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Home , George Papadopoulos, Greek junta, Gust Avrakotos, Nikolaos Makarezos, Operation Gladio, Stylianos Pattakos

Yannick Verberckmoes 00903164 Master Program in American Studies Academic year: 2013-2014

April 21, 1967 Shock Opportunism and the

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. J. Ken Kennard

In this thesis we will investigate the concept of shock opportunism relating to the Greek colonels’ regime, that governed from 1967 to 1974. Shock opportunism is defined as the use of a possibly premeditated collective shock, e.g. a natural disaster, war or coup d’état, as an opportunity to radically implement neoliberal economic reforms. On the one hand we will look at why and how this was done and on the other, we will link the case of Greece to similar examples of authoritarian regimes during the to come to a better analysis of this dark period in Greek history.

Although writing a thesis is a very solitary endeavor, its merits can never be accredited to just one person. I would therefore like to express my gratitude to the following people:

Prof. Dr. J. Ken Kennard: for yelling at me for about thirty minutes one week after the break and explaining to me in quite straightforward English that my first draft still needed a lot of work, as this was a testimony to the great care and effort he displayed in helping me throughout the research and writing process.

Prof. Dr. Victor Gavin: for his useful advice.

Gizem Özbeko ğlu: for her undying support and access to the library of Boğaziçi University (Istanbul). Both of which were absolutely essential to the completion of this dissertation.

Jannik Held: for introducing me to Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine over a couple of beers.

Brigitta Van Der Jeught: for her careful correcting of spelling mistakes.

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Contents

Introduction...... 6 Chapter One: American Control over Greece in the Larger Cold War Context ...... 9 Long-term insurance ...... 11 Conservative stability ...... 13 Chapter Two: The Threat ...... 16 Center Union and developmentalism ...... 17 The army belongs to ...... 19 ...... 20 Aspida conspiracy ...... 21 Chapter Three: The Shock. The Colonels and the CIA...... 24 The coup ...... 27 The American reaction ...... 29 Sensory deprivation ...... 31 Economic shock therapy ...... 34 The shock wears off ...... 38 The shock that ended the Colonels’ regime ...... 39 Conclusion ...... 42 Bibliography...... 45

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Introduction

The aim of this dissertation is to look into why shock opportunism was applied by the Greek colonels’ regime, that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. The term “shock opportunism” is based on Naomi Klein’s concept of the “shock doctrine”, as explained in Klein’s book under the same title. Klein’s theory is that neoliberal economic policies are very often applied after a collective shock such as a natural disaster, a military coup, a war, etc., which Klein illustrates by means of a host of historic examples. The definition of the shock, in Klein’s words, is “a gap between fast-moving events and the information that exists to explain them.” (Klein 2007: 458) This lack of knowledge about what is going on is key to neutralizing any popular resistance to the implementation of neoliberal economic policies, which essentially mean: privatization, tax cuts, decreased spending in the public sector and deregulation. In order to maximally capitalize on the effects of a shock, these policies are issued within a very small time frame. A process that is known as economic “shock therapy”. (Klein 2007: 7) One of Klein’s examples is the collapse of the in 1991. used this shock to carry out significant economic reforms that brought Friedmanism to Russia and plunged it into a decade of chaos. Yeltsin’s policies had the typical results of wiping out the middle and lower classes, while a select few made fortunes. As Klein writes, “By 1998, more than 80 percent of Russian farms had gone bankrupt, and roughly seventy thousand state factories had closed, creating an epidemic of unemployment. In 1989, before shock therapy, 2 million people in the Russian Federation were living in poverty, on less than $4 a day. By the time the shock therapists had administered their ‘bitter medicine’ in the mid-nineties, 74 million Russians were living below the poverty line, according to the World Bank.” (Klein 2007: 237-8) When shock therapy is undertaken by authoritarian regimes, they usually rely on systematic to thwart popular resistance. This was, for instance, the case in Chile under the of Pinochet, but as we will see, it was also one of the main characteristics of the colonels’ Greece. The problem with Klein’s theory, however, is that she fails to adequately define it. The closest she comes is to quote Milton Friedman, one of the founding fathers of neoliberalism, as he observed that “only a crisis –actual or perceived- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” (Friedman 1962: 2) Secondly, the use of the word “doctrine” is framed by Klein in a linear historic narrative that accounts the rise of neoliberalism from the teachings of an obscure Friedrich Von Hayek to world domination. As Klein writes, “The history of the contemporary free market – better understood as the rise of – was written in shocks.” (Klein 2007: 18-9) Given that this is a simplification of a process that is far more complex and haphazardly in nature, we would prefer the term “shock opportunism”, since an economy can only be turned neoliberal if conditions allow it. Shock opportunism can thus be defined as the use of a possibly premeditated collective shock, e.g. a natural disaster, war or coup d’état, as an opportunity to radically implement neoliberal economic reforms. As Greece was not

6 mentioned as an example of the shock doctrine in Klein’s work, we will show how this case serves to both demonstrate her point and prove its shortcomings. When looking at this particular period in time, we need to take into account the larger Cold War context (i.e. the position of Greece as an American client-state), the regional context (i.e. the relations of Greece with its neighboring countries, specifically , and ), and the Greek domestic context (i.e. the political forces operating within Greece). In the first chapter we will therefore look at the broader Cold War context paired with the Greek political context in order to comprehend which political forces were operating in Greece. The story begins with the (1945-1949), which brought about the arrival of the on the shores of Greece so as to help a conservative establishment defeat communist guerillas. By the term “establishment” is meant: an oligarchy of the Greek economic elite, Greek conservatives and the . A second clarification needs to be made concerning the Greek communist resistance. “Communist” in this case does not signify that it received support from the Soviet Union. Following the defeat of Greek in 1949 due to a lack of resources, the US turned Greece into a stable client state. American power over Greece was manifested in the US’ control over Greek and the army. Within Greece, the basis for stability was formed by a stifling , in which suspected communists were arrested, detained and tortured. Upon this foundation of coercion rested a conservative triangle of power, made up of the Palace, the oligarchy and the army, that kept Greece firmly in the Western camp. The United States furthermore insulated the armed forces from political control and by financing and training them to a large extent, it made sure that the loyalty of the Greek army lay as much, if not more, with the United States than with Greece. On the political scene the right was able to maintain itself by a constant rigging of elections and its economic policies were such as to cater to the needs of the oligarchy by granting them monopolies that were protected by law. As we go into the political instability of Greece in the second chapter, we will consider what the perceived threat was that justified a coup. From the early 1950s successive conservative governments with American support provided, as said, an artificial kind of stability. But when a new opposition party, the Center Union, gained increasing electoral support, it was perceived as a threat to both the Greek conservative power structure and the United States. We will look into how this party became supposedly dangerous and what its real aims were, especially as regards the economy. As the Center Union prevailed in the elections of 1963, it sought to end the tight grip of the Greek security forces on public life and see through its economic program. A crisis over the island of Cyprus, however, put the government of directly in the sights of the Americans. In the meantime, George Papandreou’s son, , was accused of having been involved in a communist conspiracy. The Greek king then removed George Papandreou from power and two years of political unrest followed. Yet as the elections scheduled for May 28, 1967 were drawing nearer, the Center Union was slated to win. In the last chapter we will look at how the junta applied the principles of shock opportunism, as soon as it came to power on , 1967. While the initial political shock of a military coup had installed the regime, it was able to sustain itself by way of a reign of terror, which

7 entailed the arrest and incarceration of anyone who resisted. Due to a range of torture techniques, the junta’s prisoners were then literally and figuratively shocked into submission. Lastly, the regime turned Greece into a neoliberal haven by means of economic shock therapy. In this chapter we will take a look at the political and philosophical reasons for the junta to assume power, but we will also go into the possible complicity of the CIA in the coup and what their motives could have been, before considering who benefitted from the regime. We will subsequently analyze the reaction of the United States to the new regime and find out why the United States supported the junta. The irony of this episode in Greek history is that while the colonels had been able to seize power by means of a shock, it was also a shock that removed them: the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Finally, we will briefly discuss what happened in the wake of the colonels’ rule, as we shed some light on Andreas Papandreou’s government and its time in office (1981-1989).

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Chapter One: American Control over Greece in the Larger Cold War Context

As a civil war had erupted in Greece in 1944 between rightwing conservatives and communist guerillas, British forces, that had just liberated the country from German occupation, sided with the conservatives. The reason behind this was an agreement made by and in October of 1944 in Moscow, known as the “”, which carved up the Balkans into spheres of influence between the and the Soviet Union. “Russia was to have 90 per cent dominance in Rumania, and 75 per cent in Bulgaria; Britain was to have 90 per cent in Greece; in Yugoslavia and Hungary, the influence of the two powers would be balanced, each with 50 per cent.” (Nachmani 1990: 496) Britain’s dominance over Greece was furthermore linked to its imperial interests in the Near and Middle East. With British help, the Greek conservative establishment quickly succeeded in defeating the communist forces of the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS) and a peace treaty was signed in Varkiza on February 12, 1945. However, in March of 1946 another round of fighting broke out between communist insurgents and the British-backed Greek government. Contrary to expectations, Stalin stuck to the agreement made with the British and did not send help to the Greek communists. As Amikam Nachmani writes, “Moscow was prepared to abandon Greece for the sake of tightening its grip on the rest of the Balkans.” (Nachmani 1990: 496) Nonetheless, the communist uprising in Greece was believed by the West to be supported by the Soviet Union and was therefore seen as a direct violation of the percentages agreement. But since the British found it increasingly harder to carry the economic burden of their war effort in Greece, they asked the United States for help in 1947. At the time, the United States adhered to its policy of , which essentially entailed two things. “On the one hand, it involved an acceptance of the West’s inability to intervene effectively in opposition to the Soviet Union’s policies in the countries garrisoned by Soviet troops. On the other, it meant that the United States was prepared to block the extension of the Soviet sphere in Europe by whatever means might seem necessary.” (Clogg and Yannopoulos 1972: 230) As Greece was in danger of falling to the communists, while the Soviet Union looked for partial control of Turkey’s Dardanelles, the US took action. President Truman proclaimed his in a message to Congress as “the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”1 In order to rally support for his demand to send $ 400 million dollars in immediate aid to Greece and Turkey, the President portrayed the situation as an almost existential struggle between freedom and tyranny. As Kaplan writes, “The newly acquired

1 Special Message to the Congress on Greece and Turkey: The Truman Doctrine, Truman Library Public Papers, March 12, 1947. Web March 23, 2014. Source: http://www.Trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=2189&st=&st1=

9 position of leadership of the combined with the global threat of Soviet communism to offer a Manichean setting of the problem, permitt[ed] the decision for aid to Greece to be judged as combat between good and evil.” (Kaplan 1993: 7) The logic behind the Truman doctrine also enveloped a concerning all of Europe, which to Truman’s mind, was threatened by an impending spread of communism.

It would be an unspeakable tragedy if these countries, which have struggled so long against overwhelming odds, should lose that victory for which they sacrificed so much. Collapse of free institutions and loss of independence would be disastrous not only for them but for the world. Discouragement and possibly failure would quickly be the lot of neighboring peoples striving to maintain their freedom and independence.”2

Far less ideological terms were used in an assessment of the situation by the Central Intelligence Group, the direct precursor of the CIA. Given that neighboring Soviet satellite states did send limited amounts of aid to the communist guerillas, the Central Intelligence Group, believed that this support actually came from the Soviet Union. However, this was far removed from the truth. As Stalin told the Yugoslav government in Belgrade, “the Soviet Union wanted nothing to do with the Greek communists.” (Murtagh 1994: 39) Due to its misreading of the situation, the Central Intelligence Group feared that if the communists won in Greece, “(1) The Soviets would gain control of the Aegean and the approaches to the Dardanelles; (2) their dominance of the Balkans would be complete; and (3) they would achieve a strategic position in the Eastern Mediterranean, thereby outflanking Turkey, threatening the Suez Canal, and endangering the polities of the .”3

Facing the overwhelming material superiority of the Greek government forces due to American support, the Greek communists found themselves in dire straits and eventually surrendered in 1949. As the forces of freedom had won the civil war, one would expect Greece to finally be free, but, in the words of Nachmani, “[t]he civil war was ended only by the almost total American colonization of the country.” (Nachmani 1990: 496) The United States based its control over Greece firstly on a thorough grip on the Greek armed forces, which were to a significant extent trained and financed by the US. The total US financial aid that was furnished to Greece from June 1947 to June 1957 amounted to $ 1,491 million, of which “a mere $ 341 million was spent on non-military projects, such as housing, health and education, which would have been of direct help to ordinary Greek people.” (Murtagh 1994: 40) To preserve its control over the Greek army, the United States insulated it from Greek political control and made sure it was loyal to the US first and Greece second. As part of the American machination to keep the armed forces out of the hands of the Greek government, the king was placed in charge of them and he thereby enjoyed far more power than he

2 Ibidem. 3 Central Intelligence Group, The Greek Situation, February 7, 1947, CIA Research Reports, Reel II (Greece), 00479, Middelburg: Roosevelt Study Center.

