The Kremlin's Confidant, page 20
Makarezos described how the Mont Parnes licence had been agreed. He said that Dimitriou, a Cypriot casino owner in London, approached him and he had taken Dimitriou to see Papadopoulos. Dimitriou placed a case with $5 million dollars in cash on the desk. The money was deposited in numbered accounts in Switzerland, in the names of the wives of the three leaders of the junta. They agreed that Dimitriou would finance the development of the Mont Parnes Hotel and they would receive 50 per cent of the profits of this and of the casino. The calculation of earnings was kept in a special set of books, in which payments to the junta leaders would be shown as a working expense. Makarezos showed Kavadias the private books to support his claim that they had been in receipt of a total of $100,000 a day. These were huge sums but Stein had told Martin that in this period Mount Parnes was one of the highest-rolling casinos in the world.
Ladbrokes, he said, would need to improve on the arrangements with Dimitriou. He proposed that Ladbrokes deposit a total of $25 million into the three leader’s wives’ Swiss accounts, whose details he gave, with a minimum further investment by Ladbrokes of $75 million. All enterprises would operate on the basis of a 50-50 profit split.
Makarezos told Kavadias that Donald Nixon, the brother of the US President, was also in Athens, seeking the same deal as Ladbrokes. He said that the Palm Springs group which Nixon was representing was controlled by the Mafia, and that, while the junta had no fear of internal opposition, they did not wish to see the Mafia establish itself in Athens. He was therefore willing to negotiate with Ladbrokes, which he believed to be a reputable company.
Martin conveyed these discussions to Cyril Stein, who suggested that $5–6 million would be a more appropriate sum for the initial deposit but the other elements of the proposal could be negotiable.
Martin felt uneasy about these negotiations, but he and Filias, released by this time, saw the value of the information in demonstrating the long-rumoured corruption of the junta. They believed that publicising the details could cause more ethical officers to rebel and open the way to the restoration of democracy. However, in late September, before Martin could wrap up the deal, Makarezos was forced from office. Papadopoulos had had himself declared president in August and had decided to appoint a civilian government. Martin gave the bank account details to Peter Preston, editor of the Guardian, with instructions to publish them if anything happened to him. Asked about this in 2017, Preston said he put them to one side, but they then disappeared.
Dimitriou himself had a chequered career. In the 1950s, he had been an informer for the British on EOKA and, when he fell suspect, was extracted from Cyprus to London. There he made his initial money running brothels in the Queensway area. He was killed just after the fall of the junta, allegedly because an army truck in Cyprus hit the car in which he was sitting.
Naval revolt and junta’s collapse
For their first five years in power, the Colonels presided over a minor economic boom. They had gone out of their way to attract foreign investment, three months after the coup opening the country’s doors to foreign companies. Dimitriou’s investment in the Mont Parnes casino was one of these new investments. Economic growth was driven by large-scale public works, including hydroelectric and thermal power plants. Pattakos used to be known as the ‘first trowel of Greece’ because of the number of foundation stone layings and associated ribbon cuttings at which he was filmed, digging implement in hand. Copious low-interest credits were made available for hotels – a number of which were never built – and tourism boomed. Farmers were encouraged through the write-off of agricultural loans up to a value of 100,000 drachmas (then about $3,500), a move to boost support for the regime in rural areas.
By 1972, however, the fizz was going flat, and the Papadopoulos regime began to face other problems. University students were increasingly restive and their protests came to a head in early 1973. In February, students at the Law School of the University of Athens went on strike, barricading themselves inside their faculty buildings and demanding repeal of a new law allowing forcible drafting of ‘subversive youths’, which had been applied to eighty-eight of them. The brutality of the subsequent police intervention combined with concerns about the apparently growing corruption of the regime disturbed many, not least officers in Greece’s navy.
After his return, Martin had been focusing on business, working against the image of the Colonels when he could. In early 1973, he was approached by his old friend, Troupakis. The 40-year-old captain asked for his help. He explained that the Greek navy was preparing a counter-coup against the junta and asked Martin to set up a channel to King Constantine and sympathisers in the British government and to obtain assurances of their support. He also asked Martin to organise an escape route, to be used in case of a failure of the coup, arranging for a suitable craft to be available to move officers from western Greece to Italy. The 50-year-old Rear Admiral Spiridon Konofaos, another leader of the plot, confirmed the request and asked Martin to attend a meeting with the group’s leadership. This was to be held in an ante-room at the Athens hospital, where Troupakis’s wife was confined with a terminal illness.
Arriving at the hospital, Martin was perturbed to find the group in conversation with his old sparring partner, Lepczyk, the US minder of King Constantine. He drew Troupakis aside and asked him if he knew Lepczyk’s background. Troupakis replied that they felt that they needed the blessing of the CIA. Martin suggested Troupakis was being naïve. Troupakis had previously given him details of the CIA’s involvement with the junta, and there was no reason to suppose that the relationship had ended. He was disturbed at the extraordinary lack of security about the plot, which apparently was a topic of excited conversation among officers’ wives.
