By PHK
At the end of my book review essay of Valerie Plame Wilson’s Fair Game, I wrote that Laura Rozen’s Afterword (or Epilogue) chapter on Greece was the low point of the book for me and that I would explain why in a later post.
Here’s that subsequent post and here's why. For the most part, the devil is in the details. The problem is that errors in, or misstatements of, several basic details made me begin to wonder whether Rozen, had – probably unintentionally and inadvertently – succeeded in rewriting portions of Greek political history, US-Greek relations, and, for that matter, life of US Embassy employees in Athens.
Where I began to have a queasy feeling about this part of Rozen’s Afterword was when she misnamed both major Greek political parties during the 1960s (p. 321). For the record, neither the Pan Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) nor New Democracy (ND) existed prior to the downfall of the Greek military junta in 1974. The 1960s precursor to PASOK was named the Center Union (EK) and the precursor to ND was the National Radical Union (ERE). As Greek politics expert Richard Clogg explains in his 1979 book A Short History of Modern Greece “PASOK represented a new element in the Greek political spectrum, considerably left of the Center Union” and New Democracy’s “political philosophy was never very fully developed.” That’s not, however, how Rozen tells it.
Missing, ignored or slighted
What Rozen also missed, ignored, or slighted in her description of 1960s Greek politics was the significance of other elements on the political scene that helped lead to the April 1967 military coup – also known as the “Colonels’ Coup.” To be brief, these elements included the intrusive role played by Queen Frederica on the right and the significance of the extreme left – often represented by EDA, a coalition of Marxist parties or groups including crypto-Communists. EDA (United Democratic Left) regularly garnered 10-20 percent of the vote in post World War II national elections. This is important for understanding the origins of the home-grown Greek terrorist group N-17 – to which Rozen devotes much of her text because its leader and mastermind, Alexandros Yotopoulos, was the son of the Greek Trotskyite leader, an underground far left fringe group from the pre-World War II era.
It is also important to note that during the years just prior to the 1967 Colonels’ Coup, inflation had mushroomed, basic services had badly deteriorated, and political infighting – personalities and clientage networks are crucial to understanding not only this period but the entire sweep of Greek politics - had sky-rocketed close to the breaking point.
Question: A passport – or, hmm, was it really a visa?
Why Rozen (or her editors) chose to include a lengthy quote from Charlie Wilson’s War telling us that in 1968 then Greek Center Union politician Andreas Papandreou received a US Passport to leave Greece (sic) is beyond me. (footnote, page 322) Not only was it extraneous to Plame's book, but also wrong - at least according to Papandreou. Papandreou’s story is complex, but according to his own memoirs, Democracy at Gunpoint: the Greek Front, page 293 (1970) he received a visa from the US and - with pressure from then US Ambassador Phillips Talbot - a Greek passport and permission to leave the country from the Greek junta. I have never heard or seen any reason to doubt Papandreou’s account and Rozen has not persuaded me otherwise.
So why do the Greeks celebrate OXI Day?
I was curious to read Rozen’s description of Greece as being invaded by both the Italians and the Germans during World War II. True, the Greeks were attacked by Mussolini’s forces in one of Italy’s stupider moves, but the Greek Army not only repulsed them, but drove them out of southern Albania as well. The day the Greeks said “OXI” (no) to the Italians is celebrated on October 28 as a major political holiday throughout the country.
The strategic significance of the Greek Army’s success in opposing the Italians is that the Nazis came to the rescue of their Italian allies soundly defeating the Greek forces and sending many into exile in the Middle East and others underground – but there were three additional ramifications. First, the Nazi invasion of the Balkans not only diverted troops from, but also, delayed the German invasion of the Soviet Union pushing a planned autumn operation into the far more difficult winter environment and contributing to its ultimate failure.
Second, the Greek Communist Party which had been illegal and underground since 1936 when it had received 6 percent of the vote in that last pre-war election flourished as it never had before and was in de facto control of much of Greece at the time the Germans retreated. This led to the bitter Greek Civil War which emerged in full force after the German retreat as well as the American entry into Greek politics. And third, the German occupation led to the near destruction of the large and influential Jewish community in Thessaloniki as described in Mark Mazower’s Salonica: City of Ghosts.
Routes, not route, to the U.S. Embassy from the north
In a rewrite of US Embassy employee routes to work from apartments in the northern suburbs, Ms. Rozen tells us that Plame “like some other U.S. officials was inexplicably assigned to housing in the northern suburbs of Athens, accessible to the capital and their embassy by a single road that had a bottleneck that made drivers vulnerable to attack.”
True, Vassilias Sophias, the main artery from Constitution Square to Athens’ northern suburbs that runs past the US Embassy is, and has been, a bottleneck for years.
Not true, however, that a single road connected all those suburbs and the Embassy. I, for instance, lived in a northern suburb and rarely, if ever, used Vassilias Sophias to drive from my apartment to either the US Embassy or the Hellenic American Union where I worked as Executive Director for three years in the early 1980s. We too had been warned to vary our routes and departure times because of N-17 – and if at all possible to stay off of Vassilias Sophias. But there were other reasons as well: Vassilias Sophias was so clogged with traffic that lesser known back roads were faster and far more pleasant.
Furthermore, when I worked in Athens, the pollution cloud hung so heavily over much of the Attica basin most of the year a garden apartment on a hill north of the city made good sense for health reasons. But as Rozen did admit, N-17 did not confine its attacks to Americans, American installations or Vassilias Sophias. Only four of its 23 murder victims were Americans and Vassilias Sophias was only one of its preferred target locations so it probably didn’t matter where someone lived if N-17 had decided to put that individual in its gun sights.
I look forward to Brady Kiesling’s forthcoming book on N-17 and plan to review it on Whirled View when it comes out. If you have not read his Diplomacy Lessons (2006), I recommend you do so. If you would like a better – and I would suspect a more accurate description - of a bizarre 1993 incident in Athens in which two CIA operatives were caught in a “van full of wigs” and subsequently sent home from the country than related in Rozen's Afterward, please read Diplomacy Lessons, page 204.
Oh, by the way, Brady’s title is not spelled political “councilor” as indicated on page 327 of Fair Game – it’s “counselor” and N-17 did not emerge in 1973 as suggested on page 322, it emerged on December 23, 1975 with Welch’s murder. A good copy editor should have caught both.
Although Rozen interviewed Kiesling for and quoted him in her Afterword, I would have been far more comfortable if he – or someone else with a far better grasp of Greek politics and US-Greek relations than Rozen has thus far demonstrated – had written this chapter instead.
To conclude: As I wrote at the beginning of this post, the devil is often in the details. I wish Rozen and her editors had paid them far more heed.
Books consulted on Greek politics: Richard Clogg, A Short History of Modern Greece, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979; Keith R. Legg, Politics in Modern Greece, Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1969; John Brady Kiesling, Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower, Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006; Mark Mazower, Salonica City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews (1430-1950), New York: Random House, 2004; Andreas Papandreou, Democracy at Gunpoint: The Greek Front, Garden City, NY: Double Day & Co., 1970.
Articles consulted on the demise of N-17 came from news sources Kathemerini, To Vima, Eleftherotypia, The Athens News, the BBC, The Washington Post and The New York Times.