3. Greece 1947 to early 1950s

From cradle of democracy to client state

Jorge Semprun is a Spaniard, a Frenchman, a novelist and film-writer, former Communist, former inmate of Buchenwald. He was at the infamous Nazi concentration camp in 1944 with other party members when they heard the news:

For some days now, we had talked of nothing else. … At first some of us had thought it was a lie. It had to be. An invention of Nazi propaganda, to raise the morale of the people. We listened to the news bulletins on the German radio, broadcast by all the loudspeakers, and we shook our heads. A trick to raise the morale of the German people, it had to be. But we soon had to face up to the evidence. Some of us listened in secret to the Allied broadcasts, which confirmed the news. There was no doubt about it: British troops really were crushing the Greek Resistance. In Athens, battle was raging, British troops were retaking the city from the ELAS forces, district by district. It was an unequal fight: ELAS had neither tanks nor planes.
But Radio Moscow had said nothing, and this silence was variously interpreted.1 The British army had arrived in Greece during October and November 1944, shortly after the bulk of the Germans had fled, an evacuation due in no small part to ELAS, the People’s Liberation Army. Founded during the course of 1941- 42 on the initiative of the Greek Communist Party, ELAS and its political wing EAM cut across the entire left side of the political spectrum, numbering many priests and even a few bishops amongst its followers. The guerrillas had wrested large areas of the country from the Nazi invaders who had routed the British in 1941.
ELAS/EAM partisans could be ruthless and coercive toward those Greeks who did not cooperate with them or who were suspected of collaboration with the Germans.
But they also provided another dramatic example of the liberating effects of a world war: the encrusted ways of the Greek old guard were cast aside; in their place arose communities which had at least the semblance of being run by the local residents, inchoate institutions and mechanisms which might have been the precursor of a regenerated Greek society after the war; education, perhaps geared toward propaganda, but for the illiterate education nonetheless; fighting battalions of women, housewives called upon for the first time to act independently of their husbands’ control … a phenomenon which spread irrepressibly until EAM came to number some one to two million Greeks out of a population of seven million.2 This was hardly the kind of social order designed to calm the ulcers of the British old guard (Winston Churchill for one) who had long regarded Greece as their private manor. The Great Man was determined that the Greek king should be restored to his rightful place, with all that that implied, and the British military in Greece lost no time in installing a government dedicated to that end. Monarchists, quislings, and conservatives of all stripes found themselves in positions of political power, predominant in the new Greek army and police; members of EAM/ELAS found themselves dead or in prison.3 In the early days of the world war, when defeating the Nazis was the Allies’ over whelming purpose, Churchill had referred to ELAS as “those gallant guerrillas”, and ELAS’s supporters had welcomed the British in early November 1944 with a sign reading, “We Greet the Brave English Army. … EAM.”4

But the following month, fighting broke out between ELAS and the British forces and their Greek comrades-in-arms, many of whom had fought against ELAS during the war and, in the process, collaborated with the Germans; others had simply served with the Germans. (The British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, acknowledged in August 1946 that there were 228 ex-members of the Nazi Security Battalions — whose main task had been to track down Greek resistance fighters and Jews — on active service in the new Greek army.)5 Further support for the campaign against ELAS came from the US Air Force and Navy which transported more than two British divisions into Greece.’’6 All this while the war against Germany still raged in Europe.
In mid-January 1945 ELAS agreed to an armistice, one that had much of the appearance and the effect of a surrender. There is disagreement amongst historians as to whether ELAS had been militarily defeated or whether the Communists in the ELAS and EAM hierarchy had received the word from Stalin to lay down the gun. If the latter were the case, it would have been consistent with the noted agreement between Stalin and Churchill in October 1944, whereby spheres of influence in Eastern Europe were allocated between the two powers. In this cynical (as Churchill acknowledged) Monopoly game Britain had landed on Greece. Churchill later wrote that Stalin had “adhered strictly and faithfully to our agreement of October, and during all the long weeks of fighting the Communists in the streets of Athens not one word of reproach came from Pravda or Izvestia”.7 Nor, as Jorge Semprun noted, from Radio Moscow.
