In Greece things are different. Here it has been often said that no secrets can be kept. Given the national character to be open-hearted, free of speech, loud in conversation, strong in reaction and generally hot-blooded, this is probably true. And even if the love of truth is somewhat lukewarm, the desire to express opinions in public is passionate, and that is about as close to the truth as one can get in the context of Greek reality.
In Greece, let a man be brought almost casually before the public prosecutor on charges that are merely alleged, and the beans are spilled – and in such abundance that there is a danger of being suffocated in the cascades of evidence (often contradictory) that erupt.
“I am an agent for ΚΥΡ!” (the Greek central intelligence agency) all the headlines announced, but this was only the opening gambit of Daniel Krystallis, one of several arrested on September 12. It is common practice to hold more than one job here, but Krystallis, a journalist, not only was working with ΚΥΡ, which is said not to be involved in domestic security, but was spying on TV reporters and student radicals and informing on bomb plots which he himself was concocting. In this confusion of activities, the police which was tracing him did not know that he was working for intelligence, and intelligence did not know that he was being shadowed by the police.
A second jack-of-all-trades, engineer George Tsitsilianos, arrested on the same day, appears to have been dabbling in terrorism while composing the state-published text-book on chemistry for high school students. Among other later arrests, that of naval officer Vassilis Serepissios, electronic expert Michael Megalokonomou and businessman Nicholas Pipitsoulas seem to be more in the mainstream of classical espionage for the source of their activities may be connected with the defection of diplomat Sergei Bokhane from the Soviet Embassy in Athens to the US.
What the role of the US has been in these matters is beyond the scope of these remarks, but should the holding up of a delivery of F-16s be due to a fear that Greece is a security risk which will leak top secrets to another foreign power, this is simply twisting the traditional virtue of frankness into appearing like a moral defect. It is most unlikely that another foreign power should be bothered with examining airplane parts in Aspropyrgos in the dark hours of the night with the kindly services of Messers Serepissios, Megalokonomou & Co. when it can more readily pinch the original plans by more efficient, if less colorful, channels of espionage.
If these revelations caught and held public attention this month, there was another disclosure – quite secret until now – which is perhaps of greater significance.
On September 9 The Times, noting the death of Sir Ellis Waterhouse two days earlier at the age of 80, stated in its obituary on “perhaps the most distinguished art historian of his time” that “his war service with the Army and the Foreign Office in Middle East and in the Embassy of Greece was something of a mystery.”
Five days later, in the same paper, the well-known diplomat David Balfour enlarged on this suggestive statement as follows;
“The fact is that Ellis Waterhouse was largely instrumental in preventing Greece from being turned into a communist country in 1944.”
In digest, as political advisor to Sir Reginald Leeper, British Ambassador to the exiled Greek^ government in Cairo, Waterhouse worked primarily to prevent British support from reaching the communists and to ensure that a Government of National Unity be installed immediately after the German withdrawal. Both objects were achieved.
“As a result, Athens was taken over in October 1944 by a coalition government under George Papandreou, the present Prime Minister’s eminent father…” Waterhouse “left behind him a Greece which owed him much, since it was by then impossible for the Communists to realize their dream of domination, but a nation which remained quite unaware of the great service he had rendered it.”
As a final apocalyptic revelation, Melina Mercouri has confessed in a student magazine that she neglected her elementary school studies for anti-German resistence. Unwittingly, it appeared, she had given away not a military or even a national secret but an ethnic mystery; namely, her age. Fortunately, in her memoir, Born Greek, she wrote that she took her high school diploma while her grandfather was mayor of Athens and he left office in 1934. Now journalists predict that in some future statement she will confess that she neglected her kindergarten work for active resistance against the junta. So the mystery is preserved, and like the wizard Merlin, Melina grows younger with the years.
