The Reluctant Spy (11 page)

Greeks across the political and social spectrum, from the monied precincts of the right to Communists and Socialists on the left, were outraged by Bakoyannis's assassination. From that day forward, 17 November's purchase on public support steadily weakened. The group continued to murder and bomb, but with the help of Radomir the Red and other informants during the 1990s, its adversaries—and America's clandestine case officers proudly counted themselves among them—were slowly closing in.

GREECE WAS NOT
a regular stop on European swings by American presidents. Dwight David Eisenhower visited in December 1959, near the end of his presidency, and George H. W. Bush paid a call in July 1991. That was it, two presidents in four decades, until President Bill Clinton arrived in 1999. Despite warnings from the intelligence community, the White House was bound and determined to include Greece in a November presidential trip, especially since Clinton was also touching down in Turkey, Greece's longtime adversary. But the timing wasn't great, to put it mildly. His trip, originally planned for November 13 to 15, was trimmed back after a series of early November protests, a bomb explosion or two, and even a tableau featuring a mock trial of the president and a hanging of his effigy. The list of grievances was long, from U.S. support of the junta in the late sixties and early seventies to the recent bombing of Yugoslavia, an offense to Greece and its traditional Serbian allies. The president's
visit, cut back to less than twenty-four hours, was reset for November 19 to hopscotch a critical day on every Greek's calendar.

November 17, the day the military junta bloodily crushed a student protest, the inspiration for the radical group of the same name, was a day for celebration by Greeks, not a day for Americans trying to befriend Greeks. There were always marches commemorating the day, even as 17 November's grip on the popular imagination was loosening, and there were always demonstrations in front of the U.S. Embassy and even red paintballs tossed at its façade, symbolic gestures of disdain for American backing of the junta. On November 17, 1999, more than ten thousand people filled the streets, protesting Clinton's upcoming arrival and just about everything else American.

The next evening, in the center of Athens, several banks were burning—the result of Molotov cocktails tossed by assorted anarchists, Communists, and maybe even a few 17 November types, although small firebombs normally would have been beneath their dignity as self-reverential terrorists. Friday, November 19, 1999, when Clinton arrived, central Athens seemed like a ghost town because Greek authorities had limited protests to an area several miles away from his motorcade's route. In addition to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton were accompanying the president, with the entire entourage staying at the Intercontinental Hotel, some distance from the U.S. Embassy. Security was tick tight.

During a presidential visit abroad, nearly every American in an official capacity gets pressed into duty, even if the stop is only for a few hours. Exceptions were not made for CIA officers on temporary assignment. My job was to take notes at Clinton's late afternoon meeting in his Intercon presidential suite with the leader of the opposition, Costas Karamanlis, nephew of former prime minister Constantine Karamanlis, who was a towering figure in twentieth-century Greek politics. Albright, Berger, and U.S. ambassador Nicholas Burns
attended, of course, as did Karamanlis's foreign-affairs and military advisers. For all that intellectual firepower in the room, very little substance came out of it. This was happy talk—we love you, you love us—and why not? Greece was two decades past military dictatorship, a flourishing democracy with its share of troubles but a country now committed to peaceful transitions of power.

The Greeks left after the meeting ended. Then the president and Berger walked out, the two of them chatting, followed a half minute later by Albright and Burns. Albright was upset about something: “These Greeks, they're such horrible people,” she said to the ambassador. “I don't know how you live here.” What apparently bugged her was the Greek government's penchant for telling Washington what it wanted to hear, particularly about its commitment to combat terrorism, then never acting on the promise.

Berger ended his conversation with Clinton; suddenly, I found myself four feet away from the president of the United States—in effect, all dressed up and no place to go. Then the elevator door opened and Hillary and Chelsea walked out. As they approached him, the president, making small talk, said something about how much they'd all enjoyed the Parthenon that morning; the head of the Parthenon Museum had given them a personal tour at 10 a.m. Hillary did not appear happy, so the president repeated his thought: “We sure had a good time at the Parthenon this morning, didn't we, Hill?”

“Jesus Christ, Bill, it rained all day. I'll be in the room.” After which she walked past him with Chelsea in tow. You had to feel for the guy. Maybe it was a lingering hangover from the Monica Lewinsky mess, but this was rough treatment, particularly in front of strangers. Clinton chewed his lip for a couple of seconds before he turned to me and said, “Let's get the hell out of here.”

“Yes, sir,” I said and followed him and three Secret Service agents into the elevator. We were headed to a lower level ballroom where the president had to deliver a speech on trade and business relations to an audience of 1,200 that included the Hellenic-American
Chamber of Commerce, an American women's association, and all the U.S. Embassy families. He had only three or four minutes to marshal his composure; he did that and more, delivering a terrific speech that drew several standing ovations. For the first time, I saw up close what they meant about Clinton magic before big crowds.

In fact, President Clinton did and said all the right things on the trip. He gave that great speech. He became the first American president to apologize for U.S. support of the military junta. And he left Americans in Athens with nothing but warm feelings about him.

Amazingly, his visit also had a profound impact on the Greek press. For the two weeks prior to Clinton's arrival, the printed and electronic media were on the warpath, with commentators across the political spectrum claiming the American president wasn't welcome in Greece. What really got to me and many other Americans was the way they referred to him—not as president of the United States, but as
“O Planetarhis,”
which translates as “the planet ruler.” It was a phrase concocted for the moment, and if it was intended to offend Americans, and it was, the ploy was successful. Americans in Greece took pride in their country. This kind of dissing was uncalled for. The Greeks were portraying the American government and its politicians as a bunch of fascists and imperialists; at the same time, they ignored Serbian atrocities against the Muslim population in Yugoslavia.

