibbutz in the Negev, and went to the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and other Christian sites. He met with both Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and Foreign Minister Golda Meir. Knowing his next stop would be Cyprus, the Israelis discussed with him their interest in active relations with this new, independent, non-Arab state that lay a mere 140 miles from Haifa.
When Elias arrived in Cyprus, he was met at the airport by Greek Ambassador Konstantinos Tranos, who insisted they go first to the Greek Embassy to send to Athens information on Israel’s Cyprus recognition plans. Afterward, Elias participated as Makarios and Tranos devised a successful diplomatic solution concerning Cypriot-Israeli recognition. Elias never returned to Israel, but that did not stop his critics from adding Israel to the growing list of countries alleged to have hired Elias to spy for them—a list that would include Egypt, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, France, Great Britain, and the United States, as well as his native Greece.
—
IN SEPTEMBER, AFTER his trips to Israel and Cyprus, Demetracopoulos broke an “exclusive” on the Eastern Mediterranean maneuvers of fifteen units of the Soviet Black Sea fleet. Karamanlis and security chiefs at Naval Headquarters were “shaken” to notice how closely Elias’s story “paralleled” a secret report disseminated to the Greek military community. The American Embassy again complained to the CIA. Grogan approached the Tribune’s Donovan for a second time to warn about Demetracopoulos, but once more nothing came of it.19
Briggs blocked Elias’s appointments when he could, but because of his ongoing gripe over the frequency of US naval visits to Greek ports, he “took to staging trips out of Athens, when what [he] regarded as a superfluous naval visitation loomed,”20 leaving his naval attaché in charge. Thus, Briggs was away in late September when Vice Admiral George W. Anderson, Commander of the Sixth Fleet, invited Elias on board his flagship, the Des Moines, for lunch in the harbor at Piraeus. Elias used the opportunity to brief him on the details of what had happened earlier with Admiral Brown. Otherwise, it was a routine visit and the two posed for a photo, which Anderson inscribed “with warm personal regards and high esteem for your professional excellence.”21 Anderson started to give what Elias described as “a rather fiery interview” on Soviet activities, the Black Sea, and other matters. When time cut short their face-to-face interview, Anderson took with him the written questions Elias had prepared. This time, remembering the lesson of Admiral Brown, Anderson bypassed the diplomatic pouch and sent the answers by regular mail directly to Elias. The full Q & A text was published on October 2, 1960. Anderson, incensed by Briggs’s “shabby” treatment of the Sixth Fleet and reports of Briggs’s censorship, complained to Admiral Burke in Washington, who passed it up the chain of command to the secretary of state and eventually the President.22 There was immediate blowback.
Two days later, on October 4, the CIA’s Grogan again approached the Tribune’s Robert J. Donovan. This time the “ask” was explicit:
Dear Bob,
1. You will recall our conversations in January and in May 1960 regarding Dimitrakopoulos [sic]. This man continues to represent himself as the Athens Stringer of the New York Herald Tribune and carries a letter of accreditation from the Tribune, dated 7 October 1959. He is listed by the foreign press division of the under ministry of press and by the Foreign Press Association in Athens as the representative of the New York Herald Tribune. If the information furnished previously regarding this individual was not sufficient, I can when you return to Washington give you a fill-in.
2. It would be helpful all around, in view of the information I have on this man, if the Herald Tribune would send a letter stating that he is no longer in their employ to the following:
(1) Foreign Press Association;
(2) Foreign Press Division of the Underministry of Press; and
(3) Protocol section of the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
3. We hope you will be able to cooperate in this request which would not be made except of the most compelling reasons.
Stanley [Grogan]23
To make it easier to comply, Grogan attached a draft letter dated ten days later, October 14, to each of the three entities, all with managing editor Fendall W. Yerxa’s name and title typed in as the signatory. Donovan sent the Grogan correspondence to Yerxa, and this time Yerxa sent a letter to Elias advising him “that the working agreement…with the Herald Tribune News Service…is hereby canceled. The letter of accreditation to you…is on my authority voided.”24 No explanation was given, although the letter also informed him that “notice to this effect” would be mailed to the three press organizations. Thereafter Yerxa sent the exact text submitted by the CIA, on Herald Tribune stationery and over his signature, to the three offices named by Grogan. The only difference between Gorgan’s draft and Yerxa’s letter was one corrected typo.
Trying to connect the dots some years later, Elias said it “is very unlikely Grogan would know of these organizations. That type of detail would have to come from the CIA and the embassy in Athens. Briggs’s fingerprints are all over the letter.” He continued:
I found it extraordinary then, and today, that one of the world’s premier dailies would take a draft submitted by the CIA—by any outside organization or individual, for that matter—and use it intact…More significant, the letter levels accusations against my character and was mailed to people with whom I had to interact. I was incensed…Professionally I had to respond. If the letter simply had withdrawn my accreditation, the matter would have ended. I had no right to accreditation, and the Herald Tribune had every right to withdraw it whenever and for whatever reason it wished. But neither Grogan nor anyone at the newspaper seem to have thought through the draft and to have realized it was asking for more trouble than it gave.
Before he received his termination letter, Elias had submitted a story to the Herald Tribune’s Paris office revealing that Greece and the United States had formally agreed to place nuclear weapons on Greek soil several weeks after the Greek government officially denied that “any such weapons” were based in Greece. The story could not be used, however, on account of Yerxa’s order.25
