The Kremlin's Confidant, page 19
During the remainder of that night, Martin cleared his house of incriminating material, ferrying it by car to the nearby farm of his brother-in-law, Terry Miall, and concealing it in a haystack. In the morning, he moved Kiki to the house of a friendly neighbour:
The police arrived at about 10 a.m., led by Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nicholls. There followed three hours of what he might have described as interrogation, although I saw it as a rather intriguing discussion. Classically, I was initially told that everyone else had already confessed to everything.
After an initial period of fear, I got into my stride, playing the straightforward role of a dedicated democrat, married into Greece where power had been seized by a shabby, fascist dictatorship and where my friends had been tortured and imprisoned. I preached a fiery sermon about the iniquitous failure of the British government to support the democratic cause. I accepted fully my part in the sending of aid for the humanitarian and non-violent aspects of resistance against the Greek dictatorship and claimed that I had exercised the greatest possible caution to stay within the law. I declined to be distracted into any debate about such details as bomb-making. After a few hours, Kiki joined me and we continued a joint evangelist show. I asked my interrogators what they would do if faced with a similar dilemma. I suggested parallels with the 1930s when only a tiny minority of outsiders had worked against Nazi oppression in Germany. I insisted that I was opposed to violence.
By early afternoon, the police had drunk a good deal of whisky and the questioning became less hostile. ‘As he departed, Nicholls said, “You’ve convinced me. You’d better let me know how to join the cause.” It was my impression that they categorised me as an amiable eccentric, which description they used for members of the Wadham Senior Common Room whom they had already interviewed.’
Another set of papers related to one of the Super Snipes. Nicholls bemoaned the current state of Oxford intelligentsia. He said, ‘We spoke to this don for thirty minutes and he appeared unable to comprehend what we were talking about.’ The object of his scorn, an eminent member of the Wadham Senior Common Room, was equally scathing about the police, telling Martin, ‘They talked to me for thirty minutes as though I was an expert on motor-cars, when everyone knows that I don’t drive and have never owned a car.’ Bowra’s cut-out system clearly had worked well.
They found very little in the house – a sample gas pistol from America, which they found among Kiki’s clothes and which I claimed to be for her protection; a hollowed-out book which had been used by Simon Morrissey to send some money from Malta; and a batch of coded messages, which excited them greatly but which were doodles generated in the early stages of developing of a one-time-pad system. They removed all my records that had not been previously hidden. They dug in the garden, but found nothing there.
There was one room that I had totally overlooked when clearing the house during the night. That room contained a considerable amount of material, including a consignment of walkie-talkies donated by a sympathetic police officer. Miraculously, that was the only room of the house that was not searched. They asked questions about the financing of the house which suggested that they thought I might be in the pay of some foreign power. They clearly were confused by the cut-out arrangements we had fixed with Wadham College. All the Democratic Defence cars were registered in the names of members of the Wadham Senior Common Room.
By this time, the police had arrested Takis when he went back to Williams’s flat in London. He was carrying the passport of another activist exile, the Cypriot Andreas Christodoulides. He stuck to his nom de guerre of Takis Sofianos and resolved to say as little as possible. Incarcerated in Rochester Row police station, he declined to say how he had entered the UK or to offer any information whatsoever, except that his name was ‘Takis’. However, early almost every morning, he would start shouting he wished to co-operate. In would come an interrogator and a note taker and Takis would then launch into a tirade on Greek history.
Before long, Nicholls began to realise he had a problem on his hands. Within a day or two of the arrest, Labour MPs began telephoning him, as did Cedric Thornberry, saying they would take Takis’s case up with the Home Secretary, James Callaghan. Nicholls refused to be browbeaten and by the end of the week Takis had been moved from Rochester Row near Victoria to Pentonville Prison. Some Labour MPs who had just returned from the trial of Filias wrote to Callaghan saying that Takis risked torture if he was deported to Greece. After three weeks, he was released to Martin’s care in Oxford, having to report to the police once a day. He and Martin spent their time adjusting to this new situation, lobbying for support, with occasional breaks for fishing on the nearby lake at Blenheim Palace.
