ON THE DAY before the Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy, keeping up a façade of normalcy, held his first meeting with a head of government since his inauguration. There were toasts and photos aplenty at the Greek Embassy, where Prime Minister Kostantinos Karamanlis greeted him and the American First Lady cordially accepted an invitation to visit Greece.39
Kennedy also held a private meeting with Karamanlis. The Americans wanted to cut back their foreign aid spending and planned to encourage allies, notably Germany, to pick up the slack with countries like Greece as part of “burden sharing.”40 On the table were other matters as well. An agreement on terms of Greek repayment of prewar claims to American bondholders was still unresolved. And Greece’s plans to establish a tariff union with the European Economic Community were thwarting American efforts to open up another market for its tobacco growers.
Given the electoral scare from the left in the Greek elections of 1958, Kennedy felt that Karamanlis, however flawed, was still the best option to secure American interests, although some advisors preferred a more liberal alternative.41 With the Berlin crisis escalating, the President reassured the prime minister of Greece’s importance to the NATO shield against Soviet aggression. And Karamanlis used American concerns about Communism spreading in Laos and Vietnam to retain an acceptable amount of military aid.
With fallout from the Burke interview hurting his access to top American Embassy officials, Elias cultivated a friendship with the American in charge of negotiating the bond debt issue, and worked lower-level officials, whose leaks helped him explore angles for covering the coming cutbacks in American aid.42 Much later, reviewing Kennedy’s unsuccessful June 1961 confrontation with Khrushchev in Vienna, Elias wondered why the young president had not spent more effort planning and weighing the risks involved.43 With a blend of sorrow and exasperation, he later chided: “With all the important decisions facing the President in the Oval Office, why was he, or his press secretary, wasting any of their important time trying to punish me for being right? I had expected something more from him.”
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GREECE HELD ITS own election in October 1961, with the rules again altered to reduce the strength of the left-wing EDA in favor of a centrist coalition.44 To further facilitate the result, the CIA engaged in covert funding of both the center-right ERE and center-left EC (Enosis Kentrou), George Papandreou’s party.45 EC moderates fared better than they had in 1958, but still came in second to Karamanlis’s conservatives. Ambassador Briggs privately admitted that the Greek crony capitalist government and its ham-handed patronage system was corrupt and had lost touch with the people. Nonetheless, he openly supported Karamanlis and his right-wing victory.46
EC leader Papandreou, believing the system had been rigged to relegate his party to the role of token opposition, thundered that the election had been stolen, notably by machinations of the right. He pledged to engage in anendotos or anendotos agon, an “unyielding struggle” to overturn the results with new elections. The CIA pigeonholed Elias as a Papandreou partisan and Karamanlis opponent, but the journalist denied having a political ax to grind. “Few reporters want to beat to death an office holder or institution,” he explained. “I got my kicks from scooping other reporters. It is often hard for people in public life to understand that this is what drives most reporters.”47 Demetracopoulos acknowledged widespread fraud in the 1961 election, including intimidation, violence, and double voting, but believed the absence of these factors would not have changed the outcome. To him the ERE was not the main threat to Greek democracy. He was more concerned about the growing political role of the IDEA faction in the Greek army and its offshoot, EENA (the Union of Young Greek Officers).
Elias’s primary military sources were leading pro-Western, pro-monarchist admirals and generals, some of them senior IDEA members or sympathizers. Through them he heard about a group of several dozen junior officers who seemed to admire Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser for his authoritarian personality and strongman nationalism, while eschewing his Cold War neutralism. However, he had trouble figuring out this group’s specific agenda. Some of their names—Papadopoulos (nicknamed by his cohorts “Nasser”), Ioannidis, Ladas, and Roufogalis—would eventually become quite familiar, unalterably changing Elias’s life.