“It is essential to remember,” Professor D.F. Fleming has pointed out in his eminent history of the cold war, “that Greece was the first of the liberated states to be openly and forcibly compelled to accept the political system of the occupying Great Power. It was Churchill who acted first and Stalin who followed his example, in Bulgaria and then in Rumania, though with less bloodshed.”8 A succession of Greek governments followed, serving by the grace of the British and the United States; thoroughly corrupt governments in the modern Greek tradition, which continued to terrorize the left, tortured them in notorious island prison camps, and did next to nothing to relieve the daily misery of the war-torn Greek people.9"There are few modern parallels for government as bad as this,” CBS’s chief European correspondent Howard K. Smith observed at the time.10 In the fall of 1946 the inevitable occurred: leftists took to the hills to launch phase two of the civil war. The Communists had wrenched Stalin’s strangulating hand from their throats, for their very survival was at stake and everything that they believed in.
The British were weighed down by their own post-war reconstruction needs, and in February 1947 they informed the United States that they could no longer shoulder the burden of maintaining a large armed force in Greece nor provide sizeable military and economic aid to the country. Thus it was that the historic task of preserving all that is decent and good in Western Civilization passed into the hands of the United States.
Several days later, the State Department summoned the Greek chargé ‘affaires in Washington and informed him that his government was to ask the US for aid. This was to be effected by means of a formal letter of request; a document, it turned out, to be written essentially by the State Department. The text of the letter, the chargé d’affaires later reported, “had been drafted with a view to the mentality of Congress … It would also serve to protect the U.S. Government against internal and external charges that it was taking the initiative of intervening in a foreign state or that it had been persuaded by the British to take over a bad legacy from them. The note would also serve as a basis for the cultivation of public opinion which was under study.”11

In July, in a letter to Dwight Griswold, the head of the American Mission to Aid Greece (AMAG), Secretary of State George Marshall said:
It is possible that during your stay in Greece you and the Ambassador will come to the conclusion that the effectiveness of your Mission would be enhanced if a reorganization of the Greek Government could be effected. If such a conclusion is reached, it is hoped that you and the Ambassador will be able to bring about such a reorganization indirectly through discreet suggestion and otherwise in such a manner that even the Greek political leaders will have a feeling that the reorganization has been effected largely by themselves and not by pressure from without.12 The Secretary spelled out a further guideline for Griswold, a man the New York Times shortly afterwards called the “most powerful man in Greece”.13 During the course of your work you and the members of your Mission will from time to time find that certain Greek officials are not, because of incompetence, disagreement with your policies, or for some other reason, extending the type of cooperation which is necessary if the objec-tives of your Mission are to be achieved. You will find it necessary to effect the removal of these officials.14 These contrivances, however, were not the most cynical aspects of the American endeavor. Washington officials well knew that their new client government was so venal and so abusive of human rights that even confirmed American anti-communists were appalled. Stewart Alsop for one. On 23 February 1947 the noted journalist had cabled from Athens that most of the Greek politicians had “no higher ambition than to taste the profitable delights of a free economy at American expense”.15 The same year, an American investigating team found huge supplies of food aid rotting in warehouses at a time when an estimated 75 percent of Greek children were suffering from malnutrition.16 So difficult was it to gloss over this picture, that President Truman, in his address to Congress in March 1947 asking for aid to Greece based on the Greek “request” (the “Truman Doctrine” speech), attempted to pre-empt criticism by admitting that the Greek government was “not perfect” and that “it has made mistakes”. Yet, somehow, by some ideological alchemy best known to the president, the regime in Athens was “democratic”, its opponents the familiar “terrorists”.17 There was no mention of the Soviet Union in this particular speech, but that was to be the relentless refrain of the American rationale over the next 2 1/2 years: the Russians were instigating the Greek leftists so as to kidnap yet another “free” country and drag it kicking and screaming behind the Iron Curtain.
