A timely reveiw of a first hand account of the Colonel's Coup (Greece) in 1967, by a survivor of state-sponsored torture:
I Should Have Died by Philipe Gigantes (writing as Philip Deane)
The current turmoil in Greece gives us an opportunity to review a little-known and little-studied incident in U.S.-Greek relations: the 1967 Colonel’s Coup de Etat.
Greece, the Cradle of Democracy, was benighted by no small number coups and revolutions in the 20th century. Some of the coups were due to the Truman Doctrine, which resulted in the U.S. supporting a number of totalitarian regimes throughout the Cold War.
Philipe Gigantes was a Greek war hero turned journalist, who used the nom de plume of Philip Deane. In 1950, while on assignment for Hearst Newspapers, he was wounded and captured by North Korean forces and held for the duration. He was tortured extensively during this period.
After the war, he ended up working for the U.N. until 1964 when he accepted an appointment as a minister in the cabinet of King Constantine of Greece. Shortly after beginning his service to the King, he began to notice conspiratorial developments within the government; those developments culminated in the Colonel’s Coup of 1967. The Colonel’s Junta then held power until 1974.
In 1977, Gigantes (under his nom de plume Deane) published a fascinating memoir of his experiences with torture at the hands of the North Koreans, and his own observations from inside a liberal, parliamentary government as the junta maneuvered into position and took control. The name of the book is I Should Have Died, and it shows Gigantes’ considerable journalistic skills. He was a keen observer, a digger for information, and had a tight, fast-moving style of prose.
I found this book by chance, flipping through a mass of uncatalogued books at a second hand store. It’s out of print now, but there are a number of used copies available through Amazon.com at prices ranging from under a buck to $78 (Amazon lists the book by Gigantes’ pen name, Philip Deane).
This amazing book, besides telling several little known chapters of history, struck me as highly relevant to modern U.S. politics. The first portion, for instance, gives a graphic yet economical narrative of his experiences as POW in the care of the North Koreans. Gigantes was beaten up by North Korean troops, bound and forced to sit for extremely long periods without sleep, water or food, and relentlessly interrogated. He was kept in his chair so long that he soiled himself, and was then forced to clean up the mess, and kicked by his guards in the process.
When Gigantes had been captured, he was working as a reporter, but because his captors knew that he had numerous friends in government, military and intelligence positions, they assumed he was a spy and had valuable information to divulge. Like all victims of torture, he was presumed guilty and interrogated relentlessly with this premise.
The dust jacket describes this treatment as torture, as does Gigantes himself. Yet in the U.S. of 2008, where torture has been legally defined as causing crippling injury, death, or pain equivalent to death, it is interesting to note that if Gigantes’ captors had been modern U.S. military or intelligence, the U.S. legal system would exonerate them. (Of course, if Gigantes’ captors had been private ‘contractors,’ employed in a war zone, they would not even be subject to legal action.)
After the worst of the torture had ceased, Gigantes was given a comparatively mild interrogator who engaged Gigantes in a series of discussions regarding the merits and faults of the NATO powers, vs. the Communist countries, which were mostly allied, to varying degrees, with Russia and the USSR. Gigantes’ direct experience as victim of torture at the hands of Communists, fortified his faith that the U.S. led coalition, however badly flawed, was at least preferable to the Communist system.
In the years after the end of the war, Gigantes ended up working for the UN until he was offered a position by King Constantine in 1964. Shortly after beginning his service to the King, he began to notice signs of plots and intrigue. His many and varied connections, plus his newshound skills, enabled him to discern that a coup was in the making.
The object of the plot was the ouster of liberal Prime Minister George Papandreou and the emasculation of Parliament so it would function as a rubber stamp for the King. Gigantes was approached directly by one of the intellectual architects of the coup, who wanted Gigantes on their side and told the author that they only sought a system similar to the U.S., with a strong executive.