In early August, the Norwegian government granted Takis permission to enter their country. He arrived on a document giving his false name and virtually nothing else. He was met by the 52-year-old Jens Evrensen, the Director General of the country’s Foreign Ministry who had led Norway’s complaints against the Greek Colonels at the European Court of Human Rights, and by Arne Treholt, a 27-year-old journalist at Arbietbladat (Labour News). Treholt had interviewed Andreas Papandreou in 1966 and become secretary of the anti-junta organisation in Norway. Just before the Dover incident, Treholt had been to stay with Martin and then accompanied Smee on a run to Greece in one of Martin’s adapted Super Snipes. On this occasion, their contact did not know to whom to give the bombs, so they buried them in a secluded place off the Athens–Corinth road.6
Takis went to stay with Treholt, doing so for several months before the Norwegians issued him with a passport. He noted with surprise the close relations that Treholt had with Soviet officials, and was not alone in this. The Norwegian security services had already begun to tap Treholt’s telephone and they continued to do so after he left journalism and joined Norway’s Foreign Ministry. In 1984, he was arrested at Oslo Airport with sixty-six classified files that he was planning to deliver to his Soviet contact, Gennady Titov, in Vienna. He served eight years of a twenty-year term before being released on grounds of ill health.
Williams later appeared at the assizes in Lewes, fortunately before a sympathetic judge. Upon the basis that no use of any subversive or explosive material was intended inside Britain, the only charge maintained was that he had failed to carry the proper documents for the export of explosives. He was fined £50. The police were furious, seeing the nugatory sentence as an invitation to others to traffic explosives across Europe. As one officer told Murtagh, ‘We couldn’t give a fuck what they did in Greece. It was how they got the stuff there that bothered us.’7 It also bothered other security forces in Europe who suddenly woke up to the breadth of activities of Democratic Defence in Europe. As one of those involved in the investigation told Murtagh:
Special Branch concluded that at no time did the organisation pose a deliberate threat to the United Kingdom or anyone in it, or any other European countries, except Greece. What they did there was their business. All of us – police and intelligence services – agreed that they had to be stopped moving guns and explosives through our countries.8
Surveillance and wire-tapping started, with the next blow against Democratic Defence being the arrest of Christodoulides and a colleague on the German–Danish border and seizure of a consignment of pistols, ammunition and electronic detonators purchased in Sweden. Christodoulides was less lucky than Williams. He was sentenced to twelve months in prison and, after release, deported.
Martin assumed that Williams was now wholly compromised by the police and that he should not be informed of any future matters of sensitivity. For his part, Williams too had decided it was time to move on, as had Hudson. ‘We realised we had lost our effectiveness and that we were under surveillance by the police. And after two years, I had had enough – it was a good “out” for me,’ Williams told the author five decades later. The garage where Hudson had worked had also been neutralised. The police had arrived, asked questions about Martin, carried out a search without a warrant, and found some grams of cannabis. In his book on this period, Richard Cottrell writes that they offered to overlook the drugs if Peter Johnson, a further colleague, agreed to implicate Williams and Packard in a conspiracy to export explosives.9 Johnson appears not to have blanched; in December, he was fined £100 on drug charges.
Martin was keen to patch things up with the Brooks and some months after the Dover arrests, Danae arranged for him to meet her brother, Major Patrick Brook, the original owner of the Porsche. Martin duly arrived at the Bunch of Grapes, a pub in Knightsbridge, and started to talk with a man whom he thought was Brook. They discussed the resistance and the Dover incident, but Martin found the conversation rang untrue, excused himself and left. When he got home, there was a message from Danae saying that her brother would be unable to make the meeting. Martin understood that others were taking an interest in him.
