ROSENTHAL DECIDED IT would be useful to send Cliff Hackett to Greece during the August recess for a first-hand assessment from a diversity of Greek voices. In the late-summer heat of Athens, Hackett met with embassy staff, opposition leaders, and a government representative. Discontent was widespread not only among the opposition. Hackett also found low morale within the embassy, some of whose staff claimed that political reporting was being “subordinated to the exigencies of rescuing the ambassador and his career.”38 The Greek government representative told Hackett that internal Greek politics were not a “proper” US concern, and the Greek secret police followed him to his appointments, presumably to intimidate those he was interviewing. Hackett estimated that public support of the government was at 15 percent. He concluded: “nothing can change truly [in embassy reporting] so long as the ambassador remains.”39
Elias spent much of the rest of the summer on the Pappas memorandum he had promised Rosenthal, unaware that on August 25 the FBI, in coordination with the State Department and CIA, had commenced a new round in their search for actionable dirt. He wasn’t secretive about his work and, on August 29, a nationally syndicated column disclosed that on September 8, Tom Pappas, “a rich Greek-American friend and backer of President Nixon will…be the target of a 50-page blast before a House [F]oreign [A]ffairs subcommittee” delivered by Elias Demetracopoulos. He would charge Pappas with “misusing his high connections” and “urge a Justice Department probe of Pappas’ contacts with the White House, Cabinet, and Congress to ‘talk up’ the Greek junta.”40
In early September 1971, Murray Chotiner called Elias and asked to have lunch with him at the Jockey Club. For years, Chotiner, though dogged by a history of links to organized crime, had been Nixon’s consigliere in charge of malicious tactics.41 He had managed Nixon’s red-baiting Senate race in 1950 and worked with John Mitchell on the 1968 presidential campaign. In 1970, Chotiner directed Agnew’s campaign to savage so-called “radic-lib” candidates for the Senate, helping to defeat one of Elias’s better congressional friends, New York Republican Senator Charles Goodell. At the time of the Demetracopoulos invitation, Chotiner had left the administration for private practice, but located his law offices on the floor above the Committee to Reelect the President. He still had a White House phone.
Elias remembered being “flabbergasted” when he received Chotiner’s call. Elias had met Chotiner at social gatherings in the past, and had even once invited him to participate in one of Brimberg’s financial briefings in New York, an invitation Chotiner had graciously declined.42 What did he want now, Elias wondered. Whatever it was, he thought it might be prudent to have a witness to the meeting and so suggested to Rowley Evans that he come sit at a nearby table. Evans laughed off the request: “You’re joking. What would Chotiner want to do with you?” he asked.
Nevertheless, on September 7, shortly after Elias entered the Jockey Club and took a seat at his regular table—positioned inside the entrance to the right and against a wall, so he could see people coming in before they saw him—he noticed Evans seated alone at a nearby table. He rose to greet Chotiner, and at first the conversation was light and amicable, with Chotiner displaying an uncharacteristic sense of humor. They touched on topics from life in general to domestic and international politics, past and future. Then Chotiner became specific. He wanted to know why Elias was so upset with Pappas. Before his guest could give him a straight answer, Chotiner cut him off.
“Lay off Pappas,” Chotiner advised, deadly serious. “You can catch a lot of trouble. You can be deported. It’s not smart politics. You know Tom Pappas is a friend of the President.” Chotiner glared. His tone became increasingly menacing, and he repeated: “You know Tom Pappas is a friend of the President. You know what that means?”
The message was clear: You’re playing over your head. Pappas and the President will crush you. If you think things are difficult now for you, submitting the memorandum will only make matters worse. You may think your immigration troubles are behind you, but remember you’ve been stripped of your Greek citizenship. You have no country. If you don’t play ball, you can be thrown out of America as well. If you’re sent back to Greece it means torture, imprisonment, and probable death.
Elias kept calm, though discomfort and anger were welling up. After about an hour-and-a-half meal, Elias stood up and thanked Chotiner for lunch, but added that he still planned to submit the memo. Chotiner pursed his lips, slowly shook his head, and made his exit.
Evans was sitting too far away to hear any of the conversation but witnessed clearly the facial expressions and body language. He never again questioned the validity of a tip from Elias or thought his friend was “joking” about possible danger.
