In Greece, it seemed Elias’s persona non grata days were gone. He considered 80 percent of the recently announced cabinet to be friends. But in Washington, State Department Javerts remained hostile, nagging the CIA for help in repackaging anti-Demetracopoulos intelligence and trying to enlist the FBI in digging up fresh evidence to support a case for civil or criminal violations.
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WHILE CYPRUS NEGOTIATIONS were falling apart in Geneva, Nixon, facing almost certain impeachment and removal from office for his cover-up activities in the Watergate scandal, resigned. Kissinger stayed, assuring allies abroad of continuity in American foreign policy. On August 9, four hours after Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as President, Assistant Secretary of State of Inter-American Affairs Jack Kubisch was sworn in at the White House as Henry Tasca’s replacement. Kubisch had never been an ambassador and had no experience in the region, but his appointment was praised in Greece because it meant Tasca would be gone. Others sourly noted that all along the real American ambassador had been Tom Pappas, who was still active in both Athens and Washington.
The United States could have played an honest broker role at the Geneva Cyprus talks, urging inter-communal deliberations that led to serious reforms. Instead it looked the other way as Turkey flouted the cease-fire. The US would not cut off Turkish arms. Most significantly, it supported Turkey’s desires to create, in effect, two distinct states with separate administrations. The “enclaves” or “cantons” plan that Kissinger endorsed would provide Turkish Cypriots with more than one-third of the land area.
Talks broke down on August 14. Turkish troops attacked Nicosia from two sides, looting, raping, and turning longtime residents into refugees in their homeland. The second invasion was simply a land grab.
By the next day, the Turks, having taken Famagusta (Ammochostos) in the east and divided Nicosia, now controlled the entire northern part of the island. Conceding Turkish military superiority, a weakened Athens hesitantly prepared for war. Unable to help Greek Cypriots, the new Greek government withdrew from the military side of NATO, which had failed to stop the conflict.
Previously, a State Department staff recommendation that NATO Supreme Allied Commander General Andrew Goodpaster become involved went nowhere. Goodpaster had the respect of both sides.6 Kissinger, however, preferred to deal with the heads of state directly, even alone. This proved especially disadvantageous to the Greeks. Kissinger remembered Prime Minister Ecevit from the time the Turkish diplomat had been a participant at one of Kissinger’s Harvard seminars for emerging leaders. Ecevit leveraged that prior relationship. By contrast, Karamanlis had no prior personal history, and had difficulty even speaking English.
Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister George Mavros called Elias to ask for his help. Elias immediately flew to Geneva and for about two weeks assisted him “from morning to night.”7 Elias told Jim Pyrros to call him collect at the Intercontinental Hotel with news from the US, but he was seldom there. Demetracopoulos sat with Mavros during much of the conference, breaking away to brief the press, because, Elias said, there was no one else. He visited London to see Makarios, who expressed disappointment at repeated Turkish violations of the cease-fire and persistent squabbling among the old politicians in Greece. Returning to Washington from Geneva late on Saturday, August 17, Elias recounted to Pyrros Turkish negotiating tactics that augmented their overwhelming military and diplomatic advantages. He criticized the Greek Foreign Service’s complete disorganization and its inability to frame consistent messages to garner favorable news coverage.
En route home, Demetracopoulos also visited with Eleni Vlachou in London, who said, after much hesitation, that she would be returning to Greece to reopen Kathimerini. He also talked with Andreas Papandreou, who said he had postponed his return to Athens at least three times. Elias advised him to delay a while longer, because he “can only raise the temperature while being unable to contribute anything.”8 Andreas disagreed and ended his exile of nearly seven years with 15,000 supporters turning his airport arrival into a rhetorically hot political rally. An interview Andreas gave to the New York Times a week later calmed Elias some. Andreas, claiming he’d matured, said he did not intend to organize large public demonstrations, not because he’d changed his positions, but out of fear they could provoke the military’s return.9 This sounded responsible, Elias said, but added that Andreas was always unpredictable, often changing direction completely within a couple of hours.10
Even without Andreas stoking anti-American sentiment, demonstrators took to the streets of Athens for days. And in Nicosia, on the morning of August 19, an angry crowd of more than 1,000 Greek Cypriots, shouting anti-American epithets, marched on the American Embassy to protest the failure of the United States to stop the Turkish invasion. Women shouted “kill them, kill them” from nearby balconies. American cars were set ablaze. Tear gas didn’t stop the surging crowd. High-powered rifles targeted shuttered windows. Rodger Davies, a career foreign service officer and the former director of Near Eastern Affairs, who had often tangled with Elias, had recently been appointed ambassador to Cyprus. He sheltered his tiny embassy staff in a second-floor hallway, where a bullet killed him almost instantly.
