The Amorgos Conspiracy: A True Story

By Elias Kulukundis

The Amorgos Conspiracy is the true story of the escape of a political prisoner from the colonels' dictatorship of the 1960's. The moderate left-wing politician George Mylonas is being held in exile on a remote Aegean island. A plot to rescue him is mounted by his son-in-law, Elias Kulukundis, the author-a young Greek-American writer-who leads the rescue party to the island of Amorgos. The drama unfolds against an idyllic setting of a cruise in Greece, and the other rescuers-young Italian volunteers about the same age as Kulukundis-do not know either the identity of the prisoner or the "member of the resistance," who is leading them. Kulukundis, the narrator, is traveling under a Danish passport belonging to one Arne Diener, a young Danish citizen who like many Scandinavians in that era has donated his passport to the resistance against the colonels. What makes The Amorgos Conspiracy different is the fact that it is not a novel. It is a true story. It is Elias Kulukundis' gripping tale, of organizing the escape of his father-in law, George Mylonas. This is a book about coming of age, "a true story that marked the end of my youthful illusions" as Elias says.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483518121

Book preview

end.

Maps

Prologue

The engine made a throaty noise as Lorenzo steered the boat between the jagged rocks that enveloped us like Antarctic promontories. Above one of them, to our starboard side, we could see the peak of Amorgos. It was not yet seven in the morning.

Giancarlo waited in the bow, holding the anchor over the side. Lorenzo killed the engines and for a moment all was still until we heard the clank of the anchor chain. Anna appeared from below in her bathing suit and Mario came up after her, also ready.

Anna went to the opening in the rail and, leaning over the side, she plunged into the water. Mario dove in after her, joined by Giancarlo. Their voices broke the quiet, and that was good. The more noise, the better. We were tourists who had got up early to swim at a deserted cove first thing in the morning. Giancarlo splashed Mario, and Mario held Giancarlo’s head under water. Our purpose in stopping there was to get me off the boat, and while doing that the Italians were taking the opportunity to let off steam.

Four days earlier, we had passed through the Corinth Canal. I had been sitting in the bow, looking up at the steep slopes of the isthmus that rose from the water on either side so that the 30 foot frame of our boat the Lady R was invisible to anyone not standing on the rim. Overhead, fixed to a metal trestle bridge spanning the canal, was a giant poster of a soldier with a bayonet against a phoenix rising from the flames—the evervigilant emblem of the Greek colonels’ Revolution. I observed all this as I sat on the deck leaning back against the windshield. Our tiny craft was passing below the poster’s notice, out of sight.

Suddenly I heard a loud knocking coming from inside the cockpit. At the wheel, Mario the journalist motioned me to get out of the way of his view. His view of what? His officiousness irritated me. He was always getting on my nerves, sometimes getting in my way. The first time had been when the boat broke down at Corfu and he wanted to turn back.

I stood up and as I did so, I spread my fingers toward the windshield in a gesture that only I could understand. To a Greek showing an open palm with fingers spread is roughly equivalent to the middle finger to an American or the first two to a Brit. Mario did not know that. He didn’t even see the gesture, which was intended as a private communication between me and myself, an affirmation of Greek solidarity against the arrogance of my foreign rival.

At that moment, I looked up and saw a soldier with a rifle and a bayonet looking down at me— a real one. Our eyes connected and I knew he had seen what I had done. It happened in an instant, but now the man must know I was Greek— I could not be anything else.

He watched us as we passed under trestle. We had shown our passports at the entrance to the canal. If the man scanned the crew list, he might wonder why there was no Greek in our party, just five Italians and one Dane. He continued to watch us making agonizingly slow progress toward the open water ahead.

Once we emerged from the isthmus into the Aegean, for all the police would know, we could have sailed anywhere—north toward Athens, south to Monemvasia, or east toward Amorgos.

Even though we were heading for Amorgos, we could sail northward along the coast of Attica until we reached Cape Sounion, then sail down the string of islands on the other side. Or we could risk the open water and sail straight across to Seriphos. We debated the question among ourselves, I speaking French to the Italians, they speaking Italian to each other which I didn’t understand, and French to me. Only Anna spoke English.

We were in a flat-bottomed boat, so following the coast was the safer choice; but sailing straight across to Seriphos would save two days and attract less attention from the police. Lorenzo said we should risk it. He was a Sunday sailor and a lawyer by profession, but he knew what he was doing. I was glad, as the open water seemed to offer some protection from human danger, if not from the elements. I didn’t mention the gesture to the Italians. I kept that to myself.

