A Greek journalist untangles an unsavory web, exposing a high-level plot to have him fired from one of the most respected newspapers in the United States. His offense: Publishing interviews with three senior naval officers. All three—including Admiral Arleigh Burke—came to his defense.
This story involves three U.S. Navy admirals—Arleigh A. Burke, Charles B. "Cat" Brown, and George W. Anderson. The first and last were Chiefs of Naval Operations, while the other was Commander-in-Chief Allied Forces, Southern Europe based in Naples, Italy.
All three granted me interviews on the record. All raised a furor, not so much for their content as for the simple fact that they were given to me. Most astounding and offensive—not just to me personally but to the spirit and substance of democratic practice—was that they prompted a campaign to have me fired by my employer, The New York Herald Tribune News Service. Even more astounding was that the newspaper acceded to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) pressures to do just that. Later, the agency acknowledged that it had been unfair and told The Herald Tribune it could rehire me, which it did immediately. But the hiring and firing left The Herald Tribune—then commonly recognized as the second-best newspaper in the United States after The New York Times—looking embarrassingly like a toady for a U.S. government agency.
Every good story requires a heavy. In this one, he is Ellis O. Briggs, the U.S. ambassador to Greece from 1959 to 1961. I can understand why he might have ground his teeth when I was around, but I remain mystified to this day as to why he went to such great lengths to use his official position to destroy me professionally. The three admirals were aghast at Briggs's professional conduct and were aware of his known antipathy to U.S. military brass. They went out of their way to assist me professionally and personally. And there is no way I could thank them for all they did.
The first interview that proved explosive was with Vice Admiral Brown in January 1960. At a purely social event in Athens, I mentioned that I would like to interview him on the record as I did earlier when he was Commander of the Sixth Fleet. I gave him two pages of questions. He said he would draft answers when he got back to his headquarters in Naples and forward the responses to me.
He did just that. But he sent the responses via the diplomatic pouch to the naval attaché in Athens, who showed the text to Briggs. The ambassador killed the entire interview. Briggs wrote Brown and said, rather condescendingly, that he concluded "no useful purpose at this time would be served" by publishing the interview. Briggs explained that the President, Secretary of State, and Navy Secretary, among others, all had addressed the questions I asked and "there accordingly exists no area of doubt or uncertainty that needs clarification."
Admiral Brown was incensed. He did not work for Briggs, and Briggs had no authority to "edit" or veto Brown's remarks. Brown was so irritated that he went straight to Arleigh Burke, then the Chief of Naval Operations. Years later, Burke told me he raised the censorship of Brown with both Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter and President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
But Briggs was not finished with me. There is a gap in the documentary material here. But it appears that he went through the CIA station chief in Athens, Laughlin A. Campbell, and the Director of the U.S. Information Service in Athens, Leonard R. Greenup, to CIA headquarters. The next documentary evidence I have describes the CIA contacting The Herald Tribune to hint that I should be fired as the newspaper's stringer in Athens. On 11 February 1960, 12 days after Briggs killed the Brown interview, Robert J. Donovan, Washington bureau chief of The Herald Tribune, wrote a letter to his boss in New York, Manager Editor Fendall W. Yerxa. In that letter, a copy of which the newspaper later provided me, the Washington bureau chief forwarded a memo "given to me by a CIA man in the presence of Allen Dulles," then-Director of the CIA. The unnamed "CIA man," I later learned, was Stanley Grogan, chief press aide to Dulles.
The attached memo was a screed describing me as "untrustworthy" and out to "embarrass the U.S." The implication was that the CIA wanted me fired. But Donovan's letter to his superior in New York does not say Grogan made such an explicit request. The records The Herald Tribune gave me indicate that Yerxa did nothing but put the letter and the memo into a file.
A few months later, in May 1960, I wrote an article that caused some rioting in Athens and a major diplomatic flap between Greece and Italy. It described a classified document the Italian government had submitted to NATO. It was simply a rehash of a 1938 paper produced by the government of Benito Mussolini, asserting that parts of the Greek provinces of Western Macedonia and Epirus and parts of Yugoslavia (including Kosovo) belonged ethnically to Albania, which Mussolini seized in 1939. When my article appeared, Greeks were incensed, seeing the Italians as still having greedy designs on a Greek province. Why Italy sent such a stupid document to NATO, I have no idea. I simply reported that it did.
