The second approach was to portray the investigation as a baseless, partisan attack. The President’s men believed they could convince the Republicans on the committee, but given the Democratic majority, they would lose if it came down to a straight party-line vote. House Minority Leader Gerald Ford was directed by Nixon to quarterback the campaign.40 After firming up some wavering Republicans, he targeted several pro-Nixon Southern Democrats, aided by White House operatives who warned that the administration would expose any violation of election law or other misbehavior, no matter how trivial or technical. The Nixon team did its homework well. Kentucky Democratic congressman William Curlin, Jr. remembered: “Certain members of the committee were reminded of various past political indiscretions, or of relatives who might suffer as a result of [a] pro-subpoena vote.” The White House also smeared Patman himself by associating him with the “known Communist agent,” Elias Demetracopoulos.41
In early 1972, as part of the administration’s effort to blunt Demetracopoulos’s activities, the FBI had gone to the Dupont Circle branch of the Riggs Bank, where the CIA had set up dummy accounts and regularly monitored legitimate customers. Elias had maintained an account there since his self-exile in 1967. The bank allowed the FBI to rummage through Elias’s bank records, and readily turned over a copy of a $150 check Elias had deposited into his account.42 The check was a reimbursement from Sartorius & Co. for advance payments Elias had made toward Patman’s transportation and other incidental costs associated with the June 1971 trip.
In June 1972, a New York–based FBI agent presented a copy of the check to George Kendall, president of Sartorius & Co., who had asked Elias to invite and escort Patman to New York. After confirming the connection, the agent warned Elias’s employer about Demetracopoulos, making his activities sound sinister, and invited Sartorius to reconsider the wisdom of employing him. Shaken, Kendall called Elias to terminate their relationship.
Then, in September 1972, as Patman sought to round up votes for subpoena power, Nixon’s men shared a curated Demetracopoulos dossier of lies and disinformation and gave it to members of the committee “in confidence,” including a secret cable from Ambassador Tasca charging Elias with being head of a “well organized conspiracy being paid by foreign power.” Demetracopoulos, they were told, was a Communist or perhaps even a double agent. These lies were bundled with the fact that Demetracopoulos had arranged the Patman speech, the honorarium, and coverage of all related expenses—a relationship that was completely lawful.
A third line of attack was to explicitly threaten that any committee members’ “yes” votes would be used against them in and after the fall election. Nixon had an ally on the committee in Democratic congressman Richard T. Hanna from California. Both John Mitchell and Henry Kissinger possessed FBI reports implicating Hanna in the receipt of illegal campaign contributions from the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. Hanna had been expected to vote “yes” for subpoenas, but, when he saw the Demetracopoulos dossier, he folded immediately. Hanna’s vote switch provided cover for others to change position. When the committee met on October 3 to decide whether to convene hearings with subpoena powers, the vote was 20 to 15 against, with six Democrats on the committee joining with the unified Republican minority in opposition.43 The failure to secure subpoena powers was enough to kill this first investigation into the Watergate break-in and any other political hearing until long after the election, even though the scandal was the only potential trump card available to the Democrats.44
In the last weeks of the presidential campaign, with heightened negative attention on Elias from the McGovern-letter reaction, the Patman Watergate inquiry, and the accelerating intelligence-community investigations, the State Department considered springing its own October Surprise in an effort to silence the troublesome Greek. Ambassador Tasca urged Washington to immediately declassify and release all of the summary reports compiled by four previous US ambassadors to brand Demetracopoulos as persona non grata. In a series of “Secret” oral and written exchanges debating the tradeoffs of such a release, State decided in the end to heed the observation of an unnamed Greek Desk staffer: “There are things mentioned in the correspondence that I’m sure we still don’t want to remind people of…I’m afraid that releasing this kind of thing in an effort to nail Elias would likely cause us greater pain than it would him.”45
23.Fallout from a Mutiny
UNDER NO ILLUSIONS THAT MCGOVERN would be able to stage an upset, Elias took some solace that despite Nixon’s landslide victory, Republicans lost seats in the Senate and didn’t win the House. He knew, however, that continued Democratic control of Congress would not assure support for Greek democracy.
