The greek connection, p.38
The Greek Connection, page 38
Press accounts noted that Agnew’s “unreserved support” for the Greek regime went far beyond the polite demands of protocol. Upon his return, Agnew told the President proudly how he had resisted embassy entreaties to invite some token opposition figures to the reception for him in Athens. Nixon gave his nod of approval.67
Three days later, after senators deleted a House provision to ban military aid to Greece, the US Senate defeated, at least temporarily, the entire US Foreign Aid bill—a signal of disapproval of the junta. Democratic Senator Quentin Burdick and Republican Senator Mark Hatfield each wrote Elias afterward to thank him for his “persuasive” testimony before the Foreign Relations committee, which they credited for affecting the final vote.68
22.
Campaign 1972
FROM THE TIME THAT NIXON assumed the presidency, he was committed to assuring that his 1972 re-election victory would be sufficiently grand to obliterate memories of his razor-thin contests in 1960 and 1968. As early as January 1969, he met with campaign advisors in the Oval Office to design a strategy to win at any cost. The President approved a privately funded political-intelligence network in which loyalists would aggressively plug any embarrassing leaks and conduct sustained espionage—ranging from surveillance to wiretaps to infiltration—against real and imagined opponents. Soon, the Special Investigations Unit, aka “the Plumbers,” formed by the White House as a reaction to the release of the Pentagon Papers, escalated the range of operations to theft and sabotage. The Watergate planning and break-in was but a small part of a larger enterprise that included vindictive tax audits, attacks on the press, expanded domestic espionage, mail intercepts, and burglaries.
On January 27, 1972, in the attorney general’s office, Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP) counsel G. Gordon Liddy presented the first of his elaborate “Operation Gemstone” covert operations to deputy campaign director Jeb S. Magruder, John Dean, and John Mitchell, who was preparing to leave Justice to become head of CREEP. By the March 7 New Hampshire primary, the Nixon campaign’s dirty-tricks unit had effectively crippled the candidacy of Maine senator Edmund Muskie, Humphrey’s 1968 running mate, widely considered the strongest Democratic candidate. Attention turned to the reform-wing campaign of Democratic senator George McGovern. Demetracopoulos’s close relationship with the long-shot candidate was well known to Nixon operatives.
Going into the race, Nixon was confident that the disproportionate Republican money advantage could overwhelm the cash-poor Democrats. The prolific fundraising of Tom Pappas, co-chair of CREEP’s finance committee, was one of the President’s best weapons; any disclosures that would implicate Tom Pappas as the bagman for an illegal funds transfer from Greece in 1968 could be explosive. Mitchell and Maurice Stans suspected that Larry O’Brien might still have in his files documentary evidence supporting such charges. Three days before the Operation Gemstone meeting, Elias received a concerned letter from Louise Gore.
I went to Perle’s [Perle Mesta’s] luncheon for Martha Mitchell yesterday and sat next to John [Mitchell]. He is furious at you—and your testimony against Pappas. He kept threatening to have you deported!! At first I tried to ask him if he had any reason to think you could be deported and he didn’t have any answer—But then tried to counter by asking me what I knew about you and why we were friends. It really got out of hand. It was all he’d talk about during lunch and everyone at the table was listening…If there is anything I can do—not that I know what—let me know.1
IN THE WEEKS before Mitchell’s outburst, fallout continued from the State Department’s botched attempt to undermine Elias with their blind memo to Speaker Carl Albert. Forwarding Abshire’s third reply to Demetracopoulos to his boss, John Dean, Deputy White House counsel Fred Fielding noted that State had given Congress “bad info that it will not stand behind if info becomes public,” adding “What a grande screwup!”2
Distancing himself from Mitchell, Dean tried to take charge, telling Abshire that “before I pass judgment on this beauty I want to know what was fact vs. fiction in the document.”3 A meeting was held at the CIA to decide who would conduct a time-consuming “exhaustive review” of Demetracopoulos files, because his dossier contained “sensitive correspondence.”4
While Dean and Abshire urged restraint, others in the US government were directed to attack. The State Department’s Intelligence and Research Bureau sent a SECRET memorandum to the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division enclosing a January 20 airgram from the Athens embassy. An FBI SECRET airtel purported that Demetracopoulos might be collaborating with Andreas Papandreou, perhaps in some violent anti-junta action.5 A CIA report depicted efforts to implicate Elias in Archbishop Makarios’s efforts to secure Czech arms for Cyprus.6 All the while, Mitchell’s Justice Department was attempting to confirm the existence and identity of some foreign principal behind Elias and thus nail him for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.7
On January 29, Elias attracted the administration’s attention for a different matter, when he became the first to disclose to the press confidential negotiations to home port the Sixth Fleet in the Athens port city of Piraeus. Elias opposed the “shocking and ill timed” Pentagon plans to use Greece as a permanent naval base on moral, political, and military grounds.8 Within a month, the House Foreign Affairs subcommittees on Europe and the Near East were preparing to hold joint hearings on the decision.