The neighboring Communist states of Bulgaria, Albania, and particularly Yugoslavia, in part motivated by old territorial claims against Greece, did aid the insurgents by allowing them important sanctuary behind their borders and furnishing them with military supplies (whether substantial or merely token in amount is a debatable question). The USSR, however, in the person of Joseph Stalin, was adamantly opposed to assisting the Greek “comrades”. At a meeting with Yugoslav leaders in early 1948 (a few months before Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet Union), described by Milovan Djilas, second-in-command to Tito, Stalin turned to the foreign minister Edvard Kardelj and asked: “Do you believe in the success of the uprising in Greece?” Kardelj replied, “If foreign intervention does nor grow, and if serious political and military errors are not made.” Stalin went on, without paying attention to Kardelj’s opinion: “If, if! No, they have no prospect of success at all. What, do you think that Great Britain and the United States — the United States, the most powerful state in the world — will permit you to break their line of communication in the Mediterranean? Nonsense. And we have no navy. The uprising in Greece must be stopped, and as quickly as possible.”18 The first major shiploads of military assistance under the new American operation arrived in the summer of 1947. (Significant quantities had also been shipped to the Greek government by the US while the British ran the show.] By the end of the year, the Greek military was being entirely supported by American aid, down to and including its clothing and food. The nation’s war-making potential was transformed:

continual increases in the size of the Greek armed forces … fighter-bombers, transport squadrons, air fields, napalm bombs, recoilless rifles, naval patrol vessels, communication networks … docks, railways, roads, bridges … hundreds of millions of dollars of supplies and equipment, approaching a billion in total since the end of the world war… and millions more to create a “Secret Army Reserve” fighting unit, composed principally of the ex-members of the Nazi Security Battalions referred to earlier.19 The US Military Mission took over the development of battle plans for the army from the ineffective Greek generals. The Mission, related British military writer Major Edgar O’Ballance, “took a tough line and insisted that all its recommendations be carried into effect, at once and in full”.20 Eventually, more than 250 American army officers were in the country, many assigned to Greek army divisions to ensure compliance with directives; others operated at the brigade level; another 200 or so US Air Force and Navy personnel were also on active duty in Greece.
All military training methods and programs were “revised, revitalized and tightened up” under American supervision21… infantry units made mote mobile, with increased firepower; special commando units trained in anti-guerrilla tactics; training in mountain warfare, augmented by some 4,000 mules (sic) shipped to Greece by the United States … at American insistence, whole sections of the population uprooted to eliminate the guerrillas’ natural base of operation and source of recruits, just as would be done in Vietnam 20 years later.
“Both on the ground and in the air, American support was becoming increasingly active,” observed CM. Woodhouse, the British colonel and historian who served in Greece during the mid-1940s, “and the theoretical line between advice, intelligence and combat was a narrow one.”22 The Greek leftists held out for three terrible years. Despite losses of many tens of thousands, they were always able to replenish their forces, even increase their number. But by October 1949, foreseeing nothing but more loss of lives to a vastly superior destruction-machine, the guerrillas announced over their radio a “cease fire”. It was the end of the civil war.
The extent of American hegemony over Greece from 1947 onwards can scarcely be exaggerated. We have seen Marshall’s directives to Griswold, and the American management of the military campaign. There were many other manifestations of the same phenomenon, of which the following are a sample:
In September 1947, Vice-Prime Minister Constantine Tsaldaris agreed to the dissolution of the government and the creation of a new ruling coalition. In doing so, said the New York Times, Tsaldaris had “surrendered to the desires of Dwight P.
