Greece: When Will NATO Call In the Troops?

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

02 July 15

hatever the Greek people decide in Sunday’s off-again, on-again referendum, the story won’t end there. The IMF, most Eurocrats, and the mass media here will continue to vilify Prime Minister Alexis Tsipris for fighting against austerity, while many on the left will accuse him of selling out far too much on his anti-austerity, pro-growth promises. But if he and his Syriza-led government manage to retain the confidence of Greek voters and become a viable model for others in Europe, how long will Washington and its NATO allies let them be? History offers a nasty warning – and a glimmer of hope.

On April 21, 1967, high-ranking Greek military, intelligence, and secret police officers took power in a well-executed coup. They relied on NATO’s Prometheus Plan, which Washington and its allies had designed ostensibly to prevent local Communists from coming to power anywhere in Western Europe, even by way of democratic elections.

The Greek officers claimed they were acting to prevent an imminent Communist plot, and some of them may have believed it. In reality, at least in the short term, they were blocking the expected election the following month of the moderate, anti-monarchical Center Union, headed by Georgios Papandreou Sr. But the colonels, as they became known, had grander ambitions.

“These colonels had been plotting for years and years,” explained Robert Keeley, a US foreign service officer in the country at the time and later ambassador to Greece. “They were fascists. They fitted the classic definition of fascism, as represented by Mussolini in the 1920s: a corporate state, uniting industry and unions, no parliament, trains running on time, heavy discipline and censorship … almost a classic fascist ideal.”

The coup organizers quickly rounded up as many as 10,000 people, including politicians, artists, academics, students, and priests. Military and security police tortured many of them, both to gather information about possible opposition and – more important – to terrify the Greek people into submission. They pulled out their prisoners’ toenails and fingernails, beat the bottom of their feet, breaking bones and peeling off the skin. They shoved filthy rags often soaked with urine or even excrement down their throats, pumped high-pressure water up their anuses, inserted sharp objects into women’s vaginas and men’s anuses, and applied electric shocks to heads, nipples, and genitals.

For seven years in the land that invented democracy, the colonels pursued their fascist agenda, keeping themselves in power with continued arrests, torture, exile to desolate prison islands, and denial of basic human rights. Their behavior so outraged European public opinion that the Council of Europe voted to exclude Greece from its ranks, a symbolic victory that served as a stepping stone to the restoration of civilian rule.

Lest we lose all hope, two people did much of the work to make the colonels official pariahs. Maria Becket, a wealthy Greek aristocrat then in her thirties, worked with the underground resistance to smuggle torture victims out of the country to testify before European authorities. Her husband James Becket, an American lawyer, did Amnesty International’s first report on torture, documenting its use by the Greek junta. Even after Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, his 1970 book Barbarism in Greece still offers useful insights.

I came to know the Beckets in the early 1970s, when Jim was working as Director of Public Information for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. Anna and I happened to be there, and when Maria learned that we were about to fly on to Istanbul, she asked if we would stop over in Athens. She wanted us to deliver a series of secret messages to members of the resistance. We agreed, and the horrors in Greece suddenly appeared far more personal than writing an article, signing a petition, or applauding the iconic Costa Gavras film Z.

Our fear focused not just on the colonels, but also on agencies of our own governments, British and American, who had built up a long, symbiotic relationship with the fascists of Greece.

Back in the closing days of World War II, the British government of Winston Churchill moved brutally against the Greek Communists, who had led the resistance to German and Italian occupation. To oppose them, the Brits created Greek special forces, the Mountain Raiders Companies (LOK), which pointedly recruited fascists who had dominated the Greek military and police ever since the 1930s. Many of the recruits had created “security battalions” during the occupation to hunt down anti-Nazi partisans and slaughter Greek Jews. After liberation, the Greek government purged them as Nazi collaborators, but their brothers-in-arms worked to rehabilitate them through a group called the Holy Bond of Greek Officers.

