Most believed that, if the Pell amendment became law, the President would invoke his congressionally provided authority to override the ban in the interest of national security, as he had done with the Hays amendment the year before.
When Greece held a plebiscite on a new constitution on July 29, the question was rigged so that a “yes” vote meant not just accepting a republic, but approving Papadopoulos as its first president. Some in the Nixon Administration were “worried that something might happen” and predicted that a clear majority would vote “no.”28 Elias, however, assumed there would be enough intimidation and falsification to ensure Papadopoulos’s victory.
Some opponents urged a boycott, and abstentions ran high at 25 percent, but official results indicated that Greece as a whole had voted 78.4 “yes” for the referendum: over 80 percent in the countryside, 59.6 percent in Athens’ periphery, and 51.1 percent in Athens proper. Papadopoulos had his mandate. He was empowered, for seven years, to reconstruct the government as a presidential parliamentary republic, a “guided” democracy that would still be under military control. Tasca declared admiringly that the Greek president had “outfoxed them all.”29
After his formal accession, Papadopoulos broadcast decrees that included a general amnesty for crimes committed since April 21, 1967, and covering more than 300 known political prisoners. He abolished martial law and the military tribunals used to punish offenses against the state, and promised to hold elections in 1974 and to restore a freely elected parliament the following year. Some highly visible members of the opposition, such as Eleni Vlachou, Andreas Papandreou, Mikis Theodorakis, George Mylonas, Konstantinos Mitsotakis, Orestis Vidalis, and Melina Mercouri, were told they could return, even in cases where their citizenship had been stripped. The Velos conspirators were pardoned, but not restored to their military careers. Even Papadopoulos’s would-be assassin, Alekos Panagoulis, had his own special pardon, which he refused to accept.30
Most Greeks received these pronouncements favorably. Secretary Rogers expressed pleasure at the announced restoration of “political freedoms” and the promise of elections. Tasca returned to his pro-Papadopoulos stance, even proposing to Nixon, with Tom Pappas’s encouragement, that the beleaguered President pay a state visit to Greece. Kissinger vetoed the idea. Other US administration officials who’d urged pressures against the junta remarked that these liberalization gestures had tied their hands.31
Elias, however, saw through the rhetoric. Travelling in Europe, he said that although he was pleased for the released prisoners and their families, he remained “skeptical” of the government’s “true intentions.” He warned that “the junta still retains a very large repressive machinery which it can at any time apply again.”32 At best, the country was entering a “Portugalization” phase of modified dictatorship. Politicians were told that political parties, when they were permitted to return, would be monitored by a “special” Constitutional Court. The general amnesty covered only “crimes” committed within the jurisdiction of Greece. Individuals who had committed “crimes” against the Greek government from outside the country were not pardoned. Thus, although many who had lost their citizenship could safely return, others, like Elias, Karamanlis, and Lady Fleming, could not. Demetracopoulos wore being on the “unforgiven” list as a badge of honor. “Even if everybody returns to Greece, and only three persons remain outside,” he insisted, “I will be one of them.”33
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AMONG THE RELATIVELY unexamined decrees issued by Papadopoulos in October, but flagged as dangerous by Elias, was one that absolved “any lawyer or state official of crimes committed during the exercise of their duties related to the defense, prosecution, interrogation and trial of any form of criminal activity or acts related to them.” This was a move to block political prisoners from suing their jailers or interrogators for torture, illegal detention, or other maltreatment. The issuance of this decree was no accident, as the ordeal of Spyros Moustaklis and his family would eventually prove.
After the May 22 abduction and arrest of Major Moustaklis, his wife Christina went daily to the infamous Boumpoulinas Street headquarters of Asfaleia, the civilian security police, with food and clothes, but was repeatedly told that he wasn’t there. Finally, on Wednesday June 4, someone from police headquarters called to say not to come again, for her husband had been transferred almost immediately after his arrest to ESA headquarters. She knew what that meant. ESA was the Greek Military Police, an internal security branch of the Greek Army, known for its aggressively repressive tactics. It was controlled by Dimitrios Ioannidis, recently promoted from colonel to brigadier general and considered the most fiendish member of the ruling junta. He ran ESA as his private army. Ironically, the dank, windowless underground rooms of ESA’s Special Interrogation Section, where much of its torturing took place, was located at Freedom Park.
The paramilitary army officers at ESA believed that the treasonous behavior of a celebrated battalion commander deserved special attention. During the forty-seven days Moustaklis was kept incommunicado, he was mercilessly abused. All the while, he stoically ignored verbal assaults and psychological tortures and refused to provide names, plot details, or a confession. Day and night, music blared and motors roared outside to disguise from passersby the shrieks of other prisoners’ pain. Inside, no cosmetic precautions were taken. When torturers took rest breaks, they played recorded tapes of the same screams and moans. Moustaklis was ordered to relieve himself during “standing ordeals” and not permitted to wash or change clothes. When they finally gave him a bucket to use, they went days without emptying it.
