Greece: The Besieged King

In Athens, the birthplace of democracy and often the site of its suffering, the floodlit Acropolis looked down upon a peaceful city preparing to retire for the night. Late diners strolled through the Plaka district of restaurants and tavernas, and traffic thinned to a trickle in the city's center. Then, only moments after midnight, moving so fast that it all seemed over in minutes, shadowy figures in battle dress began to appear everywhere. From barracks in Athens and all over Greece, troops slipped quietly out and took up battle stations in every key town, at every major intersection, at every railroad station, airport and radio transmitter. From the lovely plains of Lakonia to the forbidding hills of Macedonia, Greece quickly found itself last week under the grip of a new master: the army.

All radio stations faded off the air. Then the armed forces station broke the silence to announce a curt and chilling bulletin: in the name of the King, the army had seized power. Tanks and armored personnel carriers stood at every intersection, five of them with pointed barrels taking up posts outside Parliament. Greece's borders were closed, and its communications with the outside world stopped. No planes could land or take off, and arriving ships were turned away from ports. Suddenly, a land of 8,550,000 people, roughly the size of the state of New York, found itself totally cut off from the rest of a puzzled world, in the first military takeover in Free Europe since the 1930s.

Barricade. In Athens' Kolonaki district, three soldiers and a captain called at 2 a.m. upon Premier Panayotis Kanellopoulos, who had heard of trouble and barricaded his door. The officer explained that they had come to protect him. "I need no protection," cried Kanellopoulos. "I am the Premier of Greece." The soldiers broke down the door. "Why don't you kill me here?" the Premier asked. The soldiers hustled him swiftly into an army truck and drove him off to a detention center.

In his suburban home at Kastri, a political foe of Kanellopoulos, former Premier George Papandreou, was dragged out of bed and marched off without even being given time to put on his shoes; he had to carry them along. His leftist son Andreas, sleeping some miles away, was a particular target of the military; they sent eight soldiers and a captain to fetch him. They overpowered his bodyguard, smashed a glass door while breaking into the house and dragged Andreas off in his underpants, his feet bleeding from the glass.

The scene was much the same all over Athens. By 3 a.m., practically all of Greece's leading politicians, of almost every persuasion and leaning, had been rounded up and herded into detention centers in downtown Athens. The military suspended key clauses of the constitution, banned strikes and all public gatherings, imposed censorship on the press, closed schools, banks and stores, did away with the need for search warrants and set up special military courts to try violators. Troops patrolled the streets with orders to shoot anyone who broke the dusk-to-dawn curfew. The seizure was such a model of military precision that no one had time to organize a protest. Despite some rumors of shooting in Athens and Salonica, the coup was virtually bloodless.