For more than a year, Elias had been seeking ways to stage a large public debate on the situation in Greece. He contacted Harvard international law professor Roger Fisher, who was the moderator of the PBS public-affairs program The Advocates, which used as its television format a courtroom setting. Fisher was skeptical, but Elias persisted, insisting the military funding issue was not dead, and suggesting proponents and opponents who could make for lively television, including Melina Mercouri. For weeks in early 1971, Elias helped producer Susan Mayer prepare the program, from arranging witnesses to refining lines of argument.3 Meanwhile, the pro–military aid side relied on the State Department to identify and vet their witnesses. When PBS announced the national TV debate in late February, it touted the participation of Mercouri, Elias Demetracopoulos, and Max Van Der Stoel, a Dutch political leader whose fact-finding trips to Greece had contributed to the country’s withdrawal from the Council of Europe. The only potential witness named for the other side was Greek-American Tom Pappas.
At the March taping in Cambridge, Elias’s side remained the same, with the addition of columnist Robert Novak. Pappas was replaced by William Kitner from the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, Kenneth Young, foreign policy advisor to Lord Beaverbrook’s UK newspaper chain, and former Karamanlis foreign minister Evangelos Averof.
Elias made his usual points that the undemocratic government was a security liability for the US and NATO, and that opposition groups across the political spectrum viewed military aid as symbolizing support for the junta.4 He swatted away his cross-examination and protected Melina from such an ordeal by pre-taping her appearance. (She nevertheless was attacked as coming from a Communist family and parroting the Communist line.) The other side said previous Greek governments had been “cancerous” and it would take time to resolve “structural deficiencies,” that the junta was Greece’s “last and best hope,” and that an arms embargo would turn Greece over to the Communists and make the Mediterranean a Russian lake. The national audience voted overwhelmingly for the arms-embargo side.
Elias’s manifold activities continued to confound the junta apologists. When pressed to define himself politically in interviews, he said he was a center to center-left anti-Communist who believed in free enterprise, free elections, and a free press.5 Then he would turn the tables by asking the important, unanswerable question: If the Greek government had such widespread support, why was martial law still imposed, and no date established for elections? If the regime won truly free elections, he said, he would accept the results. But he doubted that would ever happen.
Undaunted by persistent vitriolic attacks, Elias also poked back at Kissinger and Nixon’s foreign policy advisors with a series of speeches on college campuses and before civic groups, reworking his George Washington University and Hudson Institute material and provocatively questioning whether Greece could become “A New Vietnam.”6 The State Department, which sent someone to follow him and take notes, expressed surprise to the embassy that not only was his presentation “a spiel designed for right-wing audiences,” but that he would deliver it to “leftists.”7
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IN HIS ROLE as Wall Street consultant, Elias would occasionally invite members of Congress to New York to give paid speeches to different firms’ clients and business associates. In spring of 1971, at the request of Brimberg and the firm of Sartorius & Co., Elias arranged for Congressman J. Wright Patman (D-TX), chairman of the House Banking Committee, to make a well-publicized dinner speech to the New York financial community at Club 21. In June, he escorted him to and from the event.
While on the trip to New York, Elias told Patman about Republican fundraiser and tycoon Tom Pappas’s illegal campaign financing activities for Nixon in 1968, behavior Demetracopoulos planned to describe in testimony he would deliver to Ben Rosenthal’s House Foreign Affairs subcommittee a few weeks later. The evening was a success. Afterward, believing the plausibility of the illegal campaign-financing information, which reinforced Patman’s suspicions and doubts about the President, Patman urged Al Hunt, the Wall Street Journal’s national political correspondent, to check out Demetracopoulos’s story. Hunt, however, failed to do so.8
Meanwhile, Associated Press investigative reporter James Polk, looking for an angle to discuss troublesome aspects of money in politics, decided to focus on speaking fees paid to powerful members of Congress to address groups with an interest in legislation coming before their committees.9 Interviewing congressional staffers looking for some good examples, he hit pay dirt with Jim Pyrros, Detroit congressman Lucien Nedzi’s legislative aide, who told Polk about the Patman trip to New York. On June 29, the AP reported about the $1,500 fee and dinner. The payment wasn’t illegal, but Elias was angry because Pyrros’s tip to Polk had turned into a news item that made Elias’s behavior look unseemly. Pyrros apologized and thought that was the end of the matter.10 It would surface again in ways neither could have expected.
