On March 7, 1973, President Nixon met in the Oval Office with Tom Pappas, a Greek American business magnate, political fixer, and friend of the CIA. Pappas had delivered $549,000 in cash to the 1968 Nixon campaign as a gift from the leaders of the Greek military junta. The money had been laundered through the KYP, the Greek intelligence service. It was one of the darker secrets of the Nixon White House.
Pappas now had hundreds of thousands of dollars more to offer the president--money to buy the silence of the CIA veterans jailed in the Watergate break-in. Nixon thanked him profusely: "I am aware of what you're doing to help out," he said. Most of it came from members and supporters of "the colonels"--the Greek junta that seized power in April 1967, led by George Papadopoulos, a recruited CIA agent since the days of Allen Dulles, and the KYP's liaison to the agency.
"These colonels had been plotting for years and years," said Robert Keeley, later the American ambassador to Greece. "They were fascists. They fitted the classic definition of fascism, as represented by Mussolini in the 1920s: a corporate state, uniting industry and unions, no parliament, trains running on time, heavy discipline and censorship...almost a classic fascist ideal."
Greek military and intelligence officers had worked in concert with seven successive station chiefs in Athens. They had a great friend in Thomas Hercules Karamessines, the Greek American chief of the clandestine service under Richard Helms, and they always had believed that "the Central Intelligence Agency was an effective and relatively direct route into the White House," said Norbert Anschutz, the ranking American diplomat in Athens during the 1967 coup.
Yet the colonels had taken the CIA by surprise. "The only time I saw Helms really angry was when the Greek colonels' coup took place in 1967," said the veteran analyst and current-intelligence chief Dick Lehman. "The Greek generals had been planning a coup against the elected government, a plan we knew all about and was not yet ripe. But a group of colonels had trumped their ace and acted without warning. Helms had been expecting to be warned of the generals' coup, and when a coup occurred, he naturally assumed it was this one, and he was furious." Lehman, who had read the overnight cables from Athens, "tried to cool Helms off by pointing out that this was a different coup, which we had no line on. This was a new thought."
Official American policy toward the colonels was cool and distant until the inauguration of Richard Nixon in January 1969. The junta used Tom Pappas, who had been working with the CIA in Athens for twenty years, as a courier to slip cash into the political coffers of Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew--the most powerful Greek American in the history of the United States. The payoff reaped benefits. Agnew came to Athens on an official visit. So did the secretaries of state, defense, and commerce. The United States sold tanks, aircraft, and artillery to the junta. The CIA's Athens station argued that the arms sales to the colonels "would bring them back to democracy," said Archer K. Blood, a political officer at the American embassy. That was "a lie," Blood said--but "if you said anything critical about the junta, the CIA would explode in anger."
By 1973, the United States was the only nation in the developed world on friendly terms with the junta, which jailed and tortured its political foes. "The CIA station chief was in bed with the guys who were beating up the Greeks," said Charles Stuart Kennedy, the American consul general in Athens. "I would raise issues of what would amount to human rights, and this would be discounted by the CIA." The agency "was too close to the wrong people," Kennedy said. "It seemed to have undue influence over the Ambassador," an old friend of Richard Nixon's named Henry Tasca.
In the spring of 1974, General Demetrios Ioannidis took over as the leader of the junta. He had been working with the CIA for twenty-two years. The agency was Ioannidis's sole contact with the government of the United States; the ambassador and the American diplomatic establishment were out of the loop. Jim Potts, the CIA station chief, was the American government, insofar as the junta was concerned. The agency had "a major asset in Athens. They had a relationship with the guy who ran the country, and they didn't want it disturbed," said the State Department's Thomas Boyatt, the Washington desk officer responsible for Cyprus.
"CONNED BY A PISS-ANT GENERAL"
Cyprus, an island forty miles off the coast of Turkey and five hundred miles from Athens, had been divided and conquered by Greek and Islamic armies since the days of the prophet Muhammad. The Greek colonels had a deep hatred for the Cypriot leader, Archbishop Makarios, and an abiding desire to overthrow him. The American deputy chief of mission in Cyprus, William Crawford, had gotten wind of their scheming.
"I went up to Athens with what I considered proof positive that they were going to pull the whole house of cards down," he remembered. "I was told by our chief of station in Athens, Jim Potts, that that was just absolutely impossible. He couldn't agree with me: these people were friends with whom we'd worked for thirty years, and they would never conduct anything so foolish."
