343. Letter From the Ambassador to Greece (Talbot) to the Country Director for Greece (Brewster)1
Dear Dan:
With the Cyprus issue having survived the war threat, the domestic Greek political pot is boiling once again.
Twice in recent days King Constantine has expressed to me his anxiety about the Junta’s intentions. On November 30, when he and the Queen came to the Embassy residence for dinner with my wife and me and Cy Vance and John Walsh, he told me in an aside that he feared the Junta might move that night to arrest Defense Minister Spandidakis and Generals Kollias and Perides. The King had met each of the three earlier in the day and had been concerned that the Generals expected to spend the night in Athens. He had advised General Spandidakis not to sleep at home and the other two to find places other than their usual quarters in Athens.
The difficulty as the King understood it was that Generals Kollias and Perides had been furious at the government for agreeing to pull back the Greek troops (in excess of the contingent) from Cyprus and that Spandidakis as a hawk had also resisted the government’s decisions. The Junta ministers, as leaders of the government, had accused all three generals of insubordination and talked of dismissing them. Should they try to arrest them that night there would be a first-class crisis. From other sources we had understood that at the same time the Junta leadership was bracing its security mechanism out of fear that the King might be organizing a countercoup. I put our political and [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] people on an all-night alert to watch the situation, which was complicated later in the evening when a homemade bomb was thrown into a crowd in downtown Athens and a woman killed. She was the first casualty of the anti-regime terrorist campaign mounted sporadically in recent months, apparently by very small groups of provocateurs.
At about 3:30 a.m. we thought the King’s foreboding might have substance. The Royal Gendarmerie Commander for Attica put out a hurried [Page 701] call for numbers of his best men, who on arrival at gendarmerie headquarters were armed with tommy guns and hand grenades and dispatched in squads of five or six to various sections of the city with the mission of protecting various ministers in their homes. It was only with the arrival of daylight that we were certain that “protect” did not mean “arrest.” Later information suggested that the Junta was in fact worried that the evening’s bomb incident might be followed by more bombing attempts directed at the homes of certain ministers. It was in this general atmosphere that the King that evening muttered to me that “I’m going to have to get rid of these people (the Junta) one day soon.” He was not more specific, however. (He made this comment while attempting to reach Junta ministers by telephone to get the details of the downtown bombing incident. The last time he had used my telephone to call ministers was on the night when I told him that a court martial had given a five-year sentence to Averoff.)2
As you perceive, the dicey part of all this is that those generals whose military pride was most hurt by the decision to withdraw Greek forces from Cyprus under Turkish pressure are precisely the ones on whom the King has been most counting for support against the Junta in any future showdown. An oddity of recent days, in fact, is that on Cyprus questions the King, Pipinelis and Col. Papadopoulos have supported the same policy lines while opponents of the Junta and natural supporters of the King’s role in Greece have opposed Greek “capitulation.”
On December 5, when I called on the King to recapitulate developments during the final days of the Vance Mission,3 we had some further conversation about the domestic situation. He was preoccupied with difficulties he foresaw on the immediate horizon. He senses that with the easing of the Cyprus crisis the Junta will attempt to move very rapidly to recoup its diminishing prestige and consolidate its hold on power. Specifically, he anticipates that the Junta will promptly press for the appointment of Col. Papadopoulos as Deputy Prime Minister and will also try to get rid of Spandidakis and those senior generals (the King’s supporters) who had opposed the government’s decisions on the Cyprus question.
The King also asked whether I had seen the Caramanlis statement.4 I had, and I commented that we had been approached by a friend of Caramanlis who had recently seen him in Paris (but I did not identify the source as Athanasios Tsaldaris) to urge that we encourage the King and [Page 702] Caramanlis to get into communication, since they were the only two men who, working together, could resolve the situation. The King rather abruptly changed the line of the conversation without commenting on this point. Nor did he echo my praise of the performance in recent days of Pipinelis; on the contrary, he observed that Pipinelis had made some mistakes in dealing with the Greek governmental and military elements which were saved only by the King’s intervention.
It was obvious the King did not wish to discuss political personalities who might be available as alternatives to the Junta, and on this occasion I did not press him. I can only conclude that either the family’s antipathy to Caramanlis remains strong or they are in a deep-covered relationship that he did not want to discuss with me. Unfortunately, the former is the more likely possibility.
Meanwhile we have been hearing from all of our political contacts that now is the time for the King to move against the Junta and that he would be certain to have the support of practically all of the old crowd, from George Papandreou to Harry Rendis. Some of the reports indicated they would support a move by the King to create a government of military figures responsive to him or even on the basis of another year or so of martial law or a variant thereof. We have also heard from these sources that the Junta is losing credibility in the country. Certainly it has blundered in foreign relations and now in relations with press proprietors, and these missteps have not gone unnoticed. It may be that skepticism of the Junta’s effectiveness will spread through wider segments of Greek society and even that that most potent non-military weapon of all, ridicule, might come into play. This could undermine the Junta’s public support but not, at least for sometime, its command of the military units that control the Athens area and its grip on strategic units in the northern commands.
As of today, we don’t know what impact the new constitutional draft will have, nor even its thrust. Since the beginning of the Cyprus crisis I have not heard anything (nor have I pushed to seek it) about the draft now presumably approaching completion and the government’s plans for dealing with it. However, it could become a factor in the new situation, just as could the open campaign of opposition to the Junta that seems to have been launched by Caramanlis.5
- Source: Department of State, Greek Desk Files: Lot 69 D 553, Countercoup. Secret; Exdis.↩
- Averoff was arrested on July 12, charged with violation of a rule against gatherings of five or more persons. He was tried and sentenced to 5 years in prison on August 15 and pardoned on August 16.↩
- A memorandum of conversation is in Department of State, Central Files, POL 15–1.↩
- In a November 29 interview in Le Monde, Karamanlis had strongly criticized the foreign and domestic policies of the Junta.↩
- Printed from an unsigned copy.↩