True Spies Debriefs: Alexis Papahelas on Greece, Journalism and the CIA
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If you can hear me, take the encryption button off. Hello, True Spies listeners. Welcome back to our new assignment, True Spies Debrief.

Alexis Papahelas is a leading investigative journalist and the executive editor of Greece's leading newspaper. He's also the author of A Dark Room, an extensively researched history of the role of the United States in Greece's seven-year military junta, beginning in 1967.

True Spies producer Morgan Childs spoke with Alexis about this dark chapter in U.S. foreign policy, about the 25 years he spent digging up previously untold secrets, and about the evolving role of journalism today.

Alexis, you are an intimidating person to interview for many reasons, not the least of which being that you've spoken with more people to make history than I can possibly count. Among them are Yasser Arafat, Barack Obama, George Soros, Bashar al-Assad. But someone that you spoke with on multiple occasions is Henry Kissinger. And that's where I'd like to start.

You have written that you tried to ask Kissinger about Cyprus on multiple occasions, but found that he was particularly cagey on that topic. And in fact, much more than he was on Chile, for instance. What was it about Cyprus and Greece that made Kissinger so skittish?

First of all, thanks for hosting me, Morgan. It's a real pleasure. Let me say, I mean, Kissinger was a very complicated person, as you know. I think he had a real issue with Cyprus because one of the things that he really sort of despised was the fact that he was demonized by Greek-Americans.

An amazing thing that comes to mind is that when President Ford takes over after Nixon's resignation, one of the first meetings that Kissinger attends, which is a national security meeting at the White House, Kissinger is there. It's like late August '74. And outside there are about 60,000 or 70,000 Greeks yelling against Kissinger for his role in Cyprus. And he could never get over that because he always said that he was blamed for something that he was not responsible for.

And I think basically Cyprus was an issue where he was both very cynical about it and also a bit out of his depth. I mean, he really mishandled the situation. This is very clear for some of the declassified stuff that has come out since. So let's step back a little bit because we don't talk about Greece very much on this podcast. Maybe take us back to the roots of the Cold War presence of the U.S. in Greece.

What were the Americans trying to accomplish there as far back as the 1940s? The Americans come in after the war. They take over from the Brits, who were sort of the dominant power in Greece before the war. There's a civil war that goes on between the Greek government and the Greek left.

The Greek left is defeated. And then the U.S. basically creates a huge apparatus in Greece, which was very much geared towards defeating the left and making sure that the communists would never take over. So the CIA had a very strong presence here in Greece.

A lot of it was Greek Americans, actually, people who spoke the language and so on, and had been hired through OSS before during the war. And the main purpose was to make sure that Greece would never fall into communist hands. So one of the things that we're doing is that we're very strong up in northern Greece,

trying to get people from Bulgaria, from Albania, from Yugoslavia to come over to flee to Greece. And, you know, they were debriefed by a lot of the CIA people.

And also there were a lot of covert operations to make sure that the non-communist parties would win the elections and make sure that the left would never come to power. And they also created the Greek Diligent Service. It was completely funded and organized by the CIA from its very beginning in the 1950s. And they even had a program called the Stay Behind Program,

where they had hideaways in all of Greece, which was full of secret weapons, money, uniforms, and so on. And the idea was that if Greece was overrun by Soviet troops, that some of the Greek raiding forces, special forces, along with some CIA people, would get some of that money, some of those weapons, and make sure there was a guerrilla effort against the Soviets up in the mountains. It's quite an amazing story.

In your earlier book, The Rape of Greek Democracy takes its title from a now infamous cable sent by the U.S. ambassador to Greece. Could you talk about what that cable said and what it sort of revealed about the Americans' frame of mind when it came to Greece and Greece's democratic stability? Yeah, this is a story that was told to me by the then U.S. ambassador, Philip Stalbot. So the coup basically breaks out on April 21, 1967.

and the ambassador sits down in his office to write a cable to Washington explaining what has happened. The then CIA chief was Jack Murray, who was a former Marine, I believe, Major during the war. He puts on his old Marine uniform in order to go through all the blockades of the Greek military. He finally makes it to the embassy. He goes up to the ambassador's office

and the ambassador shows him a draft of a cable that he was sending to Washington. And he had put the headline, The Rape of Greek Democracy. So the CIA head takes the cable, looks at it and says,

What do you mean? How can you rape a whore? So that's the way, you know, basically the agency was looking at the Greek democracy back then in the 60s. I'm curious to hear your perspective as somebody who spent time, so much time working and also studying in the U.S., looking back on this period. But I suppose I'd like to get a little bit about your personal background in Greece first, because your latest book, A Dark Room, opens with a very personal story about

about how this national story intersects with your own family history. Could you talk about how your childhood and sort of coming of age in this period in Greece's history has informed and maybe also inspired your work as a documentarian? Sure.