The idea for a home port in Greece had originated with the new Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt. The admiral had fond memories of his times in Greece and thought that tripling the current level of navy personnel by moving some 10,000 sailors and their families there would be good for morale, personnel retention, and budgetary efficiency. Foreign policy and strategic considerations were not his primary concerns.
American officials would claim that anti-Americanism in Greece was essentially nonexistent; that the addition of a huge American colony would have little adverse impact on Greece and no implications for current relations with the junta. For its part, the Greek government lusted after the deal, believing that in exchange for a few thousand homes, new docks, and ancillary facilities, it could strengthen its role as an indispensable American ally.9
By the time the House hearings convened in March, President Nixon had invoked national security and exercised his authority to waive the Hays amendment blocking the supply of arms to the Greek dictatorship. Angry junta critics blasted Nixon’s decision and the selection of Greece over other Mediterranean homeporting sites.
State Department officials blamed Elias for submitting a polemical memorandum and orchestrating negative testimony from others. Demetracopoulos argued that the homeporting proposal violated the essential purpose of the Navy’s “Mobility Doctrine,” which called for an armada able to operate independent of any shore facilities. Such land dependence, he warned, could jeopardize its flexibility. He pointed out the political risks of implementing a program without giving either the US Senate or the Greek people a vote on the matter.10
The Defense Department bulled ahead, refusing to supply important witnesses or provide documentation regarding other possible facilities. The State Department had opposed homeporting in Greece until Admiral Zumwalt invited Joseph Sisco to play golf with him at the exclusive Burning Tree Country Club.11 Afterward, Sisco and his Foggy Bottom colleagues flipped and began supporting Zumwalt’s fiction that Athens had been selected only after carefully examining fifteen other ports in the Mediterranean. State went so far as to backdate a hastily prepared analysis describing the disadvantages of every place except Piraeus, while Near East Affairs director Rodger Davies claimed that a home port in Piraeus would facilitate settlement of the Arab-Israeli dispute.12
In response to pressure from other intelligence agencies, the FBI expressed frustration that they had so much information on Demetracopoulos “it was frequently not possible to tell what information in the files related to variations of previously reported incidents or to incidents merely similar in nature to those previously reported.”13
Elias knew he was viewed negatively by American officials but was unaware of the extent to which some people he thought were his friends, or at least not his enemies, would undermine him. Mary Gore Dean, Louise’s sister and John Mitchell’s paramour, with whom he’d socialized for more than a decade, told the FBI that because Elias held liberal views he might be a Communist. 14
More significantly, for decades Elias had submitted stories to the North American Newspaper Alliance and thought he had a good relationship with its president/executive editor Sid Goldberg, his staff, and his family. He knew that Goldberg was a former American intelligence officer and a conservative Republican, friendly with the likes of Murray Chotiner and opposed to McGovern. But Goldberg had vouched for his NANA employment at the time of his 1967 escape and stood by him in the ensuing immigration battles, fully aware of his anti-junta activities. Elias couldn’t have foreseen that NANA’s manager and Goldberg’s right arm, Vera Glaser, would inform the FBI that Demetracopoulos had no substantial relationship with the news service and volunteer that because Elias was “single, intelligent and a good mixer,” he’d been asked to escort “very prominent” married women to functions and “taken advantage of the