Long before this, Martin had decided that he had to watch his own communications with care. He concluded that he should have maintained a better cut-out arrangement with the Democratic Defence émigrés in London. He also felt he should have been more careful about car deliveries, on this last occasion, for instance, by using an innocuous second car to move material into France and then transferring them into the Porsche:
In these cases, as in others, it came down to time and money. We were operating on a shoestring and we lacked the money or personnel to run proper safety systems. Furthermore, we were prone to mistakes because after two years of efforts we were exhausted by the requests made of us.
He decided to work only with Takis or with new and previously uninvolved contacts. He set out to retrieve the materials in the pipeline – various batches of supplies had newly arrived from the USA and other points, waiting to be collected from left-luggage lockers at mainline stations in London and Paris. At this point, according to Cottrell, Spiros Mercouris, brother of the actress, came to England, thanked Martin for his good work for Democratic Defence and asked him now to stop.10 Martin denies memory of any such conversation, and Filias considers the idea totally wrong. For Martin, the critical factor causing him to close down the London cell was the news from Athens that his father-in-law had suffered a stroke. The family asked Kiki and him to return so that Kiki could support her father and the two could help with the family business.
Ideals on the Side
Business and monkey business
Kiki’s father, Nikos, moved to Athens in the 1920s, setting up shop in the Monastiraki district just west of Syntagma Square. He had built up one of the larger textile trading operations in Messenia, the south-west corner of the Peloponnese, and then decided to chance his luck in the capital. It was a difficult time. The Greek invasionary forces had just been driven out of Asia Minor and, with 1.5 million refugees from the new Turkish Republic, the city was groaning at its seams. He prospered, giving Aris and Kiki an expensive education and bringing them up in the exclusive Kolonaki area, a (long) stone’s throw from the Royal Palace, Parliament and the National Garden. After her marriage to Martin in 1956, Kiki kept at a distance from the business, while Aris tried various ventures, none particularly successful.
Travelling openly to Greece in 1970 represented a risk for Martin; he had no idea what was known by the Greek security police about his involvement with Democratic Defence. From the reports he had read and what he had been told by Troupakis and Wall, he believed the Colonels were, to a considerable extent, acting as proxies for elements of the US intelligence community. He did not believe that the Special Branch in the UK would have passed on anything about his activities to the Greek authorities.1 However, he was concerned they might do so to the CIA – and the CIA to its Greek counterpart, KYP. He discussed the position with Frank Dobson, a Labour MP who had attended the trial of Filias, and with Airey Neave, a Conservative MP. A week later, Dobson said that Callaghan had assured him that no information concerning him would be released to any foreign agency, and particularly not to the CIA:
In preparation for my departure for Greece, I cleared up the loose ends of the supply chain to Democratic Defence. I approached Dobson, Neave and Michael Wall for as much political cover as might be available. Then, with my belongings purged of anything that might link me with resistance activity but with my nervous system jangling, I took a British Airways flight to Athens. All went well. There was no hold-up at passport control. My customs examination was cursory.
It was with some aplomb that Martin metamorphosed to businessman. Kiki decided to open her own shop, and Martin assisted her take on the representations of Mothercare, Mary Quant, Stirling Cooper and other Chelsea-boom British designers. Her father, now in reduced health, continued the main business and Martin signed up the Marks & Spencer franchise for Greece. He also worked with Aris Tsatsoulis to build up the jeans operation described below.
Less successful was his foray into hospitality. Early on, supported by some shipowners, he tried to launch a Tuscan restaurant. The opening night proved decisive. Perplexed at the way no food was coming from the kitchen, Martin went to see what was happening. He found the chef in tears and the sous-chef dead on the floor, stabbed to death by his jealous boss. The shipowners, considering this a bad omen, pulled out.
In this period, Martin focused on mammon and squash rather than contesting the regime he deplored. His role in supporting Democratic Defence was much reduced. Its leader in the absence of Filias, Kouvelakis, the judge, had left Greece in June 1969 to co-ordinate supplies of propaganda, weapons and explosives from abroad. While visiting Martin in Oxford, he learned of the arrest of Karagiorgas, his close associate in Democratic Defence, after the latter’s botched bomb preparation. Fearing detention in Greece, Kouvelakis decided to base himself in Geneva where he took up a scholarship to study international law. That left Democratic Defence temporarily rudderless, although isolated acts by individual members showed a continuing will to resist.
