THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

Chapter 9:  A " WET JOB " IN WASHINGTON ?

AS WE HAVE more than once seen, Kissinger has a tendency to personalize
his politics. His policies have led directly and deliberately to the deaths of
anonymous hundreds of thousands, but have also involved the targeting of
certain inconvenient individuals -General Schneider, Archbishop
Makarios, Sheik Mujib. And, as we have also more than once glimpsed,
Kissinger has an especial relish for the Washington vendetta and the local-
ized revenge.

It seems possible that these two tendencies converge in a single case: a
plan to kidnap and murder a man named Elias P. Demetracopoulos. Mr
Demetracopoulos is a distinguished Greek journalist with an unexampled
record of opposition to the dictatorship that disfigured his homeland
between 1967 and 1974. In the course of those years, he made his home in
Washington, supporting himself as a consultant to a respected Wall Street
firm. Innumerable senators, congressmen, Hill staffers, diplomats and
reporters have testified to the extraordinary one-man campaign of lobby-
ing and information he waged against the military gangsters who had
usurped power in Athens. Since that same junta enjoyed the sympathy of
powerful interests in Washington, Demetracopoulos was compelled to
combat on two fronts, and made (as will shortly appear) some influential
enemies.

After the collapse of the Greek dictatorship in 1974 -a collapse
occasioned by the events I discuss in Chapter 7 on Cyprus above -
Demetracopoulos gained access to the secret police files in Athens, and
confirmed what he had long suspected. There had been more than one
attempt made to kidnap and eliminate him. Files held by the KYP -the
Greek equivalent of the CIA -revealed that the then dictator, George
Papadopoulos, and his deputy security chief Michael Roufogalis several
times contacted the Greek military mission in Washington with precisely
this end in view. Stamped with the words "COSMIC: Eyes Only" -the
highest security classification -this traffic involved a plethora of schemes.
They had in common, it is of interest to note, a desire to see
Demetracopoulos snatched from Washington and repatriated. An assassi-
nation in Washington might have been embarrassing; moreover there
seems to have been a need to interrogate Demetracopoulos before
despatching him. (The Greek junta was in 1970 expelled by the Council of
Europe for its systematic use of torture against political opponents, and a
series of public trials held in Athens after 1974 committed the torturers and
their political masters to long terms of imprisonment. ) One proposal was
to smuggle Demetracopoulos aboard a Greek civilian airliner, another was
to put him on a Greek military plane, and still another was to get him
aboard a submarine. (If it were not for the proven record of irrationality
and mania among the leaders of the junta, one might be tempted to dismiss
at least the third of these plans as a fantasy.) One sentence stands out from
the COSMIC cables:

We can rely on the cooperation of the various agencies of the U.S.
Government, but estimate the Congressional reaction to be fierce.

This was a sober estimate: the CIA and the NSC in particular were notori-
ously friendly to the junta, while Demetracopoulos enjoyed the benefit of
many friendships among senators and members of the House.

Seeking to discover what kind of "cooperation" US agencies might have
offered, Demetracopoulos in 1976 engaged an attorney -- William A.
Dobrovir of the DC firm of Dobrovir, Oakes and Gebhardt -- and brought
suit under the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act. He was
able to obtain many hundreds of documents from the FBI, the CIA and the
State Department, as well as the Department of Justice and the Pentagon.
A number of these papers indicated that copies had been furnished to the
National Security Council, then the domain of Henry Kissinger. But
requests for documentation from this source were unavailing. As previ-
ously noted, Kissinger had on leaving office made a hostage of his own
papers copying them, classifying them as "personal" and deeding them to
the Library of Congress on condition that they be held privately. Thus,
Demetracopoulos met with a stone wall when he used the law to try and
prise anything from the NSC. In March 1977, however, the NSC finally
responded to repeated legal initiatives by releasing the skeletal "computer
indices" of the flies that had been kept on Demetracopoulos. Paging through
these, his attention was not unnaturally caught by the following:

7024513 DOCUMENT= 5 OF 5 PAGE = 1 OF 1
KEYWORDS ACKNOWLEDGING SENS MOSS BURDICK GRAVEL RE MR DEMETRACOPOULOS
DEATH IN ATHENS PRISON DATE 701218

"Well it's not every day," said Demetracopoulos when I interviewed him,
"that you read about your own death in a state document." His attorney
was bound to agree, and wrote a series of letters to Kissinger asking for
copies of the file to which the indices referred. For seven years -I repeat, for
seven years -- Kissinger declined to favor Demetracopoulos's lawyer with a
reply. When he eventually did respond, it was only through his own lawyer,
who wrote that:

Efforts were made to search the collection for copies of documents which
meet the description provided. ... No such copies could be found.

