BEFORE ENGAGING IN ANY RESISTANCE efforts, Elias wanted to understand what was already being done to block American support for the junta. Whom could he rely on, in Washington and elsewhere? Who shouldn’t be trusted? Who were new players and what resources could they bring? He didn’t want to rehash the activities of others and didn’t want others to be blindsided by his plans. His approach was non-ideological. He wanted allies from across the political spectrum. Organizing a powerful opposition force, then mobilizing it would take hard work, beginning with hundreds of phone calls, letters, and personal visits.
Elias first contacted influential Greek-American business and civic leaders in Chicago. Unanimously they told him that they identified as good Americans and, if the US government wasn’t seriously opposed to the junta, then neither were they. If the United States wanted to support the dictatorship outright, so would they. Although there were notable exceptions, voices from Greek-American communities, from New York to San Francisco, echoed these sentiments. The responses from Boston, Tom Pappas’s hometown, were even more strident, asserting that the political change had made visiting Greece more comfortable, and that those arrested, and perhaps tortured, probably deserved it. Known junta opponents were hissed at when attending Sunday services.1 These reactions were especially dispiriting because they stood in stark contrast to the overwhelming anti-junta sentiment among Greeks living throughout Europe, Canada, Argentina, and Australia. It was an inauspicious beginning.
After he arrived in Washington in October 1967, friends from Elias’s past visits eagerly invited him into a swirl of seasonal Georgetown cocktail receptions and dinner parties. A few who knew the story of his escape and difficult entry cautioned him to be careful. “There are people who are quite angry that you managed to get into the country. They will do anything to get rid of you,” warned Colonel Walter Bryte, after taking him aside at a gathering. “Don’t fall into a trap. Don’t do anything that will give them ammunition to deport you.” The German Embassy alerted Elias that the Greek Embassy wanted him sent back, also cautioning him that his D.C. activities would cause trouble for his friend Ambassador Schlitter.
One of the bright spots of those early months was his renewed relationship with A-list power couple Blake and Deena Clark, who welcomed him and his cause. Born Ruby Constandina Speliakos in La Jolla, California in 1913, Deena was a popular television personality who hosted award-winning celebrity interview programs and also had moderated Meet the Press.2 Although growing up with her mother despising her father’s Greek ethnicity, Deena proudly embraced her Hellenic heritage and “venerated” Elias and his strong personality.3 They made him a regular at events at their Kalorama Road mansion “Arcadia,” opening up important connections.
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IN DECEMBER 1967, King Constantine attempted a counter-coup, relying on close advisors and royalist generals whom he expected to help him establish an alternative government in Thessaloniki that would then overthrow the colonels. On December 13 he flew north, only to be faced with mid-level pro-junta officers who had learned of the disorganized scheme and arrested the loyalist generals. The King was forced to flee to Rome the next day with his royal entourage.4
That same month, Elias was asked by a dinner party hostess to escort an attractive divorcee who lived nearby. The woman, Ingrid Rodenberg, had an alluring combination of a pretty face, stylishly coiffed dark hair, and a lithe, athletic body from spending hours on tennis courts. Elias knew this was someone he wanted to see again. And so, he was happy to accept her invitation to join her and her children for dinner at their Massachusetts Avenue home on December 22.
Earlier that day, Eleni Vlachou, the exiled publisher of Kathimerini, had telephoned Elias from London to tell him that she had been interviewed by American television about her own harrowing escape from Greece in the wake of King Constantine’s failed counter-coup. The story would be on the news in the United States that evening and Elias did not want to miss the broadcast. After dinner, Rodenberg told him he could go watch the news on the second-floor master-bedroom television, while she bathed the children on the third floor and got them ready for bed.
While watching the news, he heard a great commotion outside the bedroom.5 Fearful that someone sent by the junta had come to assault or kill him, he locked the door and tried to call the Washington office of the FBI. The phone was dead. Suddenly, the door was broken open and three men barged in. “Who are you?” Elias shouted, “What do you want?”
“A friend of Mr. Rodenberg, the woman’s husband,” replied one.
“She doesn’t have a husband,” Elias snapped back, believing Mrs. Rodenberg’s divorce was ancient history.