Elias was not alone in being happy to see Ambassador Briggs leave in February 1962. The outgoing diplomat was seen as so partisan that Greek opposition leaders refused to attend his farewell ceremonies. He was replaced in January 1962 by the more liberal Henry Labouisse, husband of Eve Curie, the daughter of Nobel Prize winners Marie and Pierre Curie. They came to Athens as a power couple, said to be close to the Kennedys. Elias’s sources, however, told him that Labouisse was in fact damaged goods—dumped in Greece to get him out of an embarrassing situation in Washington after the American president realized that Labouisse was out of his league trying to restructure the US AID program; Jackie Kennedy had endorsed the soft landing.48
While some embassy personnel described the new ambassador as a sweet, calm, laid-back Louisiana gentleman, Elias’s assessment was closer to that of the former embassy senior staffer who recalled: “I’m not sure that Henry knew a lot about what was going on, or even worried about it.”49 Elias thought Labouisse’s well-organized wife would have made the better ambassador. He longed for the days of ambassadors Grady, Allen, and Riddleberger—engaged professionals whose postings in Greece weren’t consolation prizes.
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MEANWHILE, DEMETRACOPOULOS HAD not abandoned his resolve to rectify his suspicious 1960 firing from the New York Herald Tribune, which he thought might have been connected to Ambassador Briggs. During the preparation for Kennedy’s inauguration, Elias had met with American attorneys to discuss how to proceed in a lawsuit. His New York lawyers agreed that he had been “badly treated” by the newspaper but told him that this did not mean he could win a long and expensive libel action.50 They were troubled by technical questions involving venue and jurisdiction and whether, if “publication” of the letters took place in Greece, the Greek law of defamation should apply. His attorneys recommended negotiations with the Herald Tribune to obtain a face-saving letter of apology to the newspaper groups that had received the offending letters. Only if no such letter could be obtained should he consider filing suit. Even then, prosecuting a lawsuit from Greece would be difficult, take years, and be a huge drain on his resources.
Demetracopoulos had taken a step toward this goal during his Kennedy inauguration trip by calling Robert White, former president and editor-in-chief of the Herald Tribune, who had recently left the paper over management issues. Elias had talked to White over the phone during his hiring process but had never met him face-to-face. Elias informed White that he was planning to sue the newspaper over managing editor Yerxa’s letter to the Foreign Press Association. White invited Elias to his suburban Westchester home to discuss the matter. Demetracopoulos took a cab from the train and arrived at White’s 200-year-old house in Rye after a harrowing trip through a torrential, tree-snapping winter thunderstorm. The former Tribune executive, who had hired Yerxa, listened attentively to Elias’s side of the story. As Elias was leaving, White said: “Anyone who braved such weather to make his case must be telling the truth.”
White acted quickly. He arranged for the Greek journalist and his attorney to meet with Yerxa and himself in Manhattan. It was agreed that the libel action would be dropped if a letter were sent to the reporter and the others involved—the Foreign Press Association, the Protocol Section of the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Foreign Press Division of the Greek Ministry of the Press—retracting Yerxa’s allegation that Demetracopoulos had misrepresented himself as a correspondent for the Herald Tribune.51 It was understood that the paper would not reinstate Elias.
Yerxa agreed to be responsible for sending out the retractions. The letters, however, were never sent. Perhaps, with White’s returning to the hinterlands of Mexico, Missouri, later that month, Yerxa felt no pressure to follow through. On April 29, 1961, almost three months after the letter was to have been sent, Demetracopoulos cabled Yerxa, noting that he had in his possession “sufficient documentary evidence” to prove that the US Embassy in Athens had “acted in a manner contrary to the basic principles of freedom of the press” and that this interference caused “the severance” of his “working arrangement” with the newspaper.
Demetracopoulos never received a reply to his cable, and when Elias returned to the US in the summer of 1962, the Herald Tribune matter was still unresolved. Elias was impatient to remove the stain on his reputation which he felt prevented him from moving forward on other employment opportunities. It was also a matter of philotimo (personal honor). Elias told his attorneys that he was not seeking monetary damages. He simply wanted his reputation back, unbesmirched.
