ELIAS WORKED HARD to keep the different aspects of his life carefully compartmentalized. If he had to change an appointment, he never explained why, even to friends. Professional colleagues said they never knew Elias’s sources or friends, and his friends never knew his business associates. He held fast to his pledge to protect sources, even after the sources died. Former girlfriends insisted he didn’t drop his guard in pillow talk. An ideal extra man at social events, he would never reveal secrets whispered to him by his tablemates.
As a journalist, he believed that by closely guarding confidences he could maintain sources in sometimes-opposing camps, giving him better opportunities to ferret out underlying truths. Friends and colleagues could only speculate on what he did in the other spheres of his life. Persa, who didn’t know many facets of his American life, was his eyes and ears concerning the personal world he left behind. Telephoning and writing, sometimes daily, in loving prose, always addressing her envelopes to his “Robert Speer” alias, she was his foremost cheerleader, worrywart, and trusted advisor, and his best friend.
A November letter from Persa was the first sign that something was wrong with Elias’s father. Panagiotis had been hospitalized after running a high fever; the diagnosis was pneumonia. Persa had known Panagiotis for more than a decade, and since Elias’s exile she had monitored his health, visiting him more often than his own relatives and friends did. A skilled nurse, she tried to be calming in her communications with Elias but did not disguise the serious situation.
Letters changed to phone calls as Panagiotis’s fever spiked. His father said he wanted to see his son. Through Persa, Elias told him to hold on, that he would come as quickly as he could. Elias was shaken and desperately wanted to see his father before he died. The promise that he was coming itself had a beneficial effect. The eighty-one-year-old man rallied, and his fever temporarily dropped.
Although he suspected that the rumors of his being stripped of Greek citizenship were true, he had received no official confirmation of the fact. Fortunately, he now held an American green card, so he wasn’t stateless. Knowing that his father did not have long to live, Elias called the Greek Embassy, explained the circumstances, and requested a “laissez-passer”—an unusual diplomatic authorization customarily granted for emergency travel for humanitarian-aid workers that is not normally provided to private persons. Such a pass would allow him to visit Greece for no more than a couple of days. The request was treated with unhelpful coolness and no suggestions of a timetable.
Elias then informed his Senate friends of his father’s illness and his travel request. Democratic Senators Burdick, Gravel, Hartke, Fulbright, Kennedy, and Moss sprang into action, individually calling and sending telegrams to the Greek ambassador and addressing an “urgent request” to Prime Minister Papadopoulos through the American secretary of state.49 Would he allow Demetracopoulos, an only child, to complete a forty-eight-hour safe passage to visit his dying, blind, widowed father and leave “without hindrance of any kind?” They received no response for nine days.
Still, Elias started packing. Early on a Saturday morning his phone rang, and a familiar voice said: “Elias, this is Ted Kennedy…I know my colleagues are trying hard to get you a safe conduct pass. I’m calling to tell you, if they do offer a pass, I don’t think you should take it. I don’t think you should go to Greece. I’m hearing things that make me very uncomfortable.”
Elias replied: “What is it? Senator, are you telling me it’s a trap?”
Kennedy: “I can’t go into details, but I’ve done some checking. Elias, I’m saying that I fear that, if you go, you may never come back.”
Elias thanked him. It was sobering news, but the promise to honor his father’s dying request weighed heavily.