On the tourist island of Paros, a policeman said to Giancarlo in Greek, How fast is your engine? When Giancarlo did not understand, he said mockingly, "What’s the matter? No capisce? I froze. We understand a little, I said in English. We know stafili and karpouzi." I deliberately pronounced the words for grapes and watermelon with a marked foreign accent. The policeman eyed us suspiciously. While we refueled, he walked up and down along the dock as though deciding what to do. We left Paros before he could ask us anything else.

Our boat did only ten knots, so at the end of two hours we would still be within twenty miles of Paros. Again, the police could not have known which way to look for us. But if they had heard any of my telephone conversations earlier in the summer, they might guess we were going to Amorgos. Reluctant to risk another encounter with the police, we spent the night in a deserted cove on the southern coast of Naxos sheltered by a canopy of stars.

The new day found us ten miles from Amorgos.

Behind the rocks off Amorgos’s northern coast, I kept my head below the crest of the land, as though I was afraid someone on the island could recognize me from ten miles away. It had been four days since we sailed through the isthmus, but I was still tense. Corinth was where I had felt fear for the first time. Fear permeated my thoughts and clouded everything I saw, like a drop of iodine spreading slowly in the glass, making sinister whorls in the water until the whole glass was colored. You couldn’t think clearly when you were afraid, with that cloudy substance coursing through your humors and obscuring your sight.

Even if the police somehow got suspicious and came to the islet where I was left to wait, I could still decide if I was really the Dane, or become myself again—an American of Greek descent, graduate of Phillips Exeter and Harvard, son of a Greek shipowner. That would surprise my Italian comrades once again since they knew me as Arne Diener, a Danish citizen, residing at 26, Kirkegade, Roskilde, Denmark. Who was that?

I tried to smile as I assembled my things—a fishing line, a knife, a set of flippers, and a diving mask. My comrades were dropping me off at this uninhabited islet where I would spend the day with the rubber launch for company. If anyone came, I would say that my friends had left me here to fish. If the Italians did not return, I would have to make my way to the mainland and out of the country by myself.

I listened to the lively Italian chatter. Except for the sailor who had been sent along by the owner, the others were all childhood friends, relaxed and free with each other. They were unaware both of my identity and that of the prisoner they were going to rescue; I hadn’t even told them our destination until we were in Greek waters. I dwelt among them as a silent presence, incongruously dark among their fair skins. With my black beard, I looked like a Greek priest in American clothes—I definitely did not look Danish.

It was a sunny October morning, the kind you remember from your school days, when you are inspired by new goals and aspirations. But here in the southern Cyclades islands, it was still summer and warm enough to swim.

Mario had a book in his overnight bag — The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson by Eric Goldman. It had been published in the US earlier that spring of 1969, barely a year after the incumbent president had announced that he would not seek nor would he accept his party’s nomination to run for reelection in 1968. Richard Nixon was President now, with Spiro Agnew as his Vice President. This was the highest office ever held by a Greek-American. But Agnew was the wrong kind of GreekAmerican, and his place in the White House had the effect of consolidating US support for the triumvirate of colonels who had overthrown democracy in the land of its birth. In response, a group of European governments went before the European Commission of Human Rights to accuse the colonels of torture and other human rights abuses. If the prisoner escaped, he could testify that the colonels, or the junta as they were known, had held him for fourteen months without charging him with any crime —merely because they considered him a danger to public order and security, in other words a danger to themselves. If one man could be detained that way, anybody could.

The plan was for the Italians to take a taxi to the village of Hora, which like all medieval villages in the Aegean was built inland in the hills. They would walk into the café where the prisoner, a prominent politician and former cabinet minister, had lunch every day under the surveillance of the police. The Italians wouldn’t speak to him nor show any sign of recognition. The signal would be the book. Mario would carry it under his arm and casually lay it on the table in front of him. When the politician saw it, he would know the day of his escape had come and these were the tourists who would rescue him.

That was the plan. And the next four hours would tell us if we could carry it out..

I continued packing, stuffing a wind-breaker, shirt, chinos, and espadrilles into my airline overnight bag along with a copy of L’L’Europeo with the pages folded to create pockets for three passports—one American and one Danish for me, a French one for the politician.

The previous summer, on August 13, 1968 a young member of the anti-junta resistance, also in bathing suit, mask, and flippers and also pretending to be there to fish, had set explosives under the coastal road that Colonel George Papadopoulos, the dictator, took every morning from his residence at Lagonisi to his office in the now inactive parliament building on Constitution Square. There, Alexander Panagoulis, the wouldbe assassin, was wading in the water, watching for the dictator’s limousine to pass along the highway above. Pretending to be diving for sea urchins, he prepared to push the plunger when the limousine reached the point where the explosives were set below the road.

