Elias reminded anyone who would listen that the only one who mattered in Greece was the pernicious Ioannidis, and that the regime’s ability to provide stability and security for American interests was illusory. Purges of well-trained senior Army officers continued, he warned, leaving in their wake fissures and a growing anti-NATO, neutralist, ultra-Qaddafist faction. To make matters worse, he added, the Polytechnic demonstrators had revealed “almost as much hostility toward the United States as toward the Athens regime.”
Demetracopoulos also lost no opportunity to point out Greece’s drop in economic growth, tourism receipts, and foreign investment. He mocked the underwhelming capabilities of the regime’s leaders, singling out in particular Prime Minister and Finance Minister Adamantios Androutsopoulos, who had been touted by the Greek Embassy in Washington for his stellar credentials as an economist. Androutsopoulos, they claimed, had received his degree from the University of Chicago and taught in its prestigious economics department “for many years.” Tips provided to reporters by Elias revealed that not only was most of Androutsopoulos’s résumé fraudulent, but the owner of a Greek restaurant in Chicago said that he had to fire the erstwhile manager of Greece’s economy from a job as night cashier “because he couldn’t keep the [cash] register straight.”1 In public, Nixon Administration officials continued to fault Demetracopoulos for being inaccurate, wrongheaded, and intentionally deceptive. But privately, a National Security Council action memorandum, prepared by a multi-agency drafting group for Secretary of State Kissinger, confirmed Elias’s assessments. The NSC report criticized the Greek regime for being “reactionary” and showing “no promise of moving toward representative government.” It described the leaders as “political nonentities,” with “less technical capability” of dealing with the country’s serious economic, political, and social problems than the previous one. Portrayed as “narrowly nationalistic” and fanatically anti-Communist, “the new regime is not a group of ‘Atlanticists’ who see their relationship with the US and NATO based on shared values.” The Army, it said, was divided, upset about its close identification with the regime, worried about its military capabilities, and concerned about the “Qaddafites.” The report also acknowledged “an element of anti-Americanism…that would have been unthinkable a few years ago” and worried about Tasca and Kissinger being called to testify before tenacious critics in Congress.2
Although aligned with Elias’s analysis, the report diverged from his and his allies’ positions in its recommendations. Afraid that “moralist/interventionist” pressures would make matters worse, the NSC memorandum gave the Ioannidis regime a life expectancy of less than a year and advocated a “substantially hands-off” approach modified by a “nose holding public posture.” The regime’s likely successor, it suggested, would be a series of coups varying only “in degree rather than in kind.” No actionable decision was to be made because Kissinger was busy elsewhere and his staff deemed there were “no pressing issues” in Greek-US relations.
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IN FEBRUARY 1974, Tom Pappas, after months of jockeying among attorneys, was finally scheduled to testify behind closed doors before the Watergate committee to tell what he knew about the cover-up of fundraising for the original Watergate defendants. Elias had hoped that the Watergate investigators would look at Pappas’s long history as a Nixon fundraiser and not limit its probe to his fundraising in 1972. The Pappas connection, however, was regarded by Watergate investigators as a Committee “loose end.”3
To try to influence the process, Elias had encouraged Seth Kantor, Washington correspondent for the Detroit News, to look at Pappas’s earlier activities. Kantor was a dogged investigative reporter who’d been with President Kennedy in Dallas on the day he was assassinated and would spend more than a decade investigating the background of Jack Ruby, the killer of Lee Harvey Oswald. In January, he published an article noting that Watergate probers had started showing interest in a so-called Greek Connection, and the role of foreign nationals illegally funding American campaigns. He spotlighted the mysterious fundraising role of Tom Pappas in the 1968 election, Agnew’s surprise endorsement of the junta, and charges that the Greek military regime had funded the 1968 Nixon campaign.4
Despite Kantor’s story, Roger M. Witten, a member of the Justice Department’s Watergate Special Prosecutor Force, intentionally limited the possible charges against Nixon’s moneyman. When Witten and his colleagues met with Pappas and his attorney on February 2 for a voluntary interview, Pappas denied doing anything knowingly illegal or improper during the 1972 campaign. No one asked him about 1968.5
The fix was apparently in to protect Pappas. In his prosecutorial memorandum on February 22, 1974, Witten wrote that by accepting and receiving a $15,000 political donation in Greece from a Greek citizen residing in Greece and delivering it for him to Maurice Stans at Nixon finance headquarters in Washington, Pappas technically broke the law. Nevertheless, he recommended “we do not prosecute Pappas, unless further evidence of venality or corruption develops.”6 The task force never considered any such evidence of “venality or corruption,” though it was readily available in Pappas’s FBI file and other records. Other Watergate staff claimed later to have had no knowledge of Pappas’s alleged role in Nixon’s 1968 campaign and maintained they would have considered it had it been brought to their attention.7 Years later, Witten refused to discuss the apparently willful exclusion of Pappas’s pre-1972 criminal behavior.