Griswold … of [US] Ambassador MacVeagh, and also of the King”.23 Before Tsaldaris addressed the Greek legislature on the matter, MacVeagh stepped in to make a change to the speech.24 Over the next several years, each of the frequent changes of prime minister came about only after considerable American input, if not outright demand.25 One example of the latter occurred in 1950 when then American Ambassador Henry Grady sent a letter to Prime Minister Venizelos threatening to cut off US aid if he failed to carry out a government reorganization. Venizelos was compelled to step down.26 The American influence was felt in regard to other high positions in Greek society as well.
Andreas Papandreou, later to become prime minister himself, has written of this period that “Cabinet members and army-generals, political party leaders and members of the Establishment, all made open references to American wishes or views in order to justify or to account for their own actions or posi-tions.”27 Before undertaking a new crackdown on dissidents in July 1947, Greek authorities first approached Ambassador Macveagh. The ambassador informed them that the US government would have no objection to “preventive measures if they were considered necessary”. Reassured, the Greeks went ahead and rounded up 4,000 people in one week.28 An example of what could land a Greek citizen in prison is the case of the EAM member who received an 18-month sentence for printing remarks deemed insulting to Dwight Griswold. He had referred to the American as “the official representative of a foreign country”.29 “In the economic sphere,” Andreas Papandreou noted, the United States “exercised almost dictatorial control during the early fifties requiring that the signature of the chief of the U.S. Economic Mission appear alongside that of the Greek Minister of Co-ordination on any important documents.”30 Earlier, American management of the economy may have been even tighter. A memorandum from Athens dated 17 November 1947, from the American Mission to Aid Greece to the State Department in Washington, read in part: “we have established practical control … over national budget, taxation, currency issuance, price and wage policies, and state economic planning, as well as over imports and exports, the issuance of foreign exchange and the direction of military reconstruction and relief expenditures.”31 There was, moreover, the creation of a new internal security agency, named and modeled after the CIA (KYP in Greek). Before long, KYP was carrying out all the endearing practices of secret police everywhere, including systematic torture.
By the early 1950s, Greece had been molded into a supremely reliable ally-client of the United States. It was staunchly anti-communist and well integrated into the NATO system. It sent troops to Korea to support the United States’ pretence that it was not simply an American war.
It is safe to say that had the left come to power, Greece would have been much more independent of the United States. Greece would likely have been independent as well of the Soviet Union, to whom the Greek left owed nothing. Like Yugoslavia, which is also free of a common border with the USSR, Greece would have been friendly towards the Russians, but independent.
When, in 1964, there came to power in Greece a government which entertained the novel idea that Greece was a sovereign nation, the United States and its Greek cohorts, as we shall see, quickly and effectively stamped out the heresy.

35. Greece 1964–1974

“Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution,” said the President of the United States

“It’s the best damn Government since Pericles,” the American two-star General declared.1 (The news report did not mention whether he was chewing on a big fat cigar.) The government, about which the good General was so ebullient, was that of the Colonels’ junta which came to power in a military coup in April 1967, followed immediately by the tradi-tional martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, torture, and killings, die victims totaling some 8,000 in the first month. This was accompanied by the equally traditional declaration that this was all being done to save the nation from a “communist takeover”. Corrupting and subversive influences in Greek life were to be removed. Among these were miniskirts, long hair, and for-eign newspapers; church attendance for the young would be compulsory.2 So brutal and so swift was the repression, that by September, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands were before the European Commission of Human Rights to accuse Greece of violating most of the Commission’s conventions. Before the year was over, Amnesty International had sent representatives to Greece to investigate the situation. From this came a report which asserted that “Torture as a deliberate practice is carried out by the Security Police and the Military Police.”3 The coup had taken place two days before the campaign for national elections was to begin, elections which appeared certain to bring the veteran liberal leader George Papandreou back as prime minister. Papandteou had been elected in February 1964 with the only outright majority in the history of modern Greek elections. The successful machi-nations to unseat him had begun immediately, a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek military, and the American military and CIA stationed in Greece.