I was a teenager back when the Honda happened in Greece. It was a very tense time. I had a lot of friends and cousins and so on who got into trouble, even went to prison for participating in anti-Honda riots and so on. But the amazing story was that we're living in an apartment building. And at that time, there was sort of a rumor that Greece was ruled by an invincible dictator. His name was Ioannidis.

But nobody had any clue what this guy looked like because he was the head of the military police. So he was not, you know, in the press. There were no photos of him or whatever. So I remember a relative of ours came from abroad and he had this copy of Newsweek magazine. And they had a rare picture of this guy. And said, you know, he's the invisible dictator of Greece. I remember my father looking at the picture and he got really flabbergasted because we realized that

that the guy was visiting the apartment upstairs from our house, basically because his sister was living right next to us.

And then we realized, you know, what all these bodyguards were doing outside their apartment building and so on. And the incredible story is that the final chapter of this guy's tenure in power actually took place up in that apartment because only one floor up from where I was living. And he, you know, the day that the Turks overran Cyprus, he

He goes there with two of his lieutenants and he has a conversation with somebody we have no clue who it is. We suspect it was somebody he knew from the CIA, from his very close contacts with them.

And he goes in and he talks to somebody for about half an hour. Then he comes out and says, it's all over. I'm going to give up power. That's it. So for me, it was like a seminal moment. And being a very curious child, you know, I decided later on that I really want to know what's going on behind closed doors and, you know, to become a journalist. But that was a moment that was kind of a defining moment for me when I realized what had really happened there.

I know that you spent 25 years working on this book, and I'm curious to hear, did you feel that the characters in this story sort of solidified to you over the course of the two and a half decades of working on this book? Or did you feel that they fell into shape in a way that you sort of already understood who they were by the 1990s?

Well, actually both. I mean, some people came out very lively from conversations with them or with others or from all the declassified transcripts of the different conversations. For example, Kissinger is amazing. I mean, in the spring of 74, there's a famous meeting in the State Department. And a lot of people, including the agency, are telling him that the U.S. should support

the return of democracy to Greece, because this Honda wasn't really going anywhere. And they also warned him that there was going to be a lot of anti-Americanism in Greece and so on. And Kissinger turns around to them after listening to them for about half an hour and says, listen, this is the State Department, it's not the political science department. And this was so Kissinger, it was so realpolitik, so cynical and so on. And then there were all these other characters, agency characters, like the famous Dr. Dirty, Gastavrakotos,

who was a very famous CIA guy, Greek-American. He was in Greece on and off for more than 20 years. There's some incredible stories about him. I never had the chance to talk to him because initially he refused and then he had dementia, so it was hard to talk to him. But he's a central figure in this whole book.

And he's definitely a bigger than life kind of guy. Very tough, very cold worries, very cynical, brutal in many ways.

One of the major elements of this book is a 38-minute recording from a war council meeting of the junta held during the invasion of Turkey in 1974 in Cyprus. Tell me a little bit about what that recording reveals about the end of the junta and what we can take away from that audio. This is an amazing, basically, piece of history.

the head of the armed forces back then, had this whole war council secretly recorded. And the main thing is you see the dictator, Ioannidis, feeling very betrayed by the US and NATO, but mainly by the US. I mean, he kind of claims in that recording that he had some assurances that he could do the things he did in Cyprus and get away with it and there will be no Turkish invasion.

And he repeats this like two or three times, saying, I've been set up, you know, and all that. And then the main thing is that he decides to go to war against Turkey and also to declare the unification of Cyprus with Greece.

And the incredible thing is he gives the order during this meeting, but nothing happens. And the people who were there were basically sort of his own puppets, you know, the prime minister, so-called prime minister, the generals and so on. They actually resist his orders. So you can see the implosion of this very powerful man who everybody was like really fearful of within these 45 minutes. And then the meeting sort of breaks up in chaos.

And tell me a little bit about the response to these revelations. I think it was, you know, I mean, for me, it was very, it made me very optimistic. The fact that a lot of the young people watch this series, this documentary, their ratings were phenomenal.

And I think there's sort of a real desire here to learn more about history in a non-ideological way, in kind of a factual way. And I think a lot of people were basically impressed by the fact that the whole story was there in front of their eyes. I mean, there were a lot of rumors, a lot of urban legends, conspiracy theories, and so on.

But this was the first time where you had like, you know, former CIA guys basically confessing to, you know, all kinds of stuff that was going on. A lot of the Honda people were assistants to some of the Honda leaders telling, you know, the story behind the scenes. And I think that basically it was a...

Let's say he was almost like a painful tutorial in our past. Tell me a little bit about, so I know that you were really coming of age when the coup was launched and became quite political. And this is really the crux of your political coming of age. Why then did you go on to study in the United States and then to work there? Yeah.