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STILL FURIOUS ABOUT Ambassador Tasca’s role in blocking Elias’s Athens trip a few months earlier, Senators Moss, Gravel, and Burdick asked Senator William Fulbright to demand the ambassador testify before the Foreign Relations Committee. They then made public their letter that charged the White House and the State Department, and particularly Tasca, with whitewashing their ugly behavior in “The Demetracopoulos Affair.”11 For days the State Department’s spokesman was besieged at his press conferences with questions he couldn’t answer. Henry Kissinger decided the President should be briefed on “The Demetracopoulos Affair,” and provided his own “Secret” memorandum concerning the “recent flap over a request by Greek ‘journalist’ and resistance leader, Elias Demetracopoulos, to return to Greece to see his sick father.”12 After the Greek press published critical wire-service stories, Tasca demanded a counterattack.13
The State Department believed “it would be inadvisable to openly discuss Demetracopoulos’s personal background with people on the Hill because “we would run the risk of exposure to charges of character assassination.”14 It decided instead to smear Elias surreptitiously, using Republican senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania and “key staff members” of the Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs committees to do their dirty work. State hand-delivered a one-page, unsourced account of the laissez-passer history, which claimed that Elias had failed to contact the Greek Embassy in Washington for a temporary pass.15
Fulbright and other members of his committee had become increasingly concerned that Tasca was too close to the colonels, who had failed to undertake promised political reforms. “The Demetracopoulos Affair” reportedly played “a significant part” in the chairman’s decision to dispatch in February two senior investigators from his committee to Greece to report back on the situation there.16 To Tasca’s dismay, they came with voluminous notes and extensive lists of persons to see. Greek officials bluntly refused to meet with them because of the “inadmissible character” of their mission, and according to an embassy report, the “Greek government’s heavy-handed surveillance of the visitors did not help the situation.”17
The sixteen-page investigators’ report noted the gap between regime rhetoric and the actual progress toward restoring parliamentary government and other freedoms. To counter reports that political prisoners had been released, it pointed out the new arrests that had followed. To refute government denial of torture, it described contrary reports from victims and their families and noted the government’s non-renewal of the agreement for International Red Cross inspections. Opposition groups described a “vicious circle” in which, because the Greek people believed that the United States supported the regime, opposition was deemed futile, and Americans then interpreted this absence of public opposition as evidence of public support. The investigators concluded that the regime “is able to exert more leverage on us with regard to military assistance than we have been willing to exert on the regime with regard to political reform. We see no evidence that this will not continue to be the case.”18
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IN 1971, “NEW Politics” congressional-rules reformers succeeded in opening up House subcommittee chairmanships and providing the staff resources to conduct investigations. Benjamin Rosenthal, a liberal New York congressman from Queens who was known for his consumer-rights advocacy and Vietnam War opposition, had been appointed the new chair of the Subcommittee on Europe. Several years earlier, Rosenthal had hired Clifford Hackett, an experienced Foreign Service officer who’d been a USIA congressional fellow in Congressman Don Fraser’s office, where he had become sensitized to the situation in Greece. In the days following his appointment, Rosenthal was regularly accosted in the House gym by his handball regulars, USCDG co-chairmen Fraser and Don Edwards, who urged him to make the situation in Greece a subcommittee priority.19
Hackett proposed to Rosenthal a series of comprehensive hearings on American policy on Greece. When Elias heard about the House inquiry, he eagerly offered to help. But, because Hackett knew his chairman came with a clear viewpoint, he insisted on making the hearings as balanced as possible.
Demetracopoulos was aware of some dissenting voices in the State Department and at the NSC who were recommending that Tasca meet opposition leaders and nudge the junta into lifting martial law, even if Nixon’s honoring of junta representatives in Washington and sending high-level officials to Athens provided a more forceful expression of American policy. One of these was Assistant Secretary and veteran State Department troubleshooter Joseph Sisco. Knowing that Demetracopoulos would be on the witness list for upcoming congressional hearings on Greece and probably quite frustrated in his recent dealings with some in the State Department, Sisco invited the exiled journalist to share his views in a one-on-one meeting.
Elias told Sisco that the administration was mistaken in asserting that the regime was moving toward parliamentary democracy.20 According to Elias, the problem wasn’t Papadopoulos per se, because Papadopoulos was a prisoner controlled by the military machine. “He’s not a demagogue like Nasser or Hitler,” Elias said. “He can’t arouse the population; he has no charisma. If he thought he had 51 percent of the popular vote he would hold free elections. If he had 35 percent he would go to rigged elections. But he has much less than 35-percent support and finds himself locked in.”
