A DOOR MAY have closed in Athens, but Demetracopoulos saw an opening in Washington. After he discussed the developments in Greece with Louise Gore, she told him he could now also go public with her 1968 letter expressing shock at Agnew’s about-face on Greece. Elias gave copies to the staffs of both the Senate and House intelligence committees and Evans and Novak. They speculated that the private letter “may prove indispensable to the committee’s probe of long-standing charges that the junta funneled Greek government money into the Nixon-Agnew campaign in return for Nixon-Agnew support.” Congressional sources told them that Tom Pappas “is certain to be summoned when the Church committee ends the assassination phase of its probe and moves into the explosive area of covert CIA operations abroad.”32
The CIA claimed: “there is no truth to these allegacions [sic],” but withheld in their entirety—then and now, more than fifty years later—the contents of top-priority memoranda concerning Thomas Pappas’s “connections with CIA.”33 Spiro Agnew claimed to be outraged by the column, denied any personal involvement, but did not exonerate or even mention Pappas in his statement.34 Although Agnew said he wanted to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee to “clear the air,” some Republicans feared that the disgraced former vice president would use a closed-door session for payback against Nixon. In that spirit, the Republican vice chairman, Texas senator John Tower, made sure that Agnew was never formally asked to appear.
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GIVEN THE NEW Greek administration’s “general amnesty” and reluctance to initiate prosecutions, it’s not surprising that questions about the extent of American government and CIA support for the dictatorship went unanswered. On August 9, 1975, the eleventh day of the Athens trial of the twenty coup protagonists, lawyer Alexandros Lykourezos tried to give evidence of coup leaders’ contacts with US “secret services.” He referred to a statement by then–CIA director William Colby, who said in his 1972 Senate confirmation hearings that the CIA had “for some time…cooperated with Mr. Papadopoulos.”35
When the presiding judge, John Degiannis, commented that American military and political leaders were not being tried in the current case, Lykourezos responded, “Perhaps they are, indirectly.” He expressed regret that the current trial was not heading in that direction. He then recommended that Elias Demetracopoulos be invited to appear before the court as a person “who would be able to prove…the pre-April meddling and support of the defendants by foreign powers.” Judge Degiannis turned down the request as not “feasible.” When Elias then cabled Degiannis to state that he could “return to Athens within twenty-four hours,” his telegram was returned “with the excuse that the person who was to receive it refused to do so.”36
Undeterred, Elias prepared materials for a possible Washington deposition that could be used in Athens, but, in the perpetrators’ trial that ended on August 23, he was never invited to give testimony.37 After less than a month of deliberations, Papadopoulos, Makarezos, and Pattakos were sentenced to death by firing squad for insurrection. Fifteen others, including Ioannidis, received life sentences and lesser terms.
On principle, Elias did not believe in the death penalty, but in this case he believed that a harsh decision would have served the cause of justice. He bristled at Karamanlis’s eventual decision to commute the junta trio’s death sentences to life imprisonment. He understood Karamanlis’s desire not to create martyrs by execution and feed political polarization and revanchism, but he did not like it.
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BY SEPTEMBER 1975, the case for full congressional investigations of CIA activities in Greece before and during the junta years was growing stronger. The Senate Intelligence Committee had heard some testimony on the issue but had not released its findings.38 Several of those interviewed by staff acknowledged that before the 1967 coup they had been aware of Greek and American discussions, even including Karamanlis, considering a military solution to the Greek political chaos. The AP reported that a list of American witnesses identified by Demetracopoulos would be asked to tell what they knew about such plotting.39 However, for much of the year the White House, notably Deputy Assistant to the President Richard “Dick” Cheney, had worked to deter congressional intelligence committee investigations. Disclosures, the CIA warned, would be “disastrous.” All the while appearing cooperative, the Ford Administration effectively shielded essential information by invoking national security. The Church Committee was reduced to “appealing, cajoling, negotiating or begging for data,” and in the end essentially let the administration set the agenda.40
Elias knew that the Senate hearings had been delayed, but still expected to be given a new time to testify. Months passed, and no calls came. Eventually John Holum, McGovern’s lead staffer, informed Elias that he had been told that Kissinger had warned Church specifically against pursuing the CIA-Greece angle, using danger to national security as his justification. An angry Elias gave the tip to syndicated columnist Nick Thimmesch, who confirmed publicly Kissinger’s intervention.41
Seymour Hersh, in his Kissinger book, The Price of Power, dug more deeply into the larger issues and confirmed that the Church committee investigation of the 1968 Pappas-to-Nixon money transfer was also “abruptly cancelled at Kissinger’s direct request.”42 Church, ignoring the commitment he had made to members of the Senate when assuming the select-committee chairmanship, was at the time actively considering running for President. The committee proceedings were being wrapped up; the final report being prepared. For Church, who had never been in the forefront of congressional opposition to the junta, there were more important issues.
House Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Otis Pike was not as deferential as Church, and not afraid to investigate the Pappas-CIA matter. Even dire warnings from Kissinger and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger would not dissuade him. In September 1975, Pike sent committee counsel Jack Boos to Rome to get a sworn statement from Henry Tasca on his recollections of CIA activities in Greece and Cyprus during his tenure.
The retired ambassador was relaxed and affable, exhibiting none of the dyspeptic acerbity of his years in Athens. As part of a more general conversation, outside the sworn formal interview, Boos asked Tasca what he knew about the CIA and Pappas’s roles during and after the Nixon campaigns.43 Tasca wasn’t there in 1968 but said that some of the colonels and others had told him stories confirming the Demetracopoulos allegations. The junta, Tasca added, “leaked like a colander,” and the Pappas financial skulduggery was widely known to others outside. He thought former Ambassador Talbot probably knew about it, but in his view Talbot was a “see-no-evil guy.” CIA officials, noted Tasca, were tightlipped about their own roles, but he felt the station “would have been clearly aware of the fundraising stuff.” As for the recycling of CIA money, he said it wasn’t as if someone wrote initials on the CIA money and then those bills came back to the US, even if “it was functionally the same thing.”
As Tasca understood the process, the request for Greek money was advertised to the colonels as being urgently needed by the Nixon campaign, with Tom Pappas the one shaking them down. If Nixon-Agnew won, Pappas predicted, “you’ve got great ‘ins,’ but if they lose you’re really out in the cold.” He stressed that the race would be extremely close, and money was tight. “If you want to get maximum credit,” he said, “now’s the time!” According to Tasca’s account, the CIA chief of station, Jack Maury, met with the colonels separately and backed up Pappas’s sales pitch. Tasca may not have trusted the CIA, but he admired how deeply they had penetrated the junta. Maury “knew when Papadopoulos went to the bathroom and would definitely have known about the Pappas money transfer,” Tasca recalled. CIA antennae were acutely sensitive at the station level when American partisan politics came into play. Operatives in Athens would have been very cautious about formally apprising their superiors. According to Tasca, CIA director Richard Helms was a “smooth, slippery guy” and wouldn’t want to know about a lot of things.
Pappas was back at his Nixon fundraising in Greece for 1972, Tasca said, but Tasca claimed to know nothing about the scope and details of that campaign. Pappas often made it clear to him that important things were happening of which the ambassador would be kept unaware.
When Boos returned to Washington, he turned in the sworn statement from Tasca and presented to the committee his findings on the 1974 coup and Cyprus.44 Privately, he briefed his chairman on the confidential details he had learned about the 1968 money transfer and the role Pappas had played. Pike was inquisitive and followed up, asking Congressman Ben Rosenthal for the memorandum on Pappas that Demetracopoulos had submitted to Rosenthal’s subcommittee in September 1971.45 The 1968 money transfer was clearly illegal, and, if it involved recycled US taxpayer funds subsidizing candidate Nixon, a legitimate scandal. But Tasca’s story was second-hand and occurred before he was on the scene. He could never say, “I saw the money being transferred.” Former Central Bank head Galanis, who had confirmed to Elias the cash transfer, was dead. Tom Pappas had effectively lawyered up to beat any Watergate rap, and would likely use his age (seventy-six), health, or some other excuse to avoid ever appearing before Congress. Roufogalis and the other junta leaders were en route to jail. The Pike committee wasn’t going to get them to come to Washington and testify. Sure, Pike could call former CIA director Richard Helms to testify. But Helms had walled himself off, as he later confirmed. If, in the unlikely event someone in the Athens station had passed the information to headquarters, he would have been told by someone lower than the director to “sit on it.”
The Pike Committee was already fractious and highly partisan, and its Democratic chairman wanted to complete the committee’s work without the Republicans bolting. Pike was not one to waste political capital, and the Pappas contribution in 1968 was ancient history. Nixon was gone. Simply raising the issue of the 1968 election would be explosive, even before requesting testimony from Mitchell and Stans. Pike and some other members were considering running for the Senate. They had hoped that favorable reviews of their work on the committee could help launch their campaigns. But, by late fall of 1975, many had begun to have second thoughts.