Well, the truth is that I was very anti-American in my younger age, as everybody else was in Greece. I participated in a lot of demonstrations against the US embassy because of its policy on Cyprus and all this. And I still think that it was a huge mistake, you know, the way they treated the Cyprus issue and the way they supported the Greek dictatorship. I think it was a huge mistake on moral and policy grounds as well.

But then I decided to go to the US because I basically thought that I could get a very good liberal college education in the US. It was a very different US from what we're experiencing these days. And also, one of the things that really intrigued me when I first got to the US and I started studying history was how open

people are, you know, about talking about their past. I mean, I would go to different think tanks or universities and you'd see all these like former officials or even presidents, you know, talk about things in the past in a very open way.

And that's something that really, really impressed me, really intrigued me. That's actually decided to sort of get involved in history. Has your life in the States had any sort of negative influence on your work in Greece? I read an interview with you suggesting that you'd been accused of having a special relationship with the U.S. and sort of favoring America to your home in Europe. Yeah, I mean, I've gotten this part of criticism because, you know, anytime you get involved into investigative work,

and I've done a lot of investigative work on terrorist organizations and so on, you get a bit of that pushback.

But, I mean, I do know that that's not the case and I know that both my reporting and my history writing has been quite objective and doesn't have anything to do with whether I lived in the US for 20 years or not. So where's the English translation of A Dark Room? Actually, I have the first book translated. I got it done about six months ago, The Rape of Greek Democracy.

And the second book is being translated as we speak. So hopefully by next year, I'm going to have it published in English. That's great to hear. I mean, it does seem like there must be an English speaking audience that would benefit from understanding sort of what unfolded as a result of this engagement or manipulation in this chapter of Greece's history. Yeah, I think there's a big story to be told with a lot of, you know, useful conclusions, let's say, for what's going on today.

And also, you know, there are so many people who are involved with Greece in the 60s and in the 70s who played a very important role. And I think it's really, for me, it's important that all this come out in a very kind of objective and realistic way, let's say. Yeah, I know that because the book is so many years in the making, you started research for it in the 1990s, I believe. And I'm curious how...

President Clinton's position on the Greek junta sort of might have enabled you to do new work on the subject. No, actually, I mean, I was very lucky because having lived in the U.S. for 20 years, I met a lot of the former U.S. officials, State Department mainly, who were very critical of U.S. policy towards Greece.

They offered me a lot of details, even some stuff from the paper trail and so on from the past. And they really made me understand what was going on. And they really wanted their story heard out because they were really pissed off, let's say, at what especially the Nixon administration had done in Greece.

But then the amazing thing is that, you know, even though I tried to have a lot of stuff declassified through the Freedom of Information Act and so on, we had some real difficulty. And even during the Clinton administration, I think there was a lot of pushback by some of the old Greek hands that, you know, some of this stuff shouldn't come out and so on.

Eventually, I managed to get a few things, mainly through the Clinton era, but I also got a lot of stuff through informal sources, so to speak.

And what else did the reporting or research process involve for this? I mean, I'm curious how this ended up being a project that stretched over so many decades. Yeah, it was a lot of time spent with former agency people. Like I remember this old, very old, his late 80s guy. He had flown into Greece during the war. He had parachuted into Greece right before the Germans left.

He had actually liberated a couple of Greek towns along with the communist guerrillas that he fought against afterwards, which was an amazing story in itself. And this guy was in Greece for many years. He was the liaison with the special forces in Greece. So he had set up all this network of secret hideouts and caves and so on. And he was, you know, one of those like guys that, you know, he had lived through everything basically.

And I would like go almost every weekend after his house in somewhere in Maryland. And I would spend time with him. He'll tell me all the stories, how he was like flown on into Greece secretly from Vietnam to tell the Greek dictator, the first one, Papadopoulos, not to kill one of the famous Greek politicians back then. And he basically read him the cable from the CIA because he wanted to make sure that he wouldn't do it.

And then they went on sort of joking about it. And this guy was like a real, you know, Honda lover also, because all these people were very close to him. You know, they had all these close bonds from the Cold War period and so on. And I remember one day I said, you know, I'll go to Greece, I might see Papadopoulos, you know, the dictator who was by then in prison. He was actually in a hostel, but under guard.

And he said, oh, great, you know, I'll give you a picture that I have with him. So he hands me over this picture where, you know, they were handing up in northern Greece in 1965. And it's like half of the CIA station, along with Papadopoulos, who two years later would become the dictator. And that in itself was like an amazing piece of history. So I would spend a lot of time talking to these people, sort of debriefing them, you know, listening to the stories and getting a feel for what was really going on.

There's one story that sticks out about you getting to know the king of Greece. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about that. Yeah, this is actually a very funny story because the former king of Greece, he was like a very naive, very polite, but very naive kind of guy. So the way I got to know him is when I first published my first book, The Rape of Greek Democracy. There was a story in there about a guy who was an assistant defense officer in Greece.