Demetracopoulos was not surprised that Pappas escaped prosecution, let alone conviction, for his financial crimes. After witnessing years of corruption on both sides of the ocean, he’d seldom seen anyone punished or even deterred from similar behavior. Skimming had been common during the US aid programs of the 1950s, CIA money had been used to influence outcomes in Greek elections, and the outright bribery of the apostates in 1965 and 1966 was well known to the informed public. Such behavior in Greece disgusted him, but he didn’t see the United States as appreciably better. American politicians who needed substantial financial support weren’t about to bite the hands that fed them. He didn’t regard his own friends in Congress as corrupt, but he could cite examples of others, such as New Jersey senator Harrison Williams, who had tried to shake Elias down for cash.8 The law about campaign contributions by foreign nationals was toothless, and probably would not be used even if it were tougher, Elias believed. The only real hope was an aggressive press allied with bipartisan congressional investigations that exposed bad behavior—especially before an election.
Even if he had wanted to, Elias was too busy lobbying against the junta to be an investigative journalist on American campaign finances. He was pleased with the 1971 reporting that James Polk of the Associated Press had done about thousands of dollars of mysterious campaign money sent in the names of Greek-Americans to the Nixon campaign in 1968. The alleged donors said they never made such contributions.9 This, Elias thought, could have been part of the web of Pappas fundraising stories Drew Pearson had been trying to uncover back in 1968. Years later he regretted how, in honoring his pledge to Larry O’Brien, he had failed to help Pearson.
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IN JANUARY 1974, Congressman Don Fraser, chairman of the subcommittee on international organizations, with staff consultant Clifford Hackett, went to Athens to ask tough questions about the current situation. Elias helped arrange appointments for them with opposition leaders and others beyond the embassy’s control. Tasca was furious to read their critical twenty-seven-page assessment portraying a government on its last legs, unable to resolve its political and economic problems, which were only aggravated by America’s “faulty policy” of acquiescence.10
The Fraser report recommended immediate suspension of the next phase of homeporting, along with an announcement that any further strengthening of ties would await “unequivocal and irreversible steps” toward free elections and civilian democratic rule. It also suggested that Tasca be replaced by “a new American ambassador who comes free of identification with past American policies.” Elias made sure that American and Greek audiences were well aware of Fraser’s “timely warning,” using it to blunt Tasca’s anticipated testimony of “qualified assurances.” Congressional opposition to the most recent incarnation of the Greek junta was on the rise.
Tasca’s most important appointment during his early 1974 trip to D.C. was not a closed-door appearance before the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, but a March 20 Regional Staff meeting at the State Department, led by Henry Kissinger, to discuss American policy toward Greece after the November coup.11 Tasca maintained that the current US policy had been “reasonably successful,” but difficult to implement because of, among other things, Demetracopoulos’s meddling and Greece’s historical and cultural “singularity.” He warned that “sooner or later, with the repression that’s going on in Greece, we’re going to lose” congressional support and with it military credits and military supplies, and then Greece will “turn to France or ‘go Arab,’ with Qaddafi.”
Kissinger, supporting the current policy, asked, “Why is it in the American interest to do in Greece what we apparently don’t do anywhere else—[require] a commitment…to move to representative government?”
MR. TASCA: Well, I think because Greece and the Greek people—in terms of their position and public opinion in Western Europe—are quite unique. You can go back to the constitutional Greece or the Greek lobby—whatever you want to call it—and they’ve got a position in Western Europe and the United States that…these other countries don’t…None…has a Demetracopoulos who for four years has been leading a very vigorous fight on our policy in Greece.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: But that just means we’re letting Demetracopoulos’ particular group make policy.