Pressure from the White House may well have played a role. Dave Peterson, President Ford’s intelligence briefing advisor, had provided a special report to Ford about Elias, detailing “derogatory traces from our files.”46 Afterward, according to the meeting transcript, the President exclaimed: “Boy, he’s a no good-nik isn’t he?”47 To drive the point home, Peterson left a “negative blind memo” along with a “long Kissinger memo on Elias” with Ford’s National Security advisor, Brent Scowcroft. Elias was branded a problem for a sixth successive American administration.
Elias was relentless. Seeing the Greece-CIA part of the Church Committee hearings faltering, he had looked to the House side to expose Pappas’s ongoing influence and the story of his own years of being victimized by US government agencies. When it appeared that Pike was also slow-walking his investigation, Elias asked individual members to pressure the chairman. He gave Warren Nelson, an aide to Wisconsin Congressman Les Aspin, some of what he would have given the Church committee. On December 15, Nelson wrote a four-page memo to his boss, summarizing highlights of US government attacks on Elias and making it clear that there was “somebody in the system who really has it in personally for EPD.”48 He pointed out that Demetracopoulos had “substantial documentation, including the names of many living and prominent persons he says were witnesses to or participants in parts of the story.”
Nelson concluded:
I think there’s something here demonstrating CIA abuse in the form of personal harassment…He wants to go public now and quite frankly is shopping around for a means…so that when it comes out it’s not just his allegations, but an independent body saying it. 49
Aspin, a congressional workhorse and serious Pentagon reformer who would later become defense secretary, thought an investigation was still warranted and told chairman Pike as much. At Elias’s request, Congressman Don Edwards did the same.50 On December 18, 1975, American newspaper stories identified Tom Pappas as a “Probe Target” who’d joined President Ford’s camp as a fundraiser for 1976. A former member of the Watergate special-prosecution task force said it would be “an outrage” if Pappas were raising money for Ford.51
In the Greek press the next day, Elias read that Pappas, in exchange for his legendary financial support, had asked President Ford to intervene with the Greek government to prevent him from losing his Coca-Cola franchise.52 Senator McGovern observed that Pappas had repeatedly escaped “a direct accounting for his activities…because investigators have been preoccupied with other bigger targets.”53 Demetracopoulos hoped that, with Aspin and Edwards pushing Pike, this time would be different.
His hopes would not be fulfilled. On December 23, Athens CIA station chief Richard Welch, returning from a Christmas party, was assassinated at close range, in front of his wife, in his suburban Psychiko driveway. The CIA blamed sensationalist anti-Americanism in the Greek press, worldwide publicity of Washington investigations of Agency “black” operations, and public disclosures of Welch’s identity.54 Within days of the murder, CIA defenders effectively charged Congress and liberal media with having Welch’s blood on their hands. Crusading zeal against the CIA ceased to be good domestic politics. Some blamed Elias. In one ugly scene at the Fairfax, John Mitchell screamed at Louise Gore about her friend’s responsibility, as if he had pulled the trigger.
The congressional committees backed off. On the intelligence committee, CIA hunters became the hunted, and members ran scared. In such an atmosphere, nobody wanted to consider Pappas’s 1968 money-laundering. Nobody wanted to pursue the CIA’s and others’ attacks against Demetracopoulos.
By year’s end, Elias had not achieved the objectives for which in May he had claimed to be returning to the US. He had received confirmation of plots against him. Louise Gore’s letters were now public. But his many FOIA requests into his own records had not borne fruit. Soon he and others would learn there was far more than a single “somebody in the system” gunning for him.
28.Fighting for Vindication
A DECEMBER 1974 WASHINGTONIAN MAGAZINE EXPOSÉ of foreign lobbying in the United States featured Elias, calling him “mysterious” and “powerful.” But it also mischaracterized him as a paid lobbyist.1 This offended his great pride in the fact that whatever he did for the restoration of democracy in Greece had been at his own expense. He’d insisted for years that he was nobody’s agent, on nobody’s payroll, least of all that of a foreign state.2 The story, by freelancer Russell Warren Howe, a former Reuters journalist and Penthouse magazine contributor, was the type of publicity he did not covet, especially after Howe, in 1975 and 1976, reworked defamatory claims about him into a book critical of foreign lobbyists.3 Elias considered legal action against the writer, though he ultimately decided against it, in part because it would require probing for the identities of the author’s confidential sources.4 As a journalist who had spent a lifetime protecting his own sources, he found such a prospect distasteful.