situation.”15 She did not disclose the names of his victims, she said, because she could not prove any of the allegations. At the time he was similarly unaware of the activities of Goldberg’s wife, Lucianne, whom he knew socially and who would later achieve notoriety as the literary agent who advised Linda Tripp to tape her conversations with Monica Lewinsky about Bill Clinton. In 1972 she was embedded by Murray Chotiner into the press team covering George McGovern’s presidential campaign to conduct political espionage and help produce “Democrats for Nixon” propaganda.16 While she pretended to be working for the Women’s News Service—part of her husband’s organization—she was in fact being paid by Chotiner to provide salacious personal gossip, private poll results, and schedule changes. Chotiner sent her reports directly to Haldeman on the Nixon campaign plane.
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SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT on Sunday June 17, 1972, five men broke into offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex and were arrested for attempted burglary and wiretapping. What would later become a great national scandal involving White House connections, cover-ups, and congressional investigations began as a minor crime story. At the time, Elias gave limited thought to what the burglars might have been looking for in the offices of DNC chairman Larry O’Brien. He did not know if any of the notes on his charges taken by O’Brien’s staff in October 1968 in that same suite had been kept in the office. News of Howard Hunt’s involvement brought back recollections of Hunt’s work with the CIA in Athens in the 1950s, but nothing more. Elias remained disappointed that O’Brien had not only failed to use his evidence in 1968 but had done nothing with that intelligence over the past three and a half years. What kind of opposition research were Democrats conducting on Pappas, Elias wondered. Little to none, he assumed.
In early summer 1972, Elias was most focused on convincing the Democrats to include a ban on military aid to Greece in their party platform. He had once been hopeful that Secretary of State Rogers might try to balance the administration’s clear support of the junta with gestures of support for regime opponents during a Fourth of July visit to Athens, but he soon discovered that no such pressure would be put on the junta.17 Even student demonstrations, scattered small bombing incidents, and a hit-and-run attack on the American embassy did nothing to deter the US government from its support for the Greek regime.
Elias’s critics maintained that he was such a publicity hound he wouldn’t give tips to reporters and columnists unless they featured or quoted him. In truth, Elias repeatedly found ways to pass along information with the explicit understanding that he would not be identified. He ghost-wrote correspondence, speeches, testimony, articles, and letters to the editor on behalf of United States senators and congressmen, and he used the role of anonymous “special correspondent” as a favorite stratagem, including with the New York Times.18 State Department and embassy officials lost track of how many articles in a variety of publications they believed were secretly supplied by the indefatigable exile.
As censorship rules changed, many Greek newspapers still hesitated to editorialize, but published their partisan views under the guise of straight reporting from their special correspondents abroad.19 Demetracopoulos’s old paper Makedonia/Thessaloniki used this approach, relying on their special correspondent, “L. Costis,” in London. When an American consular official asked Makedonia publisher Ioannis “John” Vellidis whether L. Costis was a nom de plume used by Demetracopoulos, he explained that Costis was a Greek graduate student at the London School of Economics working for the Times of London who had “a good connection in Washington.”20 Neither the school nor the Times has any record of an L. Costis being a student or employee during that time. When Elias was asked about the mystery years later, he smiled and said, “No comment.”