In May 1969, Filias had been sentenced to eighteen years in prison in a trial which also saw ‘Hank’ convicted in absentia. Filias continued to discountenance the regime, smuggling out statements hidden in the spines of books, in returned tubes of the ‘wrong kind’ of toothpaste, or in folded messages passed in a kiss. His frequent press statements infuriated the junta which felt belittled by its inability to curb his clarion calls for the restoration of democracy while, at the same time, incessant lobbying on his behalf led by Bowra gave him a veneer of protection against maltreatment.
In spring 1970, Kiki told Martin that a caller at her shop in the Monastiraki district of Athens had left a book for him. The caller turned out to have been the mother of Filias who had been visiting her son in gaol. The book contained, rolled up in its spine and written on toilet paper, a message from Filias. He instructed Martin to deliver a statement written on a separate length of toilet paper to the foreign press; to act as his go-between in the revitalisation of Democratic Defence; and to initiate arrangements for his escape from his cell in the Izzeddin Fortress, an Ottoman castle in north-west Crete. The message to the press was duly delivered, printed in the Guardian and then re-broadcast by the BBC Greek Service. The other two tasks proved more difficult.
Martin considered that the most valuable contribution he could make to Democratic Defence was to spring its leader and so he concentrated on this. He took advice from one person whom he thought might guide him, the former prisoner O’Connor in London. He then built up a specialist team. Hudson, the ex-racing driver, was tasked to provide and drive the getaway car. The Authoringa, still on its way to Greece, was scheduled to spirit Filias out of the country.
Essential to the plan were the bribing of a prison officer and the manufacture of a master key. For these, a considerable amount of money was needed, and Filias, communicating via his mother, told Martin to obtain funds from his family. They declined to help, suspecting a trap and fearing that Filias would be killed while trying to escape. Before Martin could act, Filias was moved to Alikarnassos prison near Heraklion and then in spring 1971, ‘for disciplinary reasons’, to Corfu. This last island proved impenetrable to Martin, and Filias stayed there until August 1973 when he was released under an amnesty. He was unbowed by his five years of incarceration and immediately threw himself back into the organisation of resistance. He was kept under surveillance but began discreetly meeting with Martin, who again set up safe houses for him.
Casinos
Just before Filias’s release, Martin found himself involved in a bizarre negotiation to establish a casino in Athens. This was with Colonel Nikolaos Makarezos, the deputy prime minister, who managed the business of the land. Martin was acting for the Ladbroke Group, the UK’s major gaming and casino company. A friend of his in Malta was an associate of Cyril Stein, then chief executive of Ladbrokes. Stein had heard of the success of the Mont Parnes Casino, an hour’s drive from the capital, and wanted to negotiate casino rights for central Athens. It was a long way from smuggling explosives for use against the Colonels to negotiating a multi-million corrupt deal with them. Martin did not have links to the 54-year-old Makarezos but a business partner in his jeans operation, Panayis Kavadias, did. And what Martin soon learnt was to numb him – until he realised its potential value as propaganda against the junta.
When Kavadias set out Stein’s interest, Makarezos cut immediately to the core. ‘It’s possible,’ he said, ‘but it will be expensive for Ladbrokes. Partly because we made an exclusive deal with Frixos Dimitriou for casino rights. He will have to be dealt with, the contract will need to be broken. And there will have to be substantial benefits for us.’
Makarezos spoke with the authority of having been one of the triumvirate which had ruled Greece since 1967 – with Papadopoulos, prime minister and shortly to become president, and Brigadier Stylianos Pattakos, commander of the tanks which had carried out the 1967 coup and then also deputy prime minister. Only Makarezos had some knowledge of economics and was tasked with running the economy, which had initially flourished but by 1973 had entered the doldrums.