Back in his apartment, Elias remembered fleetingly the promise he had made to himself when he was recovering from torture in Averof Prison: that if he got out alive, he would not be brutalized or bullied by anyone, ever again. That certainly included Nixon’s henchman. Years later, Chotiner’s widow disputed the intensity of the encounter and claimed that Robert Mardian, the Nixon Administration official who had become close to John Mitchell during the 1968 campaign, was the one behind the strong-arming of Demetracopoulos.43
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FRIDAY MORNING SEPTEMBER 17, 1971, was still warm, but summer was turning into autumn. Elias took a cab up to the Rayburn Office Building on Capitol Hill and dropped off his “Memorandum Concerning Activities of Thomas Pappas” at the office of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Europe. Elias had structured his report as an examination of Pappas’s involvement in Greek economic and political affairs, followed by a description of the tycoon’s role in American politics and policy toward Greece. He described, with citations, how Pappas “sought and secured…monopolistic control over large sectors of the Greek economy,” and detailed the Pappas brothers’ support for the dictatorship, their links to American politics and foreign policy, and the use of Pappas foundations as conduits to the CIA.44
Pappas’s embrace of the junta, Elias wrote, had a “psychological impact causing incalculable damage” and constituted “meddling in the making of US foreign policy toward Greece” that furthered “simultaneously, their own financial interests as well as the interests of a ruthless military dictatorship” all at the expense of long-range US interests in that crucial part of the world.
Surprisingly, when it came time tell the story of the 1968 Greek money in the Nixon campaign, he did so softly and indirectly. A congressional committee, he reasoned, could do a better job getting at Pappas’s role in the laundering of what were presumably US taxpayer funds to aid Nixon’s presidential campaign.45 Nevertheless, he ended his submitted memorandum with a note of mystery:
The analysis and conclusions of this memorandum are ascribed to by many major Greek and non-Greek personalities whom this writer has polled on the matter before submitting this memorandum to your subcommittee. Finally, I have submitted separately to the subcommittee items of documentary evidence, which I believe will be useful.46
BUT WHAT HAD he submitted? Nothing, in truth. Years later, he characterized this deliberately misleading maneuver of his as “the birth of Watergate.” To him, the seeds of Watergate were sown in Pappas’s behavior during the 1968 election, then germinated after the September 1971 memorandum. During the presidential transition, when Hoover told Mitchell about Elias’s October meeting with O’Brien, the FBI director didn’t know exactly what information had been shared. Afterward, Nixon’s men fixated on finding out what damaging evidence Elias or others had on Pappas that could be linked to the President. “This is what made Mitchell and Nixon furious,” he reckoned. “They saw the paragraph at the end and went ballistic.” This September 1971 memorandum suggesting he had submitted likely incriminating evidence, but actually withholding submission of the documents, was, he believed, the accelerant that inflamed Administration “paranoia” about him and “set off their willingness to have me kidnapped and eliminated.”
There was method behind his stratagem, even if it wasn’t completely thought through. Audaciously, he assumed that dropping ominous hints of having secret, damaging documents, but not actually providing them, would make him a target for those who wanted the information. He was willing to play quarry with the expectation that his hunters would do something stupid in coming after him and could then be exposed in the press, in congressional hearings, and possibly in a court of law. He speculated that John Mitchell, pressured by Pappas and upset with Elias’s close friendship with Louise Gore and his knowledge of Mitchell’s romantic relationship with Louise’s sister, might be the first to crack.
Elias didn’t know what, if anything, Larry O’Brien had done with the 1968 Pappas information Elias had given him at his Watergate offices. Elias did not store his Fairfax hotel room files neatly in cabinets, but stacked them around his place according to a system only he understood. Although he was not aware of any recent break-in, he decided to move some documents to a safe deposit box and later gave his most sensitive materials to writer Christopher Hitchens to guard.47 If Elias was afraid of serious risks to himself, he didn’t acknowledge it, but he started carrying a heavy walking cane for protection.48
Rowland Evans and Robert Novak focused their attention on Pappas, believing that Elias’s report “is certain to lead to a formal summons” for the mysterious Greek-American industrialist to testify before Congress.49 After checking with their Administration sources, they wrote that Elias’s referencing items of documentary evidence was causing “extreme nervousness in the Nixon White House.”50
Elias made sure that other news outlets had the story too. Rosenthal confirmed he was considering holding hearings into Pappas’s relationship with the Athens regime and whether he had violated laws covering private-citizen dealings with a foreign government. Headlines from Kansas City to London speculated that “US may probe financier’s role in aid to Greece,” and “Probe of Greek’s Favor-Seeking.”51 Negative coverage included Pappas’s hometown papers, especially unwelcome when he returned to Boston for his late wife’s memorial service.
