After the August 1962 confrontation in Senator Russell’s office, the CIA returned to the White House to make sure Pierre Salinger and the President took the Demetracopoulos threat seriously.10 McCone’s representatives stressed that the Agency had information supporting much more incendiary charges and discussed efforts to get the damaging material to all government agencies and “seal off” Demetracopoulos from sources of interviews. The problem, observed the CIA memorandum writer, was that State Department opinion was split. Those handling press relations were generally in agreement with the CIA, but those on the political side continued to regard Demetracopoulos as “an asset and friend of the Americans and are more reluctant to take action against him.”11
In Washington in late August, Elias had interviewed each of the military chiefs of staff: General Curtis LeMay of the Air Force, the Army’s General Earle Wheeler, and Admiral George Anderson of the Navy. Generals LeMay and Wheeler dutifully submitted their transcripts to the press office under Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, as required by the Kennedy Administration edict, and the transcripts from both interviews were promptly killed. Since Admiral Anderson had a prior positive relationship with Demetracopoulos, he directed that the text be transcribed and sent directly to Elias without first obtaining a stamp of approval from the office of the Secretary of Defense. Elias duly published it in Athens on September 13.
In the published text the admiral said no changes were planned in the size of the Sixth Fleet, sidestepped a question about bringing Polaris submarines into the Mediterranean, and gave a non-provocative response to Elias’s question about Soviet naval buildup. “It is difficult to see how these words could irritate anyone,” recalled Elias. “But they did. McNamara was livid with Anderson for violating the standing order that interviews be cleared with his staff.”12
A few weeks later, the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted. Because the Kennedy Administration decided to impose a naval blockade, Admiral Anderson was at the center of activity. On October 24, the Navy spent hours assessing all the data about Russian ships steaming toward Cuba with missiles on board. Just before noon, the Office of Naval Intelligence and Admiral Anderson’s tactical and navigational control room in the Pentagon became convinced that information provided earlier in the day by the National Security Agency was correct: sixteen of eighteen Russian vessels headed for Cuba were dead in the water or had turned back. This was key information. The Russians had blinked and would not challenge the naval blockade.
According to Dino A. Brugioni’s history of the crisis, McNamara learned later that day that some of the information about the Russian ships had been available hours before he was told. He “stormed” into the naval control room and began chewing out the officers on duty.13 The officer in charge notified Anderson, who also rushed in. In the first of a series of confrontations, the Secretary of Defense accosted the Admiral, who just weeks before had refused to submit his Demetracopoulos interview for clearance. As Elias later pieced it together from Anderson and others, “It was not a pretty scene.” The stories of the October confrontation and the earlier interview were shared with Pierre Salinger and others at the White House, further contributing to the anti-Demetracopoulos animus.
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THE UNITED STATES had been making overtures toward softening Cold War tensions with Yugoslavia. At the same time, Yugoslav radio was propagandizing on behalf of what it said was the plight of the Slav minority living in Greek Macedonia, which some Yugoslavs claimed as its own. Greece was not pleased by either of these developments.
