For years, Elias had kept under wraps handwritten letters from Louise Gore that he could have used to his advantage against Nixon and his henchmen. His deep friendship and sense of honor prevented him from doing anything that could hurt Louise or impede her career. When he told her that he’d been talking to Jack Anderson and Les Whitten about the column they were preparing that would describe his years of being harassed, loyal Republican Gore, who had been her party’s 1974 candidate for governor of Maryland, told him he could use her letter from 1972 that mentioned Mitchell’s deportation threat. “Despite the risk to her political career,” Gore told Whitten, “she would warn Demetracopoulos again if she had it to do over.”2
Whitten was especially eager to do the article. He’d recently confirmed evidence about the FBI’s aggressive June 1972 inquiry to Sartorious & Company pressuring the employer to terminate Elias’s contract. Then he received information from a reliable source who had overheard John Mitchell and Murray Chotiner discuss “getting” Demetracopoulos at a cocktail party; Tom Pappas’s name had been part of the conversation.3 On February 12, 1975, the syndicated column was headlined in different papers: “US Officials Harassed Greek Exile,” “Nixon Crowd Sought Greek Exile’s Ouster,” and “Greek Newsman Fought Odds and Won Out.”4 The article recounted the highlights of Elias’s ordeal, the efforts of politically motivated White House, Justice Department, FBI, CIA, and Nixon-campaign officials to have him fired and worse, including John Mitchell’s public threat to have him sent “home to certain torture and possible death.” The piece concluded with the idea that after eight years in exile, “Demetracopoulos is returning to his beloved Greece, not as a deportee facing torture, but as a patriot.” Wire services, including Reuters, Agence France Presse, and the New York Times, carried the story worldwide.
The Anderson-Whitten column had an impact far beyond its purported valedictory intent. Senator McGovern wrote to Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Frank Church calling the allegations “grave” and deserving “full and careful…priority” consideration during his Select Committee’s forthcoming hearings. Elias gave the McGovern letter to the Washington Post, which ran a story the next day and included an interview with Elias, who said that, after the junta’s collapse, he had heard from friends in Greece that they were visited by the KYP on behalf of the CIA seeking compromising information about him. A spokesman for Senator Church said his committee would consider the McGovern information carefully.5
Press attention to government harassment of Demetracopoulos forced the various intelligence agencies to respond publicly. The FBI made efforts to convince Whitten to disassociate its responsible behavior from more questionable practices by other federal agencies, saying it had kept alive a Foreign Agents inquiry from 1971 until 1974 only at the direction of the State Department, and had played only “a limited role…related in no way to inquiries by the White House or Attorney General.”6 New FBI director Clarence M. Kelly tried to further minimize the agency’s record, in the process also overlooking entirely its intrusive investigations of Demetracopoulos during the 1950s and early 1960s (the Bureau’s “bad old days”).7
Prompted by calls from congressmen to CIA director William Colby, the agency worked for more than two weeks on its public response, apparently skittish after Colby had been taken to the woodshed by Kissinger for being too open and cooperative with Congress. After assembling a compilation of some of the more egregious falsehoods in its “Dimitrakopoulos” dossier, the CIA produced a restrained memorandum that described “Dimitakopoulos [sic]” as “an annoyance” who while he has “made a number of enemies, many of them senior American officials…there are no hard facts in the record to show that he has worked for any foreign government against the interests of Greece (or for that matter the United States), that he is in the pay of any national government, that he has ever been a member of a foreign intelligence service or has ever been involved in criminal activities.”
It concluded:
In hindsight, the Agency may have overreacted to the provocations of Dimitakopoulos [sic]…As far as we can tell we have not taken any action against Dimitakopoulos which may have contravened American law…
Since he has been a controversial figure and the subject of many suspicions as well as antagonisms, we inevitably have had a reporting responsibility but do not know at what point this could begin to be considered “harassment.” [A large text redaction follows.]8
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Elias delayed his return to Greece after these stories about his persecution expanded the Church Committee’s growing investigation into US intelligence-agency abuses.9 But when Senate staff told him in early April that he would not be asked to testify until late May, he used the interlude to visit his homeland.
On Sunday, April 13, 1975, Elias, now forty-six years old, returned to Athens in triumph. A crowd of several hundred was waiting for him when he arrived at Ellinikon International Airport, many waving newspapers that heralded his return. They cheered enthusiastically when he stood atop the mobile staircase wearing a dark three-piece suit, a crisp white shirt, a perfectly knotted tie, and highly shined black balmorals, and carrying a leather briefcase. He waved back, blinking his eyes in the bright Athenian sunlight. The first person to greet him was Colonel Spyros Moustaklis, smiling and gesturing welcome from his wheelchair. Elias teared up at the outpouring of support. Friends embraced and kissed him, some presenting bouquets of flowers. After retrieving his luggage, the entourage piled into a caravan of cars, honking all the way into the city.10
The month that followed was a whirlwind of emotion and business. Elias went first to the Proto Nekrotafeio Cemetery to pay his respects at his father’s grave. He met with Karamanlis, to whom he gave messages from members of Congress he had generated. He conferred with opposition leaders. There was time for Persa Metaxas and other old friends. It seemed that every night involved another celebratory dinner or a long, intense briefing to discuss a myriad of domestic and international issues.