Well before November 7, Demetracopoulos had arranged to go to Europe for Brimberg and other business clients as a cover for his activist agenda. From his luxurious Le Bristol hotel room in Paris, he looked down at the chic boutiques of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and reviewed a stack of telephone messages that awaited his arrival. Elias refined his crammed schedule and reached out to contacts representing different facets of his highly compartmentalized life. He prioritized a private dinner and a US Embassy reception with Louise Gore, now in her part-time role as UNESCO ambassador. His presence with her at the social gathering displeased some State Department officials, but Louise was a loyal friend and his most trusted pair of eyes and ears in Republican circles.
One of his more significant appointments was with Konstantinos Karamanlis at his tenth-floor apartment with a panoramic view of Paris. Less formally dressed than Elias, the former Greek prime minister said he would not return home to implement the so-called Karamanlis solution until there had been a strong transitional government in power for six months to a year. Elias also met with other Greek exiles in other European cities, exchanging intelligence on the growing weaknesses of Papadopoulos, the splits within the increasingly corrupt regime, and further troubles in the armed forces. Elias regarded Brigadier General Ioannidis as increasingly the real power behind the regime and predicted that his ascension would make matters worse.
—
ON THE CHILLY, gray, overcast morning of January 5, 1973, with snow forecast, an impressive gathering of notables, friends, and foes together, paid their last respects to Harry Truman at an invitation-only memorial service at Washington Cathedral. The Associated Press described those attending as “a dichotomy on the Truman Doctrine…Sitting only four seats apart were the Greek Prime Minister [sic], Stylianos Pattakos, representing his government…and the leader of the Greek exiles in the US, Elias P. Demetracopoulos…who sat next to Senator Edward M. Kennedy.”1
Three days later, the Nixon Administration signed a five-year agreement to move ahead with the plan to expand facilities in Piraeus and create “the American navy’s largest home port in Europe.”2 Sensitive to public opposition to the plan, the Greek government told the US it would decline the $15 million of military aid and pay cash for future armaments. Refusing to accept that his side had lost this battle, Demetracopoulos continued to inveigh against the deal. To buttress his argument, he shared widely an October 30, 1972, letter he’d received from Senator Frank Church, which described private meetings the Idaho senator had had with Israeli military intelligence. The Israelis were irritated at having been made a “shuttlecock” in a badminton game among Greeks, Arabs, and Americans. The “high military officials” clearly “did not consider US bases in Greece as essential to their security.”3
Despite his position of authority, Henry Tasca viewed himself a victim. He felt frustrated by repeated political interference from Nixon, Agnew, Kissinger, the CIA’s Jack Maury, and Pappas—all of whom played back-channel roles, cutting Tasca out of the loop and creating a constant stream of problems. Pappas was the worst. The Greek-American magnate was already part of the landscape when Tasca arrived, and the ambassador knew he had to deal with him, but, as he would confide later, Pappas was a constant irritant, working all the angles, cultivating the colonels, acting as an asset for the CIA and expanding his businesses in Greece. Tasca resented Pappas’s blatant disrespect. To make matters worse, Tasca often felt he had to keep quiet about the President’s pal’s wheeling and dealing.4
At different times Tasca discussed the untenable situation in which he found himself with Kissinger, Agnew, and Nixon, who indicated to him that he would receive his long-desired posting as US Ambassador to Italy. Tasca and his wife looked forward to the Rome-based ambassadorship and then a happy retirement in a villa in the Borghese Gardens, part of Tasca’s wife’s inheritance from her father’s childhood friendship with Mussolini. He thought he had the President’s firm commitment to make the change after the election. Elias’s State Department sources told him that it was a done deal, even providing the name of Tasca’s likely replacement.