Grogan approached Donovan a second time about the troublesome Demetracopoulos. Again, nothing came of it.
In September 1960, Vice Admiral Anderson, then Commander of the Sixth Fleet, visited Athens. Briggs was unhappy for some reason and effectively boycotted the visit. Anderson invited me on board his flagship, the Des Moines (CA- 134), in the harbor at Piraeus. Time ran short, and we did not fit in the interview, so I left my written questions with the admiral. Admiral Anderson was equally furious with Briggs, and he too went straight to Admiral Burke, who raised the issue again with Acting Secretary of State Herter and President Eisenhower. At his leisure, he drafted answers and sent them to me. He did not send them via the diplomatic pouch, since I had told him about the censorship of Admiral Brown. Instead, he sent the answers by regular mail, and I published the full text on 2 October 1960.
Two days later, on 4 October, Grogan approached Donovan again, this time in writing. The CIA recently has declassified the relevant documents, including Grogan's letter. He was explicit:
It would be helpful all around, in view of the information I have on this man, if The Herald-Tribune would send a letter stating that he is no longer in their employ to the following [in Athens]: (1) Foreign Press Association; (2) Foreign Press Division of the Underministry of Press; and (3) Protocol Section of the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We hope you will be able to cooperate in this request which would not be made except for most compelling reason.
It is very unlikely Grogan would know of these organizations; that type of detail would have to come from the embassy in Athens. Briggs's fingerprints are thus all over the letter.
Grogan very helpfully attached a draft letter of dismissal—with Yerxa's name typed in as the signatory. The draft was dated ten days later, 14 October. This time the reaction of The Herald-Tribune was different. The exact text submitted by Grogan—even the hyphenation is identical—was sent out, dated 14 October 1960, on Herald Tribune stationery, over Yerxa's signature, to the three offices named by Grogan. Only a solitary letter of the alphabet was changed; in the sentence saying that I "carried" a letter of accreditation, the tense was corrected to carries."
I found it extraordinary then, and today, that one of the world's premier dailies would take a draft submitted by the CIA—by any outside organization or individual, for that matter—and use it intact. More significant, the letter leveled accusations against my character and was mailed to people with whom I had to interact. I was incensed, to use the politest term. Professionally, I had to respond. If the letter simply had withdrawn my accreditation, the matter would have ended. I had no right to accreditation, and The Herald-Tribune had every right to withdraw it whenever and for whatever reason it wished. But neither Grogan nor anyone at the newspaper seemed to have thought through the draft and to have realized it was asking for more trouble than it gave. A. C. Sedgwick, the Athens bureau chief of The New York Times and President of the Foreign Press Association of Greece sent a letter to Yerxa on 29 November 1960. In part, it read:
In so far as this letter was addressed to the Foreign Press Association I felt free, indeed compelled, to permit the members to read it. A number of them, myself included, felt that both the tone and the language employed suggest defamation and positive harm to our colleague's reputation as a journalist and to his prestige. I believe that if you re-read the letter referred to, you would concur.
Mr. Demetracopoulos is known here to be an enterprising newspaper man, held in high esteem. He has been able to produce letters from the Herald Tribune News Service editors showing that those editors placed confidence in him. That suddenly, and that for no reason that we know of, the accepted estimate of the man was thrown into reverse has left many of us wondering if some character assassin has not found his mark for personal gain.
I lost no time in hiring a lawyer in New York to sue The Herald-Tribune to rescind the aspersions it cast.
In January 1961, I flew to the United States. I had three main goals: to consult with my lawyer on how to make things hotter for The Herald-Tribune; to cover the Kennedy inauguration and report on what the change of administration might mean for Greece; and to conduct a series of interviews, including one with Admiral Burke.
Burke heard out the story of my tribulations and said he would be delighted to give me an interview, especially to demonstrate his own faith in me. In compliance with the law of unintended consequences, however, this interview exploded under Admiral Burke and got him in hot water with the Kennedy administration. (The story behind this interview and the problems it caused both of us was the topic of my article published in the January 2000 issue of Proceedings, titled "Muzzling Admiral Burke.")