One man reached for Elias’s neck and grabbed at his tie. They scuffled. Punches were thrown. Someone kicked him. Another man pulled a gun, held it close to Elias’s head and ordered him to undress. Obediently, he removed his tie and shirt. Even with a gun pointed at him, he balked at going further. He had on a truss and corset he wore to deal with the slipped disc he suffered from his imprisonment tortures. Removing it meant pain and limited mobility. When he refused to move, they roughly pushed him into a chair and forcibly tore off his pants, shoes, socks, and undergarments.
When Elias was completely stripped, he started to laugh to himself. “In a way I was relieved,” he recalled, “because here I was expecting a political attack, and I found myself naked.” This wasn’t the junta. These men were not there to kill or kidnap him. He was in the middle of a domestic squabble, not a life-threatening confrontation with the Greek dictatorship.
Elias broke away, ran onto a sleet-covered balcony, but it was too high to jump from safely, especially with his bad back. His screams for help in the near freezing winter night went unanswered. When he tried to go inside one man pushed his full weight against the door and another took photos of a shivering, naked Elias.
After about ten minutes, they let him in. They took more photos, including some of Ingrid Rodenberg, who was fighting another man trying to disrobe her after she had rushed downstairs. A man, later identified as her estranged husband Robert Rodenberg, took Elias’s trousers and wallet from the floor. The wallet contained about $400 in twenties, identification, and some personal papers. Then the group departed into the night with camera and gun.
Furious, Elias wanted to go to the police immediately to press charges. They talked with Ingrid’s attorney, who recommended that Elias first talk to his own counsel. In the wee hours of Saturday morning, December 23, Elias Demetracopoulos, distinguished journalist and a self-appointed leader of the opposition to the Greek dictatorship, walked from the Rodenberg residence to the Fairfax Hotel, wearing an overcoat but no pants, trying to avoid the yellow glow of the sodium street lamps and traffic headlights.
Elias spent Christmas Eve and Christmas at Doctors Hospital, where his physician and lawyer insisted he go to be checked out for assorted contusions, scrapes, hematomas, and piercing back pain that radiated down his leg. The day after Christmas, Elias met with his attorney, and together they went to the Third Precinct police station.
Between the holidays, Elias was contacted separately by John Richardson, former CIA Athens station chief, and Norbert Anschutz, who’d been political officer at the Athens embassy and served on the State Department’s Greek Desk. A coincidence? He thought not. They advised him to let the matter drop. Elias would not.
Rodenberg’s lawyer arranged with Elias’s lawyer to return his trousers and wallet. When the billfold arrived, most of the cash was missing. Demetracopoulos met with Assistant US Attorney Robert S. Bennett, who said it was an office policy to steer clear of domestic disputes. Elias would later learn that Robert Ridgway Rodenberg was a powerful Washington-area real estate developer and a founder of the original Baltimore Colts football team. Elias fully expected that Rodenberg could muscle his way around the Washington legal system, but he refused to be a “patsy.” Concerned that the incident could have an adverse effect on Elias’s yet-unfiled petition to stay in the United States, Ingrid Rodenberg went to the district director of the INS on December 28 to disclaim any wrongdoing on the part of Elias.
Elias learned that the Rodenbergs had started squabbling shortly after their 1961 marriage, filed for divorce in 1964, and since then had been engaged in protracted and bitter separation, support, and custody proceedings.6 Robert Rodenberg, having stopped all payments and filing for full custody just prior to Elias’s fateful visit, was now seeking fresh examples to strengthen earlier evidence of his wife’s adultery.7
Rodenberg and his hirelings’ account of the December confrontation was quite different from the reality experienced by Elias. Rodenberg claimed that he had broken into his own house with private detectives after returning early from a European business trip to find his unclothed wife blocking their marital bedroom door in order to protect a naked man hiding on their balcony. When they pushed into the bedroom, they found the bedding in disarray, male and female clothing and underwear scattered about, and two glasses of amber liquid on the night table. They took some photos of Mrs. Rodenberg and the naked strange man and left, taking with them his pants and identification. Their account made no mention of anyone with a gun or any scuffle with Elias.