Nixon, however, concerned about how to provide hush money for the Watergate burglars, had become more involved in the cover-up. When asking Bob Haldeman what Chuck Colson, White House special counsel and “hatchet man,” was looking for during the break-in, his chief aide replied, “Two things”: one financial, and the other evidence of a possible Democratic plot against them.5 In March, Haldeman told Nixon that Mitchell had advised that the best way to provide money to “keep those people in place” was through Pappas, “the best source we’ve got for that kind of thing…and he’s able to deal in cash.” There was only one ask, Haldeman said: “Pappas is extremely anxious that Tasca stay in Greece…and the plan was, you know, to remove him and put someone else in Greece, but Mitchell says it would be a very useful thing to just not disrupt that.” Nixon replied: “Good. I understand. No problem,” and then cryptically added: “Pappas has raised the money for this other activity or whatever it is.”6
Four days later, Nixon thanked Pappas personally in the Oval Office for money that was used to buy the silence of the Watergate burglars: “I am aware of what you’re doing to help out on some of these things [Maurice Stans] and others are involved in. I won’t say anything further, but it’s very seldom you find a friend like that, believe me.”7
—
IN FEBRUARY AND March 1973, the regime in Athens was startled by previously dormant university students, the “sleeping giant” that Elias had long thought, if mobilized, could be a powerful catalyst for change. Since late 1972, there had been signs that students were unwilling to accept government interference in matters of academic freedom such as curriculum selection and the election of academic committees. When students at the prestigious Polytechnic Institute boycotted classes, the regime overreacted, beat demonstrators, and made arrests. Strikes and demonstrations, articulating these and other grievances, spread to other colleges.8
The government responded by reasserting martial-law provisions that had been slowly relaxed. Demonstrators were threatened with immediate revocation of their student deferments. Newspapers were ordered not to cover demonstrations. The editor and publisher of the independent right-wing Vradyni, who refused to comply, found his home and office ransacked by tax investigators and police. Six lawyers who stepped forward to serve as defense attorneys for the victimized students were also arrested, held incommunicado, and brutalized at the special interrogation branch of the Greek military police, located opposite the American Embassy.9
The dictatorship easily survived the protests. The old political guard cheered the resistance, but workers did not take to the streets in solidarity. The army held, although some officers expressed outrage. Portraying the government’s overreaction as evidence of its instability, Elias used the Vradyni example to illustrate that the regime was increasingly being criticized from the right. He pressed for support from the American Newspaper Association and the Paris-based International Federation of Newspaper Publishers.10
The Greek government struck back, claiming that anti-junta New York congressman Benjamin Rosenthal had “incited” the recent student disorders at the behest of Demetracopoulos, a claim that even the State Department thought wildly “impossible.”11
Demetracopoulos’s reaction was to invite to Washington the celebrated exile Lady Amalia Fleming, the Greek widow of the creator of penicillin, to put a human face on regime brutalities through a series of congressional visits, press briefings, and fundraisers. The most memorable part of Fleming’s presentations was her playing a tape recording of the mother of Alekos Panagoulis plaintively describing the malevolent treatment of her son in prison.12 Elias followed up with a live rematch debate with Howard University professor Demetrios Kousoulas, broadcast to a national television audience.13 Three years before, in their regional television confrontation, Elias had repeatedly put the contributing author of the 1968 constitution on the defensive. This time the two got personal, with Elias eviscerating the professor’s apologia for the regime’s failure to restore democracy.14
The State Department continued to push hard to “get” Demetracopoulos by pressuring the CIA and FBI to find his “foreign principal.” A frustrated FBI complained that CIA information appeared to be contradictory and came from “less reliable sources” and that State had consistently failed to support its conspiratorial suspicions with any substantive information. Elias, it said, had been of interest to the US government for over twenty years but “to date, nothing has been developed through all available records to indicate that the subject poses a threat to the internal security of the US or is in violation of Federal laws under the jurisdiction of the FBI.”15 Acting director Patrick Gray recommended the FBI close its case, expressing concern that further action would result in allegations of harassment, intimidation, and infringement of constitutional rights.16 State and CIA pushed back, claiming that Demetracopoulos was much more nefarious than the FBI believed, and directed the Bureau to focus on Elias’s federal income tax returns from 1967 to 1971.
