Over a long luncheon in Schlitter’s dark-paneled office decorated with family heirlooms, they discussed the implications of the coup, and the likely crackdown on the press, which could limit, if not stop, Elias from earning a livelihood. Leaning forward, the tall, heavyset ambassador paused and quietly said, “If you ever need to get out of the country, to a place of asylum, I would make the necessary arrangements.” Elias thanked him for the unsolicited offer.
After leaving the German Embassy, Elias had second thoughts about the safety of staying in his own apartment. The Papandreous, he’d been told, had been arrested, and some people claimed that Elias was their “mouthpiece.” His old friend Kanellopoulos had been arrested as well. Elias’s book critical of a dictatorship had just been published, and he’d spent years making enemies. Most importantly, if the coup leaders were part of EENA, his repeated alerts about the danger they posed might put a target on his back. In any event, he was sure he could reduce his risks by staying with a remote friend or relative. He decided to go unannounced to his older cousin, Spyros Handrinos, whom he had saved from the Communists in December 1944.
Spyros lived in Koliatsou Square, about twenty minutes from Elias’s normal sphere of activity. He readily took in Elias, saying he could stay as long as needed. But Spyros was not master of his household. By the next morning his wife, Maritsa, expressed her discomfort at having Elias around. But with rumors of more than 10,000 arrests, Elias feared returning home. He largely kept to his room.
Over several days, Maritsa made clear that she thought Elias was putting the family in danger. She was particularly concerned that Spyros might lose his job as a hospital administrator. Both were afraid that their neighbors would say something, and she convinced him that their house was being watched. By midweek his cousin told Elias that Maritsa wanted him gone immediately. Spyros confessed that he had acceded to her wishes, though he did not want to dump his cousin out on the street. Elias did not argue, and Spyros arranged to have someone drive Elias north to the suburb of Kiffisia before the weekend. It was the last time the cousins would see each other.
Elias’s next safe house had been arranged by Daisy Schlitter, the wife of the German ambassador. It was an exquisite mansion on an old tree-lined street, owned by the family of Mary-Louise Karayannopoulou, the Swiss-born proprietress of Delicieux, perhaps the finest confectionery and chocolatier in the country. Her Kolonaki shop had a small restaurant on top that was a gathering place for the city’s social and business elites. It was unlikely that the house, home to Mary Louise’s parents, would be targeted by the junta. Elias stayed for about a month, while Mary Louise and a few of her friends discreetly dropped by to bring journals, newspapers, mail, and updates on the real and imagined happenings. Censorship of the press had begun. Persa was told he was safe, but he refused to contact her or let her visit, for her own protection.
Daisy was his most regular visitor. Her husband had been careful to remain diplomatically correct in his dealings with the new regime—so much so that it seemed he had no reservations about what had taken place—but Daisy was not at all restrained. Born a baroness in Potsdam in 1913, she had been discovered by movie director G. W. Pabst and featured as “Daisy D’Ora” in several of his silent films. Later she became a celebrated Miss Universe contestant, the toast of Berlin. As such, she was used as the model for blond, blue-eyed, Nordic-Aryan beauty, and uncomfortably required to attend an intimate piano recital featuring Adolf Hitler.19 Some of Elias’s colleagues would later gossip that Demetracopoulos carried on a torrid affair with the older, still strikingly attractive Daisy, using the Kiffisia safehouse as a convenient love nest. Elias angrily denied such charges. To have done so would have violated one of his cardinal rules of chivalry: “Never have an affair with a woman whose husband is your friend.”
During his weeks in hiding, Elias learned who was behind the coup, their agenda, and the uncertain prospects ahead. He thought the junta’s justification for intervention—allegedly to prevent an imminent Communist takeover—deceitful, their overblown metaphor of Greek democracy as a sick patient needing medical intervention stupid, and their claim to be trustees of morality and Christianity fraudulent. He heard disdainful comments about the small-mindedness and unsophisticated personal histories of the leaders, but Elias wouldn’t laugh along with those who ridiculed their apparent incompetence.