His handlers quickly realized that it would take much more than routine beatings to get him to break. So, under the watchful eyes of Ioannidis, they turned to harsher methods. They struck him hard with iron rods and used electric cattle prods to burn him on his back and neck. They went after his genitals, beating his testicles with a braided steel whip and thin sandbags. And they pushed a long metal probe deep into his penis then heated it with a cigarette lighter to increase the pain in his prostate and bladder. The ESA withheld nourishment, then gave him heavily salted food and offered only soapy water to drink. Still Moustaklis refused to divulge any information, instead spitting curses at his captors, triggering more beatings, especially to his upper body and head, causing concussions.
Many of the torturers were young recruits made to feel part of an elite unit and specially trained to inure them to the tasks at hand. They followed orders unquestioningly, working in groups of at least two, because those in charge believed that a single torturer would not be as brutal. Moustaklis endured at least two different daily shifts. The first focused on his lower body, beating him black and blue. The second moved higher, and others attacked his head.
On May 26, unable to break his resolve, the torturers broke his neck. A blow to his carotid artery was so strong that it created a clot that blocked blood to the brain, causing a stroke. Moustaklis was paralyzed and unable to speak. For about a day, he was left in a room without any medical attention. Later, guards wearing civilian clothes transferred Moustaklis to the neurology clinic at Military Hospital 401 under a pseudonym, “Michailidis,” telling the admissions personnel that he had suffered a cerebral stroke connected with a traffic accident.
Not knowing he had been removed weeks before, Christina, a dentist with a busy practice, went daily to ESA headquarters, unsuccessfully imploring that she be allowed to see her husband. On July 7, she was finally told that he had fallen ill and been hospitalized. They gave no details, saying only that she could see him in ten days. When she returned, the ESA’s army doctor—the “traffic controller” whose job it was to ensure that victims stayed alive for more interrogations and torture—explained that her “husband has suffered a thrombosis of the internal carotid. You understand how these things happen.” Christina did not understand any such thing. The last time she saw Spyros he had been completely healthy. Driven in a private car to Military Hospital 401, Christina was horrified by her husband’s medical record shown her by another military doctor: the date on one of the X-rays was May 27, more than a month earlier.
Armed guards patrolled the hospital floors. Spyros’s room was in the hospital’s psychiatric section. Seeing her husband again was “appalling,” Christina vividly recalled forty years later. “I did not see a man but a ghost, a human vegetable with the dreadful mask of a stroke case. I tried to control myself.” That he recognized her was the only positive sign. The military doctor, visibly uncomfortable, told her he was “not responsible,” and took off some of the bandages to reveal two huge wounds on the right heel and right shoulder, which he called bedsores. After he left for a brief moment, Spyros gestured to his wife to uncover him and look. Christina saw that “besides the two wounds, his hips, thighs and genital organs were black.” Moustaklis was communicating with nods since he could not speak.
Major Moustaklis remained at this military hospital, receiving minimal medical attention, until Papadopoulos declared amnesty for prisoners in July. Then Christina had him transferred to a better facility for injury, paralysis, and neurological deficits. The prognosis was bleak.
Christina knew of Elias Demetracopoulos by reputation as a well-connected journalist and the “soul and voice of Greece, beyond the Atlantic” and wrote him asking for assistance.34 Elias replied that he had not been included in the government’s amnesty list and could not come to Athens, but he wanted to help. After reaching out to medical specialists in the US and Europe, Demetracopoulos contacted a highly recommended neurosurgeon in London, Dr. Peter Schurr, who agreed to fly to Athens at Elias’s expense to examine Spyros. After the examination, Dr. Schurr recommended, in lieu of surgery, “a rigorous program of physiotherapy and speech therapy.”
Elias also contacted Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Leon Eisenberg, who had been in Athens earlier in the year to testify as a character witness for a Greek pediatrician sentenced to prison on charges of planting bombs as a protest. Elias asked him to fly again to Athens, at Elias’s expense, to see Spyros and provide a second opinion about diagnosis and the best venue for treatment. His recommendation, like Schurr’s, was for a carefully designed course of physical therapy. The best place for such treatment: Walter Reed Army Medical Center. But when Elias contacted the facility he was told that—for a variety of reasons—Major Moustaklis was ineligible.
24.Watergate, Window Dressing, and a Counter-Coup
CONVICTIONS OF MEMBERS OF THE Plumbers’ Unit were followed in April 1973 by suspicious White House resignations and firings. In May, Senator George McGovern gave Senate Watergate Committee investigators evidence linking Savannah mayor John Rousakis to John Connally’s Democrats-for-Nixon smear campaign against Elias Demetracopoulos.1 It was the first time Nixon’s former treasury secretary was publicly connected to the Watergate scandal.