The same day, Secretary Rogers sent copies of the senators’ communications to Tasca, with “confidential” instructions, that in delivering the messages to the Greek government, the embassy “should be clear [they are] acting only as a routine transmitter and not as advocate.”50 However, Rogers did emphasize the “subject’s very influential connections in Congress” and that the embassy might “point out obvious public relations benefits to GOG [government of Greece].”51 State Department staff debated the matter internally and with the embassy staff over the weekend. Ambassador Tasca, like Briggs before him when confronted with an unwelcome task, took the weekend off. Rogers noted that “Demetracopoulos [is] in position to do far more damage to regime within the US if denied a visa than anything he might write on return from visit.”52
Three days after the State Department’s “priority” communication, Tasca had taken no action. On Tuesday, conveying no sense of urgency, Tasca asked someone in his office to ask someone in the prime minister’s office “about possibility of [an] answer.” He was later told the matter had been referred to its foreign office. Five days after the request was received, Tasca wrote to Rogers, telling him the Greek government had instructed its Washington ambassador to get in touch with Demetracopoulos to tell him he should apply for “Greek laisser-passer [sic].”53
The State Department and the embassy knew that Elias was without Greek citizenship and that simply appearing there in person could put him at risk for detention or kidnapping. Rogers and Tasca were clear with each other that they could not guarantee Greek government assurances that Demetracopoulos would be allowed to depart Greece since “someone in security affairs might attempt to have Demetracopoulos detained.”54 Tasca also speculated that the Greek government “may be willing to consider some deal for Demetracopoulos’ return,” bizarrely adding “knowing Demetracopoulos’ past history, Greek government may have decided he wishes come to Greece to discuss some such deal.”55
Meanwhile, nobody from the Greek Embassy ever contacted Elias. No one from the State Department told him he should initiate an application, and that same day—Wednesday, December 16, 1970—his father died.
Persa called. The funeral was set for Friday. Services would be held in the same chapel at the First Cemetery as they were for his mother. Because of the son’s notoriety, Greek newspapers, she said, had refused to accept the customary death notice. Elias asked that the funeral be moved to Saturday, to give him a chance to come. She promised to do so. Alone in his small, cluttered apartment, Elias wept.
Condolence calls and telegrams came from Athens, other European cities, and across the US. He discussed just flying home for the funeral, consequences be damned, but friends urged him not to. Alaska senator Mike Gravel told Elias he would travel to Athens as his stand-in. Clearly someone was listening in to these phone calls. Before the next day’s dawn in Washington, Tasca had sent an anxious confidential telegram to Secretary of State Rogers wanting to know “all the circumstances relative to Senator Gravel’s attendance at funeral.”56
Tasca’s first concern was that the government would regard the senator’s attendance as a “provocative political gesture, particularly if arrangements have been made by Demetracopoulos” for him to meet with members of the opposition. Tasca dreaded the idea of a Gravel press conference, or even Gravel’s just talking with foreign correspondents or trying to meet with the Greek prime minister.
Of even greater concern was the possibility that Gravel might bring Demetracopoulos with him, “in which case problems could become even more delicate.” Deputy Foreign Minister Christos Palamas had reportedly assured Tasca that the government would not “move against” Demetracopoulos provided he “did not violate any laws.”57 But it was quite easy to violate laws inadvertently under the dictatorship. If the government had taken away his citizenship, it was because he was by definition a lawbreaker. Tasca assumed that if Elias came he might not get beyond the airport before being grabbed for interrogation.
The ambassador’s most wild-eyed fear was that Elias would prove to be some kind of proxy terrorist, arranging through his contacts “some manifestation of violence, such as a small bomb.”58 This might provoke a heavy-handed government response, thus “demonstrating that conditions here are as repressive as he has been representing them to be.” In the end, an important Senate cloture vote scheduled for Saturday prevented Gravel’s Athens trip, but the Alaska senator asked that Tasca convey to the Greek government his “personal displeasure” over its handling of the situation.59
The day of the funeral was appropriately lugubrious, gray and chilly, with intermittent drizzle. Elias hoped that in his absence there would be a respectfully large turnout, but mourners filled fewer than forty seats. Regime-spread rumors of a violent disruption scared away some family and friends; the colonels still suspected that even without proper papers Elias would somehow appear, perhaps with a “small bomb.” According to Persa, mourners represented “a small but choice crowd,” including some journalist friends, a strong sample of junta opposition, from center-right to left, past and future ministers, ambassadors, Center Union loyalists, Apostates, and Alekos Panagoulis’s mother.60 The Bokolas family came, but cousin Spyros Handrinos and his wife did not.
Police appeared to outnumber mourners at the cemetery, and some participants, sensing danger, departed immediately after the church service. Plainclothes secret police from the chapel and a fierce cordon of gendarmes in blue trench coats, armed and ready, surrounded the two dozen mourners at the tomb. Some watched the ceremony while displaying their machine guns, while others faced outward, apparently on the lookout for Elias.
Legendary newsman George Androulidakis turned to Elias’s “nephew,” Dimitrios Tsalapatis, who worked for a “semi-outlawed” weekly journal, and said, “You don’t have to be here until the end. We don’t know what will happen.”61 The burial, however, ended without incident.