It seems clear that Rodenberg’s group had come to catch Ingrid in bed in the middle of a tryst. They had been staking out the house, waiting for the bedroom light to go on, which it did when Elias went to watch television. Upon breaking in and finding no flagrante delicto, Robert Rodenberg decided to fabricate a scenario and document it.
Elias berated himself for getting entangled in such a smarmy marital mess. This could be a major distraction from his purpose in Washington. He was even more outraged to learn that, in early January 1968, Mr. Rodenberg had amended his divorce counterclaim, listing Elias as another co-respondent who had committed adultery with Ingrid.
Since the days of the false diagnosis in his Eginition medical record, he had refused to allow erroneous reports to populate official documents about him. A conviction for either the underlying crime or for perjuring himself in sworn testimony could adversely affect his immigrant visa standing. He directed his attorney to challenge the allegation. In an unlikely move for an alleged adulterer, he went on the attack, publicly calling for a full police investigation and demanding that charges be brought against the mysterious man with a gun—who turned out to be an off-duty D.C. policeman who was later investigated and found to be “a self-confessed liar.”8
Compromising photographs are an essential ingredient of a successful private-investigation divorce raid. Yet Rodenberg never produced any of the photographs taken that night, claiming they had been “lost” while being developed. This lack of photos did not vindicate Elias, however. Until the case was heard and adjudicated, the record would consist only of Rodenberg’s allegations and Demetracopoulos’s sworn denial. Those provided ammunition for his enemies at a time when the FBI was conducting investigations for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Among the interviews it conducted was one with Ymelda Dixon, the society reporter for the Washington Star. Although she was not the dinner-party hostess who had asked Elias to pick up Ingrid, Dixon nevertheless claimed to be the person “responsible for introducing SUBJECT and Mrs. RODENBERG.”9 According to the FBI report, prepared more than a year after the incident, Dixon “stated that SUBJECT was aware Mrs. RODENBERG was married” and she was “of the opinion that the relationship between subject and Mrs. RODENBERG still exists.”10 Dixon piled it on. Elias, she said, is “a single and attractive male” who “has charmed several prominent married women…and has had affairs with them…That he more or less operates as a ‘gigolo,’ ” adding that no one had told her of any incidents where money was borrowed, but that “by conversations she had formed this opinion.”11 Was Ymelda Dixon part of the hostile web Colonel Bryte had warned him about, Elias later speculated?
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ELIAS HAD SECURED his B-1 “temporary visitor for business” visa on September 28, 1967, by claiming he was a working journalist. Sid Goldberg of the North American Newspaper Alliance, referencing Elias’s years of connection to the syndicate, provided the necessary employment letter for his entry. But he was never a salaried employee of NANA, and clearly his annual freelance income was not enough to live on. According to the terms of his visa, he was admitted only until February 3, 1968, and required to notify the district Immigration and Naturalization Service office on or before January 25, 1968, of the arrangements he had made for his voluntary departure, including the date, place, and manner.
Elias knew he would never leave the US voluntarily. To him, there was no better place than Washington from which to organize an anti-junta campaign. But what to do? Elias’s enemies were real, and more than a few wanted to get him out as quickly as possible. From the moment of his arrival in October, negative reports and out-of-context information had been forwarded to INS from the CIA, State, and FBI.
Robert Brimberg was Elias’s angel. The federal agencies knew from shortly after Elias’s arrival that he was working on the Brimberg & Company payroll. But in accepting that additional employment, he was also violating the terms of his entry visa. Since well before Elias’s escape, his plan had been to quickly adjust his non–US citizen arrival status to that of a legal permanent resident, so he could get a “green card” and stay indefinitely. On January 10, 1968, Brimberg petitioned on Elias’s behalf for a so-called Sixth Preference classification—an immigration exception that provided for a change in status if a job were deemed essential and the quota for applicants from a particular country had not been exceeded.
Brimberg & Company’s petition maintained that Elias was uniquely qualified for the “economist and consultant” job Brimberg needed to fill—one that, not incidentally, required someone who had “at least three years as a foreign correspondent.” Unfortunately, no immigrant visa for natives of Greece was immediately available, and Elias was forced to turn to friends in Congress for help. The first to act was Emanuel Celler, the powerful and respected chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who had represented Brooklyn in Congress for nearly half a century. He was a passionate advocate for immigration reform, the leading architect of major civil rights legislation, and a fierce opponent of civil-liberties abuses.