At the time, he was unaware of the extent to which the Herald Tribune and other US news organizations were eager servants of US intelligence agencies. Half a century later, Yerxa would admit to his participation in the nation’s Cold War agenda, notably as the Herald Tribune–paid ghostwriter for Herbert Philbrick’s McCarthy-era agitprop I Led Three Lives. Yerxa said he knew Philbrick was a “phony,” but still took the $20,000 to complete the project.52 He also had regrets for being “pushed” by his publisher into preparing a series of articles of virulent anti-Communist propaganda. “It wasn’t a very good piece of work,” he recalled. “It wasn’t responsible journalism.” He remembered the Demetracopoulos firing, in contrast, as a mere “administrative detail.”53
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IN WASHINGTON THAT summer of 1962, Elias met with Robert Donovan, the Tribune’s Washington bureau chief, who had congratulated him on his hiring in 1959, but had since acted as the CIA’s anti-Elias middleman, a fact he didn’t disclose during their lunch. Donovan’s message was clear. “These things happen,” he said. “Just suck it up and move on quietly. Making waves will cause repercussions.”
Elias responded: “So, there may be repercussions, because I’m not going to back down.”
Donovan replied: “Well, you must remember that these people in power have many ways to come back against you.”
“Obviously you know things that I don’t know,” Elias interrupted, “but they have not yet met Demetracopoulos. I’m going to follow through with the Herald Tribune.”
“Don’t. Let it alone,” Donovan advised. “The people in the bureaucracy will try to destroy you.”
“Bob, who will try to destroy me?” Elias asked, his voice getting louder. “I will destroy them first.” The men parted and never talked again.54
In July, word passed around the White House that Elias was looking for top-level interviews. Robert Komer, National Security Council advisor and former CIA operative, sent a memo to Malcolm “Mac” Kilduff, Deputy White House Press Secretary, with copies to McGeorge Bundy, Pierre Salinger, and others:
State tells me that a smart and pushy Greek journalist named Demetrakopoulos [sic]…is in town and says he’s going to try to see the President, or, at least someone in the White House.
He is legitimate, so we don’t want to give him a complete brush-off, but State is worried lest he write troublesome stories. He is no supporter of Karamanlis, and apparently wants to write that the US is not backing the Greek defense effort because it doesn’t like the current government. He apparently saw Reston the last time.”
In a handwritten note “to all,” he added: “I strongly urge he not be received at a high level—I know him too well.”55 Two years later, Robert Komer would make an offer he thought Elias would not refuse.
13.Moving Left
UPON RETIREMENT FROM THE NAVY, Arleigh Burke became the first head of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at Georgetown University. When Elias met him in his new offices on July 16, 1962, Burke asked the status of the lawsuit against the Trib. Hearing that the promised letters of retraction had never materialized, Burke fired off a letter the next day to Herald Tribune publisher John Hay Whitney in which he warned of a possible “injustice done to Mr. Demetracopoulos,” given “his excellent reputation, his staunch anti-Communist attitude over the years, and his support for the United States.”1
Three weeks later, Elias also spoke about his problems with his old pal from a decade earlier, retired General William W. Quinn, then deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Quinn suggested that the firing had not been Yerxa’s initiative but done at the behest of the CIA. Rather than asking Quinn to take an action that might further strain relations between Defense Intelligence and the CIA, Elias took the general’s advice to involve Richard Russell, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman, who had as much oversight of intelligence budgets as anyone in Congress. Elias used Senator Strom Thurmond, who’d praised Elias effusively for standing up for Admiral Burke, as a conduit to Russell.