The Athens News covered Elias’s visit at several stages and published letters of warm praise from Senators McGovern and Hartke.11 Correspondent David Tonge covered his arrival for the BBC and published a profile on Elias in the Guardian, later expanded in the Greek press, dubbing him “the emigré eminence.” “For seven years,” Tonge wrote, Demetracopoulos “had managed to keep the Greek issue alive” and recently “played a large part in undermining Dr. Kissinger’s pro-Turkish policies.”12
On May 10, Evangelos Androulidakis, the one-time Kathimerini reporter whose writing in the 1940s had inspired Elias’s initial interest in journalism, hosted a cocktail party at the Grand Bretagne Hotel in Elias’s honor. Among more than 200 guests were several ministers from the Karamanlis government, other deputies, opposition leader George Mavros, and former Bank of Greece governors Xenophon Zolotas and John Pesmazoglou, who had quit their posts rather than serve under the junta. The American Embassy continued to disparage Elias, downplaying his contacts, the reception attendees, and his coverage in the Greek press in a SECRET communiqué to Washington.13
After the dictatorship’s implosion, the Greek government had embarked on a “de-juntification” process, dismissing or replacing some military personnel and bureaucrats. There were promises that junta leaders would be put on trial for their crimes. Hearing that KYP chief Michael Roufogalis was to be deposed, Demetracopoulos hoped that secrets from the seven-year reign might come to light. Maybe he could find out the details behind his near miss of an escape, his blocked return to visit his dying father, and the intermittent warnings he had heard since 1967 that the colonels were out to “get” him and interrogate him. He did not yet know the full scope and intensity of their plots and the names of those involved.
But after the government announced it would limit its investigation and trials to those responsible for the most egregious tortures, Elias assumed that his concerns for justice were unlikely to be vindicated. After all, Greece had no laws providing a right of access to government records. Getting answers would take hard digging, and relevant files might have already been destroyed.
Beginning with confidential meetings in Athens with Greek intelligence contacts and conversations with the head of the Greek government press office, Panagiotis Lamprias, Elias received confirmation of a long-rumored scheme of junta strongman Papadopoulos and KYP chief Roufogalis to kidnap him. He shared this information with Christopher Hitchens, who did his own complementary research. According to the most complete published account of the coded cables, Athens was prepared to dispatch a special team to the United States to carry out the plot, which was planned in cooperation with the Greek military mission in D.C. Elias was especially outraged by the revelation he found included in a Greek cable marked “COSMIC Eyes Only,” the highest security classification: “We can rely on the cooperation of the various agencies of the US Government, but estimate the congressional reaction to be fierce.”14
Elias fixated on ascertaining which of the “various agencies of the US government” could have been “relied on” to cooperate in his proposed abduction, torture, and murder. Who were the players, and what did they know and do?
He also wanted additional credible authentication of the kidnapping plot or plots. He called Jack Anderson, who assigned Les Whitten to research the story on both sides of the ocean. Working independently of Elias, Whitten discovered that Brigadier General Floros Astrinidis, head of the military mission in Washington, had been ordered by Papadopoulos in 1971 to look into ways of kidnapping Elias. Astrinidis, who successfully arranged the 1972 US arms deal, was well connected to many in the Nixon Administration.15
According to Whitten, junta leaders—especially Papadopoulos, Roufogalis, Astrinidis, and their allies—deeply loathed Demetracopoulos and sensed that “President Nixon and his aides hated” him as well. At first, the conspirators thought they would not have to do anything: Nixon Administration officials indicated that they were building a case to deport Elias. But when John Mitchell made his threat public in February 1972 and then failed to act, the conspirators “took up the cudgel.”16
For months, Papadopoulos and Roufogalis “burned up the back channel” cable traffic from Athens to the Greek military mission in D.C. with demands to carry out the plot. It is not clear to what extent Tom Pappas was used as a back channel, but, in his handwritten notes, Whitten wrote the name “Tom Pappas” in large capital letters next to a giant asterisk and, in an interview years later, asserted that Pappas was intimately involved. Americans, especially those in the CIA, were apparently aware of the Greek plans. CIA Station Chief Jim Potts met so often and openly with junta leaders that even Tasca was upset. Highly classified Greek cables indicated that American advice and help was sought, although it was not clear “who, if anyone, in the U.S. approved the kidnapping.” As laid out in the coded cables and in secret messages sent by diplomatic pouch, Athens “drew up at least three operations to get him back.”17
The easiest of the contemplated schemes was to “snatch” the exile from the District of Columbia and take him by force in a car to New York and then put him on a (preferably empty) Olympic Airways jet that could be flown nonstop to Athens. The second plan involved transporting the abducted Elias on a Greek military plane, but that had to be abandoned because of the need for refueling stops. The third alternative was to “subdue Demetracopoulos in Washington” and somehow get him into a waiting Greek submarine. This plan, though initially deemed too logistically difficult for success, was revived later by others.