Before returning to Greece in anticipation of Vice President Johnson’s early September 1962 trip there, Demetracopoulos had added two exclusive interviews to his calendar: with Assistant Secretary of State Robert J. Manning and with Edward M. Kennedy, the President’s youngest brother, who was then running for the US Senate seat formerly held by his brother. In the interviews, Elias asked about American attitudes toward totalitarian dictatorships, Greek elections, the continuation of US aid, American policies in southeastern Europe, and the “Macedonian Question,” all items that could reasonably be raised on the Johnson trip. Both men gave essentially the same answers, urging calm and hoping the Macedonia issue would not be “exacerbated” or “inflamed.”14
The Greek press and Karamanlis government picked up on the Demetracopoulos interviews and suggested that the United States was showing “excessive friendliness to Yugoslavia.”15 Recognizing the similarity of the two responses, Greek officials protested that official US policy apparently failed to side with its ally Greece against Yugoslavia. When Johnson arrived, according to an American reporter travelling with him, the vice president had to assert repeatedly that in the face of Yugoslav claims “the United States will tolerate no compromise of the territorial integrity or domestic tranquility of our ally and friend.”16
Johnson was furious that his goodwill visit had been subverted. He had wanted to be portrayed as the face of American generosity and charm while visiting “slums, villages, depressed areas, etc.”17 He complained to Ambassador Labouisse about the interview Ted Kennedy had given Elias, published in the Athens Daily Post only days before his arrival.18 Johnson saw this as one more part of a plot orchestrated by Bobby Kennedy to undermine him as Vice President and dump him from the ticket in 1964.19
Johnson grossly overreacted. Elias had been looking for good stories that would contribute to his journalistic celebrity, not to embarrass Johnson. If anything, given Ambassador Briggs’s dark warning about the attorney general’s hostility toward him in the Arleigh Burke incident, Elias was predisposed toward Johnson in his feud with Bobby Kennedy. But facts did not get in the way of Johnson’s pique. He refused to meet with any opposition leaders, permitting Karamanlis to have Johnson’s ear without challenge. The Vice President returned to Washington, telling the President: “We cannot allow…Karamanlis to fall before an irresponsible opposition because of our termination of defense support.”20 Elias’s request to interview the Vice President during his Athens visit was denied.
Elias continued to stir the pot of Greek-American relations. On the day Johnson left for Rome, he published another interview he’d conducted in Washington over the summer with the conservative presidential hopeful, Senator Barry Goldwater.21 He’d asked the Arizona Republican about rumors that the US had interfered in the last Greek election. Goldwater replied, “A careful investigation should be carried out on those accusations against our embassy role in Athens. I would certainly hope,” he continued, “that free elections would prevail and no country, including my own, should stick its nose into the business of whom the Greek people want to be their leaders.”22 Labouisse chastised Elias for having asked a loaded question of a man “who was unaware of the possible repercussions.”23
To American intelligence Demetracopoulos was an enigma. He worked for major center-left papers, which supported George Papandreou of the Center Union, but was held in high esteem by leading conservatives.24 They repeatedly claimed he was taking secret funds from mysterious interests but couldn’t find credible evidence to prove anything.
On the troublesome issue of Cyprus, he wasn’t pro-enosis or anti-enosis, but supported “what’s best for Cyprus.” He sympathized with Greek Cypriots, but wasn’t viscerally anti-Turk, and thought the minority should be treated fairly.
Demetracopoulos eschewed partisan labels. He wasn’t right of center or left of center, just Elias-centered. And on October 26, Elias P. Demetracopoulos won an Athens press award for the best reporting of 1962.25
Elias took full advantage of his membership in the Foreign Press Association and, according to American public affairs officers, often asked the high-level guest speakers the most trenchant and difficult questions.26 He delighted in verbal combat and showing up his less aggressive colleagues. In Greece in the early 1960s there was much to cover: tensions rising with Cyprus and the Western alliance, signs of a slowing economy, the ending of American economic aid, neglected social services and education—all with about one-third of the national budget committed to defense. Papandreou’s uncompromising attacks against the Karamanlis government escalated and eventually included the Crown, which was spending lavishly and getting involved in politics, criticizing Karamanlis yet refusing to dismiss him. The Queen told the CIA station chief it was time for a new government—but not with Papandreou.27 Meanwhile she grumbled that Karamanlis exhibited bad judgment, was difficult to get along with, and failed to protect the Crown from the opprobrium of the press, which she chastised as “venal and disruptive.”
In April 1963, after months of parliamentary debate over tax hikes needed to cover the royal family’s ostentatious living expenses and their frequent trips abroad, Queen Frederika decided to make a private visit to London with her daughter Irene for the wedding of her third cousin, Britain’s Princess Alexandra. Karamanlis advised her not to go, warning that expected protests would prejudice the more important Greek royal state visit there in July.28 Although the civil war had ended fourteen years before, there were still about a thousand political prisoners in Greek jails and a similar number in exile.