On October 20, Carl Marcy, the chief of staff to Chairman Fulbright, sent a letter to David Abshire, the State Department’s assistant secretary for congressional relations, asking about stories implying that Tom Pappas “exerts undue influence on US policy toward Greece.”52 The State Department’s November 3 reply, probably prepared by Greek desk officer George Churchill, praised Pappas as “a successful businessman with interests in Greece as well as the United States” who “has never exceeded the bounds of propriety or legality.”53
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IN ALL OF the years of following Pappas and his activities, Elias had met him face-to-face only rarely, in Athens in the early 1960s. During lunchtime on October 27, 1971, however, he was deep in conversation with Bob Novak at the Sans Souci, a chic French restaurant that was one of the popular “power dining” places in town, when suddenly he saw a well-dressed, bald, barrel-chested older man approach them quickly from several tables away. He was of average height, physically fit, and enraged, shaking clenched fists.
Elias realized immediately that it was Pappas. Temples pulsating, his face flush with amaranthine glower, the Greek-American tycoon ranted in English: “Stay away from me and shut up. You know who I am. Don’t mess with me. I can make big trouble for anyone I want. I can have you investigated. I know all the Wall Street firms where you work, and I’ll make sure they know all about you. You won’t have a dime. I’ll take away your livelihood.”
All around them people stopped eating and talking to watch the unfolding drama. Pappas repeated his threats and added: “When I’m done with you, you’ll be nothing.” With that, he quickly pivoted and returned to his table, without giving Demetracopoulos or Novak a chance to respond.
Elias was about to get up and go to Pappas’s table when Novak extended a calming arm and chuckled. He told Elias with a broad smile, “See, you’re having an impact. You’re doing your job.” Then, gesturing toward Pappas and his White House dining companions, he added: “If he’s that mad, you can be sure he’s told the President and his people. Get ready for their response.”
Shortly after the Pappas threats, the FBI visited Elias’s employers in New York with a long list of leading questions. Under pressure, a couple of firms terminated their contracts with Elias. Others cut back his consulting work. At about the same time, the KYP and Greek secret police conducted similar inquiries of his friends and acquaintances in Athens in an effort to aid the State Department in building its case for his deportation.54
Elias refused to back down. In early November, he distributed copies of Hackett’s confidential Athens-trip “internal memorandum,” which he got not from Hackett but from a subcommittee member.55 Headlines proclaimed: “A Bad Fitness Report for Envoy to Greece” and “US Embassy Morale Held Low in Greece.”56 This episode was too much for the embassy in Athens and the Greek Desk in Washington. Tasca, vacationing in Switzerland, was called back to Athens and threatened to resign. In late November, Kay Folger, a member of the State Department’s congressional relations staff, provided Roy Bullock, House Foreign Affairs Committee staff administrator, an anonymous memorandum that contained serious and unsubstantiated allegations against Demetracopoulos. Bullock was told it had been prepared in the State Department at the behest of Speaker Carl Albert’s office, which also received an identical copy. The plan was to have each office spread the scurrilous information.
When Elias got a leaked copy, he wrote immediately to William Macomber, head of State’s congressional relations, about the libelous falsehoods. Two days later, on December 5, Assistant Secretary of State David Abshire tracked Elias down in New York on a Sunday to apologize, assuring him that he had ordered an immediate recall of the memo. Rosenthal, who judged the memorandum “deplorable both in content and manner of distribution,” confirmed to Elias that he’d been contacted by Abshire, who had said the “blind” memorandum had not been authorized by him and “should be considered withdrawn.”57 In fact, there was a firestorm at State, with some wanting to double down on the attacks, whereas Abshire, who knew Elias from his days working with Arleigh Burke, doubted the allegations and demanded that the State Department claims be carefully verified. Preparing for a December 27 meeting between Abshire and Rodger Davies, the head of the Near Eastern Affairs (NEA) bureau, George Churchill was forced to admit “our files on Demetracopoulos contain mostly secondary material—compilations of information and the like. We simply don’t have the primary source material to do the kind of ‘Ph.D. research’ that Mr. Abshire has urged us to do.”58
Nevertheless, State continued to leak negative material, especially references to Elias’s alleged relationships with Andreas Papandreou and Melina Mercouri, and asked J. Edgar Hoover, personally, to direct a full FBI investigation.59 Rodger Davies, head of NEA, took steps to break Elias’s support in Congress and sent copies of his confidential note to Ambassador Tasca and Jim Potts, the CIA station chief in Athens.