Afterward, in a long-distance call with Persa, Elias let down his guard, “I’m dying every day alone,” he confided, sharing his anguish with words that “crushed” her.62 She reminded him that he had “loyal friends” and needed to take care of himself so he “may be able to enjoy in full the better days that are sure to come.” His dearest friend described the funeral as “beautiful and dignified…just the way you would have liked it,” airbrushing the intrusive police presence. Persa tenderly told him, “Your father has left this world peacefully and with the hope that his son would soon arrive.”63
Senator Gravel and other senators protested to President Nixon, requesting he conduct a “personal and thorough” investigation of the lack of “humanitarianism” by the State Department and the Greek government to their request for safe passage.64 Asked about the senators’ request, a State Department official conceded to the New York Times that they had received no assurances that Demetracopoulos “would have been permitted to leave Greece after his visit.”65 For two days at daily news briefings, State Department spokesman Robert McCloskey fielded questions concerning the failure to grant Elias safe passage, finally acknowledging that American communications to the regime had not been as prompt as first stated.66
Tasca also confessed that he’d advised against pushing the Greek government to respond to the congressional entreaties. He reminded Washington that Demetracopoulos had been the junta’s “most aggressive and most effective critic abroad,” and the leader behind much of the negative editorial comment that prolonged congressional support for the arms embargo. “It would be imprudent to expect” that the Greek government “would be willing to turn their back on his activities,” he warned, and not seek to take some revenge. Humanitarian concerns, he explicitly recommended, should take a back seat to American strategic interests.67
Backing away in stages from earlier statements blaming Demetracopoulos for failing to apply for a laissez-passer that would have been readily granted, the State Department admitted that there had been risks involved: that Elias might indeed have been detained, tortured, imprisoned, or killed, and that the United States knew much more on this point than it was revealing. When William Timmons, Assistant to the President, promised the senators that Nixon would look into the matter immediately, he blind-copied “Dr. Kissinger” for “URGENT ACTION.”68
Years later, asked what he would have done had the laissez-passer been granted, Elias said he would have risked a visit to Athens, despite what he learned after gaining access to his US government files through Freedom of Information Act requests. Disclosure revealed one of the most mysterious items in the entire Demetracopoulos saga: a National Security Council entry, without accompanying text, dated December 18, 1970 titled “ACKNOWLEDGING SENS MOSS BURDICK GRAVEL RE MR DEMETRACOPOULOS DEATH IN ATHENS PRISON DATE 70 18 12.” If the word “prison” were eliminated, the index title would probably be a simple reference to correspondence to the named senators concerning their entreaties. The word “death” could be an understandable reference to Elias’s father. But the inclusion of the word “prison” clearly conveys a sinister connotation, hinting at the content of the missing file. It lends credence to the rumors of Greek scenarios to kidnap and kill Elias and validates Ted Kennedy’s early-morning telephone call of warning.69
Demetracopoulos’s battle to restore democracy in his homeland had clearly unnerved the military rulers and their American counterparts. Syndicated columnists Evans and Novak wrote a blistering account of what they characterized as “A Modern Greek Tragedy,” excoriating both the junta and the Tasca-run American Embassy for “the squalid handling of the affair,” which “casts doubt on the wisdom…of the United States in restoring military aid to Athens,” and raised questions in the Senate about continued American support for the regime.70
Undersecretary Joseph Sisco sent a confidential memorandum to Secretary Rogers that ended: “the Greek government has missed an opportunity to improve its image and perhaps even to disarm its most severe critic in the United States.”71 He then wrote to Tasca commiserating about the “brickbats” thrown in his direction,” predicting that “the ‘Demetracopoulos Affair’ will quickly recede into the wings.”72
The Demetracopoulos Affair wasn’t receding quickly, however. The Evans and Novak column was published abroad. Syndication and wire services extended its life. Letters to the editor decried the “callous ineffectiveness of our representatives in Athens.” The BBC and Deutsche Welle broadcast their own stories on the topic. In reaction to adverse media coverage, the State Department claimed reservations about Elias’s motivations and credentials as “a resistance leader.” It requested that the FBI and INS provide material to buttress an updated CIA profile, saying they were “particularly interested in the sources of his funds.” Two versions of their reports were prepared: a “sanitized” one for use with senators, and a full compilation of uncorroborated smears for the White House.73