According to the secret messages, these scenarios all had a common objective and conclusion: “Once kidnapped, the exile, Elias Demetracopoulos, was to be interrogated about his American and Greek contacts and presumably tortured if he did not reveal them. This done, there would have been little other course but to kill him to conceal the kidnapping.”18
In their April 26, 1975 column, headlined “The Plot to Snatch Demetracopoulos,” Anderson and Whitten described the three abduction schemes and highlighted the plotters’ confidence that they could “rely on the cooperation of the various agencies of the US government.” Whitten said he and Anderson held back some of his most explosive findings, including interviews attesting that Elias would ultimately be murdered. They also left out any reference to Tom Pappas’s involvement. According to Whitten, junta files disclosed that the kidnapping idea was initially “dropped” in 1972 because the risks were thought too great on account of Elias’s strong congressional network. Responding to “U.S. security officials,” who swore they knew absolutely nothing about the plots against Demetracopoulos, Whitten said later, “They were lying…They knew and did nothing to stop it.”19
Earlier that year, President Ford, Henry Kissinger, and some congressional leaders had met in the White House to discuss their efforts to maneuver around the Turkish arms shutoff. Someone asked, “Can’t we get to the Greek-Americans?” Kissinger replied; “We tried. They are being used by Papandreou and his supporters—like Demetracopoulos.” According to the once-confidential February 6, 1975, “Memorandum of Conversation,” Kissinger, after mentioning Elias’s name, made the following cryptic aside: “Bitsios asked. Couldn’t we get rid of him?” During the discussion, Kissinger never provided any context for this request from anti-Elias Greek foreign minister Dimitrios Bitsios’s request. He never clarified when it was asked nor indicated what he said in response. But those in the group all knew Elias, and no one at the meeting asked what “get rid of him” really meant. Coupling this remark with the 1970 NSC document that contains the skeletal index heading “Mr. Demetracopoulos death in Athens prison”—prepared while Kissinger was NSA director—it is reasonable to infer that Kissinger and others knew about at least some of the different Greek plots to “get” Elias, a legal permanent resident of the United States, and did nothing about it.
In response to doubters in the American and Greek communities who claimed that the kidnapping planning documents were forgeries, Constantine Panagiotakos, who served as ambassador in Washington during the junta’s last months, later wrote Elias a notarized letter in which he affirmed that, from the time he arrived, he had direct knowledge of a plan to kidnap him. He knew the junta’s henchman and would-be assassin was a “protégé” of Greek foreign minister Dimitrios Bitsios, a career diplomat whose hatred for Elias was so profound that he felt comfortable trying to enlist the support of Kissinger in the plot.20 In his memoirs, Ambassador Panagiotakos also implicated others:
On 29 May a document was transmitted to me from Angelos Vlachos, Secretary General of the Foreign Ministry, giving the views of the United States Ambassador Henry Tasca, which he agreed with, about the most efficient means of dealing with the conspiracies and the whole activity of Demetracopoulos. Tasca’s views are included in a memorandum of conversation with Foreign Minister Spyridon Tetenes of 27 May.21
On June 12, 1974 the Foreign Ministry in Athens had asked Panagiotakos to “seek useful advice on the extermination of Elias Demetracopoulos from George Churchill, director of the Greek desk at the State Department, who was one of his most vitriolic enemies.”22
Panagiotakos’s political counselor, Charalampos “Babis” Papadopoulos, number three at the embassy, similarly swore in an affidavit that he attended a luncheon at the Jockey Club (downstairs from Elias’s apartment) between late May and early June 1974, at which assistant military attaché Lieutenant Colonel Sotiris Yiounis discussed kidnapping Demetracopoulos with the help of a submarine at harbor in Virginia. The political counselor affirmed that at least two other named officials at the embassy were aware of such plans.23 Papadopoulos said later that he “was assured that Henry Kissinger was fully aware of the proposed operation, and ‘most probably willing to act as its umbrella.’ ”24 This testimony gives added weight to Ted Kennedy’s earlier warning to Elias not to visit his dying father.