Philip Deane (the pen name of Gerassimos Gigantes) is a Greek, a former UN official, who worked during this period both for King Constantine and as an envoy to Washington for the Papandreou government. He has written an intimate account of the subtleties and the grossness of this conspiracy to undermine the government and enhance the position of the military plotters, and of the raw power exercised by the CIA in his country.4 We saw earlier how Greece was looked upon much as a piece of property to be developed according to Washington’s needs. A story related by Deane illustrates how this attitude was little changed, and thus the precariousness of Papandreou’s position; During one of the perennial disputes between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus, which was now spilling over onto NATO, President Johnson summoned the Greek ambassador to tell him of Washington’s “solution”. The ambassador protested that it would be unacceptable to the Greek parlia-ment and contrary to the Greek constitution. “Then listen to me, Mr. Ambassador,” said the President of the United States, “fuck your Parliament and your Constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant’s trunk, whacked good…. We pay a lot of good American dol-lars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your Prime Minister gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament and Constitutions, he, his Parliament and his Constitution may not last very long.”5 In July 1965, George Papandreou was finally maneuvered out of office by royal prerog-ative. The king had a coalition of breakaway Center Union Deputies (Papandreou’s party) and rightists waiting in the wings to form a new government. It was later revealed by a State Department official that the CIA Chief-of-Station in Athens, John Maury, had “worked in behalf of the palace in 1965. He helped King Constantine buy Center Union Deputies so that the George Papandreou Government was toppled.”6 For nearly two years thereafter, various short-lived cabinets ruled until it was no longer possible to avoid holding the elections prescribed by the constitution.
What concerned the opponents of George Papandreou most about him was his son.
Andreas Papandreou, who had been head of the economics department at the University of California at Berkeley and a minister in his father’s cabinet, was destined for a leading role in the new government. But he was by no means the wide-eyed radical. In the United States, Andreas had been an active supporter of such quintessential moderate liberals as Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey. His economic views, wrote Washington Post columnist Marquis Childs, were “those of the American New Deal”.8 But Andreas Papandreou did not disguise his wish to take Greece out of the cold war.
He publicly questioned the wisdom of the country remaining in NATO, or at least remain-ing in it as a satellite of the United States. He leaned toward opening relations with the Soviet Union and othet Communist countries on Greece’s border. He argued that the swollen American military and intelligence teams in Greece compromised the nation’s free-dom of action. And he viewed the Greek Army as a threat to democracy, wishing to purge it of its most dictatorial- and royalist-minded senior officers.
Andreas Papandreou’s bark was worse than his bite, as his later presidency was to amply demonstrate. (He did not, for example, pull Greece out of NATO or US bases out of Greece.) But in Lyndon Johnson’s Washington, if you were not totally and unquestioningly with us, you were agin’ us. Johnson felt that Andteas, who had become a naturalized US citizen, had “betrayed America”. Said LBJ:
We gave the son of a bitch American citizenship, didn’t we? He was an American, with all the rights and privileges. And he had sworn allegiance to the flag. And then he gave up his American citizenship. He went back to just being a Greek. You can’t trust a man who breaks his oath of allegiance to the flag of these United States.10 What, then, are we to make of the fact that Andreas Papandreou was later reported to have worked with the CIA in the early 1960s? (He criticized publication of the report, but did not deny the charge.)11 If true, it would not have been incompatible with being a liber-al, particularly at that time. It was incompatible, as be subsequently learned, only with his commitment to a Greece independent from US foreign policy.