At this juncture, it was announced that there was to be a courtesy visit to Piraeus by a British squadron. Martin received a telephone call from Gus Halliday, his friend from 813 Squadron in the mid-1950s. Halliday, now in charge of the Royal Navy’s amphibious forces, said that he would be in command of the visiting ships and that he hoped to see Kiki and Martin. He later told Martin that the British ambassador, Sir Robin Hooper, had invited him to bring his wife to Athens for the visit and for both of them to stay at the Residency. Gus said he had courteously replied, thanking the ambassador but saying that his wife probably would wish to stay with close friends in Athens, Kiki and Martin Packard. In rapid reply to this letter, a motorcycle messenger delivered a severely worded missive. It said that the Packards were personae non gratae and under no circumstances was he to approach or contact them.
Halliday showed Martin his reply:
Dear Ambassador, I have known Kiki and Martin Packard well for sixteen years and trust them implicitly. I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting you, but I shall continue to select my friends as I see fit. In the circumstances, my wife will not be coming to Athens at this time.
While still unaware of this background, Martin had hatched a scheme which might have caused Halliday to make a reappraisal. He suggested to Troupakis that the Hellenic navy should stage its counter-coup to coincide with the British navy visit and that a number of Greek officers, while visiting the British flagship to attend the statutory cocktail party, declare themselves to be in revolt and request asylum. Troupakis considered this to be defeatist, and preparations for the counter-coup went ahead. The plan was for the Hellenic navy to sail for a planned NATO exercise and then seize the Aegean island of Syros, 80 miles south-east of Athens, and blockade Athens and Thessaloniki.
The officers involved duly turned up at Salamis and Scaramanga naval bases early on the morning of 23 May to find the bases blockaded. They were arrested. Whether it was their lax security or the US which had given them away is unclear. However, for the US it must have been an easy choice. The Pentagon had just signed a deal for the home-porting of the US Sixth Fleet in Piraeus. This scheme, devised by the modernising Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, involved relocating around 10,000 US naval personnel and their dependants to Greece. It was a prize not to be abandoned lightly.
The only ship to escape the Colonels’ net was the destroyer Velos, built in 1943 in the US and given to Greece in 1959. It had set sail the previous day and, defying the junta, made for Italy where its officers applied for political asylum. Its commander, the 42-year-old Captain Nikolaos Pappas, was promptly thrown out of the Greek navy – though after the junta fell he was reinstated, eventually retiring as a full admiral and honorary chief of the Hellenic Navy General Staff (a post which his fellow mutineer, Konofaos, was also to hold).
Martin had made arrangements for the charter of a suitable craft in which disaffected officers could be extricated, but Troupakis, who had gone into hiding, rather than try to escape as arranged by Martin, surrendered to the authorities. Apart from the failure of the coup, he was facing the loss of his wife. He was unable to attend her funeral. Martin, who did so, took a number of participants to be security officers, rather than family.
Although easily suppressed, the naval mutiny acted as a trigger for the political events which led to the eventual fall of the Colonels. Nine days after the mutiny, Papadopoulos announced that the Greek monarchy would be abolished – a ‘Regent’ had been appointed after Constantine’s failed coup attempt of December 1967 – and at the end of July a referendum ensured him a 72 per cent vote for this change. On 19 August 1973, Papadopoulos was sworn in as president. He announced an amnesty of political prisoners – which led to the release of Filias and Troupakis – and a return to civilian government. In September, the former politician, Spiros Markezinis, was appointed prime minister.
This easing of political constraints emboldened student opponents of the regime. In November, they blockaded the Athens Polytechnic. Ioannides, waiting in the wings, sent in the tanks to crush this protest, with more than twenty students and others being killed in the process. He then displaced Papadopoulos, appointed his own president, General Phaidon Gizikis, and prime minister, Adamantios Androutsopoulos, and launched a new crack down.
In mid-1974, reports began to reach Filias from army officers that Ioannides was convinced he had a deal with his US advisers for the overthrow of Makarios, with the assurance that this would lead to an accommodation with Turkey. Filias asked Martin to deliver to key figures outside Greece his views on the opportunities this could create for Democratic Defence. Martin and Kiki set off by car through Yugoslavia. They had reached northern Italy when they heard on the radio of the bungled assassination attempt against the archbishop and the coup d’état backed by Athens. As they continued north, the story unfolded – the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and the fissions in Athens caused by the mobilisation, the conflagration in Cyprus and the possibility of war with Turkey. The country’s generals decided that only a broad-based government could handle the crisis. They asked Constantine Karamanlis, who had served for seven years as prime minister in pre-junta Greece, to return. The era of Ioannides and the notorious inquisition cells of his military police at EAT/ESA was over.
Strains of Freedom
Democratic Defence loses out
Following the fall of the junta, the main members of Democratic Defence were national figures. Appreciating this, Karamanlis offered Filias and some of his colleagues posts in his cabinet of national unity. Four of them accepted. Filias refused. He did not believe that the processes under way would ensure a reformed democracy.
As long as the junta was in power, Democratic Defence had sought to keep a sense of resistance alive, to contribute to the isolation of the Colonels, and to ensure that the post-junta leadership would have a sense of self-respect. Once the junta had fallen, its emphasis was on the principles in its founding proclamation, in particular the need to launch a grass-root political movement aimed at modernising the country.