"Efforts were made" is, of course, a piece of obfuscation that might describe
the most perfunctory inquiry. We are therefore left with the question: Did
Kissinger know of, or approve, or form a part of, that "cooperation of the
various agencies of the u.s. Government" on which foreign despots had
been counting for a design of kidnap, torture and execution?

To begin with an obvious question: Why should a figure of Kissinger's
stature either know about, or care about, the existence of a lone dissident
journalist? This question is easily answered: the record shows that Kissinger
knew very well who Demetracopoulos was, and detested him into the bar
gain. The two men had actually met in Athens in 1956, when
Demetracopoulos had hosted a luncheon at the Grande Bretagne Hotel for
the visiting professor. Over the next decade, Demetracopoulos had been
prominent among those warning of, and resisting, a military intervention in
Greek politics. The CIA generally favored such an intervention and main
tained intimate connections with those who were planning it: in November
1963 the director of the CIA, John McCone, signed an internal message
asking for "any substantive derogatory data which can be used to deny
[Dematracopoulos] subsequent entry to the US." No such derogatory infor-
mation was in fact available, so that when the coup came, Demetracopoulos
was able to settle in Washington, DC, and begin his exile campaign.

He began it auspiciously enough, by supplying "derogatory data" about
the Nixon and Agnew campaign of 1968. This campaign -already tainted
badly enough by the betrayal of the Vietnam peace negotiations -was also
receiving illegal donations from the $reek military dictatorship.

The money came from Michael Roufogalis at the KYP and was handed
over, in cash, to John Mitchell by an ultra-conservative Greek-American
businessman named Thomas Pappas. The sum involved was $549,000 -- a
considerable amount by the standards of the day. Its receipt was doubly
illegal: foreign governments are prohibited from making campaign dona
tions (as are foreigners in general), and given that the KYP was in receipt of
CIA subsidies there existed the further danger that American intelligence
money was being recycled back into the American political process -- in
direct violation of the CIA's own chatter.

In 1968, Demetracopoulos took his findings to Larry O'Brien, chairman
of the Democratic National Committee, who issued a call for an inquiry
into the activities of Pappas and the warm relations existing between the
Nixon-Agnew campaign and the Athens junta. A number of historians
have since speculated as to whether it was evidence for this "Greek con
nection," with its immense potential for damage, that Nixon's and
Mitchell's burglars were seeking when they entered O'Brien's Watergate
office under the cover of night. Considerable weight is lent to this view by
one salient fact: when the Nixon White House was seeking "hush money"
for the burglars, it turned to Thomas Pappas to provide it.

Demetracopoulos's dangerous knowledge of the secret campaign dona-
tions, and his incessant lobbying on the Hill and in the press against
Nixon's and Kissinger's client regime in Athens, drew unwelcome attention
to him. He later sued both the FBI and the CIA -becoming the first person
ever to do so successfully -- and received written admissions from both
agencies that they possessed "no derogatory information" about him. In the
course of these suits, he also secured an admission from then FBI director
William Webster that he had been under "rather extensive" surveillance on
and between the following dates: 9 November 1967 and 2 October 1969; 25
August 1971 and 14 March 1973; and 19 February and 24 October 1974.

Unaware of the precise extent of this surveillance, Demetracopoulos had
nonetheless more than once found himself brushed by a heavy hand. On 7
September 1971 he was lunching at Washington's fashionable Jockey Club
with Nixon's chief henchman, Murray Chotiner, who told him bluntly,
"Layoff Pappas. You can be in trouble. You can be deported. It's not smart
politics. You know Tom Pappas is a friend of the President." The next
month, on 27 October 1971, Demetracopoulos was lunching with column-
ist Robert Novak at the Sans Souci and was threatened by Pappas himself,
who came over from an adjacent table to tell him and Novak that he could
make trouble for anyone who wanted him investigated. On the preceding
12 July, Demetracopoulos had testified before the European subcommittee
of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Congressman
Benjamin Rosenthal of New York, about the influence of Thomas Pappas
on US foreign policy and the Athens dictatorship (and vice versa). Before
his oral testimony could be printed, a Justice Department agent appeared
at the subcommittee's office and demanded a copy of the statement.
Demetracopoulos had then, on 17 September, furnished a memorandum
on Pappas's activities to the same subcommittee. His written deposition
closed thus: "Finally, I have submitted separately to the subcommittee
items of documentary evidence which I believe will be useful." This state-
ment, wrote Rowland Evans and Robert Novak in their syndicated column,
caused "extreme nervousness in the Nixon White House."