As for the elder Papandreou, his anti-communist credentials were impeccable, dating back to his role as a British-installed prime minister during the civil war against the left in 1944–45. But he, too, showed stirrings of independence from the Western superpower. He refused to buckle under Johnson’s pressure to compromise with Turkey over Cyprus. He accepted an invitation to visit Moscow, and when his government said that it would accept Soviet aid in preparation for a possible war with Turkey, the US Embassy demanded an explanation. Moreover, in an attempt to heal the old wounds of the civil war, Papandreou began to reintroduce certain civil liberties and to readmit into Greece some of those who had fought against the government in the civil war period.’12 When Andreas Papandreou assumed his ministerial duties in 1964 he was shocked to discover what was becoming a fact of life for every techno-industrial state in the world: an intelligence service gone wild, a shadow government with powers beyond the control of the nation’s nominal leaders. This, thought Papandreou, accounted for many of the obstacles the government was encountering in trying to catty out its policies.13 The Greek intelligence service, KYP, as we have seen, was created by the OSS/CIA in the course of the civil war, with hundreds of its officers receiving training in the United States. One of these men, George Papadopoulos, was the leader of the junta that seized power in 1967. Andreas Papandreou found that the KYP routinely bugged ministerial con-versations and turned the data over to the CIA. (Many Western intelligence agencies have long provided the CIA with information about their own government and citizens, and the CIA has reciprocated on occasion. The nature of much of this information has been such that if a private citizen were to pass it to a foreign power be could be charged with treason.) As a result of his discovery, the younger Papandreou dismissed the two top KYP men and replaced them with reliable officers. The new director was ordered to protect the cabi-net from surveillance. “He came back apologetically,” recalls Papandreou, “to say he couldn’t do it. All the equipment was American, controlled by the CIA or Greeks under CIA supervision. There was no kind of distinction between the two services. They duplicated functions in a counterpart relationship. In effect, they were a single agency.”14 Andreas Papandreou’s order to abolish the bugging of the cabinet inspired the Deputy Chief of Mission of the US Embassy, Norbert Anshutz (of Anschuetz), to visit him.

Anshutz, who has been linked to the CIA, demanded that Papandreou rescind the order.
Andreas demanded that the American leave his office, which he did, but not before warning that “there would be consequences”.15 Papandreou then requested that a thorough search be made of his home and office for electronic devices by the new KYP deputy director. “It wasn’t until much later,” says Andreas, “that we discovered he’d simply planted a lot of new bugs. Lo and behold, we’d brought in another American-paid operative as our №2.”16 An endeavor by Andreas to end the practice of KYP’s funds coming directly from the CIA without passing through any Greek ministry also met with failure, but he did succeed in trans-ferring the man who had been liaison between the two agencies for several years. This was George Papadopoulos. The change in his position, however, appears to have amounted to little more than a formality, for die organization still took orders from him; even afterwards, Greek “opposition politicians who sought the ear (or the purse) of James Potts, CIA [deputy] chief in Athens before the coup, were often told: ‘See George — he’s my boy.”17 In mid-February 1967, a meeting took place in the White House, reported Marquis Childs, to discuss CIA reports which “left no doubt that a military coup was in the making … It could hardly have been a secret. Since 1947 the Greek army and the American military aid group in Athens, numbering several hundred, have worked as part of the same team …
The solemn question was whether by some subtle political intervention the coup could be prevented” and thus preserve parliamentary government. It was decided that no course of action was feasible. As one of the senior civilians present recalls it, Walt Rostow, the President’s adviser on national security affairs, closed the meeting with these words: I hope you understand, gentlemen, that what we have concluded here, or rather have failed to conclude, makes the future course of events in Greece inevitable.-” A CIA report dated 23 January 1967 had specifically named the Papadopoulos group as one plotting a coup, and was apparently one of the reports discussed at the February meeting.19 Of the cabal of five officers which took power in April, four, reportedly, were intimate-ly connected to the American military or to the CIA in Greece. The fifth man had been brought in because of the armored units he commanded.20 George Papadopoulos emerged as the de facto leader, taking the title of prime minister later in the year.