He warned about the already-strong anti-American trend in Greece. The United States was losing its traditional friends and allies. “When Kanellopoulos, Karamanlis, and King Constantine speak to me as they do, something is wrong,” he said, adding that he believed 80 percent of the Greek people were against the junta, though they were not yet prepared to die to overthrow it. Demetracopoulos advised that the State Department “double-check” the information it was getting from Athens, because Ambassador Tasca “has identified himself so completely with the regime and isolated himself so much from the former politicians that he can see things only in one way.” He described the ambassador as a stubborn man who had decided on a course of action and would not accept information that did not support it. He recommended that Sisco send someone he trusted to Athens, to make “an unhurried report on what is actually going on.” The essential thing, Demetracopoulos said, was for the US to protect its 20-year investment in Greece by reestablishing its bona fides with a wide spectrum of the Greek populace.
At the end of the meeting, Sisco told Elias he appreciated his candor and “would always be very glad to see him.” He added that he knew Elias cared deeply about the situation in Greece and had the interests of his country at heart.
Following the Demetracopoulos-Sisco meeting, Secretary Rogers sent a SECRET memorandum to Nixon cabinet officials and Kissinger asking to be informed in advance before accepting invitations to Greece, considering it “desirable to limit visits…to those cases where overriding need clearly exists.”21 Instructions were also sent to Tasca about the possibility of making contacts with the opposition. Not surprisingly, Tasca was livid. He worried that some, including the regime, might think State had begun to accept Elias’s appraisal of the Greek situation.22 The ambassador sent Kissinger a response headed “TOP SECRET SENSITIVE EYES ONLY,” advising Kissinger that there were “hazards to our interests” in meeting with the opposition and warned Rogers that prioritizing a return to parliamentary government was “fraught with great risks to security interests, with quite doubtful chances of success.”23 He directed his political counselor to compose and send to everyone on Sisco’s wide distribution list a SECRET four-page letter, challenging Demetracopoulos’s assessments as part of his “personal vendetta against the Ambassador,” revisiting outright falsehoods from Elias’s earlier dossiers, and describing Elias as a selfish opportunist and a “con man.”24
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THE HOUSE FOREIGN Affairs Subcommittee on Europe opened the first of seven days of hearings on Greece on July 12, 1971.25 Demetracopoulos strode into the spacious, high-ceilinged, brightly illuminated chamber impeccably attired, his thinning black hair combed straight back, his baldness and white teeth gleaming under the chandeliers. He chatted easily with committee members, witnesses, and reporters. This was a moment he’d been waiting for. Scheduled to respond to Rodger Davies’s State Department presentation, Elias was the third out of twenty-two witnesses. The selection of American University professor Theodore Couloumbis to open the hearings with an overview rankled him. He might be a decent academic, Elias thought, but he was a “moral eunuch” for standing on the sidelines during the past four-plus years.
Accompanied by a twenty-four-page prepared statement, Demetracopoulos began his testimony decrying the influence of Tom Pappas in Greek political and economic affairs.26 Rosenthal asked Elias, who agreed, to provide documentation to support his charges. Elias then summarized his analysis, including his warning that the dramatic drop in Greek military preparedness put NATO and American security interests at risk, along with a more recent alert about the risks of mishandling nuclear arms now stockpiled in Greece.
Elias forced the committee into executive session by offering to insert into the record a translation of a top-secret 1964 document from the chief of the Greek National Defense Staff.27 It concerned Defense Secretary McNamara’s response to Greek requests for aid, discounting the military threat to Greece from Bulgaria, despite its military superiority over Greece. Elias pointed out that alleged threats from a non-threatening Communist Bulgaria, hyped by both the Johnson and Nixon Administrations as part of their justification for lifting the heavy military–equipment embargo, was even more wrongheaded in 1971, when the Greek military regime was expanding its contacts with the entire Communist world, “notably Bulgaria.”