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IN LATE MARCH, the British Ambassador to Greece cabled London: “Real progress toward a restoration of democracy is clearly less likely now than ever.” But a fresh shoot of resistance was emerging from among members of the armed forces who had either been sacked, arrested, or voluntarily retired. Some of the remaining dissident officers considered a variety of clandestine and largely impractical plots. One of these conspirators, Commander Nikolaos Pappas (no relation to Tom Pappas), had picked up new information on the bitter factions within the junta from a talkative and zealously pro-junta lieutenant colonel while studying at the NATO Defense College. He made contact with a few like-minded active-duty naval officers scattered throughout Europe. He also passed his intelligence on to key Greeks in exile, including Elias.17
By the spring of 1973, Nikolaos Pappas’s Navy-led group believed that splits within the regime provided an opening for a revolt. They had a scheme that could succeed by working with Major Spyros Moustaklis, one of the few Army officers aligned with them. Moustaklis was a career soldier who had fought against the Nazis and Communists, then distinguished himself in the Korean War. Handsome, with deep blue eyes, a high forehead, wavy black hair, and the erect bearing of a proud officer, he was in charge of the small military garrison on the island of Syros.
The plan, scheduled to be implemented on May 23, involved taking over the island and setting up a military administration under the command of Moustaklis, who would then transfer power to a provisional Government of National Unity. Collaborating ships would blockade the Greek ports of Piraeus and Thessaloniki. If the dictatorship refused to resign voluntarily, the ships would isolate Athens from the rest of the country with gunfire and force a surrender. Previously scheduled NATO war-game exercises were to provide cover for the extra provisioning and movement of Greek ships prior to the onset of the rebellion.18
Two days before execution, leaks and betrayals alerted the regime, which moved to crush the resistance. Officers and politicians were rounded up and arrested. At home in Athens on May 20, Moustaklis waited in vain for the coded message that was to instruct him to go to Syros and put the plan in motion. He knew something had gone wrong. At dawn on May 21 he drove west for more than four hours to Messolonghi, where he planned to hide at his sister’s. Hearing that his five-month-old daughter had accidentally burned herself with boiling water, however, he returned home immediately and was grabbed by the infamous security police.
That same day, after Commander Pappas heard of the arrests, he decided to act on his own. He was already at sea aboard the HNS Velos. After starting the day’s maneuvers as if nothing were wrong, Pappas explained to his crew his intention to carry out the plan, warning that those who chose to join this mutiny would face serious consequences and urging that most—even though they expressed their solidarity—plan instead to return home to their families. Then, on the morning of Thursday, May 24, after news broke that two Greek admirals had been arrested for plotting to incite the Hellenic armed forces to mutiny and as the squadron sailed between Sardinia and Genoa, Pappas astounded the commanders of other NATO vessels from Italy, Greece, Turkey, the UK, and the US by removing his destroyer from the exercises and sailing into the Italian fishing port of Fiumicino.19
En route, he wired a message pledging fidelity to NATO and to the Greek civilization founded on principles of democracy, liberty, and the rule of law, principles he and his mutineers wanted to reestablish. He implored the free world and NATO to recognize the corruption and illegitimacy of the hated regime.20 Surrounded by Italian police boats, he asked for political asylum for himself and about thirty of his officers and crew. Two officers went ashore, indicating that Pappas would hold a press conference the next day. At the request of Italian police, they returned to the ship. An Italian tender and five Coast Guard cutters tried to block the Greek vessel from paparazzi-chartered boats and other civilian craft with Italian leftists aboard shouting support.21
The standoff continued for more than twelve hours as terms were negotiated among NATO officers, Greek diplomats, Italian officials, and the Velos insurgents. Pappas and his crew had to make sure that Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti would deny the Greek Embassy’s demand for extradition. After tense negotiations, the Italians recognized the special circumstances and granted Pappas and his coterie political asylum.