The Americans may have initially struggled to identify the players actually in charge, but Elias knew many of them from his earlier investigations, notably colonels Georgios Papadopoulos and Stylianos Pattakos. He was reluctant to admit that he had underestimated their cunning and feared they would use their anti-Communist bona fides to win American support and box in their NATO partners. Elias believed that top leaders in the US Embassy and CIA station may have been genuinely surprised by the coup,20 but that mid- and lower-level Greek-American intelligence agents were not. For many years it had been US policy not to assign ethnic personnel to sensitive postings in countries of their heritage, but an exception had been made for Greece because of the difficult language. Since World War II, Greek-American intelligence officers had dominated the Athens CIA station and, as oral histories later described, they brought with them or quickly assumed the extreme right-wing values of their KYP counterparts.21 Elias thought that, at a minimum, these individuals conveniently overlooked what they knew about the conspiring colonels, most of whom didn’t speak English.
As the days ticked by without any signs of international pressure on the new government to stand down—no landing of American marines, no counter-move by troops loyal to the King, no reports of any public resistance toward the dictatorship—Elias feared the worst.
Eleven articles of the Constitution had been suspended, but the Greek economy was in good enough shape to weather the initial shock. No immediate price would be paid for the populist measures that had just been announced. They would balloon public debt, but that reckoning lay some years in the future. Meanwhile, Thomas Pappas and others were quick to take advantage of the new government. Immediately after the coup, Pappas told his friends in America about the “stability and efficiency” of the new regime in Athens. According to an Esso-Pappas employee, on the day of the coup, Pappas “didn’t know anyone in charge. Within days he was on the first name basis with all of them.”22 His personnel director, Paul Totomis, was appointed minister of public order.23
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CENSORSHIP WAS THE first order of the dictatorship. There was an immediate news blackout. For the first couple of days, no newspaper was published. Three days after the coup, only three of the thirteen political dailies printed editions. When papers appeared on Sunday, April 23, they were “pathetic specimens,” all only four pages long, with identical texts announcing government policies, the names of new cabinet members, and the prime minister’s message.24 The regime proclaimed: “We prohibit any announcement, publication of information, or comment that, in any manner, opposes directly or indirectly the regime.” The next day the regime printed its fictionalized account of the manifest threat to public order that constitutionally justified imposing a “state of siege.” Readers were told that Communist disturbances in Thessaloniki in advance of Papandreou’s opening campaign rally had made the coup necessary.
Papers on the left were banned and their files seized. Some editors and journalists were arrested. Others went into hiding. When the authorities couldn’t find the publisher of Eleftheria, they took his seventy-six-year-old father hostage.25 Foreign correspondents tried to get their stories out, but often had their cables home interrupted or deleted. Foreign broadcasts provided what passed for local news; foreign newspapers and magazines appeared with stories clipped out. Then foreign editors shifted their attention to the run-up to June’s Arab-Israeli Six Day War. Regional correspondents left.
Several days after the coup, Georgios Papadopoulos was appointed minister of the presidency. Over the coming months he consolidated his leadership, becoming minister of national defense and prime minister in December 1967. He ordered Elias’s book banned and copies already in bookstores confiscated and destroyed.
After more than a month in hiding and learning that for now he wouldn’t be arrested, Elias returned to his flat. It had been broken into, his files and other personal property ransacked. Staying hidden in Kiffisia had likely saved Elias from interrogation, arrest, and possible imprisonment.
Press censorship affected principal as well as principle. Kathimerini owner and publisher Eleni Vlachou surprised the junta by asserting that she would not publish her newspapers under a dictatorship that abrogated press freedoms. Decades later, her obituary would call this her “finest hour…delivering a devastating blow to any hopes the junta may have entertained of co-opting the constitutional Right.”26 But as she told visiting New York Times publisher C. L. Sulzberger days after the coup, “she would lose more money by publishing now than by not publishing. She would get very little advertising as things are, and she [had] no reserve cash. On the other hand, she [had]a large payroll.”27
Other papers tried to continue, but there were few profiles in courage. Accepting censorship was safer than dealing with the vicissitudes of self-censorship. Elias knew that his editors were palpably afraid of what the junta could do to them and responded accordingly. It was clear what stories wouldn’t be accepted.
Briefly, and with difficulty, Elias tried submitting some copy that wouldn’t be immediately rejected. He refused to rewrite releases and “notes” provided by the government’s Press Control Service. He tried to get an exclusive interview with Richard Nixon when he stopped briefly in Athens on June 21 as part of a larger tour, but he wasn’t even permitted to attend the airport press conference. He had better luck providing tips to foreign journalists, like visiting columnist Robert Novak.
