The General's Revenge

Almost exactly ten years ago, a strutting, mustachioed Greek colonel returned to liberated Athens with a shining military reputation. The colonel's ist Greek Brigade, organized from Greek exiles, had done well against the Germans in North Africa, and the colonel thought so highly of his own performance that he styled himself "The Hero of El Alamein." In December 1944, as military governor of Athens, the colonel quit his desk to lead three companies of infantry and a handful of tanks against swarming Communist guerrillas, and he defeated them, spectacularly, in the gardens of the royal palace. "If the Communists had won," an old associate remarked, "they'd have strung him up in the streets."

But vain and ambitious Colonel Pausanias Katsotas, 65, could not stand his postwar obscurity. "Why shouldn't I be running Greece?" he asked. He got a routine promotion to general, but could not earn a place in any of Greece's postwar anti-Communist Cabinets; he did so poorly in the 1947-50 anti-Communist war that Field Marshal Alexander Papagos relieved him of his command. General Katsotas brooded revenge.

This year, when time came around for Greece's municipal elections, General Katsotas got his chance. The Communists, discredited by the guerrilla war, could get back only by concealing themselves inside a popular front. They offered their support to General Katsotas if he would run for mayor of Athens. He was willing. Throughout the campaign the general insisted that he was no Red puppet. Last week, with General Katsotas at the head of the ticket, the popular front swept Athens. The popular front's non-Communists had to shout to make their victory orations heard. From batteries of Iron Curtain radios, the Communists started clamoring for national elections in response to "the demands of the masses," to get rid of Premier Papagos and steer Greece on to a neutralist foreign policy. At week's end Papagos decided that the revenge of General Katsotas had gone far enough: the new mayor of Athens, a Papagos spokesman sternly warned, would not be tolerated if his office became "a bailiwick for political action and intrigue."

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