A day later in Washington, on a hot and sunny Sunday, the once-reticent Greek-American community, reluctant for generations to call attention to themselves, poured into the streets and surrounded the White House in an unprecedented demonstration. Elias and others couldn’t believe their eyes. Messages had circulated quickly in Hellenic ethnic neighborhoods, and soon—arriving in buses, cars, and planes from New York, New Jersey, Greater Boston, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, San Francisco, and elsewhere—more than 20,000 Greek-Americans of all ages spilled out of Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Park, snaked down Pennsylvania Avenue, around the Ellipse, and back. The rally turned into a peaceful walk. Some carried banners—“Greece offered friendship, Turkey offers opium”—and signs depicting Kissinger as a killer. Marchers chanted “El-las” and sang the Greek national anthem.11
Although many were angry at Kissinger and America’s role, the demonstrators’ mood was largely festive. Elias asked waspily: “Where were they during the seven long years of the dictatorship?” Pyrros replied that the second Turkish offensive, imposing a humiliating defeat on Hellenism and creating a heartbreaking wave of refugees, had touched a nerve. “Virtually every person of Greek blood has deep in his or her psyche a memory, a family tale, a personal experience of Turkish wrongdoing,” he explained. “And now, even among those persons who believe themselves immune from such feelings, the passions are aroused, the ancient sense of being wronged rekindled.”12
At Cyprus hearings before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, anti-junta stalwarts shared puzzled looks when they were joined by former junta apologists. Elias remembered well the post–World War II period when Greeks who’d collaborated or failed to resist were the first to embrace the calls for freedom and democracy. Pyrros saw a similar phenomenon in Washington. “Many of those who curried favor for the junta,” he wrote in his journal, “are now scrambling to position themselves as ‘Greek-American leaders’ and anti-Turkish, of course.”
Eugene Rossides, a former Nixon official not known for ever speaking out against the junta, reacted to events in Cyprus by founding the American Hellenic Institute as a DC-based lobbying, research, and communications think tank. With a paid staff; a restricted, high-dues-paying membership; and largely non-American funders, he became an imposing lobbyist, but he turned off some would-be supporters who saw the organization primarily as a Rossides-controlled piggy bank designed to help him recover family property in Turkish-occupied Cyprus.13
Demetracopoulos had promoted and lobbied the pro-democracy cause for seven years, using his own income to cover expenses. Fighting for Greek freedom and Cypriot independence, he believed, should be done out of patriotic love and pride, not as a money-seeking business. In coming years, the loose band of Washington-based anti-junta activists continued to work to change American policies toward Turkey and Cyprus but did so out of the limelight. In sheer numbers and volume, they were overshadowed by the newcomers. Elias was quoted less in news stories, though his behind-the-scenes work was still noticed by his opponents.
After the second Turkish invasion, some Greek-American congressmen, who’d been loath to speak up against the Athens dictatorship, became more vocal, but didn’t replace the legislators and their staffs who skillfully led the earlier battles. When in September the House of Representatives voted 307–90 to ban all military aid to Turkey until the President deemed “substantial progress toward agreement…in Cyprus,” it did so “without great involvement of the Greek-American community.”14 Congressman Ben Rosenthal and Senator Tom Eagleton, who sponsored the companion Senate resolution, were the legislative drivers.
Without regard to the island’s complex history, Greek-Americans often reduced the situation in Cyprus to good Greeks versus bad Turks. They prematurely celebrated congressional resolutions forbidding the aggressive use of American equipment, without understanding the legislative labyrinth still ahead to change provisions in US military-aid law or the diplomacy needed to achieve a sustainable solution.15 Kissinger viewed congressional action as antithetical to the flexibility he claimed he needed. The Ford Administration fought aggressively to rescind congressional legislation and scrambled to reassure Turkey of America’s overall commitment and prevent it from turning to the USSR.