Elias’s income was immediately hurt. With his book banned, his publisher was unable to pay the promised book advance and royalties on sales. Ethnos cut staff and wages. The paper still hadn’t paid his expenses for his 1966 articles from Washington and said it would also not be able to pay him for salary arrears owed at the time of the coup. Ethnos had been a popular liberal publication, but since it was “politically unwise” to be seen reading it, its circulation dropped more than 50 percent between April and May.28 By August the paper was bleeding so badly that it decided to declare bankruptcy, but the military regime would not permit it. Instead, it forced the publishers to accept a four-million-drachma loan from the National Bank of Greece to keep publishing and ordered it to accept a government nominee to run things and a right-wing junior reporter as editor. To Elias this meant that an “unethical, sycophantic incompetent” had replaced an editor whom he had considered merely irascible.
Makedonia had more resources but struggled to survive in a difficult environment. Stories were carefully selected to avoid confrontations with the government, which controlled editorials and opinion columns, photographs, headlines, other news copy, and layout. Vellidis, the publisher, continued to pay Elias for articles and maintained much of his expense account, but said he would be cutting back on editorial content and would take far fewer of his stories.
At the Athens Post, where Elias had an ownership stake and management interest, the situation soured quickly. His relationship with erstwhile business partner George Skouras, already strained, broke down. Skouras held up monies he owed Elias and, with spineless opportunism, insisted that their centrist-left paper move hard right and embrace the new regime.
Between April and July, Greek newspaper circulation fell 40 percent. There wasn’t much difference in the content from one publication to another, and the same news was available on government-controlled radio. Demetracopoulos was largely living off his savings, and some support from his uncle. It was a dispiriting time. His self-image as an independent, fearless newspaperman was challenged by the new realities. The regime made clear that it saw the press as an extension of government. To people who suggested that draconian rules of the junta were only temporary, he replied that he feared that Greece could become another Portugal, where Salazar had ruled unchecked for nearly forty years.
Quite apart from being a journalist, Elias Demetracopoulos was a zealous democrat who supported political freedoms and human rights. He favored an “open society” capable of evolving and adapting to changing circumstances. He believed in robust public debate, compromise, and incremental reform.
He agreed with Churchill’s observation that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other forms.” Greek democracy in early 1967 was not working well, but neither had fifth-century Athenian democracy. For Elias the essential elements of a functioning democracy were simple: majority rule, with free and fair elections; respect for minority rights; an independent judiciary; and a free press able to investigate and criticize its government. The new regime failed all four tests.
Elias chafed under the restrictive rules.29 He knew he was being watched and assumed his phone was tapped. When former California governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown inquired about making a first-hand assessment and publicizing his findings, Elias was noncommittal, telling him “do whatever you think God would tell you to do.” Brown came and met openly one evening early in his visit with Elias and Margaret Papandreou in the lounge at the Grand Bretagne Hotel. An eavesdropper, ineffectively hiding behind a newspaper, monitored them.
As Margaret described in her Nightmare in Athens:
I hadn’t seen Elias since before the coup, and I was happy to see him out and free. He was one of Greece’s best liberal writers…and had important contacts in the United States…I pegged him as nobody’s agent but his own…
I wanted desperately to talk to Elias…We made a date at the Hilton bar for the next week, agreeing ahead of time tthat if he didn’t show up, I would try again the following week at the same time. Arrangements for seeing people had become complicated, along with every phase of daily living. No one wanted to use the telephone, and no one knew what his personal situation would be in the future.30
THIS WAS NOT an environment in which Elias wanted to work. He wanted to escape but wasn’t sure how to do it. In the days that followed, word went around Athens that Elias wasn’t keeping his mouth shut, and that those associating with him could also be in trouble. Greek officials spied on his meetings with visiting journalists, friends, and sources. The American Embassy and the Athens CIA station also monitored his words and activities.31
The challenge put to him the night of the coup by the Pesmazoglous rang in his ears: that he be a positive agent for change, not just a reporter of society’s failings; that he summon the spirit of his teenage self, the one that had led him to risk his life to fight fascism in his homeland. Now that foreign demon had been replaced by a homegrown evil. It was time to join the resistance. This time, however, whether driven by hubris or his own brand of philotimo, he did not want merely to follow others. He wanted to lead.