This remained its target, and in this spirit, Democratic Defence agreed to co-operate with Andreas Papandreou when, a month after the junta fell, he returned to a hero’s welcome. He asked them to join his new party, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Panellínio Sosialistikó Kínima (PASOK)). Filias became a co-founder and indeed, after the party’s foundation, Democratic Defence accounted for a majority of its Provisional Central Committee. But before long, the side of Papandreou’s character that had worried Martin and others during the resistance – the politician’s unwillingness to allow any movement that he could not control – came to the fore.
During the winter of 1974–1975, the group from Democratic Defence sought to win a popular following for PASOK, to ensure that members, rather than the leadership, would decide how the party operated, and to speak with an equal voice to that of Papandreou. But, step by step, Papandreou chipped away at the authority of the committee. By mid-1975, most of those who had come from Democratic Defence had been expelled from the party and Papandreou’s writ was unquestioned. He was quick to shape PASOK in his mould, using the rhetorical skills he had inherited from his father to propel the party to power in 1981 and, increasingly erratically, to stay in office for ten of the next fourteen years.
Like many of Papandreou’s critics, Martin believes that he made – and kept – a promise to the Colonels not to become involved in violent resistance. Certainly, his six years of exile showed his relentless hostility to other opposition forces, rejecting calls for co-operation and denouncing them to the governments and others who supported them. Less proven is the extent to which he sought to provoke unrest within Democratic Defence. On several occasions, Papandreou accused Martin of working for the British intelligence services. Such accusations over Martin’s loyalty were to hang over him. In one instance, the journalist Stangos wrote to Filias saying that Martin was betraying them. In 1985, Stangos, elderly and with heart trouble told Cottrell, ‘I didn’t trust Packard from the first moment. There were others I didn’t trust too, mostly collaborators of Packard.’ To support this, he argued that many of the items sent to Greece by the ‘Packard network’ had arrived damaged.1
Suspicion and paranoia of betrayal are the bedfellows of all resistance groups, and such claims still circulate around Martin. But Filias, perhaps the person best placed to judge, never harboured any such doubts. He remained close to Martin, having him to stay at his family house in Odos Fanarioton on the northern slopes of Athens’s Mount Lycabettus. When Martin visited Athens in 2016, Filias took him for a weekend to the village house in Plataniotissa in the northern Peloponnese where he had grown up. ‘Martin was one of the best, he never let us down,’ he told Cottrell in 1985. It was the same message he had told the audience at the Panteion in April 2016, and a year later he used identical words as we sat on his terrace and a Filipino assistant, helping him deal with a broken hip, brought us a cooling lemonade.
Extruded from PASOK, Filias returned to academic life, teaching at Panteion University and becoming Director General of the National Centre of Social Research. Fifteen years on, he was appointed chairman of Olympic Airways – one of the rare heads of an airline to have earlier sought to sabotage his company’s planes. He also had a career as a successful, if nationalist, television talk-show host. ‘The show with the best ratings was when I had Martin as my guest,’ he told me.
1975 and Agee
With the fall of the dictatorship, Martin assumed that his involvement in local politics had reached a fitting end, and he kept clear of the orbit in which most of his former friends now moved. He had little to do with the British Embassy but, early in 1975, invited by the Naval Attaché to a reception, he found himself cornered by an earnest visitor. She asked him, ‘Have you heard of this Packard person? We were briefed that he is persona non grata and dangerous, and told to avoid him at all costs.’
Martin was appalled that earlier prejudices continued. He asked for a meeting with Sir Francis Brooks Richards, Britain’s ambassador since the fall of the junta. He told the ambassador that he could understand the embassy’s reluctance to have any association with him during the course of the dictatorship, but that he was perturbed to find the situation had not changed after the return of democratic government to a country in which he was running a major company. He received an apology, a claim that the matter was one of oversight, and a promise that his previous good standing would be restored.
About this time, Filias, in his normal peremptory style, summoned Martin to a meeting. A minister in Karamanlis’s government had asked Filias if he could suggest someone of confidence who had good contacts abroad and would be willing to help on a mission of considerable delicacy. Filias had advanced Martin’s name and asked Martin if he would be prepared to act on Karamanlis’s behalf.
Filias disclosed that, since his return, Karamanlis had been under pressure to accept a resumption of the historically intimate relationship between the Greek authorities and US intelligence agencies. He was now being pressed to accept the transfer to Greece from Beirut of the CIA’s Middle East headquarters – the Lebanese Civil War was building up – and the CIA was requesting several hundred blank Greek passports for use by its agents. Recognising the distaste of the Greek populace for the US intelligence services, widely considered responsible for the seven years’ dictatorship, Karamanlis was opposed to this request. But Greece was so dependent on American aid that he considered outright rejection impossible. He had therefore leaked details of the proposal to selected Greek newspapers, calculating that publication by these would trigger a politically irresistible outcry. This had not worked. According to Filias, the editors of the papers had received threats that they would be assassinated if any word of the story was printed.