MR. TASCA: How do you stop it?
UNSATISFIED WITH KISSINGER’S generic response, Tasca went on to explain the foreign factor that had figured so exceptionally in Greece since the 1821 revolution, noting that, like it or not, the Americans had become part of the country’s value system and political process. The US should get out, he said, but it would take time. When Kissinger advocated announcing that we “don’t influence things,” Tasca countered that that was tantamount to intervening in favor of Ioannides.
Coming into the meeting, Kissinger had demonstrated his unawareness of the internal dynamics in Greece by not even knowing who Ioannidis was. And, when Tasca raised his concerns that the debate between Greece and Turkey over oil exploration could escalate and drag Cyprus into the dispute, Kissinger dismissed the comment as a “foreign policy problem” not germane to their discussion of publicly confronting the Ioannidis regime over democracy for Greece. Kissinger brushed off the senior staff debate as “hopelessly abstract,” claiming that the issue wasn’t “between democracy and non-democracy,” and declaring, “[w]e don’t muck around with other countries…as long as they’re not anti-American.”12 A few months after this meeting, far from challenging Ioannidis, Kissinger endorsed providing the Greek dictator $400 million worth of military aircraft.13
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ELIAS TRAVELLED BACK and forth from Washington to New York regularly, with side trips to Boston and Hartford to service his paying clients. His mind was always on the changing situation in Athens.
On one New York trip, he visited a makeshift soundstage in a warehouse on West 19th Street in Manhattan. He had been invited by Jules Dassin, who was directing a docudrama he wrote in collaboration with Melina Mercouri, titled The Rehearsal.14 The film, shot in less than a month on a tiny budget using donated services, sought to portray the November events at the Polytechnic Institute as a rehearsal for democracy. The day Elias visited, most of the cast, which included Melina Mercouri, Olympia Dukakis, Laurence Olivier, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, and Maximilian Schell were on hand. Stathis Giallelis, star of Elia Kazan’s award-winning Amerika, Amerika, played the lead student. Melina narrated and starred. The dictators were lampooned, and the celebrities had cameo roles reading letters and poems. Mikis Theodorakis and Giannis Markopoulos contributed the music.
Elias endorsed the “melodramatic” production as a way to tell the world of Greece’s suffering and enduring spirit, and he was pleased to learn that some of the extras were Greek-American students whose parents still backed the junta. After seven long years, Elias saw public opinion mounting against the regime.
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IOANNIDIS, FACED WITH rising economic problems, a dysfunctional administration, simmering political unrest, and factionalism in the armed forces, compensated by calling for unification with Cyprus and manufacturing a crisis on the island. Both American and British intelligence reports indicated that the Greek leader was preparing to move against Cypriot president Makarios, but the reports were belittled by Nixon Administration officials.
Elias too heard reports about plots against the Cypriot president. Ioannidis supposedly had turned to his CIA contacts in Washington to do “something” about the archbishop. The most chilling account placed the former CIA station chief in Nicosia, who had been known as openly anti-Makarios, in a February meeting in Athens with Nikos Sampson, the most notorious terrorist in EOKA-B, the pro-enosis underground Cypriot paramilitary organization. Sampson, who reviled Makarios, had built his reputation in the 1950s as a photojournalist who fiendishly murdered British soldiers and civilians, then took pictures of their bloody corpses and put them in his newspaper.
After the State Department told Demetracopoulos that his concerns were exaggerated, he approached Senator Fulbright in late June to share his sense of urgency. He warned that Tasca apparently had no direct communication with Ioannidis, and that Ioannidis communicated to Washington via his Athens CIA contacts. Kissinger and his team appeared to have accepted this protocol.
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HISTORIANS HAVE NOTED how outwardly calm the Greek and Cypriot principals were as the crisis came to a head. All actors performed as if they were parts of a charade in which players carried out their historically assigned roles, expecting that at the end of the day the Americans would intervene to prevent a major conflict, as they had in 1964 and 1967. But Makarios fatally misjudged Ioannidis, Ioannidis fatally misjudged the Turks, and both fatally misjudged the Americans.