In a December 30 news story, the New York Times reported that the press office of the military-backed regime challenged Demetracopoulos’s motives. It claimed “This gentleman was not interested in seeing his dying father. He was interested in creating a noise to the detriment of his country.”74
A month earlier, the dictatorship had announced that, before the end of the year, it would tell the people when elections could take place. But on December 19, Papadopoulos proclaimed that “as far as the question of the regime and the constitution are concerned, there would be no change in the coming year.”75
21.Pushing Congress
WITH THE ARRIVAL OF 1971, Elias persisted in arranging and escorting former Greek political leaders of different stripes to meet with US government officials, despite the secretary of state’s exasperated dismissal of these visits as “obviously stage-managed.” He brought former minister of justice Dimitrios Papaspyrou, the last president of parliament, and former minister Emmanouil Kothris to the State Department to meet with Near East Affairs Deputy Assistant Secretary Rodger Davies, who was in charge of the Greek Desk. Afterward, Davies prepared a memorandum mocking the visitors and their concerns about the regime’s continuing censorship and the embassy’s lack of a balanced view of the “true situation.”1
In early February, Elias was given an opportunity to take the measure of one of Tom Pappas’s closest confidants. Socialites “Pyma” and John Pell, cousins of anti-junta Rhode Island senator Claiborne Pell, had invited Elias to dinner with opera singer Maria Callas and Spyros Skouras, who would be in New York briefly on separate business. With all the dinner guests knowing the clear differences between the two Greek men, conversation generally steered clear of politics. Elias made reference to his friend Daisy Schlitter, whom Callas remembered when she was known as “Daisy D’Ora,” an ingénue movie star.
Elias was pleased to see the diva in such good form, especially after her mysterious overdose on medications following tabloid tales about her torrid relationship with Aristotle Onassis. He was touched when at the end of the meal she patted his arm and told him she’d like to hear from him privately about the situation in Greece. Skouras was more direct, inviting him to lunch the next day. Skouras was late, and Demetracopoulos left his office, snapping in a loud, exasperated voice: “No one is worth waiting a half hour.” Later that afternoon he received a call from Skouras, furious that Elias would “act that way in front of my people.” After Elias shot back with a reminder about the rules of simple courtesy, Skouras calmed down, apologized, and asked: “Can you come again?” Elias replied that he had no time left that trip but would be pleased to do so at some later date. They never met again. Skouras died of a heart attack six months later.
That fall, Elias reminisced with John Pell, who told him it was Skouras, on short notice, who specifically requested that Elias be invited, because he wanted to talk to him privately about Pappas. Elias wondered if Skouras had been acting independently or as an emissary.
Early the following year, Elias received a surprise call from Aristotle Onassis, asking to meet. Was this something prompted by Maria Callas or someone else? Elias wondered. Demetracopoulos knew that Onassis had helicoptered to Athens days after his 1968 wedding to Jackie Kennedy to discuss a $400 million investment package designed to bolster the industrial prowess of the dictatorial regime, and that Papadopoulos was living in a villa provided by the tycoon. Despite being furious with Onassis for cavorting with the colonels, Elias invited him to lunch at the Jockey Club, a place first made popular by Jackie Kennedy’s visits. Knowing Onassis’s reputation for lavish spending, Elias paid for everything in advance, tipping everyone with explicit instructions not to take any of Onassis’s money. And when Onassis opened his wallet, everybody, from waiters and busboys to Maître d’ Jacques Scarelli, politely refused him.2 Onassis told Elias nothing he didn’t already know about Papadopoulos’s shaky control of the government, but Elias used the opportunity to talk up the power and resolve of the opposition.
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ELIAS FLEW TO Europe on business at the end of February 1971 with a heightened sense of urgency. Exiled leaders continued to operate apart, each looking at their homeland from a different angle. Interspersed with talks about international economic issues with IMF and World Bank officials, policymakers, and academics, and appointments with clients of Brimberg and other Wall Street firms, he spent hours in meetings with often-frustrating political allies. He also telephoned European military leaders and exhorted them to call their colleagues in the States to exploit tiny cracks in Pentagon thinking.
