Inouye, likely furious with Elias’s leak, authorized Holum to tell the press that although all of the four areas defined by McGovern were “certainly worth an investigation,” only the harassment of Demetracopoulos would be investigated because it involved “new allegations.” Inouye, he said, would not take up the other three because they were “old cases that had already been gone over” and the committee lacked resources to delve into the past.14
At the time, Holum didn’t know that Senator Goldwater had discouraged Inouye from continuing the larger investigation in much the same way Kissinger had derailed the Church inquiry. This time, instead of using national security as the excuse to stop digging, the rationale was personal. Tom Pappas had learned of the McGovern letter and was furious. Three of the areas of recommended inquiry directly involved him. Arguably, he was also indirectly involved in the Demetracopoulos harassment. He went to Goldwater and told him the investigations must be stopped immediately. As a decades-long major financial supporter of the Arizona senator, Pappas had leverage. On the scales of power, Goldwater’s years of cordial relations with Elias did not count. Goldwater directed his chief of staff, Earl Eisenhower, the late President’s nephew, to talk to Inouye.
Bending under Goldwater’s entreaty, Inouye never released his committee’s investigation of the CIA in Greece. However, on August 3, 1977, claiming a desire to “clear up this matter once and for all,” he told McGovern he was pursuing leads related to intelligence-agency “discrediting” of Elias. From August to October 1977, Inouye and McGovern sporadically followed up, with Inouye dealing with the CIA and McGovern the State Department, to ascertain the roots of anti-Demetracopoulos attacks in 1971 and 1974.
The State Department reported that most of the questionable content on Elias “was taken from CIA and FBI reports which appear in our files.”15 The CIA and FBI instructed State not to forward the records. As the senators pushed for more information, the CIA resisted. A CIA spokesman told a reporter that the new Demetracopoulos-inspired congressional investigation “is causing us a lot of problems.” Elias heard the same thing from his Capitol Hill sources. It appeared that the CIA, recovering from the past siege by congressional critics and emboldened by fresh support from the Carter Administration, was getting ready to strike back. Elias was still an attractive target.
Meanwhile, Elias’s lawyers were aggressively pursuing his Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests at State, the CIA, the NSC, the FBI, the INS, and other divisions of the Defense, Justice, and State Departments.16 It was frustrating and tedious work. Some of these requests had been pending since 1974 and 1975. Long delays, arbitrary bureaucratic decisions, and high fees undermined the law’s idealistic goal of an informed citizenry. Elias’s attorneys explained that the flood of requests following disclosures about domestic spying had overwhelmed FOIA staffs. Even when responses came, restrictive disclosure procedures, with broadly interpreted exemptions, meant that documents would likely arrive with much of the requested material redacted. Trying to extract information from the National Security Council was particularly exasperating. For years the NSC said it was exempt from disclosure requirements, that it had no records relating to Elias, or that the documents it had could be found elsewhere in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy. Kissinger claimed thousands of documents as his personal papers.17 At Justice, Mitchell did the same. Throughout 1977, Elias’s lead attorney, William Dobrovir, engaged in contentious exchanges with the CIA over the simple release of information and, when it was finally disclosed, the unavailability of documents without sweeping redactions. Demetracopoulos continued to press for records. For months his legal team went through the ritual of filing requests, getting denials, filing more appeals followed by more denials, or maybe a few documents with major redactions. After multiple letters, phone calls, and personal meetings, lawyers and officials tasked with responding to requests were on a first-name basis, but even that didn’t speed up the process or shake loose more information. Statutory deadlines for responding to appeals were routinely missed, allegedly due to a substantial backlog and a shortage of attorneys.
Typical determinations made in response to requests for specific documents were: “denied in its entirety,” “released with portions deleted,” or unavailable because being “currently coordinated” within the agency or other agencies or the White House. Even with Dobrovir discounting his fees, Elias’s legal costs steadily grew. He adjusted his living expenses to prioritize this pursuit.