In London on April 20, Frederika and Irene faced noisy demonstrators outside Claridge’s, their swank Mayfair hotel.29 Trying to leave by a side door, the Queen encountered Betty Bartlett Ampatielos, the Welsh wife of prisoner Antonios Ampatielos, who had been leading a sixteen-year international campaign to free her husband. She tried to present the Queen a petition calling for his release and that of other political prisoners. The royal duo bolted, running into a cul-desac where they took refuge and called for help.
The next day, a drizzly Sunday in Athens, was to have featured the First Pacifist Rally, a peace march from Marathon to Athens, echoing the massive four-day international anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist nuclear disarmament protest from Aldermaston to London the week before. But the Greek government banned the demonstration. Protected by his parliamentary immunity, the charismatic doctor Grigorios Lamprakis, a fifty-one-year-old gynecologist, medical professor, celebrated track and field athlete, and Independent-EDA peace activist, marched alone with the same black banner he’d carried at Aldermaston.30 On April 26, Lamprakis reacted to the international coverage of the Claridge’s confrontation by flying to London in the hope of getting Betty Ampatielos an audience with the Queen.31 He failed, but, on his return, he took the fight to Parliament, raising his profile as one unafraid to champion democratic principles against the Crown and its allies.
Elias knew of Lamprakis’s activities and had met him before. He regarded him as a man of accomplishment, strong principles, and integrity, but hopelessly naïve on the issues of nuclear disarmament and the effectiveness of a non-aligned world peace movement. He respected Lamprakis’s record of fighting the Axis in World War II, but thought his current battle was even riskier. While Elias doubted the Queen actually said the words attributed to her—“Who will help me to get rid of this man?”32—he gathered from his sources that some kind of revenge was on her agenda and that of others who deemed Lamprakis dangerous. After one of the Parliament debates, Elias approached Lamprakis and advised him to be very careful. Lamprakis, who’d been receiving anonymous, menacing telephone calls and letters since London, took the warning in stride.
Elias had spent much of April on trips to France and Germany with five other Greek political editors. When he returned, he focused on preparing articles for the Herald Tribune and Greek papers on the coming visit of French President Charles de Gaulle, probing government anxieties that the French leader’s remarks could drag Greece into current inter-Allied antagonisms.33 Several days after de Gaulle left Greece, Elias learned that Lamprakis would be speaking at a major peace rally in Thessaloniki. Lacking any hard evidence, but picking up on rumors, he darkly intuited that Lamprakis might soon be killed. Indeed, as a biographer of Lamprakis later wrote, all the preparations for the event “smelled of a trap, a perfidious attack in the making.”34 The original venue was changed unexpectedly. Hostile crowds outside greeted Lamprakis. En route from his hotel on May 22 at 10:20 p.m., he was smashed on the forehead. In great pain, he delivered his humanistic and idealistic speech, rich in “guileless optimism,” warning of the dangers of thermonuclear war, extolling the promise of disarmament, lauding the Aldermaston marchers, claiming portentously peace was something “beautiful to live for…and noble to die for.”35
After Lamprakis left the rally hall on foot, the assassination plot unfolded while police stood by passively.36 Two right-wing thugs attacked the parliamentarian, one driving a careening three-wheeled delivery van next to him while the other, standing in the back, delivered a devastating blow with an iron bar. Lamprakis never recovered from his coma and died five days later. More than half a million mourners, some carrying placards with the first letter of the Greek word Zei (“He lives!”), came to his funeral in Athens. This was the real-life incident fictionalized by Costa-Gavras in his 1969 Oscar-winning movie Z.
