On January 27, 1972, in the attorney general’s office, Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP) counsel G. Gordon Liddy presented the first of his elaborate “Operation Gemstone” covert operations to deputy campaign director Jeb S. Magruder, John Dean, and John Mitchell, who was preparing to leave Justice to become head of CREEP. By the March 7 New Hampshire primary, the Nixon campaign’s dirty-tricks unit had effectively crippled the candidacy of Maine senator Edmund Muskie, Humphrey’s 1968 running mate, widely considered the strongest Democratic candidate. Attention turned to the reform-wing campaign of Democratic senator George McGovern. Demetracopoulos’s close relationship with the long-shot candidate was well known to Nixon operatives.
Going into the race, Nixon was confident that the disproportionate Republican money advantage could overwhelm the cash-poor Democrats. The prolific fundraising of Tom Pappas, co-chair of CREEP’s finance committee, was one of the President’s best weapons; any disclosures that would implicate Tom Pappas as the bagman for an illegal funds transfer from Greece in 1968 could be explosive. Mitchell and Maurice Stans suspected that Larry O’Brien might still have in his files documentary evidence supporting such charges. Three days before the Operation Gemstone meeting, Elias received a concerned letter from Louise Gore.
I went to Perle’s [Perle Mesta’s] luncheon for Martha Mitchell yesterday and sat next to John [Mitchell]. He is furious at you—and your testimony against Pappas. He kept threatening to have you deported!! At first I tried to ask him if he had any reason to think you could be deported and he didn’t have any answer—But then tried to counter by asking me what I knew about you and why we were friends. It really got out of hand. It was all he’d talk about during lunch and everyone at the table was listening…If there is anything I can do—not that I know what—let me know.1
IN THE WEEKS before Mitchell’s outburst, fallout continued from the State Department’s botched attempt to undermine Elias with their blind memo to Speaker Carl Albert. Forwarding Abshire’s third reply to Demetracopoulos to his boss, John Dean, Deputy White House counsel Fred Fielding noted that State had given Congress “bad info that it will not stand behind if info becomes public,” adding “What a grande screwup!”2
Distancing himself from Mitchell, Dean tried to take charge, telling Abshire that “before I pass judgment on this beauty I want to know what was fact vs. fiction in the document.”3 A meeting was held at the CIA to decide who would conduct a time-consuming “exhaustive review” of Demetracopoulos files, because his dossier contained “sensitive correspondence.”4
While Dean and Abshire urged restraint, others in the US government were directed to attack. The State Department’s Intelligence and Research Bureau sent a SECRET memorandum to the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division enclosing a January 20 airgram from the Athens embassy. An FBI SECRET airtel purported that Demetracopoulos might be collaborating with Andreas Papandreou, perhaps in some violent anti-junta action.5 A CIA report depicted efforts to implicate Elias in Archbishop Makarios’s efforts to secure Czech arms for Cyprus.6 All the while, Mitchell’s Justice Department was attempting to confirm the existence and identity of some foreign principal behind Elias and thus nail him for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.7
On January 29, Elias attracted the administration’s attention for a different matter, when he became the first to disclose to the press confidential negotiations to home port the Sixth Fleet in the Athens port city of Piraeus. Elias opposed the “shocking and ill timed” Pentagon plans to use Greece as a permanent naval base on moral, political, and military grounds.8 Within a month, the House Foreign Affairs subcommittees on Europe and the Near East were preparing to hold joint hearings on the decision.
The idea for a home port in Greece had originated with the new Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt. The admiral had fond memories of his times in Greece and thought that tripling the current level of navy personnel by moving some 10,000 sailors and their families there would be good for morale, personnel retention, and budgetary efficiency. Foreign policy and strategic considerations were not his primary concerns.
American officials would claim that anti-Americanism in Greece was essentially nonexistent; that the addition of a huge American colony would have little adverse impact on Greece and no implications for current relations with the junta. For its part, the Greek government lusted after the deal, believing that in exchange for a few thousand homes, new docks, and ancillary facilities, it could strengthen its role as an indispensable American ally.9
By the time the House hearings convened in March, President Nixon had invoked national security and exercised his authority to waive the Hays amendment blocking the supply of arms to the Greek dictatorship. Angry junta critics blasted Nixon’s decision and the selection of Greece over other Mediterranean homeporting sites.