Despite the obstructionism, dozens, then hundreds, and eventually considerably more than 1,000 pages of Demetracopoulos files (including duplicates), were released to him. Most had been stamped “SECRET” or “CONFIDENTIAL.” Bit by bit he assembled the elements of the more-than-two-decade campaign to discredit and defame him as punishment for what American officials deemed his having “caused friction in Greek-American relations.” Suspicious American intelligence agents had wasted countless hours and resources trying to identify the source of his allegedly nefarious funding.
The truth about Elias’s finances was much simpler: hard work, a parsimonious lifestyle, and generous employers, family, and friends. From almost the beginning of his career, Elias worked at multiple publications, cobbling together a basic income. His wealthy maternal uncle, Costas Bokolas, had further helped him financially. After the 1957 death of Panagiota, his favorite sibling, Costas provided his nephew a variable allowance that enabled Elias to keep up appearances of living beyond the means of a lowly journalist.18 For a brief while, in addition to his father’s home, Elias also owned a house in Phaleron he inherited from his mother, which provided rental income.
Throughout his life, Elias was never acquisitive and never lived extravagantly. He was a renter, never owned a vehicle, and never took luxurious or extended vacations. He didn’t even own a bathing suit. His living accommodations were modest, their furnishings shabby. When he dined out, he preferred simple fare to fancy meals. He didn’t smoke, drink alcoholic beverages, gamble, or use illicit drugs. He kept a tight rein on his expenses, and when owed money, he usually insisted on being paid back in full. Unlike Tom Pappas, who used politics and his political connections as a means to amass his fortune, building personal wealth didn’t matter to Elias. Money was never his yardstick. He wanted only enough to be a successful player in the worlds of politics and business.
He spent money on his personal appearance and was often described as the best-dressed person in whatever place he went. Ever eager to pick up the tab for meals or drinks with sources, he was usually the one who grabbed the check at dinners with friends. He wanted money to be able to bring beautiful flowers or houseplants to hostesses, surprise congressional secretaries with bottles of perfume, and provide lovely experiences for his lady friends. The generous expense account from Makedonia publisher Vellidis, provided in part because Elias gave him a steady stream of unpublished reliable under-the-radar news, helped him do this in Greece. A large expense account from Brimberg, even when his base salary was low, similarly helped him in America.
During the junta years, when his business income was curtailed and expenses for European travel, long-distance telephone calls, and photocopying were staggeringly high, Deena Clark and her husband occasionally gave him cash as a gift, which he treated as a loan and tried later to repay in full. Louise Gore kept his small apartment “rent-controlled” at about $300 per month and waived some of his Jockey Club tab.
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DESPITE HIS GROWING portfolio of Wall Street consulting, Elias still identified as a journalist, and his primary reportorial project in the mid-1970s was aggressively investigating himself as he appeared in government files.19 Nonetheless, he could not resist the call to break news that could have consequences. When, in July 1977, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee considered the new President’s nomination of William Schaufele to be the ambassador to Greece, Elias was in the audience. Responding to a question about conflicting territorial claims over Aegean islands, Schaufele, an old Africa hand without Greece experience, thoughtlessly described the islands as “essentially [a] bilateral dispute between Greece and Turkey” caused by “unusual arrangements” that had resulted in Greece’s owning territory close to the Turkish coast.20
To an American audience the language was anodyne, but Elias knew that describing Greek sovereignty over its islands as the product of “unusual arrangements” would be explosive. He contacted friends in the Athens press. Demonstrations in Athens and angry editorials provoked problems for the Karamanlis government. The State Department went into damage control, issuing a statement that described Greek ownership of the islands as “based on longstanding international agreements which the United States fully supports.” However, when the State Department released the official transcript of the statement, Elias noted that those last six words had been deleted.
This, to Elias, was an even bigger story. It could mean that the United States had made the change to signal to Ankara that the Carter Administration would continue the Ford Administration’s tilt toward Turkey on Cyprus and other matters. Sharing this analysis with American and Greek columnists resulted in more editorials and demands that Schaufele’s nomination be withdrawn.21 The appointment was postponed until September, then cancelled. The State Department blamed Elias. Elias countered that it was State’s own obtuse handling of the episode that had created the problem. Demetracopoulos hadn’t lost his touch for the controversial scoop.22 But, again, there would be a heavy price.
