A dark room

Years passed, and suddenly Andreas Stathopoulos entered the picture, a man who had become friends with Ioannidis in prison. I visited him in his apartment near the National Archaeological Museum, in the center of Athens. On the wall behind him I was astonished to see portraits of Greek and foreign dictators, famous national-socialist leaders, including one of Ioannidis. The only one missing from this pantheon of dictators was Georgios Papadopoulos; there was a conspicuous gap in the row of photographs. There was also a lighter rectangle on the wall, betraying a deposition of sorts. He informed me that Papadopoulos’ portrait had at some point hung on the wall but he had taken it down once the dictator “betrayed the ideals of the Revolution 2 .” The more he talked, the angrier he became. It was all a Jewish and Masonic plot with Ioannidis as its victim. At some point he grew emotional, jumped up from the couch, I’m not entirely sure whether he threw me a Nazi salute but that’s what it seemed like, and began shouting at me hysterically. But I didn’t quit on him. He sent me letters, Ioannidis’ memorandum to the parliamentary committee of inquiry, along with newspaper clippings annotated by him or by the dictator’s own hand. During the course of my investigation, I met a man who impressed me with his perspicacity and his way of recounting events. Charalambos Palainis was an army officer, close to Ioannidis, and a man who had first-hand experience of these events. In the interview he granted me he described the last day before the downfall of Ioannidis. Ioannidis, Palainis, and one more associate departed from the Greek Parliament, from the office of Faidonas Gizikis, who was the President of the Republic at the time, to go to his sister’s house. The two men sat in the living room while Ioannidis retired to another room. When he came out he was teary-eyed, and seemed very sad, and as they were walking to the car he told them: “It’s all over.” More than anything, I wanted to know who he had talked to. The obvious answer was one of the Greek-American CIA agents with whom he had been on good terms, such as Peter Koromilas or Gast Avrakotos. The answer to this riddle still eludes me. Both Koromilas and Avrakotos refused to speak to me about the period in question. I kept searching for an answer for the longest time. One day a fax was sent to me in Kathimerini , which began like this: “I know you seek to discover who was it that Ioannidis spoke with on that fateful day.” And went on: “I don’t want to disappoint you, but it was his astrologer.” I have no idea if this was a joke someone was playing on me, or whether there was indeed an astrologer in the picture, if it was an “astrologer” like the fortune-teller whom the CIA had used to convince Plastiras to change the Electoral Act. There were other associates of Ioannidis, such as Giorgos Stavrou and Thanasis Perdikis, who helped me penetrate the workings of his mind and gain a better understanding of his decisions concerning Cyprus and Turkey. I learned much later that Ioannidis had agreed to grant me an interview, but was ultimately dissuaded by the fanatic Andreas Stathopoulos—who delivered the eulogy at Ioannidis’ funeral—based on Stathopoulos’ conviction that I had attended a number of meetings of the Bilderberg Group. I have indeed attended some of those meetings, and I was present at a historical junction for Cyprus, when a handful of Greeks and Cypriots convinced the man responsible for US foreign policy to change his stance and agree to let Cyprus enter the European Union without waiting for the dispute to be resolved, and to pressure the 2 “Revolution” is what fascists in Greece called the Military Junta. (Translator’s note)