In early July, American attention was focused on the House Judiciary Committee’s release of the transcripts of the Nixon tape recording, while the President closeted himself. Kissinger, now essentially running American foreign policy, was also under attack from both left and right at home and unsure whether he’d survive politically if Ford became President.
In response to Elias’s urgent warning, Senator Fulbright had tried to talk Kissinger into pressuring Ioannidis not to move against Makarios, but Kissinger refused to do so. The secretary of state was oblivious to the tinderbox ready to explode. In early May, Cyprus was not even on Kissinger’s radar screen, except perhaps as the place he told people he’d recently eaten the best wiener schnitzel of his life.15
On Saturday morning, July 6, Elias read in the Washington Post that President Makarios had accused the Greek government of supporting a movement to overthrow him. Demetracopoulos called contacts in Cyprus and Greece to confirm the story. The plots and protest, he was told, were quite real. Makarios made the mistake of assuming that publicly claiming that the junta sought to “liquidate” him, and detailing steps the regime had already taken toward that end, would prevent it. He revealed details about the guidance, financing, propaganda, and weapons being supplied to the EOKA-B terrorists by the Greek regime, and demanded that Greek officers then staffing the Cypriot National Guard leave the island. Makarios would personally take over Cypriot military forces.
In Athens, leaders of the façade government’s cabinet met until the wee hours of the morning. The top three Greek foreign-ministry officials resigned, probably anticipating the incipient catastrophe. In Washington, a “high State Department official” described the resignations as “routine developments.” “As of now, there’s no civilian government in Greece,” Elias told Jim Pyrros, the USCDG workhorse. “They don’t want to be scapegoats and have their necks in a noose when the Greek government falls.”
At about 2 a.m. Washington time on Monday, July 15, Elias was brushing his teeth, readying himself for his usual four-hour catnap, when the switchboard at the Fairfax patched through a transatlantic call. Heavy gunfire had just been heard at the presidential palace in Nicosia. Was this the start of the feared coup? Demetracopoulos started calling his sources. The chiefs of staff had met in the Greek Pentagon and were told the action against Makarios had begun, but no one at the US State Department claimed to know anything. Phone lines to Cyprus were down. Sources in Europe were scrambling to get information.16
Minutes after 4 a.m., Elias received a call from General Orestis Vidalis in Toledo, Ohio, telling him that he’d just heard from Europe that there had been a coup on Cyprus and Makarios was dead. The news had been announced at 11 a.m. Greek time. More calls came in. The wire services were reporting that the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation had announced Makarios’s death. In his place, “the armed forces” had installed a government of “National Salvation” with the hated Nikos Sampson as president. Memories of his 1957 meetings with Makarios off Madagascar and in Nairobi flashed through Elias’s mind, then an image of the archbishop officiating at his mother’s memorial service. He felt a profound sadness.
At 5:30 a.m., Pyrros called the State Department, which still had no information. Foggy Bottom officials, told that his sources were Demetracopoulos and Vidalis, concluded that the reports were likely true.
In the hours that followed, Elias’s anti-junta sources shared scraps of news and shards of hope. CBS television reported that the coup leaders were Greek army officers. Cyprus Radio had been the sole outlet to announce the death. There had been no independent verification. Wire services provided conflicting reports. By 10:40 a.m., Elias, after hearing from UN sources who told him that Makarios had sought safety at a UN outpost near the Green Line, which separated Cyprus into two regions, surmised Makarios may have survived. At 11:41 a.m. the State Department said it had “no definitive information,” but was inclined to believe Makarios was dead.
At 12:44 p.m., UPI issued two conflicting reports. But no one other than Elias seemed to have received information that Makarios had been seen alive and had reached out to the UN. Even the UN and the British foreign minister denied the reports.
As for US reaction to the Cyprus/Greece showdown, a member of the State Department Greek Desk confessed: “Kissinger is indifferent. Nobody gives a damn.”17 On the day of the coup, the Cypriot ambassador, Nikos Dimitriou, told the US secretary of state the new Cypriot president was a “paranoid” and an “egomaniac.” Kissinger jested dismissively that he too had been called an egomaniac. The ambassador replied sharply that Sampson was no joking matter.18