For days, the mutiny attracted positive international coverage. The Greek government claimed it was a royalist plot. But when Nikolaos Pappas spoke to the press, he made clear: “We are not royalists, or politically involved. We are Greek officers who can no longer tolerate military rule in our homeland.”
After the publicity faded, the refugees were on their own. Some stayed in Italy, others sought asylum elsewhere. Many exiled political leaders, such as Karamanlis, quickly backed away from the failed venture. Andreas was silent. The King wrote that funds were available only to help the immediate needs of the political refugees.22
The father of one sailor in the Velos mutiny wrote to Elias for help to get his son to America. Elias’s initial effort was unsuccessful because the American ambassador in Rome, former Massachusetts governor John Volpe, a longtime beneficiary of Tom Pappas’s financing, was disinclined to provide visas for anti-junta Greeks. Demetracopoulos organized an international campaign to raise funds for the mutineers. In September, Commander Pappas sent him a progress report from Varese, Italy. Listed were names and amounts donated or committed by King Constantine, Nikitas Venizelos, Konstantinos Mitsotakis, Elias, and others, with a question mark by the name of Karamanlis, indicating to date his non-support. Andreas’s name was entirely absent. Pappas thanked Elias effusively for being “the only Greek living abroad who provided such important financial assistance.”23 For all of the disparaging talk of his publicity-seeking self-centeredness, Demetracopoulos never disclosed this behind-the-scenes role.24
In Athens the rulers viewed the failed mutiny as an opportunity. For months, Papadopoulos, Makarezos, and Pattakos had been discussing the country’s constitutional future without coming to any conclusion. Should it be a constitutional monarchy with Constantine as king, or someone else as regent, or a republic under the presidency of Papadopoulos? On Friday, June 1, Papadopoulos declared the monarchy abolished. Greece would become a republic. He ordered a plebiscite in two months to ratify these decisions and announced that parliamentary elections would be held in 1974.
At a NATO council meeting in Copenhagen in mid-June, there was growing support for a serious discussion about the alleged impairment of Greece’s military capacity under the junta. While many delegates were reluctant to criticize the internal behavior of a member, several were prepared to do so directly, and all looked to the United States for leadership. Again, America shielded Greece from any negative action.25
Meanwhile in Washington, the Senate approved 46 to 41 a Pell amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act that would only authorize military aid to Greece when the US President, after a comprehensive review, reported to Congress that the Greek government was fulfilling its obligation under the North Atlantic Treaty. House hearings on homeporting provided another forum in which critics could question American policy toward Greece. The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research predicted the imminent fall of Papadopoulos. Secretary of State Rogers, in the face of congressional pressure, suggested that the second phase of homeporting be postponed. Obdurately, Nixon ignored his recommendation.26
The President, increasingly obsessed with Watergate issues, ceded much control of foreign affairs to Henry Kissinger, who by late summer would replace Rogers as secretary of state. Greece was not high on Kissinger’s agenda.
All of this was more unwelcome news for a frustrated Tasca, who by now realized he wasn’t going to Rome. In a private meeting with Papadopoulos, the ambassador modestly observed that the Greek people deserved a fair vote, triggering from the Greek leader an outburst of complaints about the United States. A diplomatic colleague observed that “Henry, who used to be so positive about the Greek regime,” had become “disillusioned,” feeling he had been “deceived” personally by Papadopoulos.27 However, when some in the State Department wanted to use the uncertainties in Greece as an opportunity to revisit American policy, Tasca allied himself with Kissinger in vetoing the suggestion.