Admiral Burke subsequently retired from the Navy and became the first head of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at Georgetown University in Washington. The flap over the interview with me never seemed to matter one whit to him. When I spoke with him at CSIS in July 1962, he asked how my suit was coming. The short answer was that nothing had happened. The Trib editors backed off when confronted by my lawyer, and they promised letters of retraction. But the letters never materialized.
Admiral Burke, gentleman that he was, then took it upon himself to write the following letter, dated 17 July 1962, directly to the owner of The New York Herald Tribune, Ambassador John Hay Whitney:
When I was unable to reach you yesterday by telephone, I spoke with Mr. John Denson, your senior editor.
The subject of my call was a matter concerning Mr. Elias P. Demetracopoulos, a Greek editor and correspondent. I understand that in the past he has worked with your Mediterranean correspondent and for the Herald Tribune News Service.
I have listened to the narration of events following an interview which Mr. Demetracopoulos had with me on January 12, 1961. The story is long and complicated. Especially in view of his excellent reputation, his staunch anti-communist attitude over the years, and his support for the United States. I think that there may have been an injustice done Mr. Demetracopoulos.
The purpose of my conversation with Mr. Denson and this letter to you is to express my hope that someone in authority in your organization will listen to this complicated narrative and look at the documents which help tell the story.
I am forever grateful to the admiral for his initiative.
I was, meanwhile, working a new route in my effort to get The Herald-Tribune to withdraw its attack on me. I had learned that my firing was not at the initiative of Fendall Yerxa but at the behest of the CIA.
With that knowledge in hand, I appealed to the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Richard B. Russell (D-GA), whom I had befriended, to hear my story, hoping he might write a letter to CIA Director John McCone. Russell had a much better idea. He said he would call McCone to his office and have me brief him personally and directly. I was floored. What's more, Russell told McCone to come alone and did not tell him the subject of the meeting.
It took place on 13 August 1962. In many ways, it was embarrassing. Since McCone did not know the topic in advance, he was unable to question me on anything but the information I chose to supply. And since he was alone, he had to serve as his own note taker. I frankly felt sorry for the man, and I slowed my pace while he visibly sweated over his notes. Senator Strom Thurmond (D-SC) also was present at this meeting.
I would love to know what happened when McCone got back to CIA headquarters that day. It is clear he did not waste time in deploying staff to find out who this Demetracopoulos fellow was and what the CIA had done to him. It is also clear that he did not like what he learned. On 17 August I received a telephone call from Everett Walker, director of the Herald Tribune Syndicate & News Service, asking if I could come to New York to accept a letter reinstating me as the service's Athens correspondent. Feeling embarrassed and exposed over this affair, the CIA reacted furiously and institutionally. They tried to demonize me and make a security risk out of me. A personal dispute involving Freedom of the Press became an institutional conflict that lasted for years.
I couldn't get to the train fast enough.
But for now I was so happy I almost forgot about other interviews I had that month in Washington with each of the service chiefs of staff: Admiral Anderson, General Curtis LeMay of the Air Force, and General Earle Wheeler of the Army. Generals LeMay and Wheeler dutifully submitted the transcripts to the press office under Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, as required by the Kennedy administration edict. The transcripts from both interviews were killed, the service press office later informed me. But Admiral Anderson was different.
The text was transcribed and duly initialed by a press aide, Commander V. C. Thomas, Office of Information, Navy Department. But it shows no stamp of approval from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Admiral Anderson never bothered checking there. The interview was published on 13 September 1962 in Athens. He said no changes were planned in the size of the Sixth Fleet; he ducked a question about bringing Polaris submarines into the Mediterranean; and he gave a very diplomatic, non-provocative response to my question about the Soviet naval buildup: "Any prudent military commander naturally would be concerned over any increase in the capability of a potential enemy to wage war against that commander's country and its forces." It is difficult to see how these words could irritate anyone.
But they did. McNamara was livid with Anderson for violating the standing order that interviews be cleared with his staff. Unfortunately, he had a habit of taking incidents like this as personal snubs. He could neither brush them aside nor address them professionally at arm's length.
