Elias Demetracopoulos was an intriguing man of mystery who was most definitely a thorn in the side of quite a few who were up to no good. The text below describes the environment in Washington around the time when Demetracopoulos was fighting on behalf of the best interests of Greece as a well connected “lone wolf” lobbyist.
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This was a sober estimate: the CIA and the NSC in particular were notoriously friendly to the junta, while Demetracopoulos enjoyed the benefit of many friendships among senators and members of the House. Seeking to discover what kind of "co-operation" US agencies might have offered, Demetracopoulos in 1976 engaged an attorney-William A. Dobrovir of the DC firm of Dobrovir, Oakes & Gebhardt-and brought suit under the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act. He was able to obtain many hundreds of documents from the FBI, the CIA and the State Department, as well as the Department of Justice and the Pentagon. A number of these papers indicated that copies had been furnished to the National Security Council, then the domain of Henry Kissinger. But requests for documentation from this source were unavailing.
Elias Demetracopoulos
As previously noted, Kissinger had on leaving office made a hostage of his own papers–copying them, classifying them as “personal," and deeding them to the Library of Congress on condition that they be held privately.
Thus, Demetracopoulos met with a stone wall when he used the law to try and prise anything from the NSC. In March 1977, however, the NSC finally responded to repeated legal initiatives by releasing the skeletal “computer indices" of the files that had been kept on Demetracopoulos.
Paging through these, his attention was not unnaturally caught by the following:
7024513 DOCUMENT=5 OF 5 PAGE = 1 OF 1 KEYWORDS ACKNOWLEDGING SENS MOSS BURDICK GRAVEL RE MR DEMETRACOPOULOS DEATH IN ATHENS PRISON DATE 701218
"Well it's not every day," said Demetracopoulos when I interviewed him, “that you read about your own death in a state document." His attorney was bound to agree, and wrote a series of letters to Kissinger asking for copies of the file to which the indices referred. For seven years–I repeat, for seven years-Kissinger declined to favor Demetracopoulos's lawyer with a reply. When he eventually did respond, it was only through his own lawyer, who wrote that:
Efforts were made to search the collection for copies of documents which meet the description provided. No such copies could be found. "Efforts were made" is, of course, a piece of obfuscation that might describe the most perfunctory inquiry. We are therefore left with the question: Did Kissinger know of, or approve, or form a part of, that "cooperation of the various agencies of the U.S. Government" on which foreign despots had been counting for a design of kidnap, torture and execution?
To begin with an obvious question: Why should a figure of Kissinger's stature either know about, or care about, the existence of a lone dissident journalist? This question is easily answered: the record shows that Kissinger knew very well who Demetracopoulos was, and detested him into the bargain.
The two men had actually met in Athens in 1956, when Demetracopoulos had hosted a luncheon at the Grande Bretagne Hotel for the visiting professor. Over the next decade, Demetracopoulos had been prominent among those warning of, and resisting, a military intervention in Greek politics.
The CIA generally favored such an intervention and maintained intimate connections with those who were planning it: in November 1963 the director of the CIA, John McCone, signed an internal message asking for “any substantive derogatory data which can be used to deny [Dematracopoulos] subsequent entry to the US."
John McCone
No such derogatory information was in fact available, so that when the coup came, Demetracopoulos was able to settle in Washington, DC, and begin his exile campaign. He began it auspiciously enough, by supplying "derogatory data" about the Nixon and Agnew campaign of 1968.
This campaign-already tainted badly enough by the betrayal of the Vietnam peace negotiations - was also receiving illegal donations from the Greek military dictatorship.
The money came from Michael Roufogalis at the KYP and was handed over, in cash, to John Mitchell by an ultra-conservative Greek-American businessman named Thomas Pappas. The sum involved was $549,000-a considerable amount by the standards of the day. Its receipt was doubly illegal: foreign governments are prohibited from making campaign donations (as are foreigners in general), and given that the KYP was in receipt of CIA subsidies there existed the further danger that American intelligence money was being recycled back into the American political process-in direct violation of the CIA's own charter.
In 1968, Demetracopoulos took his findings to Larry O’Brien, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who issued a call for an inquiry into the activities of Pappas and the warm relations existing between the Nixon-Agnew campaign and the Athens junta. A number of historians have since speculated as to whether it was evidence for this "Greek connection," with its immense potential for damage, that Nixon's and Mitchell's burglars were seeking when they entered O'Brien's Watergate office under the cover of night. Considerable weight is lent to this view by one salient fact: when the Nixon White House was seeking “hush money" for the burglars, it turned to Thomas Pappas to provide it.