The award-winning historian and journalist Christopher Simpson sums up the story in his book Blowback. When the US declared its Truman Doctrine in 1947, Washington took on London’s imperial role in Greece and gave military backing to these same fascists, along with monarchists and other ultra-right-wing nationalists, in a civil war to eradicate the Communists. In this effort, the Pentagon poured millions of dollars into the pro-fascist Holy Bond to create a “Secret Army Reserve,” which became central to Washington’s longterm intervention in Greece. Hold in mind that one of the Holy Bond’s founders – Col. George Papadopoulos – became the recognized leader of the military junta after the 1967 coup.

A cadre of Greek-American officials added to this initial intimacy, none more so than Thomas Hercules Karamessines, who headed US intelligence in Greece during the civil war and then became CIA station chief in Athens. He played a leading role in creating Greece’s national intelligence service, the KYP, which Papadopoulos came to head. The KYP then worked with the CIA to control Greece’s largely fascist special forces, the LOK, and groom them for their part in NATO’s secret stay-behind armies that operated throughout Western Europe.

Called “Operation Gladio” in Italy and “Red Sheepskin” in Greece, these shadowy groups trained for guerrilla resistance should the Soviet Union invade. They also prepared for “domestic emergencies,” which is how the special forces came to play such a prominent role in the 1967 coup and how the Greek colonels came to rely on NATO’s Prometheus Plan. “It was,” said Col. Yannis Ladas of the military police, “a very simple, diabolical plan.”

And what of Tom Karamessines? In the years before the coup, he had become deputy chief of all CIA covert action worldwide, and not just in Greece. His work included the very similar Piano Solo coup attempt in Italy in 1964 and – first as deputy and then as operations chief – a string of military coups in Latin America, culminating in the death of president Salvador Allende in Chile in 1972. Karamessines was a very busy man.

More to the point, his career serves as metaphor. America’s historic intervention in Greece shaped the first Cold War. It emboldened policy makers who wanted to work with fascists elsewhere, from the followers of Stepan Bandera in Ukraine to the military regimes in Chile and Argentina. And it defined how succeeding US presidents would expand a generally unacknowledged American empire under the guise of defending “the free world” from some overhyped Soviet – or Russian – expansion.

History is unlikely to repeat itself in the same way. But with the buildup of the new Cold War and the overhyped flirtation between Tsipris and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, we should remember the sadly-forgotten heroism of Maria and James Becket as we keep our eye on NATO’s current relationship with the Greek military. Stay tuned.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Jeb Bush's Big Lehman Brothers Problem

By Charles Gasparino, The Daily Beast

02 July 15

Why won’t the Republican hopeful come clean about his involvement with two of Wall Street’s biggest banks?

eb Bush says he released 33 years of tax returns this week because he wants to be the most transparent candidate to run for president in 2016. But if that’s really the case, why is he continuing to obfuscate some of his most lucrative and potentially controversial business dealings he had before announcing his candidacy like his work as an “adviser” for investment bank Lehman Brothers?

So, if Jeb won’t tell you what Jeb exactly did while working on Wall Street, in the interests of transparency and disclosure, I will try.

Not much is known about what Bush actually did for Lehman—the firm that went belly-up in 2008 and sparked the wider financial crisis, and Barclays, the bank that purchased Lehman out of bankruptcy and continues to work out of its midtown Manhattan headquarters. He began working for the former after his term as Florida governor ended in 2007, and continued working for the latter until the end of 2014, when he decided to run for president.

The two banks were his biggest sources of income in recent years: Bush earned more than $14 million working for Lehman and then Barclays, which based on my understanding of simple math accounted for nearly half of the $29 million he made after he left government. Yet in Tuesday’s disclosure, and even in many of his public comments, Bush has downplayed his work for the two banks.

“I also was hired as a senior advisor to Barclays where I advised their clients on a wide range of global economic issues with a mind towards navigating government policies,” he writes in an essay that accompanied the tax returns. It is the only sentence that refers to his time at Barclays. And he doesn’t mention Lehman at all.

