The greek connection, p.47
The Greek Connection, page 47
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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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.”
