The Greek Connection: The Life of Elias Demetracopoulos and the Untold Story of Watergate

by James H. Barron

Overview

Spanning from WWII to the Cold War and beyond, this is the “magnificent . . . triumphant” biography of the investigative journalist, resistance fighter, and whistle blower who helped expose the Watergate scandal (Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Leadership)

He was one of the most fascinating figures in 20th-century political history. Yet today, Elias Demetracopoulos is strangely overlooked—even though his life reads like an epic adventure story . . .

As a precocious twelve-year-old in occupied Athens, he engaged in heroic resistance efforts against the Nazis, for which he was imprisoned and tortured. After his life was miraculously spared, he became an investigative journalist, covering Greece’s tumultuous politics and America’s increasing influence in the region. A clever and scoop-hungry reporter, Elias soon gained access to powerful figures in both governments—and attracted many enemies. When the Greek military dictatorship took power in 1967, he narrowly escaped to Washington DC, where he would lead the fight to restore democracy in his homeland—while running afoul of the American government, too.

Now, after a decade of research and original reporting, James H. Barron uncovers the story of a man whose tireless pursuit of uncomfortable truths would put him at odds with not only his own government, but that of the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations, making him a target of CIA, FBI, and State Department surveillance and harassment—and Greek kidnapping and assassination plots American authorities may have purposefully overlooked.

A stunning feat of biographic storytelling, sweeping from World War II to the Cold War, Watergate and beyond, The Greek Connection is about a lifetime of standing up for democracy and a free press against powerful special interests. It has much to teach us about our own era’s abuses of power, dark money, journalist intimidation, and foreign interference in elections.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781612198286
Publisher:	Melville House Publishing
Publication date:	07/13/2020
Pages:	496
Sales rank:	1,085,800
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

James H. Barron is a journalist, attorney, and founding advisory board member of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. A creator of the award-winning International Boston Initiative and Atlantic Rim Network, he has taught courses at MIT, led study groups at Harvard's Institute of Politics, and lectured at universities in Paris and Tokyo. Barron lives in Massachusetts with his wife, journalist Marjorie Arons-Barron.

Read an Excerpt

FOREIGN MEDDLING IN AMERICAN ELECTIONS didn’t start in 2016. In 1968, the Greek military junta, which had overthrown its country’s democratic government the year before, tried to buy influence by secretly funneling $549,000—almost $4 million in today’s dollars—to the Nixon campaign, money that likely began as “black budget” US aid to the Greek equivalent of the CIA.

The winning margin in that election, the second-closest presidential contest in the 20th century, was less than 1 percent. The bagman for the illegal funds was tycoon and Republican Party fundraiser Tom Pappas, who later became known on the Watergate tapes as “the Greek bearing gifts.” Timely disclosure of this transfer could have meant a Hubert Humphrey victory, no President Nixon, no Watergate, and a different course of history.

At a 2009 fundraiser for the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, of which I am a founding board member, I told our guest speaker Sy Hersh I was considering writing something on this unexplored transaction, a stillborn October Surprise. He recommended I contact Greek journalist Elias Demetracopoulos in Washington, the person who tried unsuccessfully to expose the money-laundering plot. When I did, I quickly realized that this episode was but part of Elias’s much larger and even more compelling life story.

As a boy he was brutalized for fighting his homeland’s Nazi occupiers and imprisoned. He survived being shot in the Greek Civil War and nearly died of tuberculosis incubated during his incarceration. Inspired to become an investigative journalist by the 1948 assassination in Greece of CBS correspondent George Polk, Elias became a fiercely independent and scoop-hungry reporter, exposing truths others wanted hidden.

In 1967 he escaped Greece’s military dictatorship and fled to Washington, where for seven years he led the fight to restore democracy in his homeland. He became a target of Greek plots to kidnap and execute him, as well as of CIA, FBI, and State Department attacks on his reputation and effectiveness. Unbroken, he resolutely stood up for himself, his country, and his sense of honor.

Elias Demetracopoulos was a difficult subject. He gave me full power under the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts to access all his government files, and he provided reams of articles and documents concerning better-known aspects of his career, but opened up only slowly about his multifaceted personal life. He steadfastly resisted divulging the names of sources to whom he had pledged confidentiality, even long after the sources had died. Nevertheless, for more than five years I visited him frequently and talked with him by phone, often daily, as I tried to peel back the layers of his story, getting him to confirm or disconfirm information I’d discovered elsewhere, and reveal more of himself. Eventually he gave me access to his personal files, shared once-hidden stories, and permitted friends who held his confidences to speak openly with me.

Journalist, information broker, lobbyist, Wall Street financial consultant, trusted advisor, tipster, troublemaker, “dangerous gadfly,” suspected foreign agent, desired extra man for Georgetown dinner parties, impassioned democracy fighter and free press advocate, a man with friends and sources spanning the political spectrum, Elias always cultivated an air of mystery and carefully compartmentalized the different parts of his life. When he died in 2016, obituaries in both the New York Times and the Washington Post described him as “enigmatic”; he was said to have negotiated “a unique and controversial swath through Washington’s political and social thickets.”