State Department officials blamed Elias for submitting a polemical memorandum and orchestrating negative testimony from others. Demetracopoulos argued that the homeporting proposal violated the essential purpose of the Navy’s “Mobility Doctrine,” which called for an armada able to operate independent of any shore facilities. Such land dependence, he warned, could jeopardize its flexibility. He pointed out the political risks of implementing a program without giving either the US Senate or the Greek people a vote on the matter.10
The Defense Department bulled ahead, refusing to supply important witnesses or provide documentation regarding other possible facilities. The State Department had opposed homeporting in Greece until Admiral Zumwalt invited Joseph Sisco to play golf with him at the exclusive Burning Tree Country Club.11 Afterward, Sisco and his Foggy Bottom colleagues flipped and began supporting Zumwalt’s fiction that Athens had been selected only after carefully examining fifteen other ports in the Mediterranean. State went so far as to backdate a hastily prepared analysis describing the disadvantages of every place except Piraeus, while Near East Affairs director Rodger Davies claimed that a home port in Piraeus would facilitate settlement of the Arab-Israeli dispute.12
In response to pressure from other intelligence agencies, the FBI expressed frustration that they had so much information on Demetracopoulos “it was frequently not possible to tell what information in the files related to variations of previously reported incidents or to incidents merely similar in nature to those previously reported.”13
Elias knew he was viewed negatively by American officials but was unaware of the extent to which some people he thought were his friends, or at least not his enemies, would undermine him. Mary Gore Dean, Louise’s sister and John Mitchell’s paramour, with whom he’d socialized for more than a decade, told the FBI that because Elias held liberal views he might be a Communist. 14
More significantly, for decades Elias had submitted stories to the North American Newspaper Alliance and thought he had a good relationship with its president/executive editor Sid Goldberg, his staff, and his family. He knew that Goldberg was a former American intelligence officer and a conservative Republican, friendly with the likes of Murray Chotiner and opposed to McGovern. But Goldberg had vouched for his NANA employment at the time of his 1967 escape and stood by him in the ensuing immigration battles, fully aware of his anti-junta activities. Elias couldn’t have foreseen that NANA’s manager and Goldberg’s right arm, Vera Glaser, would inform the FBI that Demetracopoulos had no substantial relationship with the news service and volunteer that because Elias was “single, intelligent and a good mixer,” he’d been asked to escort “very prominent” married women to functions and “taken advantage of the situation.”15 She did not disclose the names of his victims, she said, because she could not prove any of the allegations. At the time he was similarly unaware of the activities of Goldberg’s wife, Lucianne, whom he knew socially and who would later achieve notoriety as the literary agent who advised Linda Tripp to tape her conversations with Monica Lewinsky about Bill Clinton. In 1972 she was embedded by Murray Chotiner into the press team covering George McGovern’s presidential campaign to conduct political espionage and help produce “Democrats for Nixon” propaganda.16 While she pretended to be working for the Women’s News Service—part of her husband’s organization—she was in fact being paid by Chotiner to provide salacious personal gossip, private poll results, and schedule changes. Chotiner sent her reports directly to Haldeman on the Nixon campaign plane.
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SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT on Sunday June 17, 1972, five men broke into offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex and were arrested for attempted burglary and wiretapping. What would later become a great national scandal involving White House connections, cover-ups, and congressional investigations began as a minor crime story. At the time, Elias gave limited thought to what the burglars might have been looking for in the offices of DNC chairman Larry O’Brien. He did not know if any of the notes on his charges taken by O’Brien’s staff in October 1968 in that same suite had been kept in the office. News of Howard Hunt’s involvement brought back recollections of Hunt’s work with the CIA in Athens in the 1950s, but nothing more. Elias remained disappointed that O’Brien had not only failed to use his evidence in 1968 but had done nothing with that intelligence over the past three and a half years. What kind of opposition research were Democrats conducting on Pappas, Elias wondered. Little to none, he assumed.
In early summer 1972, Elias was most focused on convincing the Democrats to include a ban on military aid to Greece in their party platform. He had once been hopeful that Secretary of State Rogers might try to balance the administration’s clear support of the junta with gestures of support for regime opponents during a Fourth of July visit to Athens, but he soon discovered that no such pressure would be put on the junta.17 Even student demonstrations, scattered small bombing incidents, and a hit-and-run attack on the American embassy did nothing to deter the US government from its support for the Greek regime.
Elias’s critics maintained that he was such a publicity hound he wouldn’t give tips to reporters and columnists unless they featured or quoted him. In truth, Elias repeatedly found ways to pass along information with the explicit understanding that he would not be identified. He ghost-wrote correspondence, speeches, testimony, articles, and letters to the editor on behalf of United States senators and congressmen, and he used the role of anonymous “special correspondent” as a favorite stratagem, including with the New York Times.18 State Department and embassy officials lost track of how many articles in a variety of publications they believed were secretly supplied by the indefatigable exile.