The catchword amongst old hands at the US military mission in Greece was that Papadopoulos was “the first CIA agent to become Premier of a European country”. “Many Greeks consider this to be the simple truth,” reported Charles Foley in The Observer of London.21 At die time of the coup, Papadopoulos had been on the CIA payroll for some 15 years.22 One reason for the success of their marriage may have been Colonel Papadopoulos’s World War II record. When the Germans invaded Greece, Papadopoulos served as a captain in the Nazis’ Security Battalions whose main task was to track down Greek resistance fighters.23 He was, it is said, a great believer in Hitler’s “new order”, and his later record in power did little to cast doubt upon that claim. Foley writes that when he mentioned the junta leader’s pro-German background to an American military adviser he met at a party in Athens, the American hinted that it was related to Papadopoulos’s subservience to US wishes: “George gives good value,” he smiled, “because there are documents in Washington he wouldn’t like let out.”24 Foley relates that under Papadopoulos:

intense official propaganda portrayed Communism as the only enemy Greece had ever had and minimized the German occupation until even Nazi atrocities were seen as provoked by the Communists. This rewriting of history clearly reflects the dictator’s concern at the danger that the gap in his official biography may some day be filled in.25 As part of the rewriting, members of the Security Battalions became “heroes of the resistance”.26 It was torture, however, which most indelibly marked the seven-year Greek nightmare.
James Becket, an American attorney sent to Greece by Amnesty International, wrote in December 1969 that “a conservative estimate would place at not less than two thousand” the number of people tortured.27 It was an odious task for Becket to talk to some of the victims:
People had been mercilessly tortured simply for being in possession of a leaflet criticizing the regime. Brutality and cruelty on one side, frustration and helplessness on the other. They were being tortured and there was nothing to be done. It was like listening to a friend who has cancer.
What comfort, what wise reflection can someone who is comfortable give? Torture might last a short time, but the person will never be the same.28 Becket reported that some torturers had told prisoners that some of their equipment had come as US military aid: a special “thick white double cable” whip was one item;
another was the head-screw, known as an “iron wreath”, which was progressively tightened around the head or ears.29 The Amnesty delegation described a number of the other torture methods commonly employed. Among these were:
a) Beating the soles of the feet with a stick or pipe. After four months of this, the soles of one pris-oner were covered with thick scar tissue. Another was crippled by broken bones.
b) Numerous incidents of sexually-oriented torture: shoving fingers or an object into the vagina and twisting and tearing brutally; also done with the anus; or a tube is inserted into the anus and water driven in under very high pressure.
c) Techniques of gagging: the throat is grasped in such a way that the windpipe is cut oft”, or a filthy rag, often soaked in urine, and sometimes excrement, is shoved down the throat.
d) Tearing out the hair from the head and the pubic region.
e) Jumping on the stomach.
f) Pulling out toe nails and finger nails.30 These were not the worst. The worst is what one reads in the many individual testi-monies. But these are simply too lengthy to be repeated here.31 The junta’s response to the first Amnesty report was to declare that it was comprised of charges emanating from “International Communism” and to hire public relations firms in New York and London to improve its image.32 In 1969, the European Commission of Human Rights found Greece guilty of torture, murder and other violations. For these reasons and particularly for the junta’s abolition of parliamentary democracy, The Council of Europe — a consultative body of, at that time, 18 European states, under which the Commission falls — was preparing to expel Greece. The Council rejected categorically Greece’s claim that it had been in danger of a communist takeover. Amnesty International later reported that the United States, though not a member of the Council, actively applied diplomatic pressure on member states not to vote for the expulsion. (Nonetheless, while the Council was deliberating, the New York Times reported that “The State Department said today that the United States had deliberately avoided tak-ing any position on the question of continued Greek membership in the Council of Europe.”) The European members, said Amnesty, believed that only the United States had the power to bring about changes in Greece, yet it chose only to defend the junta.33 On the specific issue of torture, Amnesty’s report concluded that:
American policy on the torture question as expressed in official statements and official testimony has been to deny it where possible and minimize it where denial was not possible. This policy flowed naturally from general support for the military regime.34 As matters transpired, Greece walked out before the Council could formalize the expul-sion.