Later disclosures have accustomed us to the part-mafioso and part-
banana-republic atmosphere in Washington during those years; it was still
very shocking for Demetracopoulos to receive a letter from Ms Louise Gore.
Ms Gore has since become more celebrated as the cousin of Vice President
Albert Gore and the proprietress of the Fairfax Hotel in Washington, DC,
where the boy politician grew up. She was then quite celebrated in her own
right: as a Republican state Senator from Maryland, and as the woman who
introduced Spiro Agnew to Richard Nixon. She was a close friend of
Attorney General Mitchell, and had been appointed as Nixon's representa-
tive to UNESCO. Demetracopoulos lived, along with many congressmen
and political types, as a tenant of an apartment in her hotel. He had also
been a friend of hers since 1959. On 24 January 1972 she wrote to him:

Dear Elias --

I went to Perle's [ Perle Mesta's] luncheon for Martha Mitchell yesterday and
sat next to John. He is furious at you -- and your testimony against Pappas. He
kept threatening to have you deported!!

At first I tried to ask him if he had any reason to think you could be
deported and he didn't have any answer -- But then tried to counter by
asking me what I knew about you and why we were friends.

It really got out of hand. It was all he'd talk about during lunch and
everyone at the table was listening ...

Among those present at the table were George Bush, then ambassador to
the United Nations, and numerous other diplomats. The Attorney
General's lack of restraint and want of tact, on such an occasion and at the
very table of legendary hostess Perle Mesta, were clearly symptomatic of a
considerable irritation, even rage.

I have related this background in order to show that Demetracopoulos
was under surveillance, that he possessed information highly damaging to an
important Nixon-Kissinger client regime, and that his identity was well
known to those in power, in both Washington and Athens. The United States
ambassador in Athens at the time was Henry Tasca, a Nixon and Kissinger
crony with a very lenient attitude to the dictatorship. (He later testified to a
closed session of Congress that he, had known of the 1968 payments by the
Greek secret police to the Nixon campaign.) In July 1971, shortly after
Demetracopoulos testified before Congressman Rosenthal's subcommittee,
Tasca had sent a four-page secret cable from Athens. It began:

For some time I have felt that Elias Demetracopoulos is head of a well-
organized conspiracy which deserves serious investigation. We have seen
how effective he has been in combatting our present policy in Greece. His
aim is to damage our relations with Greece, loosen our NATO alliance and
weaken the U.S. security position in the Eastern Mediterranean.

This was certainly taking Demetracopoulos seriously. So was the closing
paragraph, which read as follows:

I am therefore bringing the matter to your personal attention in the hope
that a way will be found to step up an investigation of Demetracopoulos to
identify his sponsors, his sources of funds, his intentions, his methods of
work and his fellow conspirators ... I bring this matter to your attention
now, believing that as an alien resident in the United States it may be possi-
ble to submit him to the kind of searching and professional FBI investigation
which would lift some of the mystery.

The cable was addressed, as is usual from an ambassador, to Secretary of
State William Rogers. Yet it was also addressed -- highly unusually -- to
Attorney General John Mitchell. But Mitchell, as we have seen, was the only
attorney general ever to serve on Henry Kissinger's supervisory Forty
Committee, which oversaw covert operations.

The State Department duly urged that "the Department of Justice do
everything possible to see if we can make a Foreign Agent's case, or any kind
of a case for that matter" against Demetracopoulos. Of course, as was later
admitted, these investigations turned up nothing. The influence wielded by
Demetracopoulos did not derive from any sinister source or nexus. But when
he said that the Greek dictatorship had trampled its own society, used cen-
sorship and torture, threatened Cyprus, and bought itself political influence
in Washington, he was uttering potent factual truths. Nixon himself con-
firmed the connection, between the junta and Pappas and Tasca and the
two-way flow of dirty money, on a post. Watergate White House tape dated
23 May 1973. He is talking to his renowned confidential secretary, Rose Mary
Woods:

Good old Tom Pappas, as you probably know or heard, if you haven't already
heard, it is true, helped, at Mitchell's request, fund-raising for some of the
defendants. ...He came up to see me on March 7, Pappas did. Pappas came
to see me about the ambassador to Greece, that he wanted to -he wanted to
keep Henry Tasca there.