As censorship rules changed, many Greek newspapers still hesitated to editorialize, but published their partisan views under the guise of straight reporting from their special correspondents abroad.19 Demetracopoulos’s old paper Makedonia/Thessaloniki used this approach, relying on their special correspondent, “L. Costis,” in London. When an American consular official asked Makedonia publisher Ioannis “John” Vellidis whether L. Costis was a nom de plume used by Demetracopoulos, he explained that Costis was a Greek graduate student at the London School of Economics working for the Times of London who had “a good connection in Washington.”20 Neither the school nor the Times has any record of an L. Costis being a student or employee during that time. When Elias was asked about the mystery years later, he smiled and said, “No comment.”
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BY LATE JUNE 1972, believing that Nixon would not change his policy toward Greece in the foreseeable future, Elias focused his presidential-election energies fully on the Democrats. The so-called Greek plank in the Democratic Party Platform on which he and the Committee for Democracy in Greece had lobbied heavily pledged that a Democratic administration would cease all support for the “repressive Greek government.”21 Elias carefully worked the raucous Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach that was dominated by “New Politics” reformers at the expense of party regulars. Demetracopoulos had friends in both camps and knew that Greece would not be the center of attention. Nevertheless, he personally delivered packets of information to all of the presidential candidates, asking for written support of the anti-junta cause.
Separately, he held discussions with McGovern and his staff regarding the importance of making American policy toward Greece part of the senator’s campaign. He wrote a public letter to the presidential nominee, praising his support of the platform plank and asking about “the specific ways” of implementing it if McGovern were elected.22 Two days later, McGovern and his aide John Holum, working with Elias on precise language, crafted a detailed response, also in the form of a public letter. McGovern said that as President he would terminate all aid to the Greek dictatorship, notify NATO of the United States’ “strict adherence” to NATO’s democratic preamble, and order a full review of the Nixon agreement regarding the establishment of homeporting facilities in Greece. He added that the number of US military personnel stationed in Greece would be reduced “to an absolute minimum.” Finally, McGovern would “sharply curtail” the number of visits to Greece of high-ranking US civilian and military officials and cooperate with NATO, the EEC, and the Council of Europe regarding their decisions on “participation by the Greek dictatorship.”23
McGovern’s candidacy may have been a long shot, but Elias believed that the senator was principled and, if elected, would become a leader in the fight to restore Greek democracy. The widespread attention to his involvement in the McGovern statement nourished Demetracopoulos’s large ego, but also made him a more valuable target for his Greek and American enemies.
Elias’s reaction to news of more special treatment from the junta for Tom Pappas stirred up new troubles. Demetracopoulos had blown the whistle years before when learning of the sweetheart deal Pappas negotiated in 1968 to become the first to bring Coca-Cola to Greece. To placate local fruit growers’ fears of competition from the soft-drink giant, Pappas had agreed to invest $20 million in local fruit-canning facilities. Quietly, on May 23, 1972, the regime enacted Royal Decree 72 A, scaling back Pappas’s earlier commitment to only $2.5 million. The reason: “lack of raw materials with which to construct the canning plants.” To Vima, one of the Athens papers for which Elias served as an anonymous correspondent, asked rhetorically how the raw materials unavailable to build canning plants for the citrus industry were in such plentiful supply to build plants for Coca-Cola.24
Over a June dinner, Louise Gore told Elias she had heard separately from a retired CIA friend and from John Mitchell that his criticism of Pappas had again been a topic of discussion in both the White House and the Nixon campaign. She also revealed that both had asked her to help stop Elias.