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ALTHOUGH GREECE WAS not high on Nixon’s agenda, Vice President Agnew yearned to make a triumphal entrance into the land of his father as the highest-ranking Greek-American in the Nixon Administration. For much of the year, he had talked up his going to Greece only to have Administration officials quash the Agnew-generated press accounts.60 Instead of Greece, Nixon and Kissinger kept sending him on goodwill trips anywhere he could play golf, have his photo taken, and do no harm. Foreign policy was Nixon’s strength, and not to be shared with his vice president. Further, Nixon was considering dropping Agnew from the ticket in 1972.61
Agnew’s hometown columnist observed that with each new public disclosure linking Tom Pappas to the junta, the possibility of an Agnew Hellenic stop on his upcoming Mideast trip grew “dimmer.”62 Indeed, no first-tier leader of any Western nation had visited Athens since the coup. However, when Nixon changed his mind about representing the United States at the Shah’s lavish festivities celebrating the 2,500th year of the Persian Empire and designated Agnew to attend in his stead, Agnew beseeched the President to permit him to visit Greece as part of the trip.63 State Department staff attempted to convince him to give up this dream, but failed.
Elias viewed the announcement with forboding and cringed to read accounts of Agnew’s trip. He was not pleased to see television broadcasts of Papadopoulos and Tom Pappas alighting from the vice president’s helicopter when they traveled to Agnew’s ancestral village. Normally, Gargalianoi had a population of 6,200, but when he arrived there, according to Time, “the streets were lined with some 60,000 cheering peasants who had come on foot and by donkey and by chartered bus from miles around.”64
As the vice president arrived in Athens, Elias called press attention to Agnew’s 1968 endorsement of the junta, and his missteps since. Concern for the regime’s victims was not on Agnew’s agenda, nor did he make any attempt to meet with the opposition. He met Papadopoulos on October 16 and toasted him at a US Embassy reception. Tom Pappas took both men out on a yacht and hosted a “sumptuous” dinner in Agnew’s honor. The vice president praised “the achievements that are going forward under the present Greek government.”65
The British ambassador cabled his foreign office. While Papadopoulos’s warm words about the Western alliance made it less likely that Greece would opt for Cold War neutrality, he reported, the Agnew visit “strengthened the regime’s standing internationally,” which could make the colonels “more difficult and demanding in their relations with other allies, including the United Kingdom.”66
Press accounts noted that Agnew’s “unreserved support” for the Greek regime went far beyond the polite demands of protocol. Upon his return, Agnew told the President proudly how he had resisted embassy entreaties to invite some token opposition figures to the reception for him in Athens. Nixon gave his nod of approval.67
Three days later, after senators deleted a House provision to ban military aid to Greece, the US Senate defeated, at least temporarily, the entire US Foreign Aid bill—a signal of disapproval of the junta. Democratic Senator Quentin Burdick and Republican Senator Mark Hatfield each wrote Elias afterward to thank him for his “persuasive” testimony before the Foreign Relations committee, which they credited for affecting the final vote.68
22.Campaign 1972
FROM THE TIME THAT NIXON assumed the presidency, he was committed to assuring that his 1972 re-election victory would be sufficiently grand to obliterate memories of his razor-thin contests in 1960 and 1968. As early as January 1969, he met with campaign advisors in the Oval Office to design a strategy to win at any cost. The President approved a privately funded political-intelligence network in which loyalists would aggressively plug any embarrassing leaks and conduct sustained espionage—ranging from surveillance to wiretaps to infiltration—against real and imagined opponents. Soon, the Special Investigations Unit, aka “the Plumbers,” formed by the White House as a reaction to the release of the Pentagon Papers, escalated the range of operations to theft and sabotage. The Watergate planning and break-in was but a small part of a larger enterprise that included vindictive tax audits, attacks on the press, expanded domestic espionage, mail intercepts, and burglaries.