As the Greek-American community stepped up its lobbying pressures, the White House tried to divide and conquer, attacking troublemakers like Elias and courting Greek-American leaders like Archbishop Iakovos. On the afternoon of October 7, the Greek Orthodox spiritual leader met Secretary of State Kissinger, NSC head Brent Scowcroft, and the President in the Oval Office and attempted to convince the Ford Administration to show support to the Greek-American community. “I can’t reason with my people,” Iakovos told them. “They are demonstrating against me.”16 Although Ford was willing to make a brief statement about the more than 200,000 Greek Cypriot refugees displaced by the Turks, Kissinger rejected the idea, telling Iakovos that Karamanlis and Mavros had asked him not to get any concessions from Turkey before the November 17 Greek elections.17
An Iakovos assistant provided Elias with a summary of the forty-five-minute Oval Office exchange that emphasized the Greek government’s fear that any announcement from Ford before the election would portray the US as Greece’s patron. The document described Iakovos, unpersuaded by their arguments, insisting that the President do something about Turkish forces on Cyprus. Elias passed the memorandum on to Evans and Novak, who confirmed its accuracy with the archbishop, then published an article noting Iakovos’s assessment that Ford had good intentions but was “too weak to take a position by himself.”18
In response, Kissinger sent a confidential telegram to the new American ambassador decrying the article as “malicious” and “totally inaccurate,” and instructed him to tell the Greek government that “there were no ‘backstage deals.’ ”19 With the election less than a week away, Mavros and Karamanlis loudly claimed that they had never said such things to Kissinger, while the politically right-centrist newspaper Akropolis editorialized that Kissinger could act without presidential approval and was motivated by his “hatred toward Greeks.”20
The first free election in more than a decade went relatively smoothly. Karamanlis’s New Democracy, which replaced his old ERE as the right-center party, was largely a cult of personality. The voters’ choice, as campaign ads proclaimed, was simple: “Karamanlis or Tanks.” Oriented toward the West and especially committed to closer economic ties with Europe, Karamanlis also appealed to anti-American sentiment by questioning if American bases should be in Greece.
George Mavros, heading the traditional Center Union, joined in alliance with John Pesmazoglou’s small party of liberal intellectuals, New Forces. Save for its clear opposition to reinstating the monarchy and a greater emphasis on social welfare, their agenda was remarkably similar to that of Karamanlis. Both leaders were trusted friends of Elias. Many of their candidates had been harassed and imprisoned during the junta years. Had Demetracopoulos voted in this election, this group would have been his choice.
Andreas Papandreou’s party, Panhellenic Socialist Movement or PASOK, embraced a socialist manifesto, called for a complete break with NATO, and held the United States, notably the CIA and Pentagon, largely responsible for Greece’s problems. He used the Iakovos memorandum at one of his rallies.21 Three parties also ran in an electoral alliance of the United Left, with Communists campaigning openly and legally for office for the first time since 1936. The far-right party, National Democratic Union, supported the discredited dictatorship.
Karamanlis received 54.4 percent of the vote, which, based on reinforced proportional representation, meant 73.3 percent of the seats in parliament.22 Nearly 20 percent abstained, even though voting was compulsory.23
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SINCE SEPTEMBER 1973, Elias had spearheaded a campaign to get torture victim Spyros Moustaklis the best medical attention possible. The specialists Elias had flown in from London and Boston agreed that despite permanent damage to his flesh and internal systems, which meant he would never again read, write, or speak, his spirit was strong. They believed he could benefit from special therapy available at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. But the highly regarded hospital for wounded veterans turned Elias’s requests down several times because Spyros was neither a US veteran nor a citizen.
Elias provided examples of past exceptions. He asked sympathetic senators and congressmen to intervene on Major Moustaklis’s behalf, but they too could not budge the bureaucracy, even though the request was only for a few tests, a thorough medical evaluation that could be done in a day, and design of a preliminary physical-therapy protocol. An Army official tentatively allowed the admission but was overruled. Even Elias’s offer of cash up front—his own—didn’t help.
When the junta was still in place, the Nixon Administration had considered it politically unwise to invite such a high-profile victim to the United States—especially after Ioannidis, personal orchestrator of Moustaklis’s torture and mistreatment, became de facto head of the Greek government. Once the junta fell, however, requests by Elias and others were rejected again. Not even the new American ambassador, Jack Kubisch, responding favorably to Christina Moustaklis’s plea, was successful in getting Kissinger to reconsider.24 Eventually though, pressure from Kennedy, Fraser, and Rosenthal and the intervention of State’s Joseph Sisco persuaded the number-two person in the Defense Department, William Clements Jr., to cut the red tape.
