He jumped onto a motorcycle driven by an accomplice and disappeared up the street. It was the tenth victim of the November 17 Revolutionary Organization whose first, US intelligence officer Richard Welch, was assassinated in 1975.
Headlines proclaiming “Truman definitely dead”, “Truman vanishes” and “Truman found” were not referring, of course, to the former US president himself but to his bronze statue which had been toppled by an explosive set by an anarchist group calling itself the Christos Kassimis Revolutionary Organization.
For five days the statue lay on its back and though officials said that it was beyond repair, even Truman prone looked better (though not unlike) many works of art that now embellish some recently established ‘sculpture garfens’. After its removal, however, the Ministry of Culture, City Hall and the municipal police did not know of its whereabouts. Three days later it was learned that it had been acquired by a member of the Society of Ahepan which had raised the statue in token of Greek-American friendship in the 1960s.
Though the Kassimis group, in claiming responsibility for the act, singled out ‘the perpetrator of Hiroshima’, it was clear that his besetting sin was the establishment of the Truman doctrine. To give the Kassimis people their due, the history of modern Greece without the Marshall Plan would have been a lot simpler. In place of Karamanlis, George Papandreou, Papadopoulos, Andreas, et alia, Greece might have had a leader of the Enver Hoxha sort who would now still be ruling over breadlines in his benevolent eighties.
The most exciting vanishing act of the month, however, was that of the Libyan foreign minister, or, more accurately, his arrival, departure, return, disappearance, reappearance and final exit. As the full plot of this 48-hour melodrama would take the fictional genius of John le Carre to unravel, the highlights must do. The arrival on April 17 of Mr Ahmad Shahati, two days after the controversial US attack on Tripoli, was itself swathed in mystery. Arriving many hours late, he was whisked in six minutes to Vouliagmeni where he had secret talks with Foreign Minister Papoulias. The next day these talks continued with the prime minister at Kastri.
At 7:20 PM Shahati’s plane took off from Elenikon Airport. Five minutes later it informed the control tower that it had developed a technical problem. At 7:30 it landed and security forces accompanied Shahati to the Athenaeum Intercontinental Hotel. At 11:30 he announced he would hold a press conference in one hour. This was mentioned on the midnight news. Officials meanwhile urged Shahati to postpone the meeting because adequate security could not be provided. The diplomat, however, eluding these officials and decending via a staff lift, appeared before 50 journalists at 1:45. After answering four questions, a battalion of security police interrupted the conference, picked up the astonished Shahati and, given the ”bum’s rush”, he vanished from the room.
Mr Shahati remained incommunicado until the following afternoon (except for requests for breakfast and having his suit cleaned), at which time he was escorted in the deputy minister of public order’s limousine to the airport where he reiterated his thanks to ‘our brother’, to Greece’s support of Libya in the EEC, and the vigilance of his security. A twin-engine aircraft was provided by Olympic Airways, though technicians had found no fault in the plane that had transported him the day before.
If the prime minister’s admonition “investigate with imagination” had not produced results on the Angelopoulos assassination, it was used freely on the matter of the Shahati visit. It was even said its purpose was to ask for specific recompense for services rendered the government by Libya earlier -probably of a financial nature. A theory was even aired that Shahati had returned to let this particular cat out of the bag. If so, security managed to keep it in.
Nevertheless, if a bag seems highly self-activated and emits caterwauling sounds and has a black tail swishing out of its bottom, it is unlikely to contain three kilos of Cretan bananas. And, in so far as parliament and opposition leaders were told nothing, only wilder speculations remained. If Kadafy called Reagan and Thatcher criminals, could his brothers think otherwise? If Libya thanked Greece effusively for presenting its case at the EEC, could it do so when all twelve members of that community agreed on sanctions against her three days later? Fantasy could even imagine that now, when Greece had managed to displease everybody, mighty America and ‘mad-dog’ Libya might in the end join forces and put sanctions on Greece.