Too impatient to wait for responses to Burke’s letter or his own message to Thurmond, Elias made a cold call to William Hill, the managing editor of the Washington Star. It may have been the slow summer schedule, but Hill agreed to see him without delay. At their August 3 meeting, Hill appointed Demetracopoulos the paper’s Mediterranean correspondent.2
Soon after, Senator Russell’s response to Thurmond’s overture exceeded Elias’s expectations. Instead of merely writing to the CIA on his behalf, the Georgia lawmaker summoned John McCone, Allen Dulles’s successor as head of the CIA, to his hideaway Senate office in the Capitol to meet Elias personally on the afternoon of August 13, 1962. Russell had instructed McCone to come alone, not telling him the meeting’s purpose. McCone, who had frequent private meetings with Russell on intelligence matters, saw the request as nothing out of the ordinary. The only other person present was Senator Strom Thurmond, along with Russell, one of the most hawkish, anti-Communist legislators on Capitol Hill.
Russell went straight to the matter. McCone was taken aback at being confronted by a case he said he knew nothing about. He was forced to take his own notes during the hour-plus meeting, most of which consisted of Elias’s lengthy description of his Trib discharge and was at an unfair advantage asking questions.3 “I frankly felt sorry for the man,” Elias recalled. “I slowed my pace while he visibly sweated over his notes—the supreme commander of American intelligence reduced to the role of stenographer all because of me. It was all very embarrassing.”
The day after the confrontation with McCone, the CIA’s congressional liaison met with Senator Thurmond and his chief of staff Harry Dent to try to undo the damage. According to a “SECRET” CIA report, Thurmond, “listened politely” to the attack against Elias, “but stated he had received very good reports about [Demetracopoulos] from people whom he respects” and asked for “the evidence on which we have reached our conclusions.”4 Because the CIA’s dossier on Demetracopoulos was replete with uncorroborated rumors and disinformation, the CIA liaison concluded that “providing trustworthy evidence…could prove a difficult case.” He told Director McCone, “We have not fully satisfied Thurmond,” but that he would try again. He did, and again Thurmond and Dent dismissed the Agency’s personal attacks as not credible.
A few days later, Elias received a telephone call from Everett Walker, director of the Herald Tribune Syndicate & News Service, inviting him to come to New York to accept a “to whom it may concern” letter reinstating him as the service’s Athens correspondent.
Elias was euphoric and raced to the train to pick up the letter that expressed the paper’s “highest esteem for his professional ability and personal integrity.”5 This was far more than he had expected. He had sought an apology, not “reinstatement.” He was also given copies of registered letters sent to the recipients of Yerxa’s earlier screed, basically identical to the letter of apology agreed upon in the meeting with Yerxa and Robert White eighteen months earlier. Elias called Celia in Connecticut to share the news. She, perhaps more than anyone, understood what Elias had been through. They met in Manhattan for a celebratory dinner.6
Could it be that the battle that had begun with Ambassador Peurifoy and CIA Station Chief Karamessines was now over? Elias’s victory was more bittersweet than that. In fact, this public reversal transformed what had been a highly personal vendetta on the part of some CIA personnel into an institutional crusade. Within days of Elias’s “reinstatement” at the Herald Tribune, the CIA, furious at McCone’s humiliation in front of Russell, discussed targeting his former wife—providing it could be “definitely ascertained” she was “angry” with him.7 They then proceeded to identify Elias as a permanent “security risk.”
The first signs of this retribution came in September 1962, when Elias was back in Greece. Shortly after publishing some of his controversial Washington interviews, he received a letter reminiscent of those he’d received from Time in 1952 and the Herald Tribune in 1960. This time it came from Washington Star managing editor William “Bill” Hill, who had just hired him, terminating their less than two-month agreement. Unlike the earlier notices, which had directly or indirectly called into question the reporter’s effectiveness or integrity, Hill’s letter explained only that “coverage as we will need…can best be handled by one of our full-time employees operating out of Washington.”8
To Elias, this seemed more than coincidental, as he was able to confirm a year later. Managing editor Hill told Elias that the order—not suggestion—to fire him had arrived from Richard Helms, then the CIA director of plans, and editor Newbold Noyes “had had no choice.”9