After meeting with Prime Minister Karamanlis during his homecoming, Demetracopoulos suggested that the 1972 abduction plan may have been dropped because of fear that public indignation in the US would help Democratic nominee McGovern and the anti-junta cause. According to the documents provided to Whitten, “Greek officials were still grumbling about Demetracopoulos right up until the junta left office last July.”25
News about the kidnapping conspiracy soon became an “affair” all its own. South Dakota Senator Jim Abourezk, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote to Senator Church on April 28, 1975, expressing his outrage that the Greek junta could have planned to kidnap Demetracopoulos with the sympathetic understanding, or even direct help, of the United States intelligence agencies.
If it is true that the CIA and other United States agencies were involved in this affair, or even that they knew of the plans by the junta and did not actively seek to stop them, then this fact should be revealed by your committee and legislative action should be recommended to insure that this sort of plotting with a foreign government can never happen again.26
Abourezk told the press he hoped “the Demetracopoulos affair” will lead to “a detailed investigation of the persistent allegations” of CIA involvement in the military coup of April 21, 1967. McGovern followed up with Church, who told him that he had assigned both matters to the “appropriate staff members…for further action.” The Greek press picked up the story, reporting “US Senate Committee to Investigate Alleged CIA involvement in Demetracopoulos kidnap plot.”27
Meanwhile, on the other side of Capitol Hill, Congressman Don Edwards told the press that the allegations of a kidnapping conspiracy “will be investigated in depth, I am sure, by the House Select Committee on Intelligence.”28 About two months later, Edwards said the matter had been referred to Searle Field, the committee’s staff director, for “follow up,” and the Associated Press reported that Demetracopoulos “is expected to appear before the committee as a witness in their investigations.”29
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ELIAS’S RETURN TO Greece was bittersweet. For all his busyness, he felt a sense of loss, a kind of kaimos, the residue left in the heart after a love affair had ended. His world there had changed, and so had he. It wasn’t just the uglification of Athens, with new concrete apartment buildings having replaced stately homes, increased traffic cacophony, and the spreading air pollution that clouded cherished vistas and blue skies. He found Athens less interesting than Washington. Having made it in fast-paced America, where he moved freely in the corridors of power and around a relatively efficient, modern city, he was reluctant to return to Greece’s frustrating quotidian realities. If he returned permanently, his life would be decidedly different and more difficult. He wasn’t recognized on the streets of Athens the way he was in Washington. His heart was in Greece, but his home was now in the United States. Elias told the Athens News he had a job to do in America. He had promised the Senate Intelligence Committee that he’d provide testimony and evidence detailing the close relationship of Tom Pappas and the colonels as well as the junta’s plans for his own abduction, with possible American complicity.
Meanwhile, the Greek unity government’s limited exposure of dark truths about the junta years left him dissatisfied. The official Greek investigation of his abduction concluded on Friday, June 13, 1975, in a hearing room at the Greek Parliament, with testimony that Dimitrios Petrounakos, part of a special committee to attack Greek journalists, had been “assigned a special mission to deal with the reactionist Elias Demetracopoulos, who was active in the USA.” His mission, never completed, had been the “exoudeterosi (elimination)” of Elias.30
After learning of the kidnapping and assassination reference in the parliament debate, Les Whitten thought the public catharsis (cleansing) process, including trials, then underway might also apply to exposing Greek involvement in the 1968 money transfer. He called Panagiotis Lamprias, deputy minister in charge of intelligence, to find out what the new government had found out about the KYP passing CIA funds to the 1968 Nixon campaign. Lamprias told Whitten that the government “planned to investigate,” promised “more information” in two days, but never replied to repeated requests. Whitten and Anderson later learned that the CIA station chief in Athens, Stacy Hulse, had “made a quiet, subtle request that the government lay off the 1968 fund mystery. Hulse passed the word, according to our sources, to the new KYP chief, Maj. Gen. Konstantinos Fetsis, who informed his civilian boss, George Rallis…At a hectic meeting it was decided to ignore our calls rather than risk worsening relations with the United States.”31
Whitten said he was later told that Karamanlis was also involved in this decision not to respond. Given the prime minister’s agenda, the CIA station chief need not have pushed hard. The new government had decided early on that, in the interest of not reigniting the country’s history of political polarization and revenge, it would limit its investigation of evildoers to top junta leaders during narrow time periods, and then only to the persons held responsible for the most egregious tortures. Thousands of legitimate claims were ignored. Permitting the disclosure of the Demetracopoulos kidnapping plots was a relatively low-cost activity that would only hurt already-discredited junta miscreants. However, allowing this to trigger a thorough investigation of real and imagined CIA–KYP collusion and skulduggery, before and after the coup, was a different matter altogether. With the Cyprus confrontation still unresolved, a clear increase in anti-American sentiment in the country, and Greece having pulled out of the military wing of NATO, there was no reason to make relations with Washington any more difficult. The Greek people were already acutely susceptible to conspiracy theories. Why give them a justifiable reason to get whipped up?
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