For the next three years, Thessaloniki’s chief examining magistrate Christos Sartzetakis and four prosecutors tried to get at the truth, to expose the conspiracy—the connections between local police and a military cabal—and punish those responsible for the assassination. However, they were stymied by more powerful authorities who blocked their efforts, restricted their resources, erected a wall of silence, and protected the masterminds.37 The trial ended on December 30, 1966, with the conspirators largely unscathed and the murderers treated as if involved only in a random traffic accident. After the junta took over in 1967, Sartzetakis and his prosecutors were jailed. Those implicated in the murder were exonerated.38
Elias was not one of the three reporters who doggedly investigated the Lamprakis assassination, disclosing sinister facts.39 It wasn’t his beat. But the gruesome murder prompted him to deepen his resolve in piecing together fragmentary details about right-wing military members of IDEA and EENA and their alleged plots. Sometimes he’d privately share his concerns with American and Greek officials, but he never used his information as part of a published article. It’s unclear whether he knew anything specifically about the Lamprakis conspiracy or shared it with the frustrated prosecutors. Late in life, Elias said he believed that IDEA/EENA and their paramilitary accomplices bore ultimate responsibility for the parliamentarian’s death. Undoubtedly, the assassination and failure to prosecute spotlighted the fragility of Greek democracy and animated Elias’s emerging center-left sentiments.
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IN LATE MAY, the newspaper Thessaloniki carried another Elias exclusive interview with an American military official that enraged Secretary of State Dean Rusk.40 He fired off a “Confidential Message” advising all NATO diplomatic posts and military branches to boycott Demetracopoulos and copied “P. Salinger/White House.” Like others during the Kennedy years, Rusk was making sure that Salinger spread the CIA misinformation to other members of the Kennedy White House and its political team, including Kenny O’Donnell, Joe Napolitan, Malcolm Kilduff, and Larry O’Brien. Demetracopoulos had been warned about how skilled the Kennedys were at getting even.
Rosemary Rorick, a top staffer for freshman Indiana senator Vance Hartke, was an important conduit. Her boss, interested in Greece and NATO, had befriended Elias and sought ways to help him. The wife of Assistant White House Press Secretary Kilduff, Rorick alerted Elias to Salinger’s personal attacks. She repeatedly told Elias about White House comments disparaging him, including after the Admiral Anderson–McNamara confrontation and Rusk’s NATO-wide boycott message. Elias appreciated the intel, but was stubborn and self-confident enough to believe that trouble went with the territory of being an aggressive, independent journalist.
Anticipating his return to the United States in the late summer of 1963, Demetracopoulos wrote to Edward R. Murrow, then director of the USIA, for help in setting up interviews through the submission of written questions to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs Phillips Talbot and, most ironically, Assistant Defense Secretary Arthur Sylvester. Murrow’s executive assistant, Reed Harris, gave Elias a discouraging response, but at the same time sent a sharp rebuke to the State Department for its anti-Demetracopoulos messages.41 Harris, who had personally felt the sting of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting tactics in the 1950s,42 chided his colleagues for being outplayed by “an astute journalist, very skillful in asking penetrating and often embarrassing questions.” To him, occasional political uproars because Elias “chooses times when his articles will sell widely” were not legitimate grounds for discrimination. Harris explained:
Demetracopoulos writes a series of penetrating questions, submits them to the official concerned several days in advance, then receives the answers orally or in writing. When he obtains the answers orally, he asks that a stenographer be present. In the end, he always obtains the answers in written form signed by the official or the stenographer. This is certainly a careful and ethical way to proceed. If our officials are not careful enough or well enough informed to answer in accordance with U.S. policy, they need not answer; but when they do answer, there is hardly a legitimate reason for complaint when the journalist publishes the interview at [a] time when it will sell best.