This same dictatorship had in June 1970 revoked Demetracopoulos's
Greek citizenship, so he was a stateless person travelling only on a flimsy
document giving him leave to re-enter the United States. This fact assumed
its own importance in December 1970, when his blind father was dying of
pneumonia, alone, in Athens. Demetracopoulos sought permission to
return home under a safe-conduct or laissez-passer, and was able to enlist
numerous congressional friends in the attempt. Among them were senators
Frank E. Moss of Utah, Quentin N. Burdick of North Dakota, and Mike
Gravel of Alaska, who signed a letter dated 11 December to the Greek gov-
ernment and to Ambassador Tasca. Senators Edward Kennedy of
Massachusetts and William Fulbright of Arkansas also expressed a per-
sonal interest.

Neither the Athens regime nor Tasca replied directly, but on 20
December, four days after the old man had died without a visit from his only
son, Senators Moss, Burdick, and Gravel received a telegram from the Greek
embassy in Washington. This instructed them that Demetracopoulos should
have applied in person to the embassy: an odd demand to make of a man
whose passport and citizenship had just been cancelled by the dictatorship.
Meanwhile, Demetracopoulos received a telephone call at his home, from
Senator Kennedy in person, advising him not to accept any safe-conduct
offer from Greece even if he was offered it. Had Demetracopoulos pre-
sented himself at the junta's embassy, he might well have been detained
and kidnapped, in accordance with one of the plans we now know had
been readied for his "disappearance." Of course, such a scheme would have
been extremely difficult to carry out in the absence of some "cooperation" --
at least a blind eye -- from local US intelligence officials.

Declassified cable traffic bet\\'cen Ambassador Tasca in Athens and
Kissinger's deputy Joseph Sisco at the State Department shows that Senator
Kennedy's misgivings were amply justified. In a cable dated 14 December
from Sisco to Tasca, the ambassador was told: "If GOG [Government of
Greece] permits Demetracopoulos to enter, quite clearly we must avoid being
put in a position of guaranteeing any assurances that he may have of being
able to depart." Concurring with this extraordinary statement, Tasca added
that there was a possibility of Senator Gravel attending the funeral of
Demetracopoulos senior. Elias, wrote the ambassador, "undoubtedly hopes
to exploit Senator's visit by providing some way of proving that conditions
here are as repressive as he has been representing them to be. He could even
try to arrange for some manifestation of violence, such as a small bomb."

The absurdity of this -- Demetracopoulos had no record whatever of the
advocacy or practice of violence, as Tasca subconsciously recognized by
making the hypothetical bomb a "small" one -- also has its sinister side.
Suggested here is just the sort of alibi or provocation or pretext that the
junta might need for a frame-up, or to cover up a "disappearance." The
entire correspondence reeks of the unspoken priorities of both the embassy
and the State Department, which reflect their contempt for elected United
States senators, their dislike of dissent, and their need to gratify a group of
Greek gangsters who are now rightly serving terms of life imprisonment.

Now look again at the computer index disgorged, after years of litigation,
from Kissinger's NSC files. It bears the date of 18 December 1970 and
appears to apprise Senators Moss, Burdick and Gravel that Demetracopoulos
had met his end in an Athens prison. Was this a contingency plan? A cover
story? As long as Dr Kissinger maintains his stubborn silence, and the control
over his "private" state papers, it will be impossible to determine.

The same applies to the second attempt on Mr Demetracopoulos of
which we have knowledge. Having avoided the trap that seems to have
been set for him in 1970, Demetracopoulos kept up his fusillade of leaks
and disclosures, aimed at discrediting the Greek junta and embarrassing its
American friends. He also became an important voice warning of the
junta's designs on the independence of Cyprus and of US indifference to
(or complicity in) that policy. In this capacity (discussed in detail in
Chapter 7) he became a source of annoyance to Henry Kissinger. This can
be established without difficulty. In a briefing paper presented to President
Gerald Ford in October 1974, there are references to a "trace paper" about
Demetracopoulos, to "the derogatory blind memo" about him, and to "the
long Kissinger memo" on him. Once again, and despite repeated requests
from lawyers, Kissinger has declined to answer any queries about the
whereabouts of these papers, or shed any light on their contents. However,
his National Security Council asked the FBI to amass any information that
might discredit Demetracopoulos, and between 1972 and 1974, according
to papers since declassified, the Bureau furnished Kissinger with slanderous
and false material concerning, among other things, a romance which
Demetracopoulos was allegedly conducting with a woman now dead, and
a supposed relationship between him and Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the cel-
ebrated "Pentagon Papers," a man he has never met.