In recent weeks I’ve interviewed numerous Wall Street executives about Jeb Bush, and his role at both firms. What emerges is a portrait of a bank “adviser” who operated more like a high-level investment banker.

A spokeswoman for Bush declined to provide specifics about his work for the banks other than point to various media accounts, including those by this reporter. But Bush, according to people with direct knowledge of his activities, helped the firm look for business from well-heeled clients, including everyone from hedge funds to billionaire investors like Carlos Slim Helu, the Mexican business magnate widely regarded as the world’s richest man.

And, in at least one instance, he appears to have been Lehman’s go-to man for an emergency investment during the 2008 financial crisis.

In his seven years working for both banks, Bush was paid handsomely for this work, but he was also thrust into several awkward situations. A couple of years ago, he met with executives from the Minneapolis-based hedge fund Whitebox Advisors, a major Barclays client. Bush was supposed to be providing high-level insight into economic issues for the big hedge fund, which was one of a handful that correctly predicted the mortgage meltdown that eventually led to Lehman’s collapse.

But according to people who were present, the meeting soon turned uncomfortable when Whitebox’s chief executive, Andrew Redleaf, began to openly browbeat Bush on his brother’s record as president, including his handling of the Iraq War.

A spokeswoman for Redleaf declined to comment but would not deny the account; a spokeswoman for Bush had no comment.

One investment banker who has direct knowledge of Bush’s work for Lehman and Barclays says over the past seven years, the former governor has had “dozens and dozens and dozens” such meetings with clients and prospective clients of Lehman and Barclays. One of those clients included Slim, the Mexican billionaire, which looms as one of the most controversial aspects of Bush’s private business dealings. This is because, if accurate, it shows how closely Bush worked with Lehman officials during the firm’s final days.

According to former Lehman executives and various news reports, Bush met with Slim to ask him to make an investment in the firm in the summer of 2008. The investment never happened, and Lehman, famously, filed for bankruptcy in September of that year.

Bush campaign spokeswoman Kristy Campbell seems to deny at least some of this account. “Governor Bush met with Carlos Slim. It was regarding a specific telecom project,” she said in an email. “It was not regarding [a] general Carlos Slim infusion of cash to save Lehman Brothers.”

She would not deny, however, that this investment could in some way have helped prop up Lehman Brothers. In fact, Campbell also refused to outright deny past media reports, including this one in The New York Times, which cites emails explaining how Bush was involved something called “Project Verde,” a firm-wide effort to get an investment from Slim and potentially help save Lehman from collapse in 2008.

Indeed, former Lehman executives say senior executives at the firm had discussed using Bush as a direct conduit to policy makers—including those reporting to his brother, who was president during the financial crisis—as Lehman was sinking further into insolvency and regulators balked at including the firm in their broader bailout packages.

Campbell says Bush never intervened with people reporting to his brother. “I do want to be very explicit on one point: Governor Bush was never asked to contact his brother’s administration regarding Lehman, and if he had been asked, would not have done it,” she said in an email.

Don’t expect to find any of what I’m reporting here when Bush releases a more detailed financial disclosure forms in a few weeks with federal election officials. Given Lehman’s role in the 2008 financial meltdown, it’s easy to see why the former governor would like people to focus on what he billed the other day as the “broken tax system that’s one of the most convoluted and anti-growth in the world” rather than the work he did that earned him millions and forced him to pay into that broken tax system.

It’s of course hard to argue that Bush shouldn’t earn a living from his contacts in business that he made in government (Bush stated he never lobbied on behalf of a company) or inherited through his family connections. This is especially true when you consider the hyper-sleaze of Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, who became a mega millionaire almost overnight by constructing possibly the most conflicted political-business-charity machines in modern political history.

But as an avowed small-government conservative, you would think Bush would know all about corrosive effects of crony capitalism, where executives at the big banks sit at its epicenter, ready to call in favors from politicians who in turn can help make those executives make a lot of money. For that reason, it’s time for Jeb to fess up about all the work he did for Lehman and Barclays. Only then can he brag that he’s acting in “in the spirit of transparency.”