[State] has been unable to supply me with any examples of use of the question and answers “out of context”…[O]ur State Department people especially seem to be rather afraid of him and they fall back on exaggerations to support their requests that he be denied the kind of access to officials which he seeks.43
Harris’s, however, was a lonely voice. More typical reaction to gripes about Demetracopoulos was the classified message CIA director McCone sent to unidentified recipients on November 13, 1963: “State pressing for any substantive derog[atory] data which c[a]n be utilized to deny subj[ect] any subsequent entry to the US.”44
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ELIAS INTERVIEWED ADMIRAL Burke again in August 1963. As Jack Anderson observed, the retired admiral was “emerging as the most articulate conservative critic of the Kennedy Administration’s military policies,” and many Republicans were urging him to run for the 1964 presidential nomination.45 Burke had served with Robert Kennedy and General Maxwell Taylor on the investigation of the 1961 Cuba debacle, and, contrary to his earlier opinions of them, “had nothing but disdain for President Kennedy and his ‘bagman’ at the Department of Defense, McNamara.”46 In the interview, Burke declared bluntly that the armed forces had had nothing to do with the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, and implied that the CIA was solely to blame.47 This was still major news because, despite disclosures, the CIA wanted to downplay its extensive role in covert operations, and Kennedy was probably nervous about the incident becoming a campaign issue.
In late August, responding to Elias’s comments to him about the Washington Star firing, Admiral Burke arranged for Elias to have a one-on-one talk with former CIA director Allen Dulles—the original source of his problems—at Dulles’s Washington, D.C. home. The early September conversation was brief and cordial, with Elias recounting the suspicious trail of perceived CIA abuses and Dulles confirming the Agency’s role, but not his own involvement, in the Time and Herald Tribune affairs. Dulles promised to “look into” the Star matter, about which he claimed to have no knowledge.
A few days later, upon Washington Post editor Russell Wiggins’s strong recommendation, Managing Editor Fred Friendly named Elias the Post’s special correspondent in Greece—only to have Post foreign editor Philip Foisie, brother-in-law of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, revoke the agreement on September 17, 1963.48 Friendly later told Elias that pressure from the White House and his “alleged problems” with the CIA had cost him this job. On September 18, Elias phoned Dulles, who told him: “Look, you got your Herald Tribune job back. That’s enough. Don’t be greedy. It’s too greedy to want to represent two US papers.”
That summer, Elias stayed again at the Fairfax and complained to Louise Gore about intelligence-community surveillance and his belief that someone had accessed his room without permission and gone through some of his stacked files. Louise thought her friend was unnecessarily anxious but agreed to help test for wiretaps that may have been placed on his phone. He made prearranged calls to her at certain times, making cryptic references. Afterward, Louise told Elias that a friend, Frank Sheridan of the CIA, mentioned he’d heard from sources (presumably the FBI) disclosing the “planted” information. Sheridan warned her to stay away.
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IN THE WAKE of the Lamprakis assassination, Karamanlis advised King Paul that the planned royal state visit to London in July 1963 should be postponed. The prime minister feared more attacks like the ones the Queen had faced in April, and further trouble from the British Parliament. Not wanting to appear pressured by the left, the royal couple rebuffed the recommendation. Karamanlis resigned, anticipating that the King would call new elections and confident that he would be victorious. A State Department assessment, believing Karamanlis’s resignation had increased his appeal, concurred in this forecast.49
The monarchs went to London and the expected demonstrations took place. Most were protesting the continued incarceration of civil war political prisoners. Some demonstrators came with philosopher Bertrand Russell and his ban-the-bomb peace activist followers. Labour Party leader Harold Wilson and Deputy Leader George Brown boycotted the welcoming banquet. Queen Elizabeth was booed for associating with her cousin, Queen Frederika, who was also castigated by some for her past membership in a branch of the Hitler Youth movement.50
The King had set November 3, 1963, as the date for new elections. Center Union party leader George Papandreou, who hadn’t stopped running since his 1961 defeat, was ready with his attacks. After time away in Zurich and Paris, Karamanlis returned to Athens on September 29 to resume his electoral campaign as the head of ERE. That season, Elias published two major stories that had a significant impact on the election.