To avoid being sued for libel, Rousakis had already made a public apology for calling Elias a Communist, but on May 17—the afternoon the nationally televised hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Elections began—the Savannah mayor, worried about being drawn into the larger Watergate investigation, called Elias’s attorney Warren Woods to “confess” that “the drafting and circulation of the anti-McGovern letter was orchestrated by the Democrats for Nixon,” specifically Murray Chotiner and Lucianne Goldberg.2 The Senate Watergate investigation became a riveting national soap opera, feeding speculation as to how high the criminal behavior went.
This attempt to turn Greek-American voters against McGovern’s candidacy quickly became a topic in confidential State Department–Athens embassy correspondence. “Elias is still riding high around here,” wrote a Greek Desk official. “Last I heard he was green with envy that the whole Watergate scandal should take place without his participation,” and was trying hard to “cut himself in.”3
Far from trying to “cut himself in,” Elias in fact made sure to avoid efforts to drag him into the middle of Nixon’s Watergate defense. Not long after the public hearings opened, the Washington Post reported that John Dean had told investigators that he’d discussed the cover-up with President Nixon at least thirty-five times. And in early June, Watergate prosecutors found a memo addressed to John Ehrlichman detailing plans to burglarize the office of Pentagon Papers defendant Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. In response, Nixon discussed with his team the idea of trying to change the story by exposing similar behavior in previous Democratic administrations.
About a month before, on May 17, after John Dean was fired and started leaking stories, Joseph Fred Buzhardt was appointed White House counsel to deal with Watergate. Buzhardt had once been on the staff of Senator Strom Thurmond, and in his recent position as general counsel to the Pentagon, he had dealt with such troubling matters as the My Lai massacre and the Pentagon Papers. Nonetheless, he found the difficulties of his new job staggering as incriminating evidence against the President seemed to accumulate daily.4
According to the President, surreptitious entries and wiretaps were commonplace during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. “This has been going on for twenty years,” Nixon said. “It is the worst kind of hypocrisy for the Democrats to make so much of it.”5 Others had also heard Capitol Hill rumors of FBI wiretaps on congressmen and reporters. But how to prove it? Buzhardt, known for his intellect, honesty, and Christian rectitude, agreed with Nixon’s desire to mount a counter-offensive documenting that break-ins did not start with Watergate. He pressured Eliot Richardson to compile a list of questionable “national security wiretaps” authorized by previous attorneys general. However, the FBI apparently did not keep written records of its illegal break-ins. John Dean had also been asked to prepare such a list and came up with nothing. With the televised Watergate hearings underway, Nixon rode Buzhardt hard to find something usable.
Under great stress, Buzhardt had an idea that Demetracopoulos could help. He had known Elias since his time with Thurmond, and he remembered his Greek friend’s story about the Kennedy Administration authorizing a break-in at his office in Athens following the 1961 Arleigh Burke interview. As general counsel to the Defense Department, Buzhardt had access to federal-agency classified information about Demetracopoulos and may well have had prior knowledge of records of pre-Nixon wiretaps and break-ins at Elias’s Washington residence that could have helped the President’s case. As Nixon’s counsel, his access to information had accelerated exponentially. Contained in one of Elias’s Defense Department files, prepared by the Naval Investigative Service, was a photocopy of the rough draft of a 1963 Burke interview. This showed clearly the first typed draft of the Q& As and Burke’s handwritten corrections.6 On the first page, in handwriting different from Burke’s, were notations reporting that copies were provided to two naval officers including one assigned to intelligence. As Burke would say later: “My secretary certainly wouldn’t have sent a rough draft out.”7
In the summer of 1973, Elias was completely unaware of the 1963 Burke break-in. Buzhardt deduced that if Elias had only a clean copy of the 1963 interview, the target of the break-in must have been Burke, not the controversial reporter, and, given the admiral’s stature, that made the transgression all the more outrageous. It might have been directed by a White House eager for opposition research concerning a possible Kennedy challenger in 1964. This was something Nixon defenders could use.
So, late on a sultry June evening, instead of going home after a long day, the President’s Watergate counsel went to the Fairfax Hotel without telling anyone in the West Wing or recording it in his daily diary. After flashing his White House card at the desk clerk, he took the elevator to the fifth floor. It was about 10 p.m. when Buzhardt knocked on Elias’s door unannounced. Buzhardt looked ashen and exhausted, and Elias invited him in without hesitation. His friend declined, requesting instead that Demetracopoulos leave his air-conditioned apartment and take a little stroll in the breezeless, muggy night.
Still wide-awake and working in shirtsleeves and tie, Elias put on his suit jacket. As they rode down the elevator together, he wondered what this was all about. Elias speculated that Buzhardt’s not wanting to come in meant he probably knew not only that Elias’s phone was bugged, but that other listening devices were planted in his room.