Elias P. Demetracopoulos was never as famous as celebrity mononyms like Bono, Oprah, Liberace, and Madonna, but for decades he was known around the nation’s capital and in major European cities as simply “Elias.” And being famous in Washington is different from being famous in music or Hollywood.

When Susan Margolis sought to explain fame in her 1977 book of that name, she chose Elias as her exemplar of fame in Washington. Fame, for Margolis, involved having power, having access to power, or appearing to have such access. Elias had it all. The essence of his success, she wrote, was his ability to be both an outsider and an insider, projecting an attractively reassuring savoir faire; to be a trusted keeper and sharer of secrets who had mastered the game of knowing what and how much to disclose or tantalizingly hold back until the next time.

We can see the impact of Demetracopoulos’s reputation in the difference between two 1976 receptions held in honor of the publisher of To Vima, the then-influential Greek newspaper, following the restoration of Greek democracy. The Greek ambassador invited celebrity journalists and government officials to his embassy, but the gathering was small and unnoticed. The only “A-list invitees” who attended were Margaret Truman and her husband Clifton Daniels of the New York Times.

The next evening, Elias borrowed the mansion of his friends Walter and Lydia Marlowe and threw a party for the same publisher that became the talk of the town. The guests included forty-two senators, with names like Fulbright, Kennedy, and Javits, thirty-four congressmen, cabinet officials, leading Washington socialites, financiers, reporters, columnists, editors, broadcast journalists, bureaucrats, and twenty-two ambassadors, including the Greek ambassador.

It was a remarkable achievement for someone who for many years was deemed persona non grata by both Greek and American officials.

There are lessons for us in Elias’s unyielding battles against powerful and abusive governments and for human rights and democratic values; his dogged pursuit of news and would-be news leakers; his belief in the potential of congressional investigations and hearings to expose wrongdoing; and his effectiveness in working across partisan political aisles.

There are eerie echoes today of Elias’s world of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s: when foreign money tainted and undermined free and fair elections, when fragile democratic norms buckled under popular susceptibility to authoritarian impulses, when human rights were deemed expendable, when independent journalists and political critics were harassed, subjected to disinformation campaigns, and disparaged as purveyors of fake news.

It’s my hope that the saga that follows will illuminate the real story behind this extraordinary Greek patriot and relentless champion of democracy and a free press.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

1 Growing Up 3

2 Resisting the Germans 19

3 Locked Up 34

4 December Uprising 47

5 A Tubercular Education 55

6 The Young Journalist 66

7 Celia 79

8 Persona Non Grata 91

9 Elias and Ethnarch Makarios 100

10 "I Don't Sit at My Desk" 111

11 Blowback 120

12 A Dark Side of Camelot 129

13 Moving Left 143

14 The Koumparos and the Star Reporter 158

15 From Reporter to Activist 175

16 Escape 191

17 Exiled in America 199

18 Junta-gate and the O'Brien Gambit 214

19 Fighting the Dictatorship 237

20 "Senator, are you telling me it's a trap?" 253

21 Pushing Congress 270

22 Campaign 1972 289

23 Fallout from a Mutiny 302

24 Watergate, Window Dressing, and a Counter-Coup 314

25 Crisis on Cyprus 327

26 After the Junta 342

27 "The Plot to Snatch Demetracopoulos" 353

28 Fighting for Vindication 369

29 Later Years 387

Author's Note 403

Acknowledgments 405

Endnotes 407

Bibliography 448

Index 474

Editorial Reviews

Richly sourced . . . at times cinematic. [The] tension between journalism and activism sits at the heart of the book’s inquiry into a corner of the Watergate story . . . ambitious.”
—The Washington Post

“Engrossing, richly detailed . . . the story of one of America’s first complex, controversial, and powerful émigré residents.”
—Washington Monthly

“This is a magnificent work, a triumphant combination of exhaustive research and fine narrative writing. The story of the Greek Connection to the Watergate saga is told through a sweeping biography of a compelling figure who captures our attention from beginning to end.”
—Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Leadership: In Turbulent Times

“James Barron has done history a favor by telling the incomparable life of the amazing and indefatigable Elias Demetracopoulos, who spent his teenage years fighting against fascism in World War II and suffering, after the war, as America threw in against those inside Greece who had stood off the Nazis. Elias, having seen it all in his youth, became a real life Zelig as an investigative reporter, committed to the telling of truth and the making of trouble for Presidents from Jack Kennedy through the post-Nixon years.  There is much new history in this book, especially about the beginnings of the Watergate scandal.”
—Seymour M. Hersh