Just a few weeks later, the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted. Admiral Anderson was at the center of activity, because the administration had imposed a naval blockade on the island.
On 24 October, the Navy spent hours assessing all the data about Russian ships steaming toward Cuba with missiles on board. Just before noon, the Office of Naval Intelligence and Flag Plot became convinced that information provided earlier in the day by the National Security Agency was correct: 16 of 18 Russian vessels headed for Cuba were dead in the water or had turned back. This was key information. The Russians had blinked and would not challenge the naval blockade. As related by Dino A. Brugioni in his definitive history of the crisis, Eyeball to Eyeball, McNamara learned later that day that some of the information on the Russian ships had been available at Flag Plot hours before he was told. He "stormed" into Flag Plot and began chewing out the officers then on duty. The officer in charge notified Anderson, who rushed to Flag Plot and tried to draw McNamara aside. Here was the admiral who just weeks before had refused to submit an interview for clearance. "McNamara then turned on Anderson," Brugioni relates. All in all, it was not a pretty scene.
Scoops and Enemies
I was a reporter and editor. I did not have a political ax to grind. I got my kicks from scooping other reporters. It is often hard for people in public life to understand that this is what drives most reporters. Few reporters want to beat to death an office-holder or an institution so much as they want to beat the reporter next to them.
Much of what I wrote was seen in Greece, however, as defending U.S. policies. So I often was accused there of being a CIA agent. Those who were more sophisticated said I had a pro-U.S. bias, citing the fact that, as a teenager during the war, because I spoke English, I helped downed U.S. fliers. What made Greeks think I was pro-American? Well, I started in journalism covering the U.S. community in Greece. That meant I wrote lots of articles about U.S. diplomats and the U.S. military. Given my standard procedure of publishing full-text interviews with major Americans, many Greeks saw me as providing a platform from which U.S. officials could explain and defend U.S. policies. That made me pro-American at the very least, if not a paid agent of the superpower.
What is interesting—and difficult for me to understand—is that while I made many enemies in the ambassador's residence, I made no enemies within the U.S. military. By definition, many of my exposes involved Greek-U.S. military relations, which was a very sensitive political topic. Yet no U.S. admiral or general ever slammed the door in my face. The brass almost always saw me as pro-American, as a foreign reporter worth catering.
But many of the ambassadors reacted differently. When they did not like the message, they decided to kill the messenger. The CIA cooperated in—or was co-opted into—this ploy. The word was put out that I was a communist, that I had volunteered to be a CIA agent, that I was an Israeli spy, that I was a Yugoslav spy. But the U.S. military never joined in this cabal. I found this interesting and amusing, given that the military is accused so often of lacking political sophistication. The ambassadors were the confused ones who concluded that if a reporter revealed a secret document that caused them any grief, then that reporter must hate the United States. The admirals and generals were the sophisticated ones, who understood that the problem of Demetracopoulos lay with the staffers who leaked him the classified material in the first place, not the reporter who published the news.
The issue of what to do about the Greek "pest"—the term favored by Kennedy Press Secretary Pierre Salinger—went higher than one might think warranted. A 30 August 1962 CIA memo—for-the-record describes a meeting at which both President Kennedy and the director of the CIA were present, and the matter of Demetracopoulos "was raised again." The anonymous memo writer reported: "The President stated that all U.S. Government agencies likely to be approached by Dimitrakopoulos (sic) should be contacted in an effort to seal Dimitrakopoulos (sic) off from sources of 'exclusive interviews.'"
But not until nine months later, in May 1963, did the State Department Near East division, which includes Greece, induce Secretary of State Dean Rusk to sign a telegram sent to embassies across Europe, asking them—but not instructing them—to give me the polite brush-off. It said:
All posts cautioned against giving exclusive written replies to questions submitted by Greek journalist Elias Demetracopoulos. USG would prefer not grant him exclusive interviews attributable US officials. Should be given regular press treatment within above limits. Reason for above is our experience with Demetracopoulos taking material out of context and using it for political purposes in Greece. Net result has been disadvantage to USG and embarrassment US-Greek relations. Posts cautioned not reveal nature or essence this message to any public information medium.