Such ethical niceties escaped Howe, who falsely claimed to be a foreign-affairs correspondent for US newspapers while in the paid employ of the Turkish government-controlled news service and its service academy. He wrote tendentious articles and taught his employers public-relations skills. Howe was a willing tool for Elias’s adversaries; he later admitted he’d also worked for a CIA false-front news organization.5
With Elias’s help, McGovern and his key staffer John Holum discovered that the primary source for Russell Howe’s “dirt” on Elias was George Churchill, the State Department Greek Desk official named by the Greek Foreign Ministry as an asset in their Demetracopoulos elimination plans. Churchill had repurposed smears from the defamatory 1971 memorandum generated by State, disclosed additional CIA disinformation, and lied to Howe that Elias had falsely claimed to have worked for the CIA as a ruse to overcome his difficulties in gaining entry to the US in 1967. When McGovern asked Churchill direct questions about providing anonymous and defamatory information to Howe, he responded with a cloud of obfuscation.6
Then, in January 1977, when McGovern saw Churchill’s name on a State Department list of 558 Foreign Service officers nominated for promotion by President Ford, he exercised his Senate prerogative and delayed consideration of all the promotions for three months, until he received more responsive replies.7 Slowly a picture emerged of Churchill as a dissembler and active participant in a Nixon Administration scheme to get back at Elias and his congressional support by circulating the malicious 1971 memorandum as payback for Elias’s filing of the anti-Pappas report. Churchill’s story that his anonymous attack letter was merely something prepared at the request of the Speaker of the House was diametrically contradicted by Carl Albert, who said he’d known Demetracopoulos for years and had never requested a “blind” memorandum.
George McGovern was well aware of the post-Welch assassination firestorm that caused many of his colleagues to back away from investigating the CIA’s misdeeds in Greece and its harassment of Demetracopoulos. He was sensitive to the need to protect identities of intelligence personnel and supported reasonable security classification restrictions. But with Church’s investigation of Greece blocked by Kissinger and the House Intelligence committee under siege by the White House, McGovern considered using his chairmanship of the Senate’s Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, which then included Greece, to undertake a formal review of US policy toward that country during the years of the military dictatorship.
On October 29, 1976, before deciding to hold committee hearings of his own, McGovern asked Senator Daniel Inouye, Church’s successor as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to investigate American intelligence activities in Greece over the previous eight years. He reasoned that the Inouye-led Intelligence Committee would have more resources and flexibility to do a thorough investigation than would a stand-alone McGovern-led inquiry.
McGovern summarized four areas that deserved careful inquiry: (1) expanding and publicizing the Church Committee’s case study of intelligence-agency covert action in Greece; (2) investigating the role of former vice president Agnew in the 1968 presidential campaign as regards Greece and the funneling of secret CIA funds back to the United States for use in Nixon’s 1968 campaign; (3) examining the efforts directed against Elias Demetracopoulos between 1967 and 1974 by American and Greek governments, including kidnap plans; and (4) investigating the role of Tom Pappas, his business interests, and his American and Greek political fundraising connections and possible involvement with “our intelligence agencies.”8
The memorandum was prepared for the senator by John Holum, who’d worked on Greek democracy issues with Elias for years. While other congressmen and their staff had shifted to other issues post-junta, Holum was tenacious and easily convinced McGovern that this was critically important unfinished business.9
Elias couldn’t have been more pleased if he’d drafted the memorandum himself. Some of them were questions he’d asked to be explored since 1967. If the investigations were done well, people on both sides of the Atlantic would finally have facts from which to move forward, and not be hobbled by unsubstantiated claims and rumors.
Indeed, suspicions about connivance between US intelligence agencies and right-wing dictators had been heightened by the September 21, 1976, car-bombing that killed Salvador Allende’s exiled former foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his aide Ronni Moffitt on the streets of Washington. The assassination was carried out at the behest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.10 Speculation that Kissinger and the CIA had advance knowledge of the plot made CIA awareness of Greek junta plots to kidnap Demetracopoulos seem less bizarre.11
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THE NIGHT JIMMY Carter was elected, bells rang out at Greek-American churches because of a widespread belief that he and his administration, unlike those of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, would not favor Turkey in disputes with Greece. They would be disappointed.
It took Inouye more than four months to respond to McGovern’s October letter.12 Privately, Inouye noted problems with pursuing the investigation. When Elias heard of the foot-dragging, he provided a copy of McGovern’s letter to Jack Anderson and Les Whitten. They wrote that McGovern’s secret letter urging a probe of “unresolved questions” about CIA dirty tricks in support of the now-fallen Greek dictatorship suggested a “scenario of intrigue at the highest levels,” and “could start more fireworks in the already volatile US-Greek-Turkish situation.”13 It could also prompt, they said, official interrogation of “such former Washington stalwarts” as Nixon, Agnew, Kissinger, Mitchell, Pappas, and CIA director William Colby.