10 would have in a regular parliamentary democracy. (Papandreou 1970: 97) Within Greece, the country was ruled by a conservative establishment. “For beyond Parliament and the government, the all too real centers of power were the Army, the Palace, a small circle of politicians and civil servants, and a number of bankers, industrialists and shipowners.” (Tsoucalas 1969: 151) American power was wielded directly through the military mission, the Embassy and the CIA, which aligned themselves with the Greek oligarchy and the palace. American interests and those of the Greek establishment were protected by turning Greece into a thorough police state, based on “the assumption of a continuing struggle against communism.” (Papandreou 1970: 91) While the Greek communist party was officially outlawed and 80,000 of its militants exiled after the civil war, people suspected of having communist sympathies were still arrested and jailed. The legal framework for this was provided by the emergency legislation of the civil war, which was still intact and had started to form what called the “para-constitution”. (Tsoucalas 1969: 148) Prisoners were detained, tortured and blackmailed in prisons and concentration camps until they signed written statements denouncing communism.4 Inside the army, a band of officers formed a secret society known as, the Holy Bond of Greek Officers (IDEA) to ensure that only officers with the right political convictions were given a shot at making a career. Members vowed to protect the fatherland from any (especially communist) threat and with a fanatical devotion to what they perceived as the security of the fatherland, they made sure that the existing power structures were strictly maintained. Moreover, “IDEA was a natural home for former Nazi collaborators and immediately after the war the organization began to attract them. Among the 2,500 mostly middle-rank officers who had joined by the end of the 1940s were 228 former collaborators.” (Murtagh 1994: 58) The most notable of these former collaborators were George Grivas and George Papadopoulos, who used the networking opportunities of this society to become very influential figures.5

Long-term insurance

During the Greek civil war the newly created CIA found its way to Greece as a part of the American effort to fight communism. This was in line with the situation in other European countries where covert action was undertaken as a compliment to the American aid furnished under the , “a necessary complement because without covert action the Plan would have been less likely to succeed as a result of opposition to American assistance focused around European communist parties.” (Barnes 1982: 669) The Greek

4 Tsoucalas writes that in 1962 the official number of political prisoners was still 1350. However, he believes that the real figure must have been a lot higher, as “thousands of persons were detained in concentration camps in the islands of and Yaros until almost the end of the Karamanlis administration [1963].” (Tsoucalas 1969: 145) 5 According to Charles Foley, Papadopoulos served as a captain in the during the Second World War, while George Grivas was the leader of the X bands. Both organizations were controlled by the Nazis and actively hunted down resistance fighters. Foley, C., Greek Dictator in CIA’s Pocket, , July 1, 1973.

11 office in was established by Tom Karamessines, a veteran of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), a World War II forerunner of the CIA. Soon the CIA station in Athens “numbered more than 100 full-time agents, most of whom were Greek Americans as Karamessines himself. And Athens became the hub of all CIA activity in the Balkans and the Middle East, as far as .” (Ganser 2005: 216) The agency played a crucial role in the development of two organizations, which would be used to subdue any internal opposition: KYP (the Greek intelligence service) and an elite commando unit, called the Greek Mountain Raiders. In 1953, the CIA created the Greek Central Intelligence Service (KYP) in its own image.6 Founded by Tom Karamessines, KYP worked very closely together with the CIA and much like all of the Greek armed forces, the KYP was essentially financed and controlled by the US. As Murtagh quotes an ex-CIA agent: “’With coinciding aims and purposes, and of course our money, it was easy to work with them,’ […] ‘KYP were good at noodling out Greek communists and those who flirted with the Soviets.’” (Murtagh 1994: 43)7. KYP’s task was to monitor Bulgarian and Russian radio traffic and to send the tapes back to the United States where they were decoded by the NSA. On the domestic level, they kept an eye on the Greek population with great enthusiasm, producing a file on everyone suspected of being a communist. Hence, according to John Katris, by 1960-1961 there were “over a million and a half citizens in a country of eight million for whom the government maintained a ‘file’.” (Katris 1971: 80) Katris also relates that by 1961, the storage of these files had become such a problem that the CIA supplied KYP and the police with a modern American computerized system. To show off this brand new piece of American ingenuity, KYP held an official gala, to which it invited the press. As the official pressed a button on the machine, it delivered a file of a believed enemy of Greece. “To everyone’s surprise the enemy turned out to be one of the newspaper reporters present.” (Katris 1971: 80) The Greek Mountain Raiders were to protect Greece from an internal communist coup or to organize resistance in the event of a full-scale Soviet invasion. The raiders were therefore trained in guerilla warfare and in the case of an invasion would relay communications to governments-in-exile and Allied forces outside of Greece. Their weapons included small arms and mortars hidden in secret arms caches, that were scattered across the country. Additionally, the CIA invested millions of dollars in more advanced weaponry, training facilities around Mount Olympus and scuba diving and parachuting equipment. (Murtagh 1994: 42) The raiders could also teach their skills to others and in that sense, they could quickly turn into a much larger force if necessary. As Ganser writes, “the secret army allegedly counted as many as 1,500 officers, which were in need to recruit immediately another 2,000, to give the Hellenic Raiding Force

6 KYP or Kentriki Ypiresia Pliroforion literally means “Central ”. 7 Murtagh does not name any CIA operators he interviewed for his book: “All interviews were conducted on the basis that sources would not be identified by direct attribution, if they so requested. Several former US diplomats and Central Intelligence Agency employees who served in Greece in the Sixties and Seventies gave their account of what happened. I thank them for giving me their time, though they may not thank me for reaching conclusions I know they do not share.” (Murtagh 1994: viii)

12 a nucleus strength of 3,500 elite soldiers.” (Ganser 2005: 217)8 In Greece, the supervision of the raiders was the task of the so-called paramilitary desk of the CIA. (Agee and Wolf 1978: 154) Together with similar organizations in other NATO countries, the Greek Mountain Raiders formed NATO’s “stay-behind network”, which was coordinated by the Allied Coordination Committee located in the NATO headquarters in Brussels. The Greek branch of the network would function under the name “Operation Sheepskin”. (Murtagh 1994: 41) In the mind of the CIA, however, this elite force was predominantly “seen as a long-term ‘insurance’ for the interests of the United States in Greece, to be used to assist or to direct the possible overthrow of an ‘unsympathetic’ Greek government.” (Agee and Wolf 1978: 156)

Conservative stability

Politically, the United States threw their weight behind a series of rightwing governments, which in turn catered to the needs of both the Americans and the Greek establishment. The political party that hence carried the favor of the US was the Greek Rally (ES), which in 1955 changed its name to the (ERE) and was from then on led by Constantine Caramanlis. Both the Greek Rally and the National Radical Union stayed in power through elaborate manipulation of the electoral system.9 For instance, “[i]n 1956 the coalition opposed to ERE won more votes than ERE but only obtained 44 per cent of the seats in Parliament against 56 per cent of the party in power.” (Tsoucalas 1969: 142) The American intent behind this orientation was to bring political stability to Greece. As Andreas Papandreou writes, “’Stability’ in the Greek context meant strong government by the political forces that could be trusted to be amenable to the dictates of the overall US strategy.” (Papandreou 1970: 89) In practice, this was translated into large military expenditures, the granting of facilities to US armed forces and strict obedience to the State Department as regarded Greek foreign policy. According to John Katris, the Greek army numbered 150,000 men at the end of the civil war, but after Greece’s admission to NATO in 1952, it was forced to increase its size of the armed forces to 200,000. While the United States helped to cover the expenses by sending $ 100 million in military aid annually, Greece still needed to spend more than $ 300 million per year to sustain an army of this size. Of course this was a severe drain on the finances of a poor country with an underdeveloped economy. (Katris 1971: 154) The right furthermore benefitted the Greek economic oligarchy, as “[a] combination of generous tax concessions, tolerated tax evasion and a strict wages discipline, reinforced by liberal police measures, made Greece a haven for profits.”

8 Ganser states an anonymous article in the Austrian political magazine Zoom as his source: (1996), Es Muss Nicht Immer Gladio Sein. Attentate, Waffenläger, Errinerungslücken, Zoom Nr. 4/5, 78. 9 The US imposed a majority electoral system on Greece in 1952 on order to bring the Greek Rally to power. “Similarly, it was through able manipulation of electoral systems, elaborated ad hoc before each general election, that the ‘Greek Rally’ and subsequently the ERE, as it was renamed by Karamanlis, managed to swell their representation in Parliament and keep themselves in power.” (Tsoucalas 1969: 142)

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(Papandreou 1970: 92) Economically, Greece remained a largely agricultural country, where typical agricultural phenomena such as clientelism and dowries were very common.

As the right was essentially the party of the Greek economic oligarchy, it maintained economic policies that favored the rich at the expense of the poor. Measures such as the devaluation of the Greek currency proved very beneficial to Greek commerce, but hurt the ordinary Greeks who saw their savings become worthless. Although Tsoucalas suggests that, “it is tempting to see the worship of free enterprise as an economic counterpart to dogmatic anti-Communism” (Tsoucalas 1969: 131), the outlook of the conservatives on the economy was founded on corruption more than on ideology. Because conservative governments relied on the oligarchy for support, large-scale tax evasion by wealthy oligarchs was simply condoned. Stavros Niarchos, for instance, one of Greece’s major shipping magnates at the time once “drew a few laughs at the tax office when he declared the annual profits of his shipyard to be 13,000 drachmae ($ 433)!” (Katris 1971: 76)10 What would prove that the right did not adhere to laissez-faire , is that the monopolies granted to family members or friends of rightwing politicians were protected by law. For example, Constantine Karamanlis, the Greek conservative President, granted a monopoly on razor blades to his father-in-law and “[a]t the same time, the government placed exorbitant import duties on razor blades, with the rationalization that this was necessary to encourage the development of domestic industry.” (Katris 1971: 85) As a consequence of this take on the Greek economy, unemployment rose and emigration for many was the only way to escape deprivation. The Right did attempt to be “somewhat Keynesian” (Tsoucalas 1969: 131) in that “[p]ublic investment expenditure rose from 1.7 billion drachmas in 1952 to 5.8 billion in 1962.” (Tsoucalas 1969: 134) This was needed to provide some employment and to modernize the country’s infrastructure. As American financial aid decreased, foreign investment was attracted in its stead. “But though the advantages offered were extraordinary, the amount of foreign capital actually invested was not significant until 1960.” (Tsoucalas 1969: 138) On the other hand, the amount of foreign investment in Greece would soon become very substantial, as by 1964 it “almost equaled the total assets of the manufacturing sector proper.” (Tsoucalas 1969: 139) However, similar to Karamanlis’ razor blades deal, foreign investment was not allowed to enter areas where domestic monopolies were operating. Conversely, to guarantee profits for foreign investors, they were simply granted their own monopolies. (Rousseas 1967: 182) The era between 1952 and 1963, characterized by its conservative stability, gradually spurred economic growth and in the early 1960s growth even increased so much as to provide Greece with an economic

10 Katris also writes that a lot of the American financial aid furnished to Greece for the reconstruction of the country “poured into the pockets of the Greek oligarchy in the form of bank loans. They were supposed to develop the land and thereby raise the standard of living of the people. However, a few months after securing one of these loans the debtor would stop making payments and would declare bankruptcy.” (Katris 1971: 75) Washington soon learned that this was the price it had to pay to secure the establishment’s loyalty.

14 miracle.11 But it would be a mistake to ascribe this to the economic policies of the right. Rather, it came about by emigrant remittances as well as profits from the new-born sectors of and shipping.12 To the outsider, Greece nevertheless seemed a fast developing and promising country, with small capsules of vast wealth, as could be found in the mundane villa areas of Athens. Underneath this mirage of affluence, however, the seeds of unrest were everywhere, as the lack of national independence, the constant violations of and the social injustice inherent in this system gradually started to weigh heavily on the minds of ordinary Greeks.