In a world grown increasingly hostile, the support of the world’s most powerful nation was sine qua non for the Greek junta. The two governments thrived upon each other. Said the American ambassador to Greece, Henry Tasca, “This is the most anti-communist group you’ll find anywhere. There is just no place like Greece to offer these facilities with the back up of the kind of Government you have got here.” (“You”, not “we”, noted the reporter, was the only pretense.)35 The facilities the ambassador was referring to were dozens of US military installations, from nuclear missile bases to major communication sites, housing tens of thousands of American servicemen. The United States, in turn, provided the junta with ample military hardware despite an official congressional embargo, as well as the police equipment required by the Greek authorities to maintain their rigid control.
In an attempt to formally end the embargo, the Nixon administration asked Papadopoulos to make some gesture towards constitutional government which the White House could then point to. The Greek prime minister was to be assured, said a secret White House document, that the administration would take “at face value and accept without reservation” any such gesture.36 US Vice-president Spiro Agnew, on a visit to the land of his ancestors, was moved to exalt the “achievements” of the Greek government and its “constant co-operation with US needs and wishes”.37 One of the satisfied needs Agnew may have had in mind was the con-tribution of $549,000 made by the junta to the 1968 Nixon-Agnew election campaign.
Apart from any other consideration, it was suspected that this was money given to the junta by the CIA finding its way back to Washington. A Senate investigation of this question was abruptly canceled at the direct request of Henry Kissinger.38 Perhaps nothing better captures the mystique of the bond felt by the Greeks to their American guardians than the story related about Chief Inspector Basil Lambrou, one of Athens’ well-known torturers:
Hundreds of prisoners have listened to the little speech given by Inspector Basil Lambrou, who sits behind his desk which displays the red, white, and blue clasped-hand symbol of American aid. He tries to show the prisoner the absolute futility of resistance: “You make yourself ridicu-lous by thinking you can do anything. The world is divided in two. There are the communists on that side and on this side the free world. The Russians and the Americans, no one else. What are we? Americans. Behind me there is the government, behind the government is NATO, behind NATO is the U.S. You can’t fight us, we are Americans.”39 Amnesty International adds that some torturers would tell their victims things like: “The Human Rights Commission can’t help you now … The Red Cross can do nothing for you …
Tell them all, it will do no good, you are helpless.” “The torturers from the start,” said Amnesty, “had said that the United States supported them and that was what counted.”40 In November 1973, a falling-out within the Greek inner circle culminated in the oust-ing of Papadopoulos and his replacement by Col. Demetrios loannidis, Commander of the Military Police, torturer, graduate of American training in anti-subversive techniques, confi-dant of the CIA,41 Ioannidis named as prime minister a Greek-American, A.
Androutsopoulos, who came to Greece after the Second World War as an official employee of the CIA, a fact of which Mr. Androutsopoulos had often boasted.42 Eight months later, the loannidis regime overthrew the government of Cyprus. It was a fatal miscalculation. Turkey invaded Cyprus and the reverberations in Athens resulted in the military giving way to a civilian government. The Greek nightmare had come to an end.
Much of the story of American complicity in the 1967 coup and its aftermath may never be known. At the trials held in 1975 of junta members and torturers, many witnesses made reference to the American role. This may have been the reason a separate investiga-tion of this aspect was scheduled to be undertaken by the Greek Court of Appeals.43 But it appears that no information resulting from this inquiry, if it actually took place, was ever announced. Philip Deane, upon returning to Greece several months after the civilian govern-ment took over, was told by leading politicians that “for the sake of preserving good rela-tions with the US, the evidence of US complicity will not be made fully public”.44 Andreas Papandreou had been arrested at the time of the coup and held in prison for eight months. Shortly after his release, he and his wife Margaret visited the American ambassador, Phillips Talbot, in Athens. Papandreou related the following:
I asked Talbot whether America could have intervened the night of the coup, to prevent the death of democracy in Greece. He denied that they could have done anything about it. Then Margaret asked a critical question: What if the coup had been a Communist or a Leftist coup?
Talbot answered without hesitation. Then, of course, they would have intervened, and they would have crushed the coup.45