Trafficking in Death

Ever since the civil war broke out in Lebanon 18 months ago, Athens has taken over much of devastated Beirut's former role as the center of commerce and trade in the eastern Mediterranean. Now, as TIME'S Dean Brelis has learned, Athens is also substituting for Beirut as a center for a grimmer international enterprise--gunrunning. His report:

They come by truck from all over Europe. Some arrive concealed in frozen sheep carcasses from Belgium. Others come hidden under the fenders of shiny new cars from West Germany. Still others arrive concealed within the false bottoms of crates filled with alarm clocks from Czechoslovakia. The hidden cargo is always the same: pistols, submachine guns, mortars and sometimes even rocket launchers. According to one estimate, one out of every ten trucks entering Greece carries contraband weapons. Says Greece's Maritime Minister Alexandras Papadogonas: "The Greek seas are simply a corridor for the vast trade in arms that is now going on in the eastern Mediterranean." In all, at least 10,000 illegal weapons have been confiscated by Greek authorities since the beginning of this year. "A mere dribble," sniffs one Western intelligence analyst, who estimates that the number of weapons flowing illegally through Greek ports can run as high as tens of thousands each month.

Free Ports. Driven from Lebanon by civil war, gunrunners are finding Greece's system of free ports ideal for their purposes. For example, goods delivered to the free ports of Salonika or Piraeus for transshipment are placed in sealed warehouses and are not liable to inspection. Some shipments intended for the Palestinians in Lebanon originate in Arab countries. Packed in cases that often identify the contents as fish or an equally harmless commodity, the weapons are shipped in roundabout ways, like from Benghazi to Hamburg to Athens, to avoid interception by Israeli patrol boats. Other weapons come from international arms merchants, who routinely sell to the highest bidder. A third major source is Eastern Europe, which acts as arms supplier to Soviet-backed parties in the Middle East. The recipients represent a who's who of revolutionary militant movements, starting with the P.L.O. and the Eritrean Liberation Front, dissident groups in the Gulf states, SWAPO and other smaller black African nationalist movements, and rebels in Pakistan's Baluchistan. The traffic reaches as far as Thailand and Burma. Its customers are not exclusively radical: some of the biggest and most lucrative orders have come from the embattled whites of Rhodesia.

Small Arsenal. The first sign that Greece had become a channel for the gunrunners came earlier this year, when a small arsenal was discovered in the home of a promonarchist deputy of the New Democracy Party named Hippocrates Savvouras. Savvouras, who admitted that the illegal arms were his (Greece has a strict antigun law), was kicked out of his party. Two prominent members of militant Socialist Andreas Papandreou's Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) were also caught in possession of five Kalashnikovs and a rocket launcher. Both were tried and received suspended sentences.

Because of the increased tempo of gunrunning, Greece has been inundated with intelligence agents descending on Athens and Salonika from Western Europe, the Soviet Union, Israel and the Arab world. The influx has made some odd bedfellows: agents who normally operate against each other, like Syrians and Israelis, now sometimes find themselves working together so that they can pinpoint a shipload of arms destined for the Palestinian-controlled ports of Sidon and Tripoli in Lebanon. Result: a high percentage of these gunrunning ships have been intercepted by the Israelis.

The arms traffic has brought unexpected financial benefits to the prostitutes of the port of Piraeus, whose lifestyle was celebrated in the movie Never on Sunday. In a desperate scramble for information, foreign intelligence agents are handing out large sums to the women in return for tidbits of gossip that customers may have disclosed about the gunrunning trade. "Business is very good these days," reflected one wharfside prostitute, "and it's easy. A lot of Johns are paying very well--just for talking."

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