On December 22, Spyros and Christina arrived at Dulles Airport, with Persa Metaxas serving as nurse and interpreter. Walter Reed provided three weeks of outpatient therapy, during which Moustaklis received medications, physiotherapy, and speech therapy. The staff trained Persa and Christina to continue his treatment back in Athens. Doctors who examined him said the only hope for any recovery of function would be long-term physical therapy.
Elias ensured that the news media covered the trio’s arrival, visit, and departure, but he guarded the Moustaklises’ privacy and time. Uncharacteristically, he refused most television coverage and requests for interviews, aware that they could prove exhausting, and arranged just a few direct press interactions. Even so, feature articles provided an account of the major’s heroic military career and the torture he’d suffered.25
On January 15, 1975, hours before President Ford delivered his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress, Senator Ted Kennedy hosted a luncheon in Moustasklis’s honor in a private dining room at the Senate. Christina thought Spyros was “living proof” to Americans that there were indeed people tortured by the Greek junta. Looking at the faces of the legislators, she knew he’d removed all doubts.
Back in Greece at the first court-martial trial of the torturers, which began on August 7 at Korydallos Prison outside Athens, nearly one hundred former prisoners and thirty former ESA soldiers gave testimony.26 Others provided written depositions or declined to appear because they’d been threatened or paid to keep silent. Spyros was the fourth to testify. Mute, semi-paralyzed, and brain-damaged, he walked into the courtroom with difficulty, on the arm of resistance comrade Tasos Minis. Sitting on a wooden chair in front of the panel of judges, with thirty-one defendants nearby, he struggled to identify his torturers among the defendants. Glaring at them, he clumsily tore open his shirt and with grunts, groans, and gestures beat himself with his fist, pointing to the clearly visible scars that marked his body. Agitated, he shouted obscenities, and police were asked to calm him down.
In a hushed courtroom the prosecutor asked: “They beat you?” Moustaklis replied by gesturing to his neck: Pat, pat, pat. The prosecutor stopped his questioning. Christina made a statement on his behalf, providing graphic and damning evidence of his ordeal. She said that when, after three months, she was finally allowed to see her husband, he was “a living corpse, a body with no brain, a human plant…The horror lives on with us,” she explained. “We have a little girl who has never heard her father’s voice, who will never feel the warmth of his hand’s caress.”27
More harrowing details of his torture were revealed during cross-examination. After a series of defendants claimed to know nothing and passed responsibility for the torture onto others, one of the tribunal members interrupted: “I have heard a lot from all of you [officers] about bravery and manliness, but so far—and the trial is nearing its end—there has not been a man to come forward and accept his responsibility. For me this is a stigma which attaches to us all…”28
Years later, Christina recalled the smug rudeness of the defendants, so arrogant that it made her feel as if she and her husband were on trial. Some even assaulted a reporter, previously victimized by the junta, who was covering the proceedings. None of Moustaklis’s torturers was executed. Only one received a lengthy sentence. Most received modest fines or no punishment.
According to Amnesty International, none of the junta’s torture victims received any direct compensation for their suffering. Major Moustaklis received some small benefits provided for all disabled war veterans, and survived for another eleven years, until April 28, 1986. His rank was raised to colonel, a step adjustment provided all dismissed officers, nothing more. Elias was disappointed by the government’s failure to compensate all of the junta’s victims, and especially Spyros Moustaklis. Although he acknowledged how rare it was for a country to punish its own for wantonly brutal behavior, he was nevertheless furious that the Karamanlis administration never properly stood up to the torturers and for their victims.
27.“The Plot to Snatch Demetracopoulos”
AS ONE OF A MUCH larger group of lobbyists, Elias worked in the fall of 1974 with Senator Thomas Eagleton and Representatives John Brademas, Paul Sarbanes, and Benjamin Rosenthal to cut off all government-financed and guaranteed sales of arms to Turkey, plus all cash sales, whether from public or private sources. After a series of fierce legislative battles, from resolutions to presidential vetoes, the embargo went into effect on February 5, 1975, as a requirement of the 1974 foreign-aid bill. It was a major defeat for Secretary of State Kissinger, and the day after the law went into effect, “Demetracopoulos” was the only Washington lobbyist mentioned by name at an Oval Office meeting among Ford, Kissinger, and some supportive members of Congress called to strategize a way around the bill’s provisions.1
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WITH HIS CITIZENSHIP restored, client obligations under control, and the Turkey vote behind him, Demetracopoulos decided that, after more than seven and a half years, he was ready to visit Greece. He told his friends, including columnists Jack Anderson and Les Whitten. They thought it was a good time to write a “valedictory” profile.