11 In the period 1960-1973 “gross domestic product grew at an average annual rate of 7.7 percent, but exports of goods and services grew at the much higher average rate of 12.6 percent.” (Thomadakis 1997: 43) 12 Tsoucalas writes that tourist receipts from 1957 on were growing at a rate of 20 per cent a year. The remittances of Greek emigrants in 1963 alone amounted to $ 173 million, while shipping accounted for another $ 170 million in foreign exchange in 1963. (Tsoucalas 1969: 134)

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Chapter Two: The Threat

The election of 1958, signified a turning point in the course of rightwing electoral supremacy, as the EDA, the political party of the left, had managed to gain substantial ground and polled a quarter of the total vote. With its 79 seats in parliament, it would now take up the role of the primary opposition party.13 These elections had seen the total demise of the liberals led by Sophocles Venizelos and it became apparent that without radical reorganization, the voice of the middle ground would disappear from Greek politics. Yet it took another two and a half years before the Center Union was formed in September of 1961, jointly led by Sophocles Venizelos and George Papandreou. The following year, the son of George Papandreou, Andreas, returned to Greece. After serving with the US Navy in the Second World War, he had obtained a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, and embarked upon a career in academics. He became a professor at the University of Minnesota and later at the University of California at Berkeley. (Katris 1971: 200-1) As the elections of 1961 were coming closer, the Greek para-constitutional system resorted to new ways to make sure that the right remained in power. The army and secret service (probably with the knowledge of the CIA) set up a plot that was “christened – without a trace of irony – the Pericles plan, Pericles being the of ancient Greek democracy.” (Murtagh 1994: 56)14 Indeed, the security forces regarded the elections as a military campaign and left nothing to chance in re-assuring another victory for the National Radical Union. Citizens were beaten, threatened or paid in order to convince them of voting for Karamanlis. By mid-October the Gendarmerie and rightwing para-military forces started to intimidate the people in the countryside. A few days before the election, the army joined in. “As was disclosed later, soldiers dressed in civilian clothes were directed to carry out acts of violence at night against citizens who belonged to the Left or to the Democratic Centre. And as elections were approaching, this turned into a veritable orgy.” (Papandreou 1970: 105) Moreover, where voters could not be beaten or blackmailed into voting for the ERE, they were simply made up. As Murtagh relates, “Fake electoral registers created an extra 200,000 ERE voters in Athens.” (Murtagh 1994: 59) Despite the violence and fraud, Papandreou’s Center Union still received 33.7 percent of the votes, with 50.8 percent for the National Radical Union of Karamanlis and 14.6 percent for the leftist EDA.15 This was a result that both the establishment and the US could be pleased with, since again “Caramanlis had emerged all- powerful. And [George] Papandreou’s Center Union had picked up 100 seats, to become His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, a role the Americans had reserved for it.” (Papandreou 1970: 105)

13 Figures: (Papandreou 1970: 92). 14 The aforementioned secret society within the armed forces, IDEA, also played a significant role in the conspiracy. Names of IDEA members involved, included George Papadopoulos, the later leader of the coup. ( Murtagh 1994: 59) As a CIA report two weeks before the elections shows, Laughlin Campbell was able to predict the outcome with amazing accuracy. As Murtagh writes, “The CIA man was just one per centage [sic] point out.” (Murtagh 1994: 60) 15 Source for the figures: (Papandreou 1970: 105).

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As a reaction to the fraudulent elections, George Papandreou initiated his anendotos, an “’unyielding fight’ for new, fair elections.” (Papandreou 1970: 108) By touring the country, he tried to rally the people behind his cause. When the Center Union held a large open air gathering in Athens the next year, Greeks flooded the streets to demonstrate their support for him. According to Andreas Papandreou, “The people came angry and determined, and George Papandreou emerged as something more than a party leader. He had become the personification of a cause, the cause of popular sovereignty and democratic rule.” (Papandreou 1970: 109) Due to a growing rift between the Karamanlis government and the palace, Karamanlis decided to resign in 1963. The rift had been caused by a dispute, which “arose from Caramanlis’ efforts to control the Armed Forces, which was a sore point for King Paul.” (Papandreou 1970: 111)16 However, the US did not regard an electoral triumph for the Center Union as a possibility. “For the Americans in Greece, Caramanlis had always been a favourite and they were deeply convinced that the could not win a decisive victory in new elections.” (Papandreou 1970: 112) But on November 3, 1963, the nightmare of both the establishment and the US came true. “The Centre Union was victorious, receiving 42 per cent of the vote and 137 seats in Parliament. Caramanlis’ National Radical Union had 39 per cent, and 28 seats. Markezinis’ progressive party won the remaining 2 seats.” (Papandreou 1970: 114) Since George Papandreou refused to form a coalition government with the right, or to rely on the left for support, he resigned and brought the country to new elections. His wish for an absolute majority in parliament was granted by the Greek people on February 16, 1964. “With an unprecedented 52.72 per cent of the votes (against 35.26 per cent for ERE and 11.80 per cent for EDA), it [the Center Union] had an ample majority in Parliament.” (Tsoucalas 1969: 180)

Center Union and developmentalism

Economically, the Center Union profoundly believed in developmentalism, an economic theory which had led to success in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. In general, developmentalist policies focus on “(1) industrialisation, (2) rapid capital accumulation, (3) mobilisation of underemployed manpower, and (4) planning and an economically active state.” (Jameson and Wilber 1992: 6) In her treatment of the success of developmentalism in the tip of South America, on the other hand, Klein explains the concept in more human terms.

Developmentalist economists believed that their countries would finally escape the cycle of poverty only if they pursued an inward-oriented industrialization strategy instead of relying on the export of natural resources, whose prices had been on a declining path, to Europe and

16 Shortly after resigning, Karamanlis left the country. “His refusal to put up the slightest struggle for his position and prestige, and his sudden departure from the country under a false name (Mr Triantafyllides), gave rise to rumours that his life had been threatened.” (Tsoucalas 1969: 178)

17

North America. They advocated regulating or even nationalizing oil, minerals and other key industries so that a healthy share of the proceeds fed a government-led development process. (Klein 2007: 55)

It is not a coincidence that Andreas Papandreou studied at Harvard, which together with Oxford and Yale was the home of developmentalism at the time. (Klein 2007: 55) When lecturing on the Greek economy in 1967, Andreas Papandreou stated his views in the following way:

To facilitate economic growth and development in Greece, I believe that the country’s infrastructure, transportation and communications, credit, and education and health must belong completely to the public sector. In contrast, agriculture and commerce should be in the private sector. Finally, industry must be both public and private. Heavy industry should probably be public while light industry should be private.”17

The danger looming on Greece was that, as the economy was gradually being opened to foreign investment, local industries would not be able to compete with big foreign corporations. Moreover, “[i]n most cases foreign capital was treated preferentially and was granted monopoly rights for the exploitation of the domestic market and the country’s national resources.” (Rousseas 1967: 182) Overall, the aim was to make Greece stronger economically and less dependent on foreign money, thereby rendering it more independent from foreign influence. Andreas Pandreou consequently believed that Greece could only grow, if it became more autonomous and democratic:

I would like to add that the views I hold on this subject rest upon the basic premise that economic development in Greece can only be realized when the Greek people control their own economic and political decisions, or better yet, when the duly elected government in Greece represents truly the will of the people. Economic subjugation, in contrast, inhibits growth and development and it conflicts with the goals of national economic and social development.18

The Center Union’s economic policy can thus be summarized as an effort to make the Greek economy stronger, to end corruption and social injustice and to make Greece less dependent on foreign capital. One of the first feats of the Center Union government was therefore an effort to redistribute income. According to Tsoucalas, “income redistribution was seen as a tool of effective demand stimulating domestic consumption. And indeed expansion was very rapid. In 1965, for the first time, the value of industrial output surpassed that of agricultural production.” (Tsoucalas 1969: 183) Secondly, the party renegotiated the deals between Greece and the two largest foreign concerns operating on Greek soil (Pechiney and Esso- Pappas) “and new terms, more advantageous to Greece, were imposed.” (Tsoucalas 1969:

17 Quoted in (Rousseas 1967: 176). 18 Quoted in (Rousseas 1967: 184).

18

183) Lastly, major reforms were made in Greek education, as compulsory schooling was extended from six to nine years and free meals were provided in all elementary schools. As Tsoucalas writes, “Of all Papandreou’s reforms, by far the most popular was the chance seen by the peasants for their children to become ‘civilized human beings’. (Free school meals and the extension of the leaving age were both abolished by the colonels directly after the 1967 coup).” (Tsoucalas 1969: 184) The story of developmentalism during the Cold War is a tragic one, given that the CIA started taking out governments that displayed nationalist combined with socialist tendencies as early as 1953, when a CIA operation codenamed “TP-Ajax” toppled the Iranian President Mossadagh. According to “[t]he prize was Iran’s oil fields”19, which were at the time controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). Mossadegh intended to nationalize Iran’s oil production and thus became dangerous to both Britain and the United States. The outcome of the operation saw the replacement of Mossadegh by General Zahedi and a reaffirmation of the power of the Shah. In South America, all the showcases of developmentalism – Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil – were run by U.S.-backed military governments by 1976 and had radically shifted their economies into free market models. (Klein 2007: 87)

The army belongs to the nation

However, what sent the Center Union directly on a collision course with the traditional establishment and the United States was not only its economic policies, but also its commitment to put an end to the rightwing police state as well as Papandreou’s actions in the Cyprus crisis of 1964. Under the slogan “the army belongs to the nation” (Papandreou 1970: 148), the Papandreou government attempted to thwart the para-constitutional control of the armed forces and intelligence service by the US and the Palace. Although, the ministry of defense was given to a loyal friend of the King, Petros Garoufalias - this later turned out to be a crucial mistake- the Center Union did break down as many elements as it could of the para-constitutional system. The government thus halted police coercion, dissolved rightwing extremist bands and released the majority of political prisoners. According to Tsoucalas, “Within a few months, a climate of freedom had been almost completely restored.” (Tsoucalas 1969: 183) As the traditional power structure of the right was now crumbling and the establishment came under threat from a new class alliance “between large masses of the peasants, the working class, and the radicalized middle and lower bourgeoisie” (Tsoucalas 1969: 181) that supported the Center Union, the rightwing National Radical Union denounced the majority party as a “Communist menace” (Tsoucalas 1969: 181). Andreas Papandreou furthermore tried to end the control of the CIA over the Greek intelligence service, but this endeavor soon proved to be a bridge too far. When Andreas Papandreou held the office of Minister to the Prime Minister, a post which entailed

19 The New York Times (2000), Secrets of History: The CIA in Iran. Web. July 27, 2014. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-chapter2.html

19 the responsibility over the secret services, he discovered that his office was bugged by the KYP, the Greek counterpart of the CIA. He then replaced the top two KYP men with others that he could trust and demanded that the eaves-dropping devices be removed immediately. The new director additionally received the task of protecting Papandreou’s cabinet from further surveillance. “He came back a while later,” Papandreou writes. “You know I am very sorry. But it can’t be done.” The man told him apologetically. (Papandreou 1971: 660) Moreover, according to depositions, Andreas Papandreou had obtained from army officers loyal to him, “the lines of all cabinet members were bugged on orders from Colonel George Papadopoulos, formerly of KYP (the Greek CIA). Papadopoulos had been transferred from KYP, but the organization still took its orders from him. After the fall of the colonels, Greek investigating judges gathered sworn testimony that George Papadopoulos received a personal stipend from the American CIA agents and that he was the man through whom they paid stipends to the rest of the KYP employees.” (Deane 1977: 96)

Cyprus

In the heat of the domestic power struggle, an international dispute again erupted between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus, as both countries laid claims on the island and Turkey threatened to invade it. Cyprus had gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1960, whereupon Archbishop Makarios III had assumed the Presidency. The island housed a majority of Greeks as well as a minority of Turks and violence between the two ethnic groups was not uncommon. Greece entertained the idea of (Greek: unity) in which Cyprus would become part of its territory. “Enosis had the advantage of putting Cyprus into NATO’s ranks, but it had the disadvantage of making Greece [strategically] too important, especially at the expense of Turkey, a faithful ally that had common frontiers with Russia. Thus, the Anglo-American for Cyprus lay somewhere between enosis and independence.” (Papandreou 1970: 131) The US obviously opposed a war between two of its allies and as tensions between Greece and Turkey rose during the summer of 1964, Dean Acheson, a former Secretary of State under President Truman, was appointed as a mediator. To solve the issue, Acheson designed a plan, hence called the “Acheson plan”, which consisted of four elements: Cyprus would become Greek, with self-governing Turkish cantons on the island, Turkey would be granted a military base on Cyprus with no limit on the amount of troops and material to be stationed on that base and lastly, Greece would hand over the island of Castelorizo to Turkey. (Deane 1977: 113) When President Johnson invited the Greek ambassador, Alekos Matsas, to the White House, the ambassador informed the President that Greece could never agree to the Acheson plan, on the grounds that it was unconstitutional for the Greek parliament to give away a part of the territory. Johnson, outraged at the ambassador’s words, responded in his typical brawling style:

20

“[F]uck your Parliament and your Constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If those two fleas keep itching the elephant, they might just get whacked by the elephant’s trunk, whacked good. […] We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr Ambassador. If your Prime Minister gives me talk about Democray, Parliament and Constitutions, he, his Parliament and his Constitution may not last very long. […] Don’t forget to tell old Papa what’s his name what I told you. Mind you. Tell him. You hear?” (Deane 1977: 113-4)

Directly after the conversation, ambassador Matsas, sent every last one of Johnson’s words in a coded message to Greece. As the coding machine was American, the Americans intercepted the message and decoded it immediately. A furious LBJ was on the phone within minutes, scolding Matsas for transferring what was supposed to be a “private conversation”. (Deane 1977: 114). As the Cyprus war scare progressed, George Papandreou’s position proved to be uncompromising towards the United States and Turkey. Tensions culminated on August 7, 1964, when the Turkish air force launched a three day bombing campaign, which left a number of Greek-Cypriot villages in ruins. (Papandreou 1970: 138-9) Since the Greek air force was unable to defend Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios purchased Czech ground- to-air missiles which were to be delivered by a Greek ship. (Papandreou 1970: 143) Of course Makarios’ move greatly infuriated the United States. Even though Papandreou did not want to provoke a war with Turkey, he also understood that NATO could not protect Greece against a Turkish threat and therefore refused to allow the Greek army to participate in the military training exercises of August 1964. Moreover, despite strong NATO pressure, he intended to reduce military expenditure. (Tsoucalas 1969: 187) In the end, an invasion of Cyprus was only prevented by a letter of President Johnson - himself under pressure from the Greek American lobby - to the Turkish president, admonishing him “in all candor that the United States [could] not agree to the use of any United States supplied military equipment for a Turkish intervention in Cyprus under present circumstances.”20

Aspida conspiracy

The Cyprus war scare more or less coincided with the ASPIDA (Greek: shield) conspiracy. Although the conspiracy was largely fabricated by George Papadopoulos, a small group of Greek officers had in fact created a secret club with the purpose of advancing their careers. However, according to Philippe Deane, “[i]t has been amply proved, since, that ASPIDA was no threat to the Greek armed forces. Six captains who felt they had been denied merited promotions had banded together to petition for redress of their grievance.” (Deane 1977: 97) The ASPIDA conspiracy was made public as a reaction to a demand George Papandreou had made to an investigation into the Pericles plan that rigged the 1961 elections

20Johnson words are quoted in: Landau, J. (1974), Johnson’s 1964 Letter to Inönü and Greek Lobbying of the White House, The Turkish Yearbook of International Relations, Vol. 14, 45-58. Web, August 4, 2014. Source: http://www.politics.ankara.edu.tr/dergi/tybook/14/Jacob_M_Landau.pdf

21

(Papandreou 1970: 145). George Grivas, the former collaborator and IDEA member, was the first to proclaim the existence of ASPIDA in a report sent to Defense Minister Garoufalias (Papandreou 1970: 151). As Philippe Deane writes, “Andreas Papandreou, the Prime Minister’s son, was accused of being the leader of ASPIDA. Testimony before the court trying the junta in August 1975 describes how the damaging rumours were manufactured, how witnesses were coached to lie and by whom. The names of those involved in this systematic campaign of calumny were put before the court. George Papadopoulos was the leader of this operation. He has been found guilty.” (Deane 1977: 98) At the time, however, the king intended to make a big issue of it. (Papandreou 1970: 155) US army officials, even though they were aware of the falsity of the accusations, also helped to spread them as much as they could. (Deane 1977: 99) The official investigation into the ASPIDA case was assigned to Colonel Laganis, an obedient member of the IDEA organization and therefore a subordinate of Papadopoulos. (Papandreou 1970: 156) Laganis immediately arrested and interrogated a number of officers, among whom was Colonel Papaterpos, the deputy director of KYP, who was appointed by George Papandreou to investigate the Pericles plan. According to Andreas Papandreou, “his close friendship with my father and me would provide the essential missing link between the military and the political leadership of the conspiracy.” (Papandreou 1970: 156) By incriminating Andreas Papandreou and convincing the Greek public that an allegedly communist faction of army officers was planning a coup, the palace, the establishment and the US, “could block our [i.e. the Center Union’s] efforts to change the army leadership – which had become a major public demand following the Pericles disclosures. [And secondly] […] they could give the King the necessary moral argument for ousting George Papandreou from the government of the country.” (Papandreou 1970: 157)

King Constantine, who had succeeded king Paul after his death in 1964, deposed the government of George Papandreou on , 1965. The reason for the ousting had been the resignation of Defense Minister Garoufalias, a loyal trustee of Constantine. Papandreou had initially given the mandate to Garoufalias, as a means of appeasing the king, but when it became apparent that the cooperation of Garoufalias with the Center Union government was no longer to be expected, George Papandreou let him off and subsequently tried to take up the ministry himself. This greatly upset king Constantine who in turn demanded the resignation of Papandreou. By means of a number of apostates (Greek: defectors) from the Center Union party, the King then tried to form a government of unquestionable loyalty to him. Apparently the CIA also had a hand in forging this scheme.21 As Andreas Papandrou writes, “The Palace and the Americans – especially the CIA – had worked hard in the summer months of 1965 to break up the Centre Union Party. They succeeded eventually in constructing a bare parliamentary majority for the government of Premier Stephanopoulos in September 1965.” (Papandreou 1970: 23) At the time it seemed that “[t]he King had won

21 Tsoucalas writes that one of the CIA agents involved was Richard Barnum, who “operated through the Esso- Pappas concern, whose interests were at stake as the huge contracts signed with the puppet government were being questioned by the Centre Union.” (Tsoucalas 1969: 206)

22 the first round. Papandreou had been ousted, and Andreas was under indictment for high [in the ASPIDA case].” (Tsoucalas 1969: 191) However, over the next two years more political mayhem ensued as support for the Center Union was still growing stronger. The ASPIDA plan backfired, when the Greek public learned that there was hardly any evidence against the defendants and the plot in the end only served to lay bare the full extent to which the Greek secret service had tried to control the political scene. “An elaborate system of tapping ministers’ telephones on behalf of KYP (the Greek CIA) was exposed; a plot against the life of George Papandreou, which had only failed for accidental reasons, was brought to light; and two officers revealed that they had been offered large sums of money to give false evidence, in order to implicate Andreas in a Nasser-style conspiracy [ASPIDA].” (Tsoucalas 1969: 199) In the Greek parliament, however, George Papandreou, later agreed to a compromise with the King, initially without the support of his son Andreas. “The main clause of the agreement was that Papandreou was to support, together with ERE [the political party of the right], an interim non-political government and was further to refrain from any attacks against the Palace.” (Tsoucalas 1969: 201) Andreas Papandreou then also agreed in order to maintain party discipline. As elections approached, it became clear that the Center Union would again prevail. Moreover, the political upheavals served to invigorate the figure of Andreas Papandreou, as the other main Center Union deputies had defected to the King’s puppet government and had even started their own party (FIDIK). But as this new party could not rely on any popular support, they would surely be wiped away in the upcoming elections. Secondly, as George Papandreou was approaching the noble age of eighty, it was believed that he would soon leave the leadership of his party to his son.22 When elections were set for May 28, 1967, the right found itself in complete disarray and the establishment feared that it would lose its economic and political privileges. According to Tsoucalas, “[n]ot unreasonably, anxiety gave way to panic. For King, Army and oligarchy, it was becoming more and more obvious that the continuation of formal democracy would lead to the collapse of the edifice it had taken the Right so many years to build.” (Tsoucalas 1969: 202)

22 As Phillips Talbot writes in a memorandum to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “At age 80, however, he's lost biological race to his son Andreas, only other leader of vigor now in party, and a government with Andreas either as backstage manager or at helm would--as we evaluate thrust of his campaign--transform military high command into a party-controlled instrument and thus effectively break authority of King and traditional influentials in this country.” On the foreign policy domain, Talbot compared Andreas to a “Mediterranean Bhutto”, the Pakistani president who, while maintaining relations with the United States, also reached out to Russia and China. Talbot furthermore stated that “Russians would not be slow to take advantage.” 271. Telegram from the Embassy in Greece to the Department of State, April 14, 1967, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol. XVI, Cyprus; Greece; Turkey (Washington DC: Office of the Historian), Web August 2, 2014. Source: http://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/xvi/4764.htm

23

Chapter Three: The Shock. The Colonels and the CIA

According to the literature, there were two groups of plotters: the big and the small junta. The big junta consisted of the king and his generals, while the small junta was “made up of Papadopoulos, Makarezos, Pattakos, Roufogalis etc., the colonels and majors who were to do the dirty work for the generals.” (Deane 1977: 120) In State Department memoranda, the King’s coup is noted as operation “Lerax 2”, lerax meaning “hawk” in Greek, whereas the colonels’ coup, the one which was eventually carried out, was called the “Revolutionary Council”23. The preparations for a coup by the small junta, led by Papadopoulos, seem to have started as early as 1963, as they blamed king Paul for not doing enough to prevent the Center Union from coming to power.24 It was an established fact that the United States would back a dictatorship by the king, if he felt that one was necessary. But although, the State Department was expecting the king and his generals to make a move, the CIA seemed to be waiting for the colonels.25 What would strongly indicate that the CIA was at least aware of the coup is the fact that Papadopoulos and his band were very well connected to the agency.26 On the other hand, as the CIA never officially admitted any involvement in the coup, it will remain forever a mystery whether the colonels acted on their own or whether they acted on the CIA’s orders.27 It has become clear through the personal account of

23 According to the declassified memoranda, the US Embassy was aware of this group as early as 1963. 245. Field Information Report, December 20, 1966, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol. XVI, Cyprus; Greece; Turkey (Washington DC: Office of the Historian), Web August 2, 2014. Source: http://2001- 2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/xvi/4764.htm 24 Field Information Report 225 from the US Embassy states that, Papadopoulos’ original group of conspirators blamed “the Palace for the political instability, starting with the fall of former Prime Minister in 1963.” 225. Field Information Report, March 7, 1966, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol. XVI, Cyprus; Greece; Turkey (Washington DC: Office of the Historian), Web August 2, 2014. Source: http://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/xvi/4766.htm 25 Field information report 245, however, would suggest that the embassy was aware of the colonels’ plot, albeit not in detail. 26 Andreas Papandreou writes that most of Papadopoulos’ men were either involved or well connected with KYP, the Greek intelligence service that worked very closely together with the CIA. According to him, “George Papadopoulos was the liaison officer between the CIA and the KYP when he was assistant to General Natsinas, director of KYP under Caramanlis. Nicholas Makarezos was chief of KYP’s information section on the night of the coup, and Michael Roufogalis, the lieutenant colonel in whose home the group gathered on 20 April to give the signal for the coup, was director of KYP’s personnel section. […] Brigadiers Pattakos and Alexander Hadjipetros – the other two men in the small inner circle of the conspiracy – were not connected with KYP; but Hadjipetros was commandant of NATO’s missile-testing base in , a position that could be held only by men intimately associated with the US military mission and the CIA.” (Papandreou 1970: 241) According to Phillippe Deane, Papadopoulos had been on the CIA payroll since 1952 (Deane 1977: 124) and was considered by an American friend of his, the journalist Marguerite Higgins, as one of “our most prized sources in Greece.” (Deane 1977: 118) 27 During the trials of the Junta leaders in 1975, after the regime had collapsed, the issue of CIA involvement in the coup was explicitly left out of the question. However, according to Philippe Deane, “there is sworn testimony by a member of KYP (the Greek CIA) that some American CIA members, wearing Greek uniforms, participated in the coup on the of April 21st, 1974 [typo: 1967] to make sure it would be bloodless.” (Deane 1977: 124) Andreas Papandreou furthermore accuses Johson’s Deputy Secreatary of Defense, Cyrus Vance, of having played a crucial role in ensuring the US did not see the plot as a communist conspiracy. “Cyrus Vance, on