On January 30, Celler called Lewis Barton, the INS district director, to express his concern for Elias’s life and personal safety if he were forced to return to Greece during the dictatorship.12 Oregon senator Wayne Morse and Indiana senator Vance Hartke made similar appeals.13 Responding to their concerns, Barton extended Elias’s stay first to April 3 and then July 3, 1968, but warned that, even if the Greek visa quota were solved, the background reports needed for prompt action had not yet been prepared.
In early May, Celler wrote to US Ambassador Phillips Talbot in Athens noting that the documentation originally requested in January needed for processing Demetracopoulos’s immigration case was still missing. He asked that Talbot provide “expeditious consideration.”14 Talbot had tried to block Elias’s entry into the US and eight months later was still in no mood to help. He told Celler officiously that his embassy had received the application on March 18 and “it would carry out, as promptly as possible, the functions required by law…[which] may require 2 to 4 months.”15
On June 17, 1968, to overcome the delays, Senator Hartke proposed trumping the quota problem by introducing Private Bill S3650 in the United States Senate, “for the relief of Elias P. Demetracopoulos.” The bill was assigned to the Senate Judiciary Committee headed by James Eastland of Mississippi, a cigar-chomping, scotch-drinking arch-segregationist. Although Elias counted a number of prominent Southern conservative legislators as friends, Eastland was not one of them. Eastland requested that the INS prepare a full investigation and report in twenty days, but, when it did not, made no further push.16
Over the summer, the INS gathered information from various federal agencies. The CIA, after admitting it had “no confirmed derogatory information” in its voluminous dossier, still fanned rumors, distorted facts, omitted evidence, and flagged areas to be investigated that could lead to deportation-worthy evidence.17 Tom Karamessines, the former CIA Station Chief in Athens, had since Elias’s arrival tried planting seeds of doubt that could overturn approval of the Greek exile’s visa. Promoted to deputy director of plans in charge of CIA dirty tricks worldwide, Karamessines sent a SECRET eight-page, single-spaced report to the INS, the FBI, the State Department’s Security Secretary, as well as the White House Situation Room. The essence of his case opposing Elias was that “the subject” had “been inimical to United States interests,” and “had numerous contacts with Soviet Bloc officials, many of whom are known intelligence types.”18 In response to Hartke’s private bill inquiry, Karamessines also resubmitted to the INS a vicious error-filled summary of Elias’s background that the Agency had prepared for Ambassador Talbot the month before Elias’s escape.
Karamessines’s strategy was apparently designed to convince a hyperventilating anti-Communist like Senator Eastland that Demetracopoulos should be denied special legislation benefits and deported. To further his case, Karamessines resurrected false information about Celia’s activities in Moscow and pushed Elias-as-Soviet-agent speculation, even when J. Edgar Hoover himself reported there was no supporting evidence.19 He pressured the INS to use raw CIA data, which it did, and to open a wider investigation to include the Rodenberg matter.20
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1968 WAS A tumultuous year, a year of demonstrations, assassinations, and urban violence. Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis. Cities erupted in flames and riots. From college campuses to the streets of Paris and beyond, from the Miss America beauty pageant to the Mexico City Olympics, social unrest rocked the nation and the world. Saddam Hussein usurped power in Iraq. And in August Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops marched into Czechoslovakia to crush the blossoming liberal reforms of the Prague Spring. American casualties in Vietnam jumped dramatically, and public support for the war declined. Senator Eugene McCarthy, running as a peace candidate, challenged President Johnson in the early Democratic primaries. Robert Kennedy entered the race in mid-March and less than three months later was shot to death. At the end of March, President Johnson surprised the nation by announcing he would not seek re-election. In April, Vice President Humphrey became the candidate of the Democratic Party establishment.
Elias Demetracopoulos followed these stories but was much more focused on news from Greece and his own immigration status. There was nothing to cheer on either front.
In Athens, the dictatorship entered its second year, with a dismal “illusion of normalcy.”21 Americans officially recognized the military regime on January 23. Others, from Britain to the Soviet Union, followed. Purges of Greek civil servants and senior military officers continued.