By 1974, Tom Boyatt became convinced that the CIA's friends in Athens wanted to do away with Makarios. He drafted a cable to Ambassador Tasca in Athens. Go talk to General Ioannidis, it said. Tell him--"in words of one syllable that even he will understand"--that "the United States strongly opposes any efforts by any element of the Greek government, overt or clandestine, to mess around in the Cyprus situation." Tell him that "we particularly oppose any efforts to overthrow Makarios and install a pro-Athens government. Because if that happens the Turks are going to invade, and that's not good for any of us."
But Ambassador Tasca had never spoken to General Ioannidis in his life. That role was reserved for the CIA station chief.
On Saturday, July 12, 1974, the State Department received a cable from the CIA station in Athens. Rest assured, it said. The general and the junta were not doing anything to overthrow Archbishop Makarios. "So, all right, we'd had it from the horse's mouth," Boyatt recounted. "I went home. And about 3:00 a.m. on Monday morning, I got a call from the Ops Center at the State Department, and the person said, 'You better get in here.'"
The junta had attacked. Boyatt rushed to the State Department, where a communications officer laid two pieces of paper in front of him. One was the CIA's intelligence brief for President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger: "We have been assured by General Ioannidis that Greece will not move its forces on Cyprus." The other was a cable from the American embassy in Cyprus: "The Presidential Palace is in flames. The Cypriot force has been decimated."
From Ankara came a flash that the Turkish forces had mobilized. Two NATO armies, the Greeks and the Turks, both trained and armed by the United States, were about to go to war with American weapons. The Turks hit the beach in northern Cyprus and cut the island in half with American tanks and artillery. There was a great slaughter of Greek Cypriots in the Turkish sector and a great slaughter of Turkish Cypriots in the Greek sector of the island. All through July, the CIA reported that the Greek army and the Greek people were solidly in support of General Ioannides. After the battle for Cyprus was joined, the Greek junta fell.
The CIA's failure to warn Washington about the war was an unusual case. There had been many such failures in the agency's annals, from the Korean War onward. In 1974 alone, a leftist military coup in Portugal and a nuclear test in India had come as complete surprises. But this was different: the CIA was in bed with the military men against whom it was supposed to warn.
"There we were," Boyatt said years later, "sitting there with the entire intelligence establishment of the United States in all of its majesty having been conned by a piss-ant Greek brigadier general."
"THE TERRIBLE PRICE"
On August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon resigned. The final blow was his admission that he had ordered the CIA to obstruct justice in the name of national security.
The next day, Secretary of State Kissinger read an extraordinary message from Tom Boyatt. It said the CIA had been lying about what it had been doing in Athens, deliberately misleading the American government--and those lies had helped start the war consuming Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus, a war in which thousands died.
The next week, gunfire broke out around the American embassy in Cyprus, and Ambassador Rodger P. Davies was killed by a bullet that tore his heart out. In Athens, hundreds of thousands of people marched on the American embassy; demonstrators tried to set the building on fire. The newly arrived ambassador there was Jack Kubisch, a veteran diplomat of broad experience, personally selected by Kissinger on the day that Nixon resigned.
He requested a new station chief, and the CIA sent Richard Welch, who had learned his Greek at Harvard and had served as chief in Peru and Guatemala. Welch took up residence in the mansion where every one of his predecessors had lived. The address was widely known. "It was a very serious problem," Ambassador Kubisch said. "I had made arrangements for him to go into a different residence and to live in a different part of town, to try and help conceal who he was and to give him some cover." Given the anti-American fervor in Athens, that seemed prudent. But "neither Welch nor his wife seemed to be at all concerned about this," he said. "They just didn't think that in Athens there was any real severe threat to them."
Welch and his wife went to a Christmas party at the ambassador's residence, just a few blocks from the CIA's mansion in the hills. When they returned home, a small car with four people in it was waiting in the driveway. Three of them forced the station chief out of his car. "They fired three slugs from a .45 into his chest and killed him," Ambassador Kubisch said. "They got into their car and sped off." It was the first time in the history of the CIA that a station chief had been assassinated. But it was part of a pattern of the past.
Ambassador Kubisch said that he had seen in Athens, for the first time in his life, "the terrible price the U.S. Government must pay when it associates itself so intimately...with a repressive regime." Part of the cost was the consequence of letting the CIA shape the foreign policy of the United States.