24

Phillipe Deane, who was the king’s Secretary at the time, that Papadopoulos was paid by the CIA to keep an eye on the king, by handing out stipends to his staff. The stipend for the valet was allegedly sufficient for him to drive a new Mercedes Benz, although his official wage was only sixty dollars per month. (Deane 1977: 54) Colonel Joseph Lepczyk, the US army attaché to the Athens embassy, with whom the King used to play squash was also secretly a CIA spy. (Murtagh 1994: 99) We would be inclined to believe that the CIA initially had a royal coup in mind, but then abandoned the plan. There are some reasons why a dictatorship by Papadopoulos’s faction would have been preferential over one by the king. First, the king was inexperienced, since he had only mounted the throne in 1964. Secondly, it was unsure whether king Constantine had enough popular support to legitimize a coup. As Andreas Papandreou suggests, “The King and the generals would have had no chance to neutralize the popular reaction, to develop any kind of following. They had become identified with a corrupt Establishment.” (Papandreou 1970: 245) The main reason, however, seems to have been that the king’s heart simply was not in it. John Katris writes that the CIA worked together with Princess Irene and Queen Mother Frederika to persuade the king of the necessity of leading a military takeover. “In fact they had worked skilfully with CIA psychologists to break down the reluctance of Constantine to participate fully in it.” (Katris 1971: 42) But from the king’s desperate attempts to maintain parliamentary government from 1965 to 1967, we can discern the king’s preference for a constitutional government. American support for a dictatorship, furthermore, was not guaranteed, as Secretary of State Dean Rusk, warned against “constitutional deviation” on April 3 of 1967, for fear of making a martyr out of Andreas Papandreou.28 In the end, the king seemed to vest his hopes in a traditional government led by ERE, although this outcome of the elections was not deemed probable.29 According to Andreas Papandreou, the king’s generals, did meet regularly to discuss a plan for a coup, but strangely the king himself did not participate in these meetings. Papandreou also believes that the generals ultimately gave up the idea. In his own words, “the Big Junta was not ready for a coup. It approached the decision many times, but each time backed away from it.” (Papandreou 1970: 220)

The second question is which elements of the United States government apart from the CIA were aware of the coup. After the assumption of power by the colonels, Marquis Childs reported that Walt Rostow, the President’s Special Assistant, had presided over a committee, known as Committee 303, that contemplated a military takeover in Greece together with representatives from the US military, State Department and intelligence

the morning of the coup (April 21, 1967) circulated among various governmental offices in Washington, D.C., to assure officials this coup was ‘ours’, and that concern about it was unnecessary.” (Papandreou 1970: 662) 28 267. Telegram From the Department of State to the Embassy in Greece, April 3, 1967, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol. XVI, Cyprus; Greece; Turkey (Washington DC: Office of the Historian), Web August 2, 2014. Source: http://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/xvi/4764.htm 29 271. Telegram From the Embassy in Greece to the Department of State, April 14, 1967, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol. XVI, Cyprus; Greece; Turkey (Washington DC: Office of the Historian), Web August 2, 2014. Source: http://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/xvi/4764.htm

25 services in February of 1967. Rostow is reported to have closed the meeting with the 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.”30 But on the date of publication of Childs’ article, Rostow sent a memorandum to President Johnson, in which he states that the committee merely assessed a request by Greek Americans to use 200 to 300,000 US dollars “to back candidates who would be anti-Andreas.”31Ambassador Philips Talbot, is said to have advised against it and when the matter was taken to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, he too refused. According to Rostow, Rusk “commented that if the dual-national Greek-Americans are concerned about the prospects and if $200-$300,000 will make the difference, they should have no trouble raising that sum themselves without involving the United States Government.” The embassy, according to its declassified memoranda seems to have been aware of both conspiring groups as early as 1963, but there is very few information available on what the embassy actually knew and the memoranda do not paint a clear picture of what was going on. This might also have had something to do with the fact that the US Embassy and the CIA in Greece were hardly on speaking terms. Hence, when the coup eventually took place, the embassy had been left in the dark. As Peter Murtagh writes, Ambassador Talbot “put his own lack of prior knowledge of the plot partly down to the antipathy that existed between the diplomatic staff and the CIA and a consequent lack of communication. (Murtagh 1994: 124) The rift between the embassy and the CIA had started much earlier. Ellis Briggs, who served as US Ambassador to Greece from 1959 to 1962, testified for a Senate Security Committee during the summer of 1963 and “admitted that while in Greece he did not have control over the American services [i.e. the CIA].” (Papandreou 1970: 108) However, a conversation reportedly took place a week after the colonels assumed power, in which Talbot complained to CIA Station Chief Jack Maury that the coup was “a rape of democracy”. To which Maury replied, “How can you rape a whore?” (Agee and Wolf 1978: 154) According to Deane, George Papandreou was well aware of the plot through his network of koumbaroi32. His Minister of Defense, Garoufalias, who had been appointed the ministry on the suggestion of the King, was protecting the conspirators from before the alleged ASPIDA conspiracy was brought out. (Deane 1977: 96) Nevertheless, as the political quarreling became ever more exacerbated, a dictatorial solution did not seem as unthinkable as before. However, according to Andreas Papandreou, “few people believed that a military coup would occur. Greece, after all, was a member of NATO, and Greek political life was under the direct influence, if not under the full control, of the United States; and it seemed impossible that the United States should tolerate a dictatorship in Greece.” (Papandreou 1970: 225) Unfortunately, this belief proved to be not entirely warranted.

30 Childs, M., A Coup in Greece; A Bit of Blackmail, , May 15, 1967. 31 290. Memorandum From the President's Special Assistant to President Johnson, May 15, 1967, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol. XVI, Cyprus; Greece; Turkey (Washington DC: Office of the Historian), Web August 2, 2014. Source: http://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/xvi/4763.htm 32 “A koumbaros is someone to whose child you have stood as godfather. The father of the child and the godfather are one another’s koumbaros.” (Deane 1977: 91) Important men in Greece had many koumbaroi and used these close relationships to manifest their influence, in a very Godfather-like fashion.

26

The coup

The first units to take action on the night of the twentieth of April, were the CIA-trained Greek Mountain Raiders and given that the raiders were under command of the CIA, this is another piece of evidence to suggest that the CIA was involved. Around midnight, the commandos stormed the headquarters of the Greek armed forces, colloquially referred to as the “Pentagon”. subsequently led a colon of tanks through the streets of Athens towards . The entire military takeover was based on the Prometheus plan, a NATO-designed scheme to take over important government facilities in case of a communist coup or a Soviet invasion. “In the event of opposition, Prometheus was unequivocal: “Smash, without hesitation, any probable enemy resistance.” (Murtagh 1994: 114) Army units arrested over 10.000 people in five hours (Murtagh 1994: 117). The officer who coordinated the arrests was Colonel Yannis Ladas, the director of the . “’My plan was carried out with mathematical precision,’ he said in an interview some years later. ‘Within twenty minutes, every politician, every man and anarchist who was listed could be rounded up.’” (Murtagh 1994: 117) George and Andreas Papandreou were among the first apprehended. George Papandreou was woken up by armed men standing at his bedpost. Andreas Papandreou hid himself on the roof of his house, but surrendered after a soldier held a gun to the head of his 14-year-old son. (Murtagh 1994: 115) In the early morning the entire country awoke to what would be its plight for the next seven years.

Shortly after 6 a.m. the radio broadcast a decree, allegedly in the king’s name, proclaiming the revolution and suspending eleven articles of the constitution. People could now be arrested on the spot and without warrant, brought before military courts and dealt with. Homes could be searched with impunity. Meetings and strikes were outlawed, domestic news subject to . The stock exchange was ordered closed, bank deposits frozen and foreign stock exchange banned. Borders and ports were sealed and communications with the outside world cut for ordinary citizens. (Murtagh 1994: 118)

The role the king would play in the first few hours was of vital importance to the success of the coup. In the organized chaos, that the coup essentially was, he could have given the army orders to repel the conspiracy. However, no such thing occurred. As Papandreou accounts, “Papadopoulos’ scheme was based on the Big Lie – that the order to execute Plan Prometheus had the King’s approval. Indeed both the Air Force and the Navy were quite prepared to move against the colonels’ junta, but the King discouraged them.” (Papandreou 1970: 246) Moreover, there was an important detail, in which the Prometheus plan differed from similar NATO plans in other countries, strongly to the colonels’ advantage. “In the case of Greece, the order for the execution of the plan did not have to be approved by the King or the cabinet. It was required only that the Chief of the Army General Staff give the green

27 light.” (Papandreou 1970: 243) This function was at the time carried out by General Gregory Spandidakis, who thus became a crucial figure for the colonels. According to Papandreou, “They found him in the early morning hours of 21 April playing cards with friends; and they persuaded him to join them just in time.” (Papandreou 1970: 243) As he confirmed his approval of the colonels’ actions to disconcerted officers, he gave “the impression that Army General Staff and the Palace were behind the coup.” (Papandreou 1970: 243) As it turned out, the king did exactly what the colonels expected of him. After five hours of negotiating, Constantine swore in the new dictatorship, in order to avoid bloodshed. “After swearing in the dictatorship, Constantine allowed himself to be photographed with the new cabinet – the most valuable piece of he gave the colonels.” (Murtagh 1994: 122)

Constantine eventually did stage a countercoup on , 1967, but his coup was repelled in less than 24 hours. At three a.m. the following day, the king already found himself on a plane heading towards with all that was left of his royal court. (Murtagh 1994: 161) His coup failed, because he no longer commanded the loyalty of the army. As Murtagh relates, “Almost 700 officers, most of whom would have been loyal to him rather than the government, had been removed from key positions and pensioned off, with junta loyalists promoted in their place. Others who remained and who initially had little love for the junta, were dismayed by Constantine’s early acquiescence with the dictatorship.” (Murtagh 1994: 157) Moreover, the Junta knew about the King’s designs, since all his telephones were bugged and “by early December, his plans were so well known in Athens that newspapers were reporting the efforts of Papadopoulos to dissuade him.” (Murtagh 1994: 157) What is remarkable about the coming to power of a dictatorship in Greece is that the country was essentially taken over by “three colonels and two captains” (Murtagh 1994: 120) The fact that the colonels assumed power in such a sudden yet very well-organized fashion meant that their success is to be attributed to the shock and confusion that the coup created. The “Big Lie” (the deception that the king backed the colonels) combined with the Prometheus instructions to “smash, without hesitation, any probable enemy resistance” can be seen as an effort to disorient and crush any opposition by means of shock. In fact, this strategy is reminiscent of what defense analysts now call “Rapid Dominance”. In their book Shock and Awe, Harlan Ulman and James Wade write, “In crude terms, Rapid Dominance would seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events so that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at tactical and strategic levels.” (Ulman and Wade 1996: xxv)

The fact that the colonels had been able to stay under the radar of the general public also meant that they had the benefit of the doubt when they first came to power. As one eye- witness accounts, “Why would they necessarily be bad?”33 Older people furthermore seemed to be content with a , as it put an end to the political unrest

33 Quoted in (Katris 1971: 214)

28 which reminded them of the horrors of the civil war. As Xydis writes, “Indeed, they experienced a sense of relief on learning of the coup of April 21, 1967, and about its promises of stability and order after the political and social disorders of 1965 to 1967, which to them appeared to be omens of new civil strife.” (Xydis 1974: 527) This stability was also essential to the business community, whose cooperation to the regime was of the utmost importance. The colonels thus “wooed this section of the population by means of anti- communist propaganda and its claim that the new rulers [were] the sole guarantors of law and order, and thereby of the rights of property and private enterprise.” (Clogg and Yannopoulos 1972: 77) The junta’s struggle against communism immediately permeated all aspects of public life and even effected the kind of Greek used in education and state documents. The colonels favored a form of Greek, called katharevousa, or ‘purifying’, over the more progressive dimotiki, or ‘popular’. Katharevousa was an artificial variety of Greek, which intended to preserve as much of the Ancient Greek, as possible, and therefore differed substantially as to the applied grammar, vocabulary and spelling. Dimotiki, on the other hand, is the Greek as it is spoken and written today. The language issue might seem ephemeral, but it is a typical example of the shift towards traditionalism that Greek society made under the colonels. As an anonymous Greek educator relates:

Since katharevousa has in many ways regained its dominant place in Greek life in general, and in education in particular. As symptomatic of an entire philosophy, the insistence on katharevousa could be related to a number of measures taken at the same time: the ban on mini-skirts, beards, and long hair; compulsory church-going by pupils and teachers; the ceremony of saluting the flag every morning in all schools (a common feature in many of the United States); and more recently the compulsory carrying of satchels by children (regardless of the fact that this adds to the parents’ expenses for their children’s education, which is supposed to be free). (Clogg and Yannopoulos 1972: 132)

In order to take the fight against atheist communism to the metaphysical level, the military regime made “Greece of the Greek Christians” the official motto of their nation. (Clogg and Yannopoulos 1972: 45) To the same ends, President Eisenhower had added the words “Under God” to the American Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.