“The Greek Connection is a marvelous book, a biography that illuminates an essential yet nearly forgotten figure who navigated some of the most important events of the 20th century. In Elias Demetracopoulos, author James Barron has vividly portrayed a real-life character as remarkable as any fictional Cold War hero. In our own era of political and journalistic skullduggery, this is a must-read.”
—Mitchell Zuckoff, New York Times bestselling author of Fall and Rise and 13 Hours

“The hero of this story, Elias Demetracopoulos, was a freedom fighter in the fullest sense, both in battle trenches and in confrontations with powerful political adversaries. His story, deftly woven together here for the first time, is a lens through which we can see 20th-century history in a new light.”
—Stephen Kinzer, author of Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“Barron brilliantly brings to life a Cold War story of international intrigue— and unravels one of the last mysteries of Watergate.”
—Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA and The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare: 1945-2020

“A fascinating biography of a remarkable gadfly, Elias Demetracopoulos, who influenced the modern history of both his homeland, Greece, and his adopted country, the United States, to a degree not yet fully measured. Packed with revelations about John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon, and the real reasons behind the Watergate break in, it is a meticulously researched and absorbing chronicle of one of the 20th century’s most powerful political sagas.”
—Nicholas Gage, author of Eleni

“Dogged probing and flair for narrative …, James Barron has produced a gripping you-can't-make-this-up profile that belatedly lifts the veil on a mysterious Watergate figure and on Cold War political hijinks that reverberate across two continents.”
—Sam Roberts, New York Times reporter and author of The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Atom Spy Case

“Elias Demetracopoulos is an illustration of how much can be achieved by a determined and courageous individual.”
—Christopher Hitchens

“[A] page-turner... Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal

“Barron’s excellently-researched and well-crafted biography of a man whose pursuit of the truth despite the potential cost of that pursuit is an inspiration in an era when the truth is all too often lies.”
—Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch

“Excellent. . . . written with extraordinary care and diligent assembly of facts. Reading this book was an enriching experience and it will undoubtedly become a required text for anyone wishing to understand U.S.- Greek relations between 1967 and 1974.”
—Alexander Kitroeff, The Pappas Post

“Barron offers an even handed portrait of a complex man . . . a deeply researched life of a man in the crossroads of history.”
—Kirkus

From the Publisher

03/27/2020

Lawyer and investigative journalist Barron writes the first biography of prominent Greek journalist Elias Demetracopoulos (1928–2016), who is hardly a household name though he should be. Barron spent a decade working on this biography, personally knowing his subject for five years. He describes how, as a young teenager, Demetracopoulos joined the resistance movement in Greece against Nazi occupation. Eventually caught, he was tortured and only narrowly escaped execution. Then he lived through the Greek Civil War of 1946–9, followed by American involvement with the Marshall Plan during the Cold War. His life as an activist is again threatened during and after a military coup in Greece in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The author shows his subject's relevance to the American politics as Demetracopoulos becomes entangled with the CIA and FBI while living in exile in the United States—he later learned he was being surveilled by American intelligence. Though he escaped to the United States, Demetracopoulos faced ongoing bureaucratic and deportation efforts for his reporting and efforts to clear his name as a political consultant during the Watergate era. VERDICT Barron's page-turner will appeal to readers interested in modern Greek history, the Cold War, and Watergate. Highly recommended.—William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport

Library Journal

2020-03-01
Biography of a defiant journalist who worked tirelessly for the cause of Greek democracy.

Barron, founding advisory board member of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, draws on numerous sources—archives, oral histories, presidential libraries, government documents, legal cases, and broadcast transcripts—to create an overwhelmingly detailed biography of Greek journalist and activist Elias Demetracopoulos (1928-2016). Growing up in war-torn Greece, Demetracopoulos joined the resistance; at age 14, he was incarcerated and tortured by Nazi occupiers. Recognizing the impact that journalists made on shaping public opinion, Demetracopoulos was determined to join their ranks. By the time he was 21, he had gained a position on “the most prestigious and influential paper in Greece,” which gave him access to powerful Greeks and the many Americans who had come to help shape Greece’s economic and political future. Eager to go abroad, Demetracopoulos arrived in the U.S. in 1951 to report for his home paper. He carried with him 24 “letters of introduction to high-ranking officials,” and he quickly came to the attention of the CIA, which offered him a part-time job sharing intelligence. He declined, returning to Greece, where he once again found himself roiled in politics when a military junta came to power in 1967. Barely escaping, he made his way to the U.S., where his outspoken opposition to the junta made him a subject of intense interest to the CIA, FBI, and State Department for the rest of his career. Barron offers an evenhanded portrait of a complex man: Detractors called him egotistical, self-aggrandizing, and narcissistic; admirers praised him as “a highly intelligent, well-informed man of influence, generous in doing favors, and a loyal friend.” Tireless and bold, he cultivated a network of sources who afforded him a close view of political intrigue; Barron gives ample evidence of the tangled machinations that characterized American policy toward Greece from Truman to Reagan.

A deeply researched life of a man at the crossroads of history.

Kirkus Reviews