But the trip went so smoothly and Clinton said such nice things about Greece that the press did a complete 180 after he left. Suddenly, he was “President Clinton” again. One particularly virulent critic on TV said the reporters, editors, and pundits, and he included himself, should be ashamed of themselves. The president had extolled the virtues of Greece; he could have complained about his chilly reception, compared to the idolatrous greetings he got in Sofia and Istanbul, but he didn't. And he could have complained about terrorism, but he didn't.

That he didn't was all the more remarkable because the central
purpose of the trip was to broker an agreement between the two countries to join forces in the battle against terrorism. The details had been worked out and no roadblocks seemed in the way, except, apparently, for one called Greek pride. Given all the anti-American demonstrations attending Clinton's truncated trip, the Greek government clearly worried about the appearance of meek acquiescence to U.S. “demands.” In the end, the Greeks took a pass on the agreement; it was never signed. No wonder Madeleine Albright was pissed off.

The world was on the lip of a new millennium; after nearly four decades of domestic terrorist acts committed by Greeks against Greeks in the name of a discredited ideology, the people were still without a government prepared to go to war against the bad guys.

But 17 November was beginning to implode, even though its members still reveled in their own mythology. In less than three years, two events—a murder and an errant bomb—would bring it low once and for all.

AS I HAVE
said before, work at the CIA—whether you labor in a cubicle in Langley, Virginia, or travel the world on behalf of your country—isn't what used to be called banker's hours in the days when bankers worked from nine to five. The business of running foreign agents could be particularly unnerving. These were sensitive operations, and I couldn't exactly meet with agent-recruits during the day. Most of the time, the meetings were set for the wee hours of the morning, which meant I had to leave the house in the late evening and drive for three hours doing surveillance detection runs to make sure I wasn't being followed. After a one-hour meeting, I'd do the anti-surveillance work again. This routine left me bone tired two or three days a week and on edge every waking hour of every day.

Part of my problem was that my marriage was falling apart. JoAnne and I came from families where long marriages were the norm. Her parents and my parents had both been married about forty years, and their marriages were rock solid. The two of us? Not so much. Our marriage, as I indicated earlier, was troubled from the very start. JoAnne's behavior of choice for dealing with perceived emotional wounds continued to be the silent treatment.

My line of work certainly didn't help. She knew I worked for the CIA, and that my initial job as an analyst was thinking big thoughts about big issues and writing papers about them at headquarters in suburban Virginia. I had often left for Langley early in the morning and stayed late into the evening; she grudgingly wrote off this routine as a condition of my employment. After all, I returned home
every night, just like any white-collar laborer in the many fields that serve the U.S. government in Greater Washington.

But she was plainly upset by what she sensed as a change in me during and after my training at the so-called Farm. I never went into the specifics of weapons training or tradecraft, but she maintained that something fundamental had transformed me. “You're a different person now,” JoAnne said, and it wasn't meant as a compliment.

How? I really wanted to know how she perceived this new alien figure in her life. I could plead guilty to greater maturity and a strengthened confidence in my ability to handle the rigors of my chosen work. Perhaps JoAnne's emotional parsing of these traits translated as tough, callous, and unforgiving. But she was never very precise, so I was left to grope for answers to questions that hadn't been asked.

Amazingly, given the growing distance between us, my wife accepted the middle-of-the-night absences in Athens, at least at first. I couldn't talk in detail about what I was doing, just that I had appointments that were a part of my work. But after several months, she became convinced I was having an affair—and on that matter, she found her voice.

“Oh, it's business,” she'd say. “What's her name?” I wasn't having an affair; I would swear to that under oath and wired up for a lie detector. But she was having none of it. After four or five months, she moved into the guest room of our temporary digs. We were barely speaking at that point.

The divorce rate in the CIA is sky-high, and part of the reason is the stress such working conditions put on marriages. But despite accumulating evidence to the contrary, I always believed my marriage was stronger than that.

I begged her to believe me, promising to do anything to prove that I was telling the truth, that I wasn't cheating on her. She was deaf to my pleas.

I had two men, both Greeks, both really good guys, who guarded our house and, in effect, watched our back. One day, Dimitri, one of the two, sidled over after I got home and pointedly commented on how good my wife was looking these days.

“Yeah? What do you mean?”

“Man, haven't you noticed? She's lost weight, she bought all new clothes, she's colored her hair. She's looking good.” Dimitri clearly sensed a disturbance in the Force. The truth was, I hadn't noticed. In retrospect, it was clear she was trying to send me a signal, but I wasn't receiving.

Soon after Dimitri's remarks, my wife said she had to go on the Pill. “I'm having some female problems, and the birth-control pill will help.”

“We've been married twelve years and you need to go on the Pill now?” But I thought, what the hell did I know? So I drove her to the gynecologist.

Now, my wife had inherited her late grandmother's house on the island of Chios. The house was made of fieldstone and in some disrepair; before we left for my temporary work in Greece and elsewhere in the region, JoAnne said that she wanted to fix up her grandmother's old place and take the kids there so they could get to know their cousins. It would also improve their Greek.