The American reaction

Washington’s initial reaction to the coup was extremely hesitant. The State Department did not want to get ahead of the facts and decided to wait. “It was to be a full week before Rusk made any public statement about the coup and then only to say that Washington was waiting for some ‘concrete evidence’ of an early return to democracy.” (Murtagh 1994: 125) Despite warnings by President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who stated that American aid would be suspended, if parliamentary government was not restored, the US government started a tenure of “looking on the bright side” (Clogg and

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Yannopoulos 1972: 241-2) and not allowing civil rights to get in the way of strategic interests. In the end, Washington’s ambivalence towards the Greek junta resulted in an arms embargo, which appears to have been largely a sham. As Maurice Goldbloom writes:

The result of the conflicting pressures within the United States government was a suspension of shipments of heavy weapons but a continuation (and in many categories an actual increase) in all other forms of aid. The weapons cut off were those which would have been useful primarily against a foreign foe; those which continued to flow were the ones most important for domestic repression. This policy must be judged in the light of the fact that a decision had been reached before the coup to phase out military aid to Greece, or at least to reduce it sharply, over the four-year period 1967-70. (Clogg and Yannopoulos 1972: 242, original italics)34

When in June of 1967, the Six-Day War broke out between and its Arab neighbors, relations between the US and the junta quickly became more cordial. The strategic importance of Greece was once more highlighted, due to its proximity to Israel and the colonels’ willingness to let the US use Greek air force bases. (Murtagh 1994: 155) Moreover, “[b]ecause of the growing Soviet naval activities in the Mediterranean during the 1960s and the USSR’s political and military moves in the Middle East – in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq – and because of the closing of Wheelus air base and other United States and British facilities in Libya after the overthrow of the monarchy in that country in 1969, the United States military facilities in Greece became more important than ever before to the Western position in the eastern Mediterranean.” (Xydis 1974: 524) As the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 had already caused a temporary suspension of the arms embargo on Greece, the arms shipments to Greece were resumed as soon as the embargo ended on September 22, 1970. (Xydis 1974: 522) Because of the junta’s pro-US and pro-NATO stand, the US military was one of its greatest supporters and the colonels obliged their American overlords in 1971 by starting negotiations to give the US Sixth Fleet home port facilities in the Athens area. “This meant that the US navy, under a contract signed with the junta, would have all the docking, service and staff accommodation facilities in Greece necessary to sustain the operations of the fleet.” (Murtagh 1994: 154) If the agreement were carried out, Athens would have become “the American Navy’s largest home port in Europe”. (Murtagh 1994: 155) In one of Murtagh’s interviews with a former American naval officer, the attitude of the US military towards the junta is made painfully clear:

’Once the junta took over, from a military point of view we were more secure in Greece,’ […] ‘In the 1970s we didn’t think about the morality of doing business with the junta at all. President Carter was ahead of his time. To look back in hindsight and say ‘Gosh, isn’t this

34 The continuation of American aid to Greece was also motivated as a way “to keep open the channels of communication between the two governments.” (Xydis 1974: 522) Turkey restored relations with the junta early on, given the necessity “to continue negotiations over Cyprus.” (Clogg and Yannopoulos 1972: 243)

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terrible’, OK, but we weren’t ready to spill that much blood for human rights.’ (Murtagh 1994: 231)

Sensory deprivation

The use of shock was not only instrumental to the colonels’ assumption of power, it was also quintessential to the way they sustained their regime: by arresting and torturing everyone suspected of being against them. This practice started from the first minute of the coup, as 10,000 people were arrested on the night of April 20th, 1967. The torture methods applied in Greece seem to be the same as the ones that have been used by other authoritarian regimes that received support from the CIA. As Naomi Klein describes the history of the CIA’s enhanced techniques from early experiments at McGill University, to waterboarding in Guantanamo, a distinct set of actions all recur, that were described in the CIA’s 1963 torture bible: the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation manual.35

Wherever the Kubark method has been taught, certain clear patterns – all designed to induce, deepen and sustain shock – have emerged: prisoners are captured in the most jarring and disorienting way possible, late at night or in early morning raids, as the manual instructs36. They are immediately hooded or blindfolded, stripped and beaten, then subjected to some form of sensory deprivation. And from Guatemala to Honduras, Vietnam to Iran, the Philippines to Chile, the use of electroshocks is ubiquitous. (Klein 2007: 41)

It should not surprise that these techniques were also used by the agents of the KYP, since, as has been said before, this agency was to a large extent trained and financed by the CIA. Moreover, the kind of torture methods, used to subdue the Greek population, fit perfectly in the aforementioned patterns. These torture methods are the grim legacy of experiments conducted at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, under the supervision of Dr. Ewen Cameron. In his attempts to heal psychiatric patients, Cameron tried to cure traumas by erasing the memory and rebuilding the personalities of trauma victims. As Klein states, “His ambition was not to mend or repair his patients but to re-create them using a method he invented called ‘psychic driving’37.” (Klein 2007: 31) Although he did succeed in

35 Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation was obtained by the Baltimore Sun after a Freedom of Information Act in 1997. “Kubark” is simply a cryptonym for the CIA. 36 According to the manual the timing of the arrest is the first step to a successful interrogation: “What we aim to do is to ensure that the manner of arrest achieves, if possible, surprise, and the maximum amount of mental discomfort in order to catch the suspect off balance and to deprive him of the initiative.” The Central Intelligence Agency, Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, The National Security Archive, p. 85. Web, August 4, 2014. Source: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/ Early morning or late night raids are preferential, given that a person’s psychological resistance is then at its lowest. 37 Psychic driving “consisted of Cameron playing his patients tape-recorded messages such as ‘You are a good mother and wife and people enjoy your company.’ As a behaviorist, he believed that if he could get his patients to absorb the messages on the tape, they would start behaving differently.” (Klein 2007: 32)

31 regressing patients into a state where they became infantile, the rebuilding of the mind unfortunately proved impossible. In the mid-1950s, the CIA became interested in Cameron’s research as it was investigating special interrogation techniques. Inspired by alleged brainwashing of American POWs in the , a program was set up “to find new ways to break prisoners suspected of being Communists and double agents.” (Klein 2007: 33) and in 1953 the program received the name MKUltra. Remarkably, Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, the director of MKUltra, who became the overall director of the CIA’s Technical Services Division38 in the 1960s, has reportedly visited Greece on multiple occasions. (Agee and Wolf 1978: 150) Whether he actually advised the junta on torture methods, is of course unclear. But it was not unusual for American agents to assist local torturers in other parts of the world. As Klein writes, “Testimony from Central American torture survivors in the seventies and eighties is littered with references to mysterious English speaking men walking in and out of cells, proposing questions or offering tips.” (Klein 2007: 42)

The findings of MKUltra were processed into the aforementioned Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, which has some distinct features so that its use can be discerned in the torture methods of the colonels’ regime. Whoever was captured was treated as a communist agent, who had to be broken down. The would stop when the interrogated person signed documents that denounced communism and gave the interrogator names of others –communists or not- who would subsequently be arrested. One method described in the manual particularly gives it its hall mark: sensory deprivation. Sensory deprivation is applied to break through the mental defenses of the detainee by attacking his or her sense of identity. This is done by distorting a person’s awareness of time and space. Hence, interrogatees are preferably held in isolation and in complete darkness so that the day cannot be distinguished from the night, meals come at different times, and no contact with other prisoners is allowed. As the manual says, “The point is that man’s sense of identity depends on a continuity in his surroundings, habits, appearance, actions, relations with others, etc. Detention permits the interrogator to cut through these links and throw the interrogatee back upon his own unaided resources.”39 The manual furthermore illustrates that the use of shock to bereave a population of any capability to resist is very similar to the way successful sensory deprivation is conducted. As a shock in Klein’s shock doctrine is defined as “a gap between fast-moving events and the information that exists to explain them” (Klein 2007: 458), the purpose of the CIA’s interrogation techniques is to do the same on the individual level.

38 “The Technical Services Division officers provided specialized back-up for CIA operations. TSD assistance to other branches of the CIA included electronic monitoring devices, various gadgets for surveillance, special weapons for clandestine operations, drugs for use in such operations, forged documents and other similar material. Most of the TSD officers had experience in radio and electronics; a few were engineers.” (Agee and Wolf 1978: 149) 39 The Central Intelligence Agency, The Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, p. 86.

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When this aim is achieved, resistance is seriously impaired. There is an interval - which may be extremely brief – of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis. It is caused by a traumatic or sub-traumatic experience which explodes, as it were, the world that is familiar to the subject as well as his image of himself within that world. Experienced interrogators recognize this effect when it appears and know that at this moment the source is far more open to suggestion, far likelier to comply, than he was just before he experienced the shock.40

The method of sensory deprivation can be seen in the eye-witness accounts of Greek torture victims. In Greece, prisoners were usually held in isolation, if they had not broken down in the initial rounds of interrogation. Contrary to what was to be expected, they did maintain their sense of time. According to the account of Helen K.41, incorporated in Katris’ book Eyewitness in Greece, she was held in isolation from December 12 to 26 at the infamous headquarters of the General Security in Athens’ Bouboulina street. (Katris 1971: 237) The highest-ranking officer at the facility was Vassilis Lambrou. Helen K. writes that Lambrou “studied in the United States in the school of Psychological Warfare.” (Katris 1971: 234)42 The same Vassilis Lambrou reportedly intimidated his prisoners by stating “We are the government, you are nothing. The government isn’t alone. Behind the government are the Americans. […] The whole world is in two parts, […] the Russians and the Americans. We are the Americans. Be grateful we’ve only tortured you a little. In Russia, they’d kill you.” (Murtagh 1994: 6) What betrays a strong connection between the American secret services and the Greek KYP was not only the applied methods, as much as the fact that most of KYP’s torture equipment had been furnished to Greece as American aid. As John Katris writes, “bicycles, jeeps, patrol wagons, iron wreaths used to squeeze skulls, wire whips, truth serums, even blankets used to carry bodies all bore the mark ‘made in U.S.A.’ or ‘U.S.’” (Katris 1971: 226) The aim of the was not necessarily to gain information. Since prisoners were released simply by giving other people’s names, a chain of prosecution and violence was set in motion to keep the Greek population firmly under control. According to an unnamed junta colonel quoted by Katris, and brutality was “a matter of survival of the Revolution.” (Katris1971: 226) The governments of , , and the Netherlands reacted against the junta’s violations of human rights by approaching ’s Commission of Human Rights in September 1967. In their

40 The Central Intelligence Agency, The Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, p. 65-6. 41 Helen K. is a pseudonym Katris gave to an eyewitness in order to protect her identity. (Katris 1971: 213) 42 Psychological warfare was taught at two different schools in the United States: the School in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. The latter was responsible for training the torturers of South America’s authoritarian regimes, which terrorized civilian populations throughout the continent. (Klein 2007: 454) Colonel Papadopoulos was also an expert on enhanced interrogation, given his past with the Security Battalions during the Second World War. In 1965, as Philippe Deane relates, Papadopoulos was furthermore entrusted by king Constantine with the position of head of the psychological warfare bureau at the Greek general staff. (Deane 1977: 119) Charles Foley writes that Papadopoulos also received training in interrogation techniques by the CIA. Because of his affiliation with the agency, old hands of the US military mission in Greece reportedly called him “the first CIA agent to become Premier of a European country.” Foley, C., Greek Dictator in CIA’s Pocket, The Observer, July 1, 1973.