Over the summer, Elias confided in his friend Jean Back, the UN’s representative in Athens, that he was trying to find a way to get out of Greece. He wanted to fight to restore democracy from outside his country. Back suggested that a good exit strategy might be through a United Nations invitation to an international conference. He asked Elias, “Do you want us to get you an invitation to represent the Greek press at a meeting in Warsaw this September?” He was talking about that year’s UN’s Editors’ Roundtable.32
“The conference itself is not the important part,” he told Elias, and on August 5 the anxious Greek journalist received a formal invitation from United Nations headquarters in New York. The UN would pay participants round-trip air travel, economy class, and $12 per diem. That was the easy part. Now, how to obtain the necessary “special security exit” permit? He turned to his lawyer, who made an appointment to see Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos, now firmly in charge, to try to get permission for Elias to leave. The meeting was brief. The answer: “Absolutely not.”
Elias’s lawyer next approached Colonel Nikolaos Makarezos, the third horseman of the troika responsible for the coup and regarded as the most reasonable of the group. Formerly in military intelligence and now minister for economic coordination, he handled the country’s finances. In his office, Makarezos took the carrot approach. He said they’d let Elias go to the conference if he agreed to say positive things about the junta or at least stayed neutral at the Warsaw conference; if he played nice, he could even be rewarded with an ambassadorship to West Germany. The attorney took the offer to Elias, who refused the bargain on the spot.
Elias asked and received from the American Embassy in Athens a letter of introduction to the American Embassy in Warsaw. But beyond that he decided not to ask for any assistance from the US Embassy in either city, because he thought that Ambassador Talbot would be unhelpful. As his situation became more complex, he also became increasingly guarded in speaking to people from the larger American community in Greece.
He quietly settled his affairs. Elias told his attorney that he didn’t want the overdue money from Ethnos that the attorney had finally obtained by exploiting a provision in the junta’s new laws, because acceptance would imply loyalty to the regime.
The most emotionally difficult part of his escape strategy involved saying goodbye to his aging, ill, and blind father. An only child whose mother had died a decade earlier, Elias knew that, if he left Greece, he might never see his father again. He raised the subject at first obliquely, then directly, and, on his father’s name day in mid-August, told his father that he was planning to use the UN invitation to get out of the country, and that he did not know what his next step would be. The two men had a long and emotional conversation, more deeply personal than they’d ever had before. His father didn’t want him to go but understood that his son had no choice. The only other people he confided in were Persa Metaxas and Daisy Schlitter.
On September 5, the UN publicly announced the Warsaw Roundtable. Elias was listed along with the other regional representatives, journalists from Turkey and Cyprus.33 On September 7, he received confirmation of his hotel booking. On September 9, he received a letter from a United Nations official regretting “very much” to inform him that “earlier this morning I was notified by the Greek government of their decision to refuse your exit from Greece to Poland.”34
The news of Elias’s blocked exit spread from Athens to Geneva to UN Secretary General U Thant in New York, then back down the pipeline. The UN in Geneva telegrammed the UN in Athens to “suggest you immediately request Colonel Papadopoulos to intervene, stressing importance granting exit.”
When it looked as if the government would let him leave after all, he booked a flight on September 11 to Warsaw. But, after an internal squabble, the dictatorship said no. The UN again intervened, letting the colonels know that this Editor’s Roundtable had originally been scheduled for Athens, but had been moved after the coup. Jean Back, who had been furiously cabling his colleagues in Geneva and New York, warned Colonel Makarezos that if Elias weren’t permitted to go to Warsaw for another UN conference, its First International Symposium on Industrial Development, scheduled to run from November 29 through December 20, 1967 in Athens, could also be relocated. One hundred thirty-one governments had been invited, and about 800 persons were expected to attend, including representatives from the private sector. The Greek government was seeking foreign investment and public relations benefits from hosting the event and had already invested time and money in providing installations and facilities. The not-so-veiled threat hit a nerve with the Greek official most responsible for the event, and may have tipped the balance between the KYP, which had been adamantly opposed to letting Elias go, and the colonels, who had been vacillating.35
Despite ultimately granting permission, the government placed tough restrictions on Elias including a limit of US$200 on money he could take with him and making it difficult even to get through the airport. There, the authorities confiscated his passport (which had a valid US visa stamped in it) and exchanged it for what was in effect a three-day pass to go to Poland and return. It looked as if he’d miss the entire first-day program. As he raced to get to his flight, customs officials and other security forces intentionally and repeatedly delayed him with questions and engaged in debates with each other. It seemed as if the battle between the KYP and the junta continued to the boarding staircase of the plane.