Early in September, after the Schaufele dispute, David Binder of the New York Times called Elias for an interview. Demetracopoulos knew Binder from the early 1960s, when Binder had covered the Balkans and was assumed to have close CIA connections. The two journalists had never clicked. Binder had suggested to colleagues that Elias was a Communist, warned the Greek ambassador he was “dangerous,” and told Demetracopoulos directly that in his life he’d known only two honest Greeks, and Elias wasn’t one of them. Debating whether he should do the interview, attorney Dobrovir advised: “If you don’t do it, they’ll write the same negative story they were planning to all along and just add that you refused to comment.”
Afraid that Binder might take liberties in quoting him, Elias took the precaution of taping the September 30 session. In his cramped apartment, he told his story, answering all of Binder’s questions, first about Schaufele and then about his life story and the CIA’s long history of discrediting him. He handed Binder news articles, hearing transcripts, and other documents to supplement the interview. Included in the packet was the 1975 CIA memorandum asserting that there were no “hard facts” showing he’d ever worked for any national government or foreign intelligence service. A couple of weeks after the interview, Elias sent the unedited, typed transcript of the interview to Binder along with additional documents.
Nothing appeared in mid-October. One month passed, then two, and no article. Puzzled by the delay, Elias thought at first that the paper might have been engaged in careful fact-checking. He remembered the Times editorial from December 30, 1970, praising his work against the military dictatorship and describing him as “a respected self-exiled Greek journalist.”23 He began to relax and think his suspicions about Binder and the CIA were unfair.
On December 2, 1977, responding to Demetracopoulos’s frustration with months of Senate inaction, McGovern complained to Inouye that the information he’d received from State was “entirely unsatisfactory” in establishing how the anonymous 1971 memorandum concerning Demetracopoulos had been “devised and circulated” to congressional offices. McGovern said, publicly, that it was time to demand that State Department personnel be questioned “on the record.”
Four days later—by coincidence?—the Times’s silence ended. On Monday evening, December 5, 1977, after getting a bulldog copy of the next day’s edition, a friend telephoned Elias from New York and said excitedly, “Elias, my friend, there is grave news.”24 Swallowing hard, Elias said, “Read it.”
Elias seethed quietly as he listened. Binder essentially called Demetracopoulos’s entire life a lie.25 He dismissed Elias’s journalistic career as “self-styled.” Using what he claimed were CIA and State Department records, to some of which Elias had been denied access, Binder passed on prevarications and malicious gossip, challenging his wartime service and asserting he’d repeatedly tried to become an American intelligence agent. “CIA records,” he wrote, “further allege that in the 1950s he was associated with both the Yugoslav and Israeli intelligence services.” Many of Binder’s questions had related to Elias’s role in the Schaufele episode, so Elias had asked him to check back if others contradicted his account of any matter. They did, and Binder didn’t.
For Elias, the indication that a “secret hand” guided Binder’s piece was the spelling of his name. Instead of spelling it the way he did, the way it appeared in Elias’s publications, in the Times’s own pages, and even in State Department records, Binder referred to him throughout as “Ilias P. Dimitracopoulos”—one of the spellings regularly used by the CIA.
What to do? Elias had always regarded the New York Times as one of the world’s great newspapers, though he readily acknowledged that it was far from perfect. He’d heard many inside stories about the arrogance and petty behavior of some personnel. But he believed that the Times, if presented with documents that refuted what the CIA records allegedly revealed, would promptly print a correction. He did not anticipate that, in fighting back against the Times, he was taking on another institution as proud, secretive, and unyielding as the CIA.
Elias had met Executive Editor A. M. Rosenthal on several occasions and felt it unlikely the truculent newspaperman would be responsive to his demand for a correction or apology.26 Managing Editor Seymour Topping, on the other hand, was someone he knew socially and had even escorted to a Brimberg dinner. Topping, however, refused to speak to him. His secretary instructed Elias to call a deputy foreign editor, who in turn told him to call the Washington bureau. Finally, traveling farther and farther down the Times masthead, he was told to “write a letter to the editor and we will consider it.”
