By Patricia H. Kushlis
(A shorter version of this review essay appeared in the FS Journal's June 2011 issue.)
On April 21, 1967, a tightly knit group of shadowy Greek colonels staged a coup d’état that deposed the Greek government and set the course of democracy in Greece back seven years. In his memoir about that watershed event and all that surrounded it, Robert Keeley, then a middle grade political officer in the US Embassy in Athens, describes the colonels’ coup and its effects from the vantage point of an Embassy reporting officer trying to keep up with a rapidly unfolding and confusing situation, all the while offering his own analyses and prescriptions for US policy – none of which, he tells us, were followed.
Despite or perhaps because of Keeley’s unreceptive audience, this is a unique and important book in US-Greek relations. It is also the only one written about that turbulent period by a knowledgeable Embassy insider. The US has often been accused of complicity in bringing about that coup, or at least knowing beforehand that it would happen. Keeley persuasively debunks these accusations.
Adding credence to Keeley's debunking of a popular but erroneous myth
To add credence to Keeley’s debunking, I think it important to mention that the Deputy Chief of Station at the US Embassy at the time of the 1967 coup had described to me several years later what he had seen that fateful day inside those Embassy walls in an interview for my dissertation research on Greek politics. What the CIA Deputy Chief told me then and Keeley’s observations in The Colonels Coup about the Embassy’s lack of knowledge about the colonels and their coup agree.
The truth is the US Embassy did know about a potential generals’ plot to have taken place later in the month, but the actions of these unknown undercover midlevel army officers who had spent their lives working in the shadows for Greek military intelligence– no. According to Keeley, the CIA had had an informant among the group that staged the coup, but the information had run dry by February 1967. One can only guess why: perhaps as Keeley conjectures because the plotters wanted to be sure the secret was safe within their small inner circle of officers who eventually pulled it off.
Keeley also makes another excellent and troubling point that I don’t remember seeing previously in print when he writes that almost all embassy staff had little or no personal contact with the Greek centrists – either George and Andreas Papandreou, the father and son leaders of the country’s major political opposition or other leaders of their party in the years leading up to the coup. I take Keeley’s word for it. I agree with him that if so, this was indeed a serious omission that should never have happened. It was clear well before the fact - after all - that Greece’s center/center-left party would win the 1967 elections if they had been held as scheduled.
Contacts with the opposition
Keeley argues that the CIA should have been in contact with these people – and was caught with its pants down. He said that the Embassy had become so vested in the ruling political right over the years that the US had failed to grasp the need to broaden its contacts so as to be able to predict, if nothing more, let alone adapt to the coming political sea change.
Keeley also tells us that he had met Center Union heir-apparent Andreas Papandreou through a friendship that had developed between Keeley’s wife Louise and a friend of Andreas’ wife Margaret, but that he did not know Andreas Papandreou well and was not encouraged to cultivate the relationship by his Embassy superiors.
Keeley’s absolutely right to fault the Embassy for not developing contacts with the political opposition. He’s wrong, however, to suggest that it should be foremost the CIA’s responsibility. In fact, I would argue that such contacts needed to be primarily the bailiwick of US Embassy State Department political and economic officers - not CIA operatives as Keeley seems to suggest.
In my view, these State Department officers including Keeley should have been encouraged to develop contacts with politically active Greeks across the political spectrum – from left to right including the Communists – if that is, the latter party leadership would have talked with us. How else to get an accurate picture of what was really happening in the country and the opposition’s aspirations. This is especially important in volatile countries – and Greek politics almost always contains elements of volatility: it’s just the nature of the beast. Such information certainly does not come from only listening to the leadership in power.
What's missing
Keeley begins his memoir with his arrival in Athens in summer 1966. Although he mentions specific events in Greek political history, he surprisingly skims over the highly turbulent conditions in the country during the several years leading up to the coup. He omits, for instance, mention of Queen Frederica, the wily widow of the politically astute King Paul, and the inept queen’s behind the scenes maneuvering on behalf of their young son Constantine who assumed the throne after his father’s death in 1964 at the tender age of 24. There’s ample evidence elsewhere that Fredrica’s meddling and abrasive personality were contributing factors that helped bring about the political instability in the first place.
Keeley also plays short-shrift to the devastating and unsettling effects the political machinations among the monarchy, the conservatives and the centrists had on Greek society over the years prior to the coup.
Political Turbulence before 1967
Perhaps Keeley didn’t experience the disruptive demonstrations and the crippling strikes himself – although it should have been hard for him to have missed them – but I remember them all too well from the time I worked at Anatolia College in Thessaloniki as a teaching fellow from August 1965-June 1966 before returning to the US for graduate studies.
I will never forget seeing the demonstrations at the Acropolis and on Constitution Square in front of the parliament my first night in Athens in August 1965 or more frighteningly being caught in the middle of a huge crypto-Communist anti-government demonstration that took over most of Thessaloniki’s downtown a couple of months later. Buses that didn’t run, garbage that hadn’t been collected, mail that was never delivered, strike after strike, a caretaker government that couldn’t govern – this all existed in 1965 and 1966 well before the colonels’ coup that brought a surface calm to the troubled land.
A book with experiential lessons important for US diplomacy today
Overall, however, Keeley should be commended for writing this book, the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and DACOR for supporting it and the Penn State University Press for publishing it. Not only does it contain a wealth of previously unpublished history about Greek-US relations but it also includes wider lessons for US diplomacy as valid today in the turbulent world of the Middle East as when Keeley learned them in Athens over forty years ago.
Book Note: Robert V. Keeley (with a prologue by John Iatrides) The Colonels’ Coup and the American Embassyz: A diplomat’s View of the Breakdown of Democracy in Cold War Greece, University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010.