Out in the Open

Christmas Eve in Athens was peaceful. On cafe terraces around Sintagma Square people sipped coffee in bright sunshine. Flower stalls did a rush business in hyacinths, violets and almond blossoms. Hardly anyone heard the guerrilla announcement when it was first made, because Athens has been jamming the rebel broadcasts from the north.

The news was relayed to the government of Premier Themistocles Sophoulis by an army radioman in Macedonia and by a destroyer which had picked it up at sea. A spokesman for General Markos Vafiades, guerrilla chieftain, had proclaimed formation of a new northern state --the "First Provisional Democratic Government of Free Greece." Chief of state: Markos Vafiades.

This move aroused mixed feelings in Washington, where it had long been expected. There was a certain relief that Soviet intentions regarding Greece, never more than half-veiled, were fully out in the open again. The Soviet catspaws in the Balkans, Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, would no longer bother to hide their affiliations with the "Markos Mountain Government" (as the Moscow radio called it). But the announcement had been adroitly timed to follow the break-up of the London conference; it was supposed to convince lukewarm supporters of the Marshall Plan that Europe's mess could never be cleaned up.

Fight for a Capital. In the rugged, snow-covered uplands of northwestern Greece, the Vafiades rebels attacked with 23 battalions, according to government estimates. They seemed to have chosen the government-held town of Konitsa, six miles from the Albanian border, for the capital of their new state. The government garrison in Konitsa was completely encircled while hundreds of shells crashed into the town from the guerrillas' 66-mm. guns. Wounded several times, Konstantin Dovas, the Konitsa garrison commander, directed the defense from a hospital bed. At week's end government reinforcements were pouring up the road from Ioannina and half a dozen Communist roadblocks had been broken.

The government fighters knew they had a tough opponent in Vafiades, who uses the nom de guerre of "General Markos." Born 41 years ago at Kastononv, in Asia Minor, he worked as a bricklayer, painter, carpenter, grocer boy, street vendor, real-estate clerk, army private, tobacco worker, journalist. In 1924 he joined the Communists in Macedonia and edited a Communist workers' publication. His police file shows that he has been jailed at least eight times since 1929; that he is 5 ft. 7 in. tall, lean and muscular; that he has blue eyes, wavy chestnut hair and a mustache that takes up where Stalin's stops. He slipped out of Salonika in 1946 to join the guerrillas and shortly became their commander in chief.

Roundup In Athens. Four days after the news from the north, the government outlawed the Communist Party and the leftist EAM, and even "sympathizers" were threatened with severe penalties. In Athens some 500 Communists were already under arrest as a result of an episode three weeks ago when a policeman saw three men get out of a taxi carrying a suspicious cloth bag. When he tried to question them, they shot him dead, then fled through the ruins at the base of the Acropolis. (The cloth bag, it turned out, contained arms.) One of the three, a Communist hatchetman named Stamatis Bitsikas, was caught, broke down under interrogation and confessed a Red plot to murder Stylianos Gonatas, head of the National Liberal Party, and two other prominent politicians. Bitsikas "sang" so effectively that 57 more Communists were arrested, then 300 more. The final roundup came on Christmas Eve, after the Vafiades broadcast.

Fast work had prevented a possible Red putsch in Athens, but the new state of affairs in the north was something else again. The Soviet puppets, Albania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia were expected to "recognize" Vafiades at any moment. Cautious Mother Russia might do so later, if things went well. For a "cold war" the international conflict was giving off a lot of heat.

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