One of the agents of the coup was the Greek equivalent of CIA. In the course of events, Gigantes had the opportunity to meet a victim of this intelligence service’s torture. He found that this person’s treatment had been far, far worse than Gigantes’ treatment by the Communists. Gigantes reports that much of the torture occurred on the Island of Makronisos, which is similar to the U.S. use of Gitmo. Gigantes also reports that besides the physical torture, the interrogators mocked the religious preferences of their prisoners, as a means of psychological terror.
Also in the course of events, Gigantes visited the U.S. embassy many times with interesting results. He found a talkative CIA agent, for instance, who stated directly that the U.S. supported the plotters of the coup. He also found this view among the diplomatic staff.
There were many others, besides Gigantes, who figured out that the stage was being set to overthrow the Prime Minister. Besides the P.M. himself, there ministers, many civil servants, and of course most of the Greek diplomats, many of whom were being told by their U.S. counterparts which side they should support in the event of a coup.
The Greek Ambassador was not pleased by these events and, along with Gigantes and others, traveled to the U.S. in an attempt to make their case. Gigantes got as far as a meeting with Bobby Kennedy, but since the assasination of JFK he had been largely neutralized as a force within the Johnson administration.
The Ambassador managed to at least talk to LBJ, but with even worse results. Gigantes writes that the ambassador quoted President Johnson as saying: "...fuck your Parliament and your Constitution...We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your Prime Minister gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament and Constitutions, he, his Parliament and his Constitution may not last very long."
In April 1967, a group of military officers overthrew the P.M. and Col. George Papadopoulos was installed as leader. The U.S. offered immediate overt support and the junta retained power until 1974.
Gigantes’ reporting is very reliable and he appears to have been a good judge of witness credibility, therefore I am inclined to believe his account. In addition to his own observations and the statements of others made directly to the author, he includes about 29 pages of supporting documents and footnotes (compare this with the length of the Greece narrative, about 100 pages). Gigantes’ notes and sources would make a good starting point for a graduate thesis in Poli-Sci or History.
If the CIA, the American Embassy and President Johnson all backed the coup prior to its execution, then logically it follows that the U.S. government gave covert aid to the coup.
Yet most U.S. published history omits the CIA/U.S. role in overthrowing the P.M. Even as late as 1999, when coup leader George Papadopoulos died, the supposedly liberal New York Times devoted a paragraph of the obituary to denial of CIA involvement in the coup.
Yet also in 1999, President Bill Clinton apologized to the Greek people for supporting the junta.
Gigantes says that after the junta was finally ousted in 1974, there were proper investigations of the abuses and crimes of the junta, but that due to fear of embarrassing the U.S. (and losing a powerful and wealthy friend), the U.S./ CIA role in the coup was swept under the rug. This sounds more likely than the denial of U.S. involvement.
After all, the CIA engineered coups in Iran, Iraq, Chile, Guatemala, Vietnam and Nicaragua. Coups are a specialty of the CIA.
Gigantes fled Greece for the U.S. prior to the coup, after having discovered that his office was bugged and that he was being followed. Disgusted by the role of the U.S. in the coup and the torture and other associated abuses, Gigantes settled in Canada. He eventually became a Senator there, and served with distinction for 14 years. Besides I Should Have Died, he wrote 14 other books. He died of cancer in December, 2004.
Gigantes knew the soul of the U.S. Here is part of one of his concluding paragraphs:
"It is a power unto itself, this international caste that is called bureaucracy, private or public, and it is strangely similar wherever it may operate. It is a co-optive society where the elders choose successors in their own image and all spend untold energy hiding past failures instead of planning new successes. And because things are getting bigger, more complex, each and all of these bureaucracies is a vast inbred conglomerate of inbred parts which become increasingly more concerned with themselves, spending increasingly more time keeping the people elect from knowing too much. Nowhere did I see this being more true than in Washington where I observed this phenomenon for ten years."
The story of Gigantes and the Colonel’s Junta is just one of many in history of U.S. dominance. It is typical in that millions were affected or harmed and thousands were brutalized, with the average American citizen never learning of the role his government and taxes played. It is also typical in showing the patterns of political force, of torture and conspiracy, that play out day after day and year after year, behind our backs and under our noses.