How can one take something out of context when publishing a full text?
Reed Harris, who had been executive assistant to Edward R. Morrow, then the director of the U.S. Information Agency, was uneasy about this. He made inquires throughout the government, trying to find out if there was any information that I was "in any way affiliated with, in the pay of, or inclined to favor the policies of any power unfriendly to the U.S."
In August 1963, Harris wrote a memo, concluding:
The objections we have been able to ferret out boil down to the fact that Demetracopoulos is an astute journalist, very skillful in asking penetrating and often embarrassing questions. To publish the answers he receives, he chooses times when his articles will sell widely. This sometimes results in political uproars.
Demetracopoulos writes a series of penetrating questions, submits them to the official concerned several days in advance, then receives the answers orally or in writing. When he obtains the answers orally, he asks that a stenographer be present. In the end, he always obtains the answers in written form signed by the official or stenographer. This is certainly a careful and ethical way to proceed. If our officials are not careful enough or well enough informed to answer in accordance with U.S. policy, they need not answer; but when they do answer, there is hardly a legitimate reason for complaint when the journalist publishes the interview at a time when it will sell best.
[Deleted name) has been unable to supply me with any examples of use of the questions and answers 'out of context,' although [deleted phrase] saying Demetracopoulos has made such use. Because the man has several times stirred up public arguments, our State Department people especially seem to be rather afraid of him and they fall back on exaggerations to support their requests that he be denied the kind of access to officials which he seeks.
Finally, Admiral Burke, in an interview given to me and published on 22 August 1966 in The Athens Daily Post, decided to go public with my case, stating:
I think all nations have in effect a CIA. In other words, I think that the CIA is a good organization. They seem to be amateurish at times because of lack of experience. I know that you have been unhappy with certain unfortunate activities of the CIA operatives in Greece. I was sorry to see my good friend, Vice Admiral William F. Raborn, who has offered so many valuable services to his country, leave the position of CIA Director. But I am optimistic that his successor, Mr. Richard M. Helms, will do a good job.
I went into exile in Washington after the Greek military seized the government in 1967. I then became an activist opposing the junta. Years later, after democracy returned to Greece, I returned to journalism. I applied for a press pass to gain access to the State Department building. My request ended up on the desk of Robert B. Bannerman who worked in the bowels of the security office under the assistant secretary for administration. He put my name into the system and discovered "voluminous files." In a January 1983 memorandum for the files, Bannerman wrote:
He was repeatedly investigated by U.S. agencies in connection with visa applications and journalistic scoops involving, in certain instances, the publication of classified materials. He roused the enmity of a succession of American ambassadors, including John E. Peurifoy, Ellis O. Briggs, Henry R. Labouisse, Phillip Talbot and Henry J. Tasca, who were convinced that his enterprising journalistic endeavors were aimed at causing problems in U.S. relations with Greece.
It was readily obvious to Bannerman that those named individuals would not want him doing any favors for this particular Greek "pest." But nothing in the rules says that being a pest disqualifies one for a press pass. If it did, there would not be many, if any, press passes issued. With this in mind, Mr. Bannerman took the file to the legal adviser's office for an opinion. Bannerman summarized in his memo:
Legal [Advisor's office] noted that a careful review of the file reflects no disqualifying information which could serve as a basis for a successful denial of a press pass—although there was certainly no question as to the fact that Subject is a controversial figure whose journalistic efforts in the past have consistently caused the United States problems and could potentially cause future problems as well.
At the same period, this Greek modernodyssey came to a happy conclusion, when the CIA, in a document dated 29 July 1982 and addressed to the Office of Security of the Department of State, finally stamped it "No Derogatory Information."
Yes, my reporting did cause some problems. But it also enabled many officials—the three admirals, for example—to present the American case directly to the Greek public. The admirals saw that the pluses outnumbered the minuses. The ambassador could see only the minuses. How is it that the admirals understood how to measure the balance far better than the diplomats?
Mr. Demetracopoulos, whose last article for Proceedings appeared in the January 2000 issue, is a Greek journalist based in Washington, D.C.