Elias wrote a four-page letter, refuting the article’s many gross inaccuracies. The Times published a heavily edited version of the letter, diminishing the article’s falsehoods and misrepresentations.27 Friends rallied around. With sardonic humor, Bob Novak told him that getting that kind of feature news story in the Times meant he had finally “arrived.” But some of his employers fretted that the news was not good for business, and a few cancelled scheduled executive briefings to their clients. Others postponed his presentations on investor implications of foreign events. His income suffered.28
Outraged but unwilling to play the victim, Demetracopoulos instructed Dobrovir to submit new FOIA requests asking the CIA and FBI for “all documents referred to or reflected in” Binder’s article. He also turned to his friends in Congress, urging that his mistreatment be made part of upcoming congressional hearings on CIA conduct. On December 14, 1977, McGovern wrote to Inouye, sharply criticizing the CIA’s selective release to the American press of “demonstrably inaccurate” materials designed to discredit Demetracopoulos, made even worse because included were documents withheld from Elias’s earlier FOIA requests.
The CIA told Dobrovir it could find no record of providing Binder any Demetracopoulos-related document or information “in writing or telephonically,” but was silent as to whether there had been any “in person” contacts.29 Evans and Novak attacked the CIA for “Harassing the Spy Who Never Was.” They recounted their own experience of receiving defamatory information about Elias from the CIA, notably around the time of Elias’s 1967 escape when a CIA officer had warned them “off the record” that Demetracopoulos had been a “double agent in Greece, for the Soviet KGB and Western intelligence services,” charges refuted by the Agency’s own files. They criticized the Times’s reporter for shoddy journalism, reporting that Binder “told us flatly that CIA officials supplied him with information years ago in Athens,” and more recently was given new, unspecified information by CIA officials “past and present.”30
In dueling letters-to-the-editor in the Washington Post, Binder denied he said he’d used any CIA information from his past in the Balkans. Incredibly, he wrote that he “didn’t know anybody from the CIA when he was a correspondent and never received any information on Elias or anyone else.” Evans and Novak responded, claiming that Binder was being untruthful.31
This exchange occurred against the backdrop of six congressional hearings between December 1977 and April 1978 on the relationship between the CIA and the news media. After the Senate Intelligence Committee backed away from the issue, the House Intelligence Committee took over. Committee chairman Congressman Edward Boland acknowledged the history of CIA contractual relationships, paid and unpaid, with individual journalists and news organizations, some American and others foreign. Describing Elias’s world of the 1950s and ’60s, in which some journalists routinely exchanged information and often faced enticements and other choices, Boland noted that, for different motives, some journalists “went further” than routine interactions: “They published stories both true and false for the CIA or they helped recruit agents. Sometimes the journalists weren’t really journalists at all, but CIA agents under cover.”32
Watergate veteran Carl Bernstein wrote a major piece in Rolling Stone that described how leading publishers and news executives had “allowed themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services.”33 According to twenty-five years of available CIA records, more than 400 American journalists “secretly carried out assignments for the CIA.” Some of the most prestigious and powerful organizations were involved, notably CBS; Time, Inc.; and the New York Times. As Elias could attest from painful personal experience, Allen Dulles was a good friend of Time’s Henry Luce. And he was not surprised to learn that New York Times columnist C. L. Sulzberger was deeply involved, and, according to several CIA officials, had at least once turned a background CIA briefing piece almost verbatim into a column.
