'Mrs. Vlachos says the coup d’etat of April 21, 1967 was "born of the Pentagon by the CIA, reared by NATO, and surrounded by doting businessmen" '

From: Helen Vlachos Doesn't Love You Anymore: Conversations With A Greek In Exile

...On a table in the living room is a short-wave receiver tuned to the Voice of America. "I always listen to their news broadcasts," Mrs. Vlachos explains. "When the Voice of America refers to 'the Greek junta' instead of to 'the government of Greece,' I'll know that American policy has changed, that I will soon be able to return home."

Post-Scarcity Totalitarianism

The image of contemporary Greece that Mrs. Vlachos conveys is a powerful and tragic one. It is a country, she says, whose democratic institutions are stifled by a brutal elite of cynical opportunists. The list of their abuses is long. The power of the colonels, she asserts, is upheld by secret police, political arrests, widespread surveillance, torture, censorship, rigged trials, martial law, blacklists, academic and clerical purges, faked reports, NATO, the CIA, and the fixers.

Her charges are sweeping and well-documented. She offers the investigative reports of impartial European commissions, and the signed statements of prominent Greeks describing their arrest, barbaric imprisonment, savage interrogations, and so on. Names, addresses, and dates are meticulously supplied, and the incidents themselves are reported with a disconcerting matter-of-factness.

Mrs. Vlachos says the coup d'etat of April 21, 1967 was "born of the Pentagon by the CIA, reared by NATO, and surrounded by doting businessmen." It is a neat way of summing up what many Europeans believe is America's substantial role in establishing the first European dictatorship to be born after World War II.

According to Mrs. Vlachos and other exiles, the Junta's coup was motivated and controlled by the CIA. The coup utilized a nucleus of ambitious Greek army officers, NATO tanks, and a NATO contingency plan code-named "Prometheus." On the night of the coup more than 6,000 persons, ranging in status from laborer to Prime Minister, were arrested, martial law declared, and the King informed of the fait accompli. The alleged motivation of the CIA was to prevent the election of the independently-minded Center Union Party, and to establish an easily-controlled marionette government whose commitment to NATO could not be reversed by troublesome free elections. Moreover, she argues, the American Sixth Fleet, expelled from Libya, supposedly needed a recreative base from which to check Russia's growing Mediterranean presence. (As a footnote, it is perhaps noteworthy that the present Premier of Greece, George Papadopoulos, one of the leaders of the 1967 coup, was formerly the liason officer between the CIA and its U.S.-funded counterpart, the Greek KYP. In this regard, exiled Greek economist George Yannopoulos has referred to Papadopoulos as "the first CIA agent who has managed to become Prime Minister.")

"What America is doing," Mrs. Vlachos says, "is creating a Las Vegas for the Sixth Fleet. The need for such a base is not strategic, but, at best, touristic."

Devaluation

Since the night of the coup, Mrs. Vlachos claims, Greece has gone downhill. A sort of moral and intellectual devaluation has occurred in which the cream of the professions have been purged, blacklisted, exiled, or forced to leave the country.

"There is a lot of shame in Greece today," Mrs. Vlachos says. "The people haven't any guns, and they know they can't fight the Soviets, America, the CIA, and NATO all at once — and so they are ashamed. Because they are losing a tradition of bravery and courage, of being fighters. Well, they haven't much choice. All they can do is carry on, but in doing that they support this band of ridiculous and malicious gangsters; the junta. It is bad for their soul. There is a falling off in values throughout Greece. The young, so many people of value, are leaving or have already left. Greece gets impoverished of anything that has any value, and what does it gain in return? Drunken American sailors."

"Of course," she adds, "the junta placed a great emphasis on moral issues when it seized power. But all that went in the first week after the coup. It was discarded when they realized they needed tourism. In fact, there have been gambling dens, casinos, only twice in the history of Athens: once during the Nazi occupation, and now again."

The people who have left Greece are many and diverse. Among them are communists, conservatives, socialists, monarchists, anarchists, and liberals. Their ranks include distinguished composers, poets, lawyers, generals, jurists, professors, architects, and actors, as well as unknown engineers, house-painters, printers, and country people. As a comminity, they lack the political and class uniformity usually found among refugees from the same country.

"The explanation," Vlachos says, "is that the junta itself has no politics. The coup was a hijacking, a power-grab by ambitious minor officers using the pretext of an 'imminent communist threat.' There was no such threat. If there was, why didn't they inform their superiors? Why didn't they alert the government or King Constantine?"

While the lives of Greek exiles outside their homeland are not ideally happy, at least their living conditions are not to blame. Because the junta has effectively sought to decapitate the opposition, the exiles tend to be among Greece's most talented and well-educated citizens: their services have been welcomed at newspapers, universities, and hospitals around the world.

Those Greeks exiled to rural areas within Greece itself are not so fortunate. Isolated from their work and friends, forbidden to receive visits from persons outside their immediate family, they are allotted 65¢ per day as a living allowance. Because the towns-people are warned by police not to converse with the exiles, the latter are cast in the role of village pariahs.

Among these internal exiles are such notables as John Pesmazoglou, former deputy governor of the Bank of Greece, and Anastasios Peponis, former director-general of the National Broadcasting Institute. Both are exiled to Thermon in western Greece. As Niall MacDermot, secretary-general of the International Commission of Jurists, recently described their situation: "None of the exiles have been given any reason for their deportation, other than the general allegation that they are a danger to security. This harsh form of punishment is based on unknown actions alleged in unknown statements made by unknown persons — a completely Kafka-like situation."

Resistance

One of the questions which invariably arises about Greece is the reason for the limp resistance offered to the colonels over the past five years. True, many Greeks have been jailed for anti-junta activities, but there has so far not been the concerted assault on the regime that many expected. Part of the reason may lie in the fact that the Greek government has always been a relatively remote entity for many Greeks. Further, functional illiteracy is not uncommon in the rural areas, making it even harder for the average Greek to become involved in the political decisions which ultimately affect him. Helen Vlachos offers yet another reason for the seeming passivity.

"Over the past two generations, Greeks have had enough of violence. They've fought bloody wars against fascism and communism both. They're sick of it. But also, the people are not armed. On the night of the coup, for instance, when the secret police arrested thousands — not one gun was found. Not one!"

"And, of course," she continues, "the junta is very well armed. The other reason for the character of the resistance is that Greece never expected that this political hijacking would be accepted by the allies and by the NATO countries. It seemed not possible. No one thought the junta would be recognized."

"You know," she says, "before this happened there had never been a single anti-American protest in Greece — neither from the Right nor from the Left. Now, 90 percent of the bombings (well, really, they are firecrackers) and care that are burned, are anti-American. Twice now, Truman's statue has been destroyed. Before there was no anti-American feeling. Now there is a disgust directed against the American government."

"People come to me and say: 'You are a conservative, Helen, you are on the Right, you cannot say that the Americans are worse than the Russians — would you like communism better?' But that's not the question! The fact is that the Americans were our friends, the Russians were not. We were allies. We fought together. So, the fact that our friends are behaving in such an absolutely disgusting and stupid way — well, it's when your friend betrays you that you feel it more."...