The Colonels' Coup and the American Embassy: A Diplomat's View of the Breakdown of Democracy in Cold War Greece

Part Two: Setting the Scene

Two SETTING THE SCENE FIRST IMPRESSIONS I arrived in Athens on July 31, 1966, and reported for duty at the Embassy the following day. When I learned that I was to be responsible for reporting on external rather than internal political affairs, I was dismayed to realize that I knew perhaps less about the Cyprus problem than I did about the domestic politics of Greece. In the afternoon of the first day my boss, Kay Bracken, walked into my office, slapped a telegram down on my desk, and said, ‘‘Draft a reply to USUN and the Department saying this is all very well but it doesn’t take care of the Turkish right of intervention under Article Four of London-Zurich, so it won’t wash in Ankara.’’ Then she walked out. I hadn’t the foggiest notion of what she was talking about and was no more enlightened after reading the telegram, which presented details of someone’s counterproposal to someone else’s scheme for a ‘‘final’’ solution to the dispute between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus. By asking a few judicious questions of John Day, the Embassy’s previous Cyprus ‘‘expert,’’ I was able to discover that Mrs. Bracken was making reference to the Treaty of Guarantee, which was part of the London-Zurich accords that had brought independence to Cyprus, Article 4 of which had been interpreted by the government of Turkey as conferring on it the right of unilateral military intervention in Cyprus to uphold the constitutional rights of the Turkish Cypriots against encroachments by the Greek Cypriots. I had no hope of becoming as expert on the Cyprus problem as either Kay Bracken or Ambassador Talbot, but I set out to learn a lot in a hurry, at least enough to draft sensible cables. Once I had briefed myself on the problem , I found that it did not occupy me full time, for the Cyprus issue was fairly quiescent that fall, with the Greek and Turkish governments engaged in a ‘‘dialogue’’ designed to compromise their outstanding differences on the issue. I had plenty of spare time to look about and observe the political setting in which the Embassy found itself. The first thing that struck me was the Embassy itself, especially its staffing. Most of the senior officers appeared to be very close to retirement, having chosen Athens as a pleasant post in which to serve out the final years of their careers. In fact, all but one of the eight senior officers of the mission either retired or otherwise left government service during the next three years: the ambassador, the DCM, the political and economic counselors, the consul general, the defense attaché, and the head of the military mission. It did not seem propitious that Washington had staffed the place with a group of people on their last legs, so to speak. The one exception was the CIA station chief, Jack Maury. In 1977 his job at CIA headquarters was liaison with the U.S. Congress. The second thing that struck me about the Embassy was that, as in many other overseas missions, its State Department contingent was vastly overshadowed and outnumbered by the military and intelligence components. There were several thousands of American military personnel stationed in the country who were not part of the mission, but the Joint U.S. Military Assistance Group Greece (JUSMAGG) had a couple of hundred officers and men, even though their sole task seemed to be to go over with their Greek counterparts the mail-order catalogue of U.S. military hardware to help make up shopping lists. Despite the staff-cutting genius of former ambassador Ellis Briggs, a notorious enemy of large missions, the military attaché section of the Embassy still numbered about forty. (The chief attaché, apparently ignorant of Briggs’s reputation, had made the mistake of starting his introductory session with the newly arrived Briggs as follows: ‘‘Mr. Ambassador, you’ll be pleased to know that here in Athens we have the largest attaché operation first impressions 19 outside Germany, Japan, and Korea . . .’’) During my first three weeks I made several futile attempts to penetrate behind the steel gates that protected the attaché offices from casual visitors and finally decided that they didn’t want me going through there because I might discover that they had very little work to do and consequently spent a good...