33 defense, the Junta claimed that Greece was under extraordinary conditions, given the alleged threat posed by internal communism. (Clogg and Yannopoulos 1972: 35) As overwhelming evidence had been gathered of the regime’s torture practices, Greece withdrew from the Council of Europe in 1969 facing certain expulsion. (Murtagh 1994: 203)

Economic shock therapy

On the economic front of their relentless battle against communism, the Junta implemented Friedmanite economic shock therapy to completely overhaul the Greek economy. The philosophical underpinning of neoliberalism was of course that it entailed the economic expression of freedom, hence the title of Friedman’s 1962 masterpiece Capitalism and Freedom. According to Naomi Klein, the irony of Friedman’s theory is that “this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as well as on countless individual bodies.” (Klein 2007: 18-9) In other words, free market capitalism has often been adhered to by the most repressive of governments. The man in charge of the Junta’s operation towards economic freedom was Finance Minister, Adamantios Androutsopoulos, who claimed to be a professor of economics and alleged to have taught at the University of . However, none of this was actually true. Androutsopoulos did spend nine years in Chicago, but failed to get a degree from the prestigious university that was also home to Friedman.43 Philippe Deane furthermore relates that Androutsopoulos had come to Greece after the Second World War and had been working for the CIA ever since. What is more, he “often boasted of this fact.” (Deane 1977: 134) Although Androutsopoulos never obtained a degree in economics from the University of Chicago, he did seem to understand Friedman’s neoliberalism, as can clearly be seen in the policies issued by the Junta. In general, the junta’s outlook on the economy resulted in increased defense expenditures, cuts in the public sector and a fiscal system that aimed to attract foreign investment by means of low taxes. The colonels likewise attempted to privatize the public sector by granting contracts to foreign firms to carry out tasks that traditionally belonged to the government. The American corporation, Litton Benelux, for instance, signed a contract in May 1967 to provide for the administration, coordination and the conducting of negotiations of projects with foreign investors in the Western Peloponnese and Crete. According to John Pesmazoglu, this deal was worth $ 840 million. (Clogg and Yannopoulos 1972: 98) The main attraction for foreign firms was a hugely advantageous taxation system. As Peter Murtagh accounts:

Within four months of taking office, the tax system was altered to attract foreign investment. Companies with headquarters outside Greece were granted freedom from all Greek company

43 Nicodemus, C., Greek Prime Minister Falsified Academic Career, The Montreal Gazette, Feb. 15, 1974. Web July 12, 2014. Source: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1946&dat=19740215&id=SpouAAAAIBAJ&sjid=mKEFAAAAIBAJ&pg= 3783,3524137

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taxation and their staff members in Greece absolved of the obligation to pay income tax. The state would not require account book audits for foreign companies and there were to be no foreign exchange controls on registered mail. Two-year renewable work permits were introduced and staff with foreign companies were allowed duty-free importation of cars, furniture and personal belongings. Thus the new tax regime allowed foreigners to operate totally tax free in Greece and export all their profits without any examination by the Greek government. (Murtagh 1994: 135)

American companies such as Ford, National Cash Registers, Union Carbide and Trans World Airlines were quick to take advantage of the new opportunities (Murtagh 1994: 135) and by 1969 foreign companies operating in Greece amounted to a total of 217. (Katris 1971: 253) magnates such as Stavros Niarchos and equally benefitted. However, the suspension of constitutional rights also caused a downfall in tourist receipts that is estimated at a loss of $ 200 million in the period 1967-71. (Clogg and Yannopoulos 1972: 100) Greece’s isolation following the withdrawal from the Council of Europe in 1969 furthermore meant that its dependence on foreign investment became ever more desperate, as another $ 200 million in capital resources expected from the European Economic Community were not made available. (Clogg and Yannopoulos 1972: 76) But the income these deals with foreign investors actually generated for Greece, was far less than what the Junta had anticipated and was even lower than in the years 1963-66. (Clogg and Yannopoulos 1972: 97) Due to the almost subordinate position of the Greek government towards big companies, “[c]hanges in prices, rates or other costs to the advantage of the private contracting partner could not be assessed or invoked for adjustment to the benefit of the country, while variations in conditions to the disadvantage of the contracting partner were bound to lead to disputes, delays and finally to the breakdown of the relationship.” (Clogg and Yannopoulos 1972: 99) The overall result of the Greek regime’s economic policies was an increase in balance deficits, lower growth and unemployment leading to emigration. By the end of 1973, inflation in Greece had reached 30 percent.44

The junta’s reforms greatly benefitted the Greek economic oligarchy and Greek Americans with business interests in Greece. As has already been mentioned, prior to the colonels’ coup, wealthy Greek Americans were lobbying with Walt Rostow to tip the balance of the elections in favor of the right using American money. Indeed some Greek Americans had a lot to gain if the Center Union did not come to power. Tom Pappas, for instance, who openly declared to be a member of the CIA45, had bribed Queen Frederika in the early 1960s and was subsequently granted permission to build an Exxon concern in the area of , despite severe opposition from the Center Union and the leftist EDA. “As a result of his deal with the government, Pappas obtained monopoly rights over the manufacture of 29

44 Inflation.eu, Inflation Greece 1973. Web July 13, 2014. Source: http://www.inflation.eu/inflation- rates/greece/historic-inflation/cpi-inflation-greece-1973.aspx. 45 According to John Katris, Pappas said this in an interview with the Greek newspaper Apogevmatini, published on July 28, 1968. (Katris 1971: 46).

35 products and according to contemporary analysts critical of the deal, stood to exercise control over 54 per cent of Greece’s exports.” (Murtagh 1994: 50) When the Papandreou government came to power in 1963, the contract was revised before being terminated by the Greek Supreme Court in 1966. (Katris 1972: 46) But with the installation of the junta, one of his employees, Pavlos Totomis, became Minister of Public Order and “[t]he contracts of Esso were revised in Pappas’ favour soon afterwards.” (Tsoucalas 1969: 206) Pappas’ brother at the time ran the Boston Pappas Foundation, that according to Tsoucalas, “was a conduit for CIA money destined for Greece.” (Tsoucalas 1969: 206) Not only did Tom Pappas wield a lot of influence in Greece, he also had some powerful friends in the United States. As Murtagh relates: “Pappas was a long-standing friend of the Republican Party. He had been one of President Eisenhower’s senior and most successful fundraisers and his relationship with Nixon went back to the late 1940s. Pappas has been credited in some quarters with having persuaded the Nixon camp to bring [Spiro] Agnew onto the presidential ticket.” (Murtagh 1994: 204) Because of these close ties between Pappas and Nixon, Ambassador Philips Talbot reportedly resigned his post in January 1969. (Murtagh 1994: 205) Elias Demetracopoulos, a Greek journalist living in exile in the United States since 1967, was the first to shed light on Pappas’ donations to the Nixon campaign. As Murtagh writes, “Demetracopoulos alleged that between July and October 1968 three separate payments totalling $549, 000 were made to the Nixon-Agnew campaign in one-thousand-dollar-bill transfers from a Pappas account in the National .” (Murtagh 1994: 204) Given the connection between Pappas and the CIA, Murtagh believes that this could have actually been CIA money, laundered through Pappas. (Murtagh 1994: 204) It is therefore not surprising that Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s Greek American Vice-President, zestfully proclaimed his support for the junta. According to Star News, Agnew stated that the junta was “seriously living up to their obligations” and had “promised free elections.” Agnew’s praise immediately headlined in the junta-controlled press. The free elections, however, were never held.46 More importantly, this could also help to explain why Nixon was in favor of resuming American aid to Greece. As Xydis writes, “In August 1971, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a $ 3.4 billion foreign aid authorization bill, but voted against further aid to Greece unless the President found that ‘overriding’ national security requirements justified waiving the ban. President Nixon decided that they did.” (Xydis 1972: 522) Officially, the reestablishment of aid to Greece was also legitimized as a way of giving the United States leverage with the colonels to push for a return to democracy, although the regime’s alliance to NATO and the strategic position of Greece were considered as even more “overriding”. (Murtagh 1994: 201-2) The explanation Nixon gave was that “Without aid to Greece, we would have no viable policy to save Israel.”47 From the Greek perspective,

46 Evans, R. and Novak, R., Did Agnew Sell Out to the Greek Junta?, in Star News, July 18, 1975. Web April 18, 2014. Source: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1454&dat=19750718&id=YMMsAAAAIBAJ&sjid=3QkEAAAAIBAJ&pg =3076,3575047 47 Quoted in Foley, C., Greek Dictator in CIA’s Pocket, The Observer, July 1, 1973.

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American help was very welcome, given the dire consequences of the economic isolation from Europe. Agnew’s office as Vice President ended even before the occurred, when he was forced to resign in 1973, facing bribery charges. (Murtagh 1994: 204- 5) Pappas’ name also appeared in the Watergate tapes, in which he was referred to as “the Greek bearing gifts”. (Murtagh 1994: 205) When Nixon needed money to finance his legal defense in the Watergate cover-up, Tom Pappas made a gift of $50,000 to John Mitchell, Nixon’s attorney general. (Murtagh 1994: 205)

The example of Tom Pappas illustrates the behind the scenes power of certain Greek Americans and would again suggest that the CIA was very much involved in the overthrow of constitutional government in Greece. This country was but one case in a host of CIA plots that took out politicians and political parties with a developmentalist agenda, a fate which in this particular story befell Andreas Papandreou and the Center Union. Because of his economic beliefs, Andreas Papandreou was smeared as a Communist48 and his implication in the fabricated ASPIDA conspiracy served only to highlight his alleged ideological convictions. We have already discussed the example of the CIA coup in Iran, which deposed President Mossadegh, since he was considered a threat to American economic interests. Exactly the same happened a year later in Guatemala, where a CIA plot was carried out to establish an anti-communist government “that would return expropriated land to the United Fruit Company.”49 (Streeter 1999: 386) Other examples are Brazil (1962), Indonesia (1965) and Argentina (1976), just to name a few.50 We will now focus on the regime of Pinochet in Chile to show some of the distinct similarities it had with the Greece of the colonels. As Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity party running on a developmentalist political agenda won the 1970 elections “promising to put into government hands large sectors of the economy that were being run by foreign and local corporations” (Klein 2007: 59), his program was bound to jeopardize American business interests. Hence, President Nixon gave CIA director Richard Helms the order to “make the economy scream”51. The companies with the most to lose from Allende’s coming to power were American mining companies with holdings in Chile and the International Telephone and Telegraph Company, which according to Klein “owned 70 percent of Chile’s soon-to-be-nationalized telephone company.” (Klein 2007: 64) Moreover, according to Philippe Agee, Southern Capital, which was the CIA’s largest proprietary, i.e. a corporation owned and operated by the CIA, “owned some ITT stock.” (Agee and Wolf 1978: 129) But despite three years of economic warfare, Allende was still in power by 1973. A coup was therefore staged by general Pinochet, who installed himself by means of full-on military

48 Childs, M., A Coup in Greece; A Bit of Blackmail, The Washington Post, May 15, 1967. 49 Other US directives for the new Guatemalan government were to “lift trade barriers, eliminate restrictions on foreign investment, supply inexpensive raw materials, realign Guatemala’s foreign policy positions with those of the United States in the Organization of American States and the United Nations, and welcome US military training and assistance.” (Streeter 1999: 386) 50 A more exhaustive list of CIA interventions since the Second World War can be found in Blum, W. (2004), Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, see bibliography. 51 Quoted in (Klein 2007: 64)

37 shock and awe. Allende was killed when jets bombed the presidential palace and just like in Greece, “the shock of the coup prepared the ground for economic shock therapy; the shock of the terrorized anyone thinking of standing in the way of the economic shocks.” (Klein 2007: 71) The Chilean economy was turned into a Friedmanite paradise, by graduate students of the University of Chicago, who upon their return to South America were called “los Chicago boys”. (Klein 2007: 62) By 1982, Chile’s economy had crashed, its debt was beyond control and employment stood at 30 percent.

The shock wears off

As time went by the resistance movements became more consolidated and better organized. Andreas Papandreou, released from the junta’s claws in 1968, went on to become a very influential spokesperson for a return to democracy in Greece. The most significant challenges to the colonels’ regime’s rule occurred in 1973. In May of that year mutinous naval officers, attempted a plot against the dictatorship. Unfortunately, on the day the officers were supposed to take the fleet to sea, access to the Scaramanga naval base was blocked by the regime.52 Only, the Velos, was able to stay out of the hands of the junta, as it was already at sea. The ship declared for the uprising, but the crew found themselves standing alone. Commander Nikolaos Pappas then sailed the Velos to , where he requested political asylum for himself and his men. In the context of a rapidly deteriorating economic situation and given the fact that the regime’s popular support was ebbing away, especially as younger people – generally against the regime- were reaching voting age and older people, who were grateful for the political stability of the dictatorship, saw their numbers decline, (Xydis 1974: 531) the junta proclaimed significant political reforms, to be supported by a plebiscite. The aim of the plebiscite, however, was also to officially install Papadopoulos as the . According to the Junta’s results, 72 per cent of the people voted in favor. (Murtagh 1994: 238) Given that Papadopoulos was confident about his authority, he announced further reforms such as the formation of a civilian government, free and fair elections, the immediate end of in the Athens region and the establishment of the Constitutional Court, which would facilitate the creation of political parties. Even more surprisingly, he proclaimed an amnesty for all political crimes committed inside Greece since April 21, 1967 and granted a pardon to Alexander Panagoulis, who had tried to assassinate him in August 1968. (Xydis 1974: 531-2) Conversely, as President, he would “retain absolute authority in matters of public order, defence and foreign affairs, the ministers of which Papadopoulos would appoint himself, and in other matters of government, his writ would run superior to that of the prime minister.” (Murtagh 1994: 238) As a reaction, students of the University of Athens occupied the campus buildings and

52 Murtagh suggests that the junta knew something was afoot and therefore took pre-emptive action. The plot, he believes, might have been betrayed by retired CIA agent Joseph Lepczyck, the King’s former squash partner, who maintained contacts both with the naval officers and the regime. (Murtagh 1994: 236-7)

38 demanded the ouster of Papadopoulos by means of radio broadcasts. The regime responded with ruthless military force, as soldiers fired 24,000 rounds at the unarmed students to end the protest. Miraculously, only 23 students were killed. (Murtagh 1994: 242) The Polytechneio (Greek: polytechnic faculty) of Athens University has since become an icon in Greek history. Due to the promised mollification by Papadopoulos of the martial law, a counter-coup was undertaken within the junta on , 1973 and a new leader emerged in the person of Brigadier General Dimitrios Ioannidis. He was one of Papadopoulos’ originals who opposed the restoration of civilian government and were spiteful of his assumption of the presidency, by which he had sidelined them. According to a classified memorandum by Tom Boyatt, head of the State Department’s Cyprus Desk, the CIA station in Athens “was unable to control its enthusiasm for Ioannides”53 and when Ioannides wanted to deal with the American government, he bypassed Ambassador Tasca and the official diplomatic channels. Instead, “he dealt direct with the CIA.” (Murtagh 1994: 243) As his Prime Minister, Ioannidis appointed Adamantios Androutsopoulos, the CIA agent and self-proclaimed economics professor who had radically changed the outlook of the Greek economy.