But Panagoulis had not accurately estimated the time it would take for the charge to go through the wire and set off the charge. Papadopoulos’s car rounded the point, its chrome bumper flashing in the morning sun, Panagoulis waited until it reached the spot where he had hidden the explosives; then he pushed the plunger. Nothing happened.

The car continued on its way to Athens. A few seconds later, several hundred feet behind the car, the road exploded with a deafening sound.

Panagoulis was arrested in his bathing suit, just as I was now. I shivered at the thought of a naked man being taken with his body exposed and vulnerable. And his treatment at the hands of the security police by all accounts was horrible.

But I was not an assassin. I was leading a party to rescue an elected member of parliament being held in detention on an island, but this would make little difference to the police. If I was caught, they would treat me the same way as they had treated the man who had attempted to assassinate Papadopoulos.

Some years later, I met Panagoulis in Geneva, a few months after he was released from prison. He gave me some advice on what to do if you were tortured, something he knew a great deal about. He said it was important not to suffer passively: you had to go on the offensive, to become aggressive. Once he bit his torturer’s little finger so hard that the tip had to be stitched back on.

But on this morning, sitting in the stern of the Lady R in my bathing suit, I had heard none of this advice. I tried not to think of the unseen enemy and concentrated only on the scene in front of me. All around me, the sun was shimmering on the deep blue. In the distance, the islands on the horizon seemed to represent all the Greek heroes of antiquity.

"It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles whom we knew."

We were intent to get all the incriminating evidence off the boat in case the police stopped it. That meant the passports and one of the twoway portable walkie-talkies, (the other was with the politician.) And me— the most incriminating evidence of all. If I was not on board, no one could prove that these Italians knew anything about Amorgos except what they had read in the Michelin Guide—that there was an eleventh-century monastery built into a cliff overlooking the sea to commemorate a spot along its southern coast where an icon of the Virgin Mary had been washed up on shore.

The pulleys made a sinister squeak as Mario and Giancarlo began to lower the rubber Zodiac. It was like the lowering of a coffin. When the dinghy was in the water, Giancarlo climbed in and started the outboard motor. He worked methodically and efficiently. He shut the engine off and raised the propeller out of the water to keep it clear. Then he offered

Mario his hand. Mario took it and together they pulled the Zodiac back against the stern.

Arne, this is where we say goodbye, Giancarlo said, and he beckoned to me to come down.

Giancarlo always had a dispassionate way of telling you what was next in store for you. He could have been an executioner. Here, Arne, place your neck on this hollow curve. Now he was showing me into the Zodiac, ready to cast me adrift in my inflatable dinghy. I placed my overnight bag in the prow. There, crouched beneath the jagged terrain with my hands on the rubber gunwales, I could see Amorgos’s peak ten miles away. After the Italians had cast me off, I would be powerless to affect anything that happened to them in the next three to four hours. Maybe I would be just as helpless to control anything that happened to me.

Anna handed me a plastic bag with my lunch.

"Grazie, Anna."

"Prego, Arne."

I put it in my overnight bag. Even a man awaiting execution would enjoy a last meal. But I had to stop having thoughts like these. I wasn’t the one who was being held prisoner, however helpless I might feel. The prisoner was on Amorgos, and I had led a party there to rescue him. And like any leader, I could bring my followers just so far. Here I must let them go to play their parts without me.

I looked at Anna thoughtfully.

We were supposed to be a summer couple. That was our cover. As the only newcomer to the party, I was only one who could have been her lover. But this was in appearance only. In reality, I couldn’t have concentrated on getting this group to Amorgos while having an affair with the only woman among them. I was no James Bond. That would have been too much for my poor nerves to handle. Besides I was married—to the daughter of the man we were going to rescue, although the Italians didn’t know that either. They thought I was a simple foot soldier sent out of Greece by the anti-junta resistance to lead the rescue party back. What would they say if they ever found out this or so many other facts about me? That was why I couldn’t let any of them get too close, not even Anna.

I placed my lunch in the bow next to the airline bag.

If the Italians did not come back for me, I could starve before a passing ship spotted me waving a white towel over my head. Suddenly I felt we were not prepared. A vital part of the plan—the rubber dinghy— had not been tested. We had bought it second-hand in southern Italy after our dinghy had been stolen. But we hadn’t had a chance to try it out. What if it was defective and it sprung a leak as soon as I was floating helplessly in the open sea? What if it shipped water as we made the run in to lift the prisoner from the island?

Lorenzo started the engine. A second later, I was hit on the cheek by the line Giancarlo threw me. I sat on the center horizontal and steered ashore with my oar. When I reached the shore, I lowered the anchor so that it lodged between two rocks. I climbed out of the Zodiac, watching