Les Aspin, who had tried unsuccessfully to get the Pike Committee to deal with Elias’s claims regarding Pappas, was now chairman of the Intelligence Subcommittee on Oversight and ran the hearings. On January 4, 1978, Morton Halperin, a national security expert and fierce critic of intelligence agency abuse of civil liberties, focused his testimony on two issues: the CIA’s use of the news media to influence events in the US, and its background investigations of journalists without their permission. To illustrate his points, he used four “tip of the iceberg” examples: the CIA’s efforts to (1) discredit studies critical of the Warren Commission Report, (2) present Salvador Allende as a threat to a free press in Chile, (3) exploit the murder of Richard Welch, its station chief in Greece, and (4) discredit Elias Demetracopoulos.34
The Demetracopoulos example, Aspin pointed out, involved current CIA leadership going after a lawful resident alien it didn’t like. Halperin asked if this was “part of a deliberate CIA effort by the clandestine services to discredit a persistent critic.” Deliberately providing information from an individual’s files without that person’s permission violated the CIA Charter, and may also have violated the Federal Privacy Act. The New York Times, rather than assigning its own reporter, as it had for other oversight hearings, used a UPI story in covering Halperin’s testimony, edited to exclude any mention of Halperin’s implication that the paper had been used as part of a CIA smear campaign.35
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IN 1978 AND again in 1981, Congressman Aspin attempted to convince successive directors of the CIA to refute Binder’s allegations—brandishing Greek Embassy–provided documents attesting to Elias’s war record and awards—but to no avail.36 Finally, on June 17, 1983, almost six years after the Binder interview, Georgia congressman Wyche Fowler, who had succeeded Aspin as subcommittee chairman, took a novel approach. He asked CIA head William Casey to read the New York Times article, then review the files in his possession dealing with Demetracopoulos, and write him “an unclassified letter that states flatly and clearly that, contrary to the New York Times article, the agency has concluded that there is no basis on which to impeach Mr. Demetracopoulos’ honesty about his war record, or to suggest that he was a spy for the Israelis and or the Yugoslavs or anybody else.”
Fowler’s proposal made no demand on the CIA “to investigate its own people” or “the source of the information in the New York Times article,” or “to address any issues of right or wrong.” Rather, it simply asked the CIA to state: “that it could not have supplied the information because its files, taken as a whole, do not support the allegations in the article.” Fowler then quoted from the 1975 CIA internal study sent to then-director Colby: that the Agency found “no hard facts” that Elias ever worked for any government against the interests of Greece or the United States or that he’d ever been in the pay of any national government or been a member of a foreign intelligence service or been involved in criminal activities. He continued:
My impression is that nothing in the Agency’s file on Mr. Demetracopoulos today would change that judgment…If you agree with the impressions I have formed as to the Demetracopoulos file, I would appreciate your confirming this fact.37
Acting CIA director John N. McMahon replied to Congressman Fowler on August 16, noting that nothing in CIA records dating from 1975 would require a revision of the CIA’s 1975 conclusion.38 This acknowledgment of Elias’s integrity pulled the legs out from under the contentions made in the Binder article six years earlier. “The CIA’s denial that it furnished any information to Mr. Binder casts serious doubt upon the credibility of his 1977 article,” wrote Fowler to Elias. “Hopefully the CIA’s confirmation of the conclusion reached in the 1975 report to Director Colby will at last put this matter to rest.”39
Pleased that he’d finally received corroboration from the CIA, Demetracopoulos returned to the New York Times. In early September, he hand-delivered to William Kovach, the Times’s Washington bureau chief, a photocopy of the recent CIA letter and memorandum, the Greek Embassy’s report on his war record, and a stack of other supporting documents, including many given or offered to Binder in October 1977. Kovach, whom Elias trusted, appeared sympathetic and told him he would do something soon to respond to the new information.
Opening the Times on Sunday morning, September 25, 1983, Elias saw the listing: “CIA review backs Greek’s denial of report on him, [page] 12.” At last, he thought, there would be a full correction and perhaps even a Times apology. But there was no story on this page. Thinking the printed index page reference wrong, he carefully searched through the entire paper. Still nothing. He telephoned Kovach and learned that executives in New York had killed his piece. On Thursday, September 29, an unbylined article in the Times began with a decidedly different tone:
A Greek journalist accused by American officials in 1977 of misrepresenting his war record and of working for foreign intelligence services, has made public a new Central Intelligence Agency review of his case that refutes the allegations against him.40