As they walked, Buzhardt came right to the point. He knew Elias retained extensive records of his work. Could Elias give him the Arleigh Burke files connected with the 1963 interview? It was a matter of national security. The President needed and wanted it. So did Buzhardt. He would explain more later.
Elias felt no need to help Nixon with anything, but “Fred Buzhardt was my friend, and, if I could have helped him, I would have.” He stopped walking and faced his beleaguered companion. He regarded his raw work product as confidential, he began, but even if he had not, he feared that anything he gave Buzhardt would go to Nixon and Colson, who would likely twist the information. Most importantly, he explained, “providing the files would involve Admiral Burke in the Watergate morass, something I’m sure he would want to avoid…To help you I’d have to hurt Arleigh Burke and that is something I cannot and will not do. My friendship with him is transcendent.”
Buzhardt said he understood, shook hands with Elias, and walked off into the night. Years later, Harry Dent told Elias that when Buzhardt recounted the incident to him, both men were touched by Demetracopoulos’s sense of loyalty. Not long before his death from a second heart attack in 1978, Buzhardt talked with Elias by phone, and the former White House counsel confirmed the stratagem. When Admiral Burke learned the details, he expressed his gratitude for having been kept clear of Watergate.
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ELIAS LEFT WASHINGTON in mid-August 1973 for a month-long European trip, ostensibly to cultivate business clients and consulting prospects, but really to confer directly with exiled Greek leaders in a half-dozen cities about Papadopoulos’s liberalization gestures.
American news was never far away. In Rome, the front page of Corriere della Sera carried a story with a photo of a smiling Lucianne Goldberg captioned “Spia per Nixon.” Agnew’s dramatic fall from power was also widely covered. When Elias read reports about the Maryland US attorney investigating Agnew for possible violations of federal laws on bribery, extortion, conspiracy, and income taxes, he was prepared to believe the worst.8 Maybe Agnew’s lying to him about Greece was just a small part of a corrupt and mendacious persona. Elias now thought of Agnew as a crypto-Greek who’d discovered his ethnicity only at election time and had revealed himself to represent the essence of shallowness and bombast. The willingness of so many Greek-Americans, even lifelong Democrats, to lionize Agnew dismayed him. When the vice president resigned, Elias wondered what not having Agnew in the White House might mean for the Greek regime.
Back in Washington, Elias uncovered in a stack of correspondence a small pale-blue envelope postmarked “New Britain, Connecticut, September 11, 1973,” from Celia’s sister, Helen Varhol. The letter said simply: “I thought you might like to have the enclosed newspaper clippings. Until we see you again, our very best to you.” The clippings were from Hartford newspapers dated September 1, announcing that Celia Was had died at 55, “after a brief illness.” Elias found the obituaries a sterile portrait of the beautiful and vivacious woman he had fallen in love with twenty-three years before.9 Images of their courtship, marriage, divorce, and years of enduring friendship flashed through his mind. He also thought of the excruciating post-Moscow pressures she had endured in Athens and how the once-wide world of this strong and proudly independent woman had become so small. In the privacy of his room, he cried.
When he reached Helen, she told him Celia had been diagnosed with lymphoma sometime in 1972 and over a period of months her health had slowly declined. When Celia had last seen Elias, earlier that year, she had said nothing about what her doctors had agreed was an early death sentence. Chemotherapy treatments made her violently ill. She retired from her job and spent the summer riveted to the televised Watergate hearings, her mind still sharp. Celia died in the hospital in the early hours of August 31, in the company of her sister and a niece. The family tried in vain to reach Elias. Her funeral had been on September 4.
Elias briefly berated himself for not knowing and being unable to comfort her or say goodbye. He thought of his own mother’s terminal illness, which she had hidden from him when he went to meet Makarios. He remembered Celia, then divorced from Elias for several years, writing beautiful words of comfort to her dying former mother-in-law. Helen Varhol responded to Elias’s heartfelt request to arrange with the Catholic priest at Sacred Heart Church in New Britain a small graveside memorial service for him to attend. Several weeks later, on a lovely early-autumn afternoon, the three of them gathered in the cemetery so Elias could pay his final respects. It was a work day; no other family was around, and Elias, with business in Hartford, did not linger.
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AS WINDOW DRESSING for his new rule, Papadopoulos gave up one of his titles and appointed as prime minister a member of the old political establishment, Spyros Markezinis. Opponents at home and abroad were not fooled, but Tasca was smitten. According to a confidential message British ambassador Robert Hooper sent to his home office, his “rather volatile colleague seems to have gone overboard for…Markezinis…[accepting him as] the only alternative to a takeover by left or right.”10 Tasca recommended that the US government fully support the new Greek government.