On July 20, Evans and Novak’s syndicated column mentioned that: “the facts in the Pappas–Coca-Cola case have now been submitted by Elias Demetracopoulos…to the House Foreign Affairs Committee,” and that Pappas’s lobbying for the dictatorship seemed “certain to swing tens of thousands of Greek-American votes, normally Democratic, into the Nixon column on Nov. 7.”25 The day after the column appeared, the FBI outlined for the CIA and State ways to depict Elias as having violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act. It also reported that, in cooperation with the IRS, it had started to look at Elias’s tax records.26
The American relationship with Greece was not high on the list of issues most voters cared about in 1972. Nixon nevertheless tried to spin McGovern’s anti–military aid position into a wedge issue for American Jews, long a loyal part of the Democratic coalition, by claiming that American aid to Greece and homeporting were indispensable for the protection of Israel. Elias quickly pointed out the absurdity of this claim, noting the Greek regime’s refusal to help the US aid Israel during the 1970 Jordanian crisis, its dependence on Arab oil and UN support for Cyprus, and its deserved reputation for being the most anti-Israeli government outside the Arab world and the Soviet bloc. Elias did not have to wait long before Greece, Arab countries, and even some European governments protested. The White House walked back the president’s remarks.27
The colonels’ regime made no official comment on McGovern’s letter, which was widely covered in the Greek press, but government spokesman Byron Stamatopoulos described it as “unacceptable” interference in Greek affairs.28 In late July he amplified his attack in the conservative newspaper Estia, characterizing Elias as “an agent of more than one foreign power,” who during World War II collaborated with the occupying Fascist authorities and received “considerable financial benefits” for his services.29 Justifiably angry, Elias engaged the legal services of Dimitrios Papaspyrou, the pre-junta president of the Greek parliament, to demand a correction from Stamatopoulos and Estia, but neither responded to his demand, and no Greek newspapers other than the Athens News would print Elias’s formal rebuttal.30 Stamatopoulos continued his vindictive campaign using the regime’s mouthpiece, Eleftheros Kosmos, to lambaste Elias and publish misinformation about him.
Meanwhile, the McGovern letter angered many in the Greek-American community. Editorials and commentary in US Hellenic papers asserted that “nearly all Greek-Americans…say that the people in Greece are happy with the regime in power.” Some criticized “prejudiced Greek exiled resistance leaders” who advocated “ultra-liberal policies.” Singling out Elias by name, they urged McGovern to investigate who was supplying junta critics with the “monies necessary for their large expenditures and lavish parties.”31
Conservative syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick made the case against McGovern’s Greece policy, characterizing the letter as “foolish” and McGovern as a “prize sucker,” naïve and inexperienced in foreign affairs. He warned that if the Greek government fell, Andreas Papandreou and his gang would install an East German–style version of communism. Kilpatrick reserved his harshest vilification for Elias, whom he described as a “one time political writer and minor journalist in Athens” who “never was a major figure in the Greek press…[and] is remembered in Athens as the author of a story in August of 1965 based upon a forged letter that gave currency to vicious anti-American propaganda.”32 State Department officials in Washington, who may have helped source the article, exchanged sniggering messages about Kilpatrick’s portrait of their target.
After an outraged Elias asked his right-wing and military friends, who had phoned to commiserate, to call Kilpatrick in protest, he and Kilpatrick met at the Sheraton Park Hotel. Only days later, Kilpatrick devoted his entire column to making “amends and amplifications,” under headlines such as “Columnist Eats Crow in Three Great Gulps.”33 In this retraction, Kilpatrick described Elias as a “handsome…personable bachelor” and “remarkable fellow.” Correcting all of his earlier criticisms point by point, he apologized for calling him a “minor journalist,” noting that the conservative weekly Human Events had described him as “the foremost political editor in Greece” and Herman Kahn identified him as “the distinguished political editor in exile.” He said Demetracopoulos’s “sensational” 1965 news story was a legitimate scoop. And he corrected his description of Elias as a left-wing hustler, noting his work for Brimberg and the diverse group of congressmen he’d successfully cultivated, including Senators Byrd, Javits, and Thurmond, who had “warmly inscribed” a photograph. “In the annals of high level lobbying, he holds a respected place,” Kilpatrick concluded.