This might seem trivial, were it not for the memoirs of Constantine
Panayotakos, the ambassador of the Greek junta to Washington, DC.
Arriving to take up his post in February 1974, as the ambassador wrote in
his later memoirs, entitled In the First Line of Defense:

I was informed about some plans to kidnap and transport Elias
Demetracopoulos to Greece; plans which reminded me of KGB methods. ...
On 29 Maya document was transmitted to me from Angelos Vlachos,
Secretary General of the Foreign Ministry, giving the views of the United
States ambassador Henry Tasca, which he agreed with, about the most effi-
cient means of dealing with the conspiracies and the whole activity of
Demetracopoulos. Tasca's views are included in a memorandum of conver-
sation with the Foreign Minister Spyridon Tetenes of 27 May.

Finally, another brilliant idea of the most brilliant members of the
Foreign Ministry in Athens, transmitted to me on 12 June, was for me to seek
useful advice on the extermination of Elias Demetracopoulos from George
Churchill, director of the Greek desk at the State Department, who was one
of his most vitriolic enemies. [italics added]

(In Greek, the italicized word above is exoudeterosi. It is pretty strong. It is
usually translated as "extermination," though "elimination" might be an
alternative rendering. It is not a recipe for inconveniencing or hampering
an individual, but for getting rid of him. ) Ambassador Panayotakos later
wrote a detailed letter, which is in my possession, that he had direct knowl-
edge of a plan to abduct Demetracopoulos from Washington. His
testimony is corroborated by an affidavit which I also possess, signed under
penalty of perjury by Charalambos Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos was at
the time the Political Counsellor to the Greek embassy -the number three
position -and was bidden to lunch at the nearby Jockey Club, in late May
or early June of 1974, by Ambassador Panayotakos and the assistant mili-
tary attache, Lieutenant Colonel Sotiris Yiounis. At the lunch, Yiounis
broached the question of the kidnapping of Demetracopoulos, who was to
be smuggled aboard a Greek NATO submarine at a harbor in Virginia.

Papadopoulos, who was Greek ambassador to Pakistan at the time he
swore his affidavit, has since said that he was assured that Henry Kissinger
was fully aware of the proposed operation, and "most probably willing to
act as its umbrella." By that stage, the Greek junta had only a few weeks to
live because of its crimes in Cyprus. Since the fall of the dictatorship, even
more extensive evidence of the junta's assassination plans has been uncov-
ered, if only at the Athenian end of the plot. But this was not a regime
which ever acted without Washington's "understanding." Attempts to
unearth more detail have also been made in Washington. In 1975 senators
George McGovern and James Abourezk, seconded by Congressman Don
Edwards of the House Intelligence Committee, asked Senator Frank
Church to include the kidnap plot against Demetracopoulos in the inves-
tigative work of his famous committee on US intelligence. As first reported
by the New York Times and then confirmed by Seymour Hersh, Kissinger
intervened personally with Church, citing grave but unspecified matters of
national security, to have this aspect of the investigation shut down.

Some of this may seem fantastic, but we do know that Kissinger was
conducting a vendetta against Demetracopoulos (as was Ambassador
Henry Tasca); we do know that Kissinger was involved in high-level collu-
sion with the Greek junta and had advance knowledge of the plot to
assassinate Archbishop Makarios; and we do know that he had used the US
embassy in Chile to smuggle weapons for the contract killing of General
Rene Schneider. The cover story in that case, too, was that the hired goons
were "only" trying to kidnap him ...

We also know that two clients of Kissinger's Forty Committee, General
Pinochet and Colonel Manuel Contreras, made use of the Chilean embassy
in Washington to murder the dissident leader Orlando Letelier, not long
after being received and flattered and in one case paid by Kissinger and his
surrogates.

Thus the Demetracopoulos story, told here in full for the first time, makes
a prima facie case that Henry Kissinger was at least aware of a plan to abduct
and interrogate, and almost certainly kill, a civilian journalist in Washington,
DC. In order to be cleared of the suspicion, and to explain the mysterious ref
erence to Demetracopoulos's death in his own archives, Kissinger need only
make those same archives at last accessible -- or else be subpoenaed to do so.

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