Greece - US Department of State

Greece 797
tion. The President and Mr. Kissinger were cynics without scruple
ready to sacrifice the Greek people to the needs of their “cold war politics.”
But in any event, they observed, the Ambassador was to blame.
He cannot but know what is going on in Greece. If he could not get
the administration to change its policies then he should resign. There
was nobody in the Embassy they could talk to. “None of them want
to hear the truth.” A couple of people described Jim Potts 3 as the evil
genius behind the present situation. They saw special meaning in his
reassignment to Greece at this time since he had served earlier in
Athens and they assumed knew Papadopoulos in his earlier KYP
incarnation.
On Corruption: Every educated Greek I talked to made a point of
the corruption of the regime. One person asserted he had it on unimpeachable
authority that the last time Minister of Mercantile Marine
Holevas went to Japan he placed an order for his third tanker. All the
members of the government are on the take. Even Pattakos, I was told,
has bank accounts in Switzerland. The corruption permeates the whole
system. At the highest levels the deals are made with the economic oligarchy,
with Bodossakis, Andreadis, Angelopoulos and others of that
ilk who are further enriching themselves through their close relationship
with the government. In the middle reaches of the government
bribes are the order of the day. In the villages, army officers are guilty
of the pettiest chicanery and venality, stealing lepta, as one man put it,
while their bosses in Athens steal millions of drachma. One University
professor philosophized that rather than cleansing the Greek body
politic the regime had introduced the new “favlokratia” (political corruption)
to levels and sectors of Greek society previously untouched—
it permeates the society, the church, the school system, the military, to
a degree hitherto unknown and they have set democracy in Greece
back another decade.
The Prisoners: I met several of the wives of prisoners. They are a
remarkable group, reinforcing my view that the finest thing Greece has
ever produced has been Greek women—both in marble and in the flesh.
Wives of University professors and military officers, they were all
young, relatively well-educated and possessed of enormous courage
and dignity. They would of course like to see the Department of State
and the Embassy take up their husbands’ cases with the regime. Mrs.
Papanicolao (wife of Col. Nicholas Papanicolao who was arrested early
on presumably for complicity in the King’s counter coup) described
his treatment calmly, in detail. As soon as he was arrested the beatings
began. He managed to escape from the room in the suburban hotel
3 James M. Potts, member of the Political Section of the Embassy in Athens.