This retraction so stupefied Elizabeth Brown, the political affairs counselor in Athens, that she asked the Greek Desk in Washington to investigate why Kilpatrick changed his mind. Exasperated by Demetracopoulos’s “remarkable talent for landing feet first,” Ambassador Tasca confidentially contacted Jim Potts, former CIA Station chief in Athens, to urge him to help dig up actionable dirt that would show that Elias “is not what he says he is.” And while Elias’s enemies were “nosing about” in Washington, the embassy passed on an uncorroborated rumor that Elias was in negotiations with Papadopoulos to get a “well-paying” job in Athens in exchange for his support for the regime and “disclosure of many secrets about communist endeavors to subvert Greece.”34
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OUTSIDE THE BELTWAY, Kilpatrick’s correction often failed to catch up to his original diatribe. Sam Nakis, the supreme president of Ahepa, the largest Greek-American organization, took on McGovern, contending that a clear majority of Greek-descent voters supported the regime. In a public letter to McGovern, Nakis wrote of his distress over the Democratic nominee’s reliance on “the self-proclaimed expatriate…whose profession of idealistic motivation is extremely suspect.”35 Shortly thereafter, Nakis stepped down from Ahepa to become vice chairman of Democrats for Nixon at the behest of its chairman, Nixon treasury secretary John Connally. This shell organization was largely designed to funnel campaign funds into opposition research and anti-McGovern dirty tricks. Connally directed Nakis to find and work with another highly visible Greek-American Democrat to attack McGovern and smear Demetracopoulos. Nakis chose John Rousakis, the Democratic mayor of Savannah. Using language that Nakis fed him, Rousakis prepared a letter to McGovern dated August 18, 1972, in which he claimed he was “shocked and appalled” not only by McGovern’s position on Greece, but by his using as his mouthpiece “an obscure Greek communist journalist.” Distributing it in late August with no one around would have been a waste. Instead, just weeks before the election, when there was little time left to respond, Connally, Nakis, and Lucianne Goldberg arranged to publish the Rousakis letter by circulating it nationally to Greek-American newspapers and clergy on Democrats-for-Nixon letterhead, as well as including it in a targeted mass mailing. Many months after the election, after the provenance of the letter text had been determined, Rousakis apologized publicly for making false charges.36
Other Greek-American groups and newspapers not directly involved in the Nixon campaign attacked Demetracopoulos as well, but none as virulently as Tom Pappas’s local Boston paper, The Hellenic Chronicle, and The Greek Proclamation Committee, an ad hoc group led by Pappas acolyte Constance Booras Roche and Nicholas Cassavetes, father of the Greek-American actor and film director. At the Fairfax, Elias received anonymous phone calls and letters threatening him with physical harm—these in addition to the death warnings that friends in the US and abroad learned about and reported to him. It is not clear whether a mysterious letter was spontaneous or part of the anti-Demetracopoulos disinformation plan, but a female reader in Muskegon, Michigan wrote to the FBI to say that the “obscure and suspicious” Demetracopoulos had played a role in the George Wallace assassination attempt and would now try to assassinate Nixon. Acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray forwarded her warning to the Secret Service, which had the primary responsibility for protecting the President.37 The episode was added to other fresh “Secret” Elias intelligence information, including a memorandum from A. Russell Ash of the National Security Council, FBI field agent interviews with allegedly “reliable” informants, and a new report drawing on the State Department’s Security Office.38 An even more invasive investigation of Elias Demetracopoulos’s personal life was about to begin.
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WHEN NEWS OF the Watergate break-in arrests hit Capitol Hill, the first member to pounce on the story was J. Wright Patman, the seventy-nine-year-old Texas Democrat and chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, whose New York speaking engagement had been arranged by Elias a year earlier. An old-style populist from the hardscrabble northeast Texas town of Texarkana, he was known for exposing miscreants who had engaged in what he deemed abusive behavior and economic injustice. His 1932 legislation for an immediate World War I veterans’ bonus had led to the Bonus Army march on Washington, and in 1970 he blew the whistle on the Nixon Administration’s taxpayer bailout of the “scandalously mismanaged” Penn Central Railroad.
Reading about the Watergate arrests, Patman recalled what Elias had told him on their train trip a year before. Sensing a connection, he recounted the 1968 Pappas money-laundering story to his staff and instructed them to conduct their own investigation by “following the money.” Within five days of the Watergate arrests, members of Patman’s staff were vigorously tracing the new and numbered $100 bills found in the burglars’ possession from Texas through Mexico and back to Washington. Working diligently, they identified the source of the four checks totaling $89,000 found in the Florida bank account of one of the burglars, Bernard Barker, a CIA operative who had been at the Bay of Pigs invasion. By August, they were preparing a preliminary report that alleged the involvement of Maurice Stans, the Nixon reelection committee’s treasurer, in a widespread money-laundering scheme. Patman surmised that establishing the burglars’ connection to the Nixon campaign could lead to the top of the administration.
At the time, the Patman probe was the only official investigation of the Watergate break-in. Patman’s staff, experienced in the way organized crime used secret, numbered, foreign bank accounts to launder money, was well-qualified to carry out this work. They prepared a list of witnesses to be interviewed. But on September 14, the first of them declined to appear. So, Chairman Patman decided to get from Congress the power to subpoena witnesses and documents, scheduling an authorization vote for his next committee meeting on October 3, 1972. The White House immediately launched a furious, multi-pronged attack on the Patman investigation. First, they challenged the committee venue as improper, insisting that any hearing would be unfair to the defendants’ civil rights given pending criminal proceedings. Patman countered that the committee’s planned investigation was “aimed at information far beyond the activities of the defendants…”39