The shock that ended the Colonels’ regime

Ioannidis repelled the promised reforms of George Papadopoulos. However, the greatest threat to his regime proved to be external, rather than internal. Tensions between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus had again mounted, while Ioannidis harbored a profound hatred towards the Cypriot President, Archbishop Makarios. To rid himself of Makarios, Ioannidis organized a coup on Cyprus and installed Nicos Samson as a puppet president.54 Turkey in turn reacted with a double invasion to protect the Turkish speaking minority of the island. Badly organized resistance by the Greek army collapsed within a couple of days, as well as the junta itself. As Deane relates, “[T]hey [the colonels’ dictatorship] got frightened and gave up power, because the Cyprus crisis had forced them to mobilise the army and they could not control the thousands of armed reservists as they had controlled an unarmed population.” (Deane 1977: 136) Due to an impending war with Turkey following the Cyprus tragedy, the junta surrendered its power to a civilian government on , 1974. Constantine Karamanlis, who up to that point was still living in , unexpectedly became

53 Quoted in (Murtagh 1994: 243). 54 It is again unclear whether the CIA was in some way involved in this coup. Officially the US State Department advised strongly against it. But Kissinger, according to an article by Theodore Kouloumbis, believes that a CIA agent could have given Ioannidis the green light and a tacit reassurance that Turkey would not intervene. Couloumbis as well as Alexis Papachelas reckon that this agent was . Kouloumbis, T., Η σχέση Χένρι Κίσινγκερ και Δημήτρη Ιωαννίδη (The relationship between and Dimitris Ioannidis), Kathimerini, August 22, 2010. Web July 20, 2014. Source: http://www.kathimerini.gr/402554/article/epikairothta/politikh/h-sxesh-xenri-kisingker-kai-dhmhtrh-iwannidh Papachelas, A., Ο Γκαστ Αβρακότος σε παιχνίδια εξουσίας (Gust Avrakotos in the middle of power games), Kathimerini. January 20, 2008. Web July 22, 2014. Source:http://www.kathimerini.gr/310761/article/epikairothta/ellada/o-gkast-avrakotos-se-paixnidia-e3oysias

39 the new Prime Minister of a government of national unity. In December of 1974, Greece held a new referendum on the monarchy, which abolished the Greek royal court. At the time Greece was permeated by “a virulent wave of anti-Americanism, encompassing Greeks of virtually all political shades.” (Pidham 1991: 113) This led to the withdrawal of Greece from NATO during the years 1974 to 1980 and a reorientation towards the European Community, of which it became a full member in 1981. In December of 1975, the new CIA station chief in Athens, Richard Welch was assassinated by a terrorist organization called , named after the date of the Polytechneio revolt. Welch had been identified due to the publication of ’s book Inside the Company, which revealed the names of certain agents. (Murtagh 1994: 259-60) The colonels were finally brought to book during a 21-day trial, that ended on the 23 of August 1975.55 On that day, George Papadopoulos, Stylianos Pattakos and , were sentenced to death. A verdict which was later commuted by the Karamanlis government to .

Andreas Papandreou’s PASOK, created in 1974, would go on to win the elections of 1981 running on the slogan of allaghi (Greek: change). “Allaghi meant a number of things to Papandreou: change in economic affairs, change in social affairs, change in foreign affairs.” (Willsford 1995: 365) Economically, the PASOK government tried to implement a fairer tax system and to expand the public sector. But this move, intended to end the corruption of the ruling classes, backfired when the age-old practice simply changed hands. As John Tomkinson writes:

Far from welcoming social justice and developing a healthy civil society, the traditional attitudes of selfishness, croneyism and irresponsibility of the traditional ruling and privileged classes was adopted by the newly enfranchised middle and working classes, on the principle 'It's our turn now.' This resulted in a large inefficient civil service bloated by a new generation of political appointees from the other side of the political spectrum, who adopted the same old practices of making croney appointments, and demanding bribes and rousfeti.56

In general, Papandreou’s economic policies failed because wealthy Greeks escaped taxes by moving their capital abroad and refused to invest in their home country as a reaction to Papandreou’s new approach on the economy. This resulted in increased budget deficits and higher inflation. (Wilsford 1995: 366) On the social front, Papandreou was more successful, as his changes allowed Greece to transform into a modern secular country. Papandreou decriminalized adultery and ended the old custom of the dowry. Another significant move was that he allowed political exiles that had fought with the communist ELAS in the civil war,

55 As Time magazine reported, “One question left unanswered by both trials was whether the American CIA actively supported seven-year Papadopoulos regime, as is widely believed in Greece. Deyannis [the President of the Court] forbade almost all discussion of the question by insisting that the court was interested solely in finding out what happened on the day of the coup.” Greece: Answering to History, Time, Sept. 1, 1975. 56 Rousfeti is Greek for “bribe”. Tomkinson, J., Athens in the I: The Return of Democracy. Web July 20, 2014. Source: http://www.anagnosis.gr/index.php?pageID=474&la=eng

40 to return to Greece, which meant that the healing process of this horrible tragedy could finally start. In the field of foreign policy, Papandreou’s tone gradually shifted from vehemently nationalistic to more moderate positions. Although Greece had just re-entered NATO the previous year, Papandreou in 1981 promised to “withdraw from NATO, kick out US bases from Greek soil, and hold a referendum on membership of the EEC”57. However, none of this actually occurred.58 In 1989 Papandreou’s government “collapsed in a welter of scandal and allegations of corruption.” (Murtagh 1994: 266) Andreas Papandreou himself was tried by the Greek High Court, but acquitted by a 7-6 vote. The fact that Papandreou laid the foundation of an oversized public sector, while not ending the traditional practices of bribery and other forms of corruption, played a large role in the collapse of the Greek economy following the worldwide crisis of 2008.59

57 Ibidem. 58 In fact, in 1983 (and in 1990) new agreements were signed for US bases in Greece. (Pidham 1991: 118) 59 BBC News, Eurozone Crisis Explained, November 27, 2012. Web August 4, 2014. Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-13798000

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Conclusion

The use of Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine, termed better as shock opportunism, as a method of addressing the complex history of the Greek junta, allows for a better understanding of all the different factors that brought about the rise to power of this regime. Shock opportunism here came down to a premeditated political shock (a military dictatorship) that sustained itself by means of torture (shocks on the individual level) and similarly washed over the Greek economy with economic shock therapy. The threat that provoked the colonels’ coup in Greece, as in so many other countries, was posed by a politician with a developmentalist economic agenda. The rhetoric, that formed the basis of American foreign policy, namely that America always fought on the side of freedom and against tyranny, led to a systemic demonization of politicians who favored more autonomy, or more economic equality. As Naomi Klein writes, “In the sixties and seventies, the favored tactic for dealing with the inconvenient popularity of developmentalism and democratic was to try to equate them with , deliberately blurring the clear differences between the worldviews.” (Klein 2007: 451) In Greece, this representation of a world in two distinct blocks, led to the demonization of Andreas Papandreou as a dangerous communist. Subsequently this fight against communism as an internal peril formed the pretext for the colonels’ assumption of power and their ideological struggle completely permeated Greek society, as its presence was felt in everything from the katharevousa version of Greek, to the ban on miniskirts and the identity construction, epitomized by the new national motto “Greece of the Christian Greeks”. The effect of this shock opportunism, however, was entirely negative. As the tortures caused relentless suffering, the Greek economy by the end of the junta’s rule was almost completely destroyed. Unsurprisingly, this also brought about a wave of anti- Americanism in Greece, exemplified by its withdrawal from NATO in 1974. The similarities between what happened in Greece and the tragic events in the countries of the Southern Cone (Chile, Argentina and Uruguay), where military brutally wiped out developmentalism, are so striking that it is tempting to look at Greece as if it were a South American country. This comparison could also serve to prove the complicity of the CIA in the colonels’ coup. For in all these countries, a vehemently rightwing government was forcefully established against the will of the people. These regimes furthermore maintained themselves on a basis of systematic torture and overhauled the economy on a new creed of free market capitalism. The ideological underpinning of this form of capitalism was that it was the economic expression of freedom. The irony, according to Klein, is that “while Friedman’s economic model is capable of being partially imposed under democracy, authoritarian conditions are required for the implementation of its true vision.” (Klein 2007: 11) The real reason behind the dogmatic adherence of these authoritarian regimes to free market capitalism, is far likelier to be found in the connection between the CIA and big corporations. In this thesis, the example of Tom Pappas has amply shown how influential certain businessmen were, as Pappas had direct links with both the Republican party and the CIA. And it were people like Pappas who had the most to lose if a developmentalist politician, in this case Andreas Papandreou, came to power. In Chile, the economic beliefs of

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Salvador Allende went against the interests of ITT and American mining companies. As a reaction to Allende’s rise to power, President Nixon famously ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream.” (Klein 2007:64) When Pinochet took control, the Chilean economy was reconstructed on Friedman’s teachings, transferred to Chile by the Chicago boys. In 1978, Philippe Agee, a defected CIA agent turned whistleblower, wrote that the common goal in all these undertakings was “the furthering of U.S. hegemony so that American multinational companies [could] intensify their exploitation of the natural resources and labor of foreign lands.” (Agee and Wolf 1978: 19) And neither was this tactic limited to South America. One of the earliest examples was Iran, where a coup deposed Mossadegh in 1953. Iran thus started a pattern of CIA interventions in countries, “where strong nationalist movements have insisted on some form of socialism to ensure national control of economic resources.” (Agee and Wolf 1978: 21) So what we have here is a worldwide phenomenon, which deserves careful consideration when studying the history of the Cold War. This linkage between the Greek dictatorship and similar CIA-installed regimes is the biggest contribution of this thesis, since none of the consulted scholarship on the Greek junta treats the case of Greece in a global perspective. However, the case of Greece also shows the soft spots in Klein’s theory. Although it is certainly true that a lot of collective shocks have paved the way for neoliberal economic reforms, a great deal of shocks did not have this result. As Naomi Klein describes the growth of Friedmanism from the Social Science building of the University of Chicago to a world dominating religion in a linear way, she foregoes the cases where shocks had a very different impact. What we have addressed in this thesis are three shocks: the Greek civil war, the colonels coup and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Only the second of these three can be categorized as a shock in terms of Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine. Since the example of Greece shows that the so-called shock doctrine can only be applied when conditions allow it, we believe that it is indeed more appropriate to use the term “shock opportunism”. A second lesson as regards the shock doctrine, is that some historical elements in the build-up of a society are so entrenched that they are virtually shock resistant. Corruption and favoritism, have run through this dissertation as a red line, from the conservative governments of the 1950s to the Greece of Papandreou’s PASOK. This seems to be the real Greek tragedy, that despite the great efforts made to render Greece a more independent and prosperous country, this dream went down with the scandals of the Papandreou government, as its leading members were under accusations of fraud in 1989. Perhaps, as a polemicist, writing with a distinctly socialist banner, the failure of Papandreou in Greece, would explain why Klein does not treat the in her book. Another explanation might be that Greece is often simply overlooked. This is of course very unfortunate, given that Greece can teach us a lot about the Cold War, as it was is the only European country where differences in ideology were fought out on the battlefield. Moreover, it was the only European country, upon which the CIA imposed its model economic model of free market capitalism. In the end, the relationship between Greece and its overlord, the United States, proves how some countries in the so-called “free world” were not allowed to be free, but slavishly had to follow American dictates. The essential message to be found in this thesis is hence one in basic . Ideology in that

43 sense was more of a means to an end, but what it essentially came down to was raw power. Greece was not permitted to have more self-determination, because American interests were at stake. As the colonels took control, the ideology of freedom was used to safeguard these interests and to keep Greece firmly on the American side. When writing this dissertation, some words of the ancient historian Thucydides therefore sprung to mind. Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian war, which divided Greece into two power blocs: Athens and Sparta. When the Melians expressed their wish for, what we would call in Cold War terminology, non-alignment, the Athenians disagreed and decided that Melos was to be in their camp. Before invading the island of Melos and slaughtering its male population, the freedom and democracy loving Athenians professed, “Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do.” (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, V, 105, 2)

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