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BY LATE JUNE 1972, believing that Nixon would not change his policy toward Greece in the foreseeable future, Elias focused his presidential-election energies fully on the Democrats. The so-called Greek plank in the Democratic Party Platform on which he and the Committee for Democracy in Greece had lobbied heavily pledged that a Democratic administration would cease all support for the “repressive Greek government.”21 Elias carefully worked the raucous Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach that was dominated by “New Politics” reformers at the expense of party regulars. Demetracopoulos had friends in both camps and knew that Greece would not be the center of attention. Nevertheless, he personally delivered packets of information to all of the presidential candidates, asking for written support of the anti-junta cause.
Separately, he held discussions with McGovern and his staff regarding the importance of making American policy toward Greece part of the senator’s campaign. He wrote a public letter to the presidential nominee, praising his support of the platform plank and asking about “the specific ways” of implementing it if McGovern were elected.22 Two days later, McGovern and his aide John Holum, working with Elias on precise language, crafted a detailed response, also in the form of a public letter. McGovern said that as President he would terminate all aid to the Greek dictatorship, notify NATO of the United States’ “strict adherence” to NATO’s democratic preamble, and order a full review of the Nixon agreement regarding the establishment of homeporting facilities in Greece. He added that the number of US military personnel stationed in Greece would be reduced “to an absolute minimum.” Finally, McGovern would “sharply curtail” the number of visits to Greece of high-ranking US civilian and military officials and cooperate with NATO, the EEC, and the Council of Europe regarding their decisions on “participation by the Greek dictatorship.”23
McGovern’s candidacy may have been a long shot, but Elias believed that the senator was principled and, if elected, would become a leader in the fight to restore Greek democracy. The widespread attention to his involvement in the McGovern statement nourished Demetracopoulos’s large ego, but also made him a more valuable target for his Greek and American enemies.
Elias’s reaction to news of more special treatment from the junta for Tom Pappas stirred up new troubles. Demetracopoulos had blown the whistle years before when learning of the sweetheart deal Pappas negotiated in 1968 to become the first to bring Coca-Cola to Greece. To placate local fruit growers’ fears of competition from the soft-drink giant, Pappas had agreed to invest $20 million in local fruit-canning facilities. Quietly, on May 23, 1972, the regime enacted Royal Decree 72 A, scaling back Pappas’s earlier commitment to only $2.5 million. The reason: “lack of raw materials with which to construct the canning plants.” To Vima, one of the Athens papers for which Elias served as an anonymous correspondent, asked rhetorically how the raw materials unavailable to build canning plants for the citrus industry were in such plentiful supply to build plants for Coca-Cola.24
Over a June dinner, Louise Gore told Elias she had heard separately from a retired CIA friend and from John Mitchell that his criticism of Pappas had again been a topic of discussion in both the White House and the Nixon campaign. She also revealed that both had asked her to help stop Elias.
On July 20, Evans and Novak’s syndicated column mentioned that: “the facts in the Pappas–Coca-Cola case have now been submitted by Elias Demetracopoulos…to the House Foreign Affairs Committee,” and that Pappas’s lobbying for the dictatorship seemed “certain to swing tens of thousands of Greek-American votes, normally Democratic, into the Nixon column on Nov. 7.”25 The day after the column appeared, the FBI outlined for the CIA and State ways to depict Elias as having violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act. It also reported that, in cooperation with the IRS, it had started to look at Elias’s tax records.26
The American relationship with Greece was not high on the list of issues most voters cared about in 1972. Nixon nevertheless tried to spin McGovern’s anti–military aid position into a wedge issue for American Jews, long a loyal part of the Democratic coalition, by claiming that American aid to Greece and homeporting were indispensable for the protection of Israel. Elias quickly pointed out the absurdity of this claim, noting the Greek regime’s refusal to help the US aid Israel during the 1970 Jordanian crisis, its dependence on Arab oil and UN support for Cyprus, and its deserved reputation for being the most anti-Israeli government outside the Arab world and the Soviet bloc. Elias did not have to wait long before Greece, Arab countries, and even some European governments protested. The White House walked back the president’s remarks.27