And he was playing squash with the king. And in the classified stuff, it became very clear to me that this guy was a, what they call, controlled American source. So he was either a CIA or DIA agent, I don't know. And he was obviously debriefing the king on what was going on.

So I had that in the book and the former king calls me up from London. I was in DC, I think, back then. And he says, I can't believe you're writing this about this person. You know, he was a friend of mine. And, you know, there's no way he was an intelligence operator because he was a very nice guy. And I said, well, you know, probably they chose him because he was a very nice guy.

And then he was like, no, no, no. You know, he was always asking me about what was going on in the palace or with the government. But I got to know more about what was going on in the embassy than he thought, you know, he was getting from me, which I thought was very naive of him because the guy even, you know, 30 years later, even though it was very clear that, you know, this guy was

place there, you know, to get info from him. He refused to deal with it. If you don't mind, I'd like to take a little bit of a left turn and ask you about the term deep state. I'm sort of surprised to see it come up so many times in preparing to speak with you and familiarizing myself with your work. I know the term deep state has a lot of baggage in the United States today, but I understand that it is actually Turkish in origin. And I think you use it in a

specific and maybe perhaps more of the original context. Could you tell me a little bit about what you mean when you use that term? Deep state in the Greek context, at least, doesn't exist anymore. But in the Cold War period, especially, there were people who were in positions of power in the intelligence, in the security services, and so on.

And who were there regardless of who was in government, basically. And there were people that had acquired a lot of leverage, a lot of power and influence, you know, over time. They were very closely knit and secretive kind of group. And they were very close, of course, to the U.S. I mean, all of the Greek deep state for many years was basically...

very, very closely allied, you know, even financed by the US security services.

So that was the definition of the deep state back then, I would say. And very Cold War focused, you know, very much anti-communist, anti-leftist and so on. And when you use the term now, what is the flavor of it and how perhaps do you use it in a different way than one might hear it in U.S. media? Well, I mean, the way I gather it now in the U.S. is that, you know, deep state is more of a leftist deep state term.

which prevents somebody like President Trump do whatever he wants to do. I think it was the other way around, basically. I mean, it was a very right-wing deep state in Greece that was making sure that the left would not come to power. So it was not liberal or anything like this. I mean, the way I get it in the States is that what people think or perceive as deep state is kind of very liberal, very kind of left-leaning, perhaps, something like this.

You know, it was completely the opposite in the Greek context. You are widely quoted as saying that you believe that the job of a journalist is to go against the current. I believe that comes from an interview that you did back in 2009.

Of course, you're not just a journalist. You're also the executive editor of the leading Greek newspaper. And you've also led that newspaper through a debt crisis and also the unraveling of the media landscape. And so I'm curious now from where you stand at this point, do you still feel the same way about the need of journalists to go against the current? Yeah.

I do. I mean, I felt like if you've seen the movie The Perfect Storm, I felt like the captain in a boat in The Perfect Storm in the sense that I was the head of a paper when Greece was going through a huge political and economic crisis. We went through a structural crisis because we're losing a lot of our circulation and our advertising revenue and all this. We had all the crisis of legitimacy for legacy media and so on.

And I learned two things from this period. One was that it's very important to listen to people. It's very easy, you know, to sort of, you know, be part of an establishment and like not listen to the average person, what they go through. And I think I made that mistake during the financial crisis. So that was an important lesson. But the second lesson, which has something to do with going against the current, was that

it's important to listen to people, but not to become populist as well. And not to go with the flow just because things lead a certain way, because there's a lot of social pressure and so on. So there were a lot of moments when, for example, when we're going through our financial crisis, we had a lot of pressure to become very populist and say, you know, whatever most people were saying, but we're saying, no, it's important to go through a fiscal adjustment. It's important to do some reforms.

And that was very, very unpopular. You know, we had demonstrations outside our building. We had a lot of, you know, letters and so on, you know, people criticizing us. But I thought that, you know, we thought that was the right thing to do. And that's what we did. And I think it paid off because people realized that you're not lying, at least, you know, that you're not playing around with facts, you know, based just on ratings or circulation and so on.

This has been terrific. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Morgan. A pleasure. Thank you so much for tuning in for this episode of The Debrief. We hope you enjoyed this conversation between True Spies producer Morgan Childs and Alexis Papahelas. More debriefs are available exclusively to Spyscape Plus subscribers.

You'll also be able to access other premium series like The Resume-Off Files, our ambitious retelling of Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes. And for true crime fans, there's The Great James Bond Car Robbery, the story of the hunt for James Bond's most notorious set of wheels. Subscribers also get new episodes of True Spies early and ad-free. Subscribe to Spyscape Plus at plus.spyscape.com.

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