In the second half of July and into August and September, Defense and State Department officials as well as regime supporters and opponents provided more testimony. Reviewing the lengthy hearings transcript, historian James Miller concluded: “The most incisive testimony came from Tasca’s personal bête noire, exiled journalist Elias Demetracopoulos, who underlined the unreliability of Greek Armed Forces.”28
Tasca did not wait to testify himself before attempting to limit the reverberations from Elias’s assertions. Eight days after Demetracopoulos’s appearance, he sent an urgent telegram to Secretary of State Rogers and Attorney General Mitchell warning, in all capital letters:
DEMETRACOPOULOS IS PART OF A WELL-ORGANIZED CONSPIRACY WHICH DESERVES SERIOUS INVESTIGATION. WE HAVE SEEN HOW EFFECTIVE HE HAS BEEN IN COMBATING OUR PRESENT POLICY IN GREECE. HIS AIM IS TO DAMAGE OUR RELATIONS WITH GREECE, LOOSEN OUR NATO ALLIANCE AND WEAKEN THE US SECURITY POSITION IN THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN.29
TASCA COMPLAINED THAT those who regarded Demetracopoulos as simply an aggressive newsman-lobbyist concerned about Greek democracy or a “light-weight rascal” without any substantial following were seriously wrong. He maintained that while “smooth operator” Demetracopoulos “has always been mysteriously financed,” new evidence indicated his financial expenditures now exceeded previous lavish estimates and he was “giving financial assistance to various congressmen. “This suggests,” the ambassador wrote, that “he is…a subsidized agent” running a well-financed campaign that has “international ramifications.” He then implored Rogers and Mitchell to step up their investigations,
TO IDENTIFY HIS SPONSORS, HIS SOURCES OF FUNDS, HIS INTENTIONS, HIS METHODS OF WORK AND HIS FELLOW CONSPIRATORS.
WE SHOULD NOT BE MISLEAD [sic] BY DEMETRACOPOULOS’ PROTESTATIONS AS TO HIS PRO-AMERICAN SENTIMENTS…WE MUST LOOK AT WHAT HE IS DOING AND HAS DONE.30
AT THE JUSTICE Department, John Mitchell saw Tasca’s request as an opportunity to nail Elias for the crime of failing to register under the revised Foreign Agents Registration Act. Indicting Elias could sully his reputation, impede his attacks, and perhaps finally build a case to deport him.
Elias had never registered as a foreign lobbyist because he never represented anyone but himself. He was not on the payroll of any agent of Greece or its opposition. His lawyers told him that legally he didn’t meet the statutory definition of someone who should register. That did not stop the US government. James C. Hise, chief of the Justice Department’s Registration Section, was told by his superiors to get the as-yet-uncorrected transcript of Demetracopoulos’s July 12 testimony to help determine if any activities of the subject would obligate him to register.31
Despite SECRET memoranda—and hush-hush meetings held in person “because…the delicacy of the matter [made] it…advisable not to discuss it over the telephone,”—officials could not point to any direct evidence of a relationship between Elias and a foreign principal.32 Nevertheless, they declared their belief, based on an extensive knowledge of Greek affairs, that the subject must be acting for someone or some organization. State was eager that Justice “do everything possible to see if we can make a Foreign Agents case,” while simultaneously warning that any FBI investigation should proceed carefully so as not to alert the “very clever” Elias or any of his “powerful friends on the Hill (Congressmen and Senators) to whom he might turn with charges of persecution and harrassment [sic] by the Government.”33 When State asked the FBI to do another check, John Edgar Hoover personally resisted, telling his intelligence-community colleagues: “No information was developed from our [prior] investigation indicating him to be engaged in intelligence or subversive activities…In the absence of specific information indicating subject is engaged in activities which could be considered inimical to the internal security of the United States, no additional inquiries by this Bureau are contemplated.”34
Angry State Department security officials, unwilling to accept “not guilty” for an answer, continued to explore ways to strike back at Elias. Admitting in SECRET memoranda that there was “nothing in the FBI file that would be very useful in dealing with Demetracopoulos’ supporters,” they discussed how best to investigate his tax returns.35
On August 6, with his anodyne testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee behind him, Ambassador Tasca paid courtesy calls on Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon. Later that same day he had a heated exchange at the White House with Henry Kissinger and NSC staffer Harold Saunders.36 Kissinger, piqued, said he couldn’t understand why, if he could go to China, there was such a “fuss about not letting people go to Greece.” While he could “understand the necessity for some cosmetics to keep our allies happy,” he believed it was “none of our business how they run their government.”
Tasca griped: “You ought to see some of the instructions I get,” complaining that he’d been asked to meet with opposition members and let the press know it. Kissinger, his voice rising, snapped, “How the hell would we like it if the Greek ambassador here started running around with Senator Fulbright?” Then Kissinger trashed Joe Sisco, saying, “that Sisco operation is the worst disaster I’ve seen.”
Beyond Sisco, Tasca’s greatest concern was the ubiquitous Demetracopoulos, who, he said, was not only “orchestrating a campaign against him,” but trying to run him out of his job. Kissinger told Tasca there was no chance that he would be “pulled out of Greece,” saying it was “not the US policy to give the Greek government a hard time.” Kissinger assured Tasca that whenever he received instructions he felt were not in keeping with the President’s policy, he should “send a message to the White House by the back channel.”37 It was not clear to which back channel he was referring. Kissinger? John Mitchell? Tom Pappas?
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