# Book Review: Eyewitness in Greece John A. Katris **URL:** **By** David Stewart **Published:** November 1, 1972 --- “Personally, I devoured the book as if reading a detective story, or rather as if watching a horror film I had seen in the past....” _Eyewitness in Greece: The Colonels Come to Power by John A. Katris New Critics Press, St. Louis, c.1971, $9.95_ In the introduction to _Eyewitness_, Vassilis Vassilikos states: “Like its earlier counterpart, _The Birth of Fascism_ by Angelo Tasca, a political exile of the Mussolini years, \[_Eyewitness In Greece_\] describes the almost mathematical political equation that leads inevitably to dictatorship ... as Tasca said in 1926, ‘What happened in Italy could spread or happen anywhere.’ History has vindicated him, but we hope it will not vindicate Katris.... Personally, I devoured the book as if reading a detective story, or rather as if watching a horror film I had seen in the past.... I was angry at myself for not remembering so many details. And it is these details that give the book its immense authenticity.” I second that observation. Although the American libertarian opposes on principle the current Greek dictatorship and argues against the flow of American dollars and material to it, the problem has been that no full account of the atrocities committed against freedom by Papadopolous has been available for a wide-range, full-scale intellectual attack on that regime. Well, here it is, a stunningly well-documented and eminently readable history of political Greece, concentrating on the years 1960–1970. An account of the entwined chaos of a monarchy, a republic and a rich, pampered and powerful oligarchy struggling to control a country of fewer than nine million people, a struggle which led, in bitterly-contested but logical steps, to the junta of April 21, 1967, “the Night of the Colonels.” The players: Frederika, Constantine, Karamanlis, the old King Paul, the heroic but enigmatic Papandreou, and, rising like a phoenix out of Nazi (and CIA) ashes, George Papadopolous. Here are the atrocities: the assassinations—including that of George Lambrakis, the young parliamentary hero, upon which the movie _Z_ was based—the mass arrests, the abolition of trials, the terrorism, the censorship, the extortion, the expropriations. Here are the rationalizations, schemes and pressure of the State. Here are Bouboulina Street and the torture of Electra Papa. And, ugliest of all, here are the taxpayers of the United States: the Patton tanks rumbling down the boulevards of a bewildered Athens, the American computers set up by American systems men to organize the files on Greek “dissidents”—all 1,500,000 of them—the American equipment and training and umpiring, CIA encouragement, State Department complicity, and N.A.T.O. assistance—along every bloody step of the way. Author Katris was a correspondent and political editor for several newspapers in Athens for thirty-five years. It is apparent from the occasional adjective, emphasis or “aside” that Katris’ own ideology embraces a kind of “benevolent” welfare statism. This is unfortunate but does not damage the book—the target of which is fascism. Katris knows fascism intimately. He depicts it mercilessly. He has drawn from the first-hand knowledge of a lifetime of friendships, enmities, contacts and alliances the raw material for a fascinating, compelling and terrifying book: an objective and passionate book. My only regret—although I can understand to a certain degree the reason for the shortcoming—is that the area of U.S. involvement is the area least well documented by the author. I would like to have seen statistics, sums, dates and details of the aid that this country has provided such a regime, and the names of the government officials responsible for providing it. There is a saying which goes: judge your friends by their enemies. Katris is a friend. The phrase turned around becomes: judge your enemies by their friends. I predict that any begrudging respect you may have for, say, Spiro Agnew, will vanish when you read this book and learn the nature of the policies of the men he has been praising. _Eyewitness in Greece_ is an uncompromising indictment and, to use someone else’s term, provides “intellectual ammunition” to last a lifetime. I enthusiastically recommend it.