Characters with courage and conviction always win our admiration, whether in books or film or real life. By the nature of their jobs, soldiers and spies must tap into both, increasing their chances of being regarded as heroes. Brady Kiesling looks at how this translates into fact and fiction.

Falconera
Children are hungry for heroes to model themselves after. I grew up with The Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien’s heroes were compelling, but they were also imaginary. If we trust St. Anselm’s logic regarding the existence of God, then a hero who exists is certainly better than one who doesn’t.

My first real-life heroes were Greek. Mary Renault’s The Lion in the Gateway was a fine retelling of Herodotus’ account of Leonidas and the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae (I secretly preferred the 700 Thespians, less gifted at self-promotion). But the second world war was for my generation a primary source of heroes. As in Tolkien, good and evil were clearly defined. A whole generation of young men took unimaginable risks in a good cause.

Alexis Ladas turns out to have been one of those heroes. The son of an Athenian stockbroker, he attended Athens College, an institution that still encouraged in its students the self-sacrificial civic virtue thought appropriate to gentlemen. Captured when Greece fell to the Germans in 1941, Ladas escaped to join the Anglo-Hellenic Schooner Flotilla (Angloellinikos Stoliskos Imiolion) based in Alexandria.

This ragtag fleet of confiscated wooden schooners, souped up with salvaged tank engines, antiaircraft cannon, and camouflage nettings, was founded by a Hellenic Navy commander named Andreas Lontos. His Greek sailors, disguised as civilians and thus sure of being shot if captured, worked alongside British commandos of the Special Boat Section in reconnaissance, commerce raiding, and commando attacks against the German occupying forces in the Aegean. Their attacks, though pinpricks in the grand scheme, helped convince the Germans to divert resources to repel an imaginary Allied invasion.

Though heroes by any reasonable standard, Ladas and his colleagues knew themselves too well to feel comfortable making such a claim. Loyal to a tradition of understatement, Ladas couched his experiences as a novel, now published posthumously as Falconera. This is the tale of Philip and Michael, two young Greek officers aboard a raiding schooner in May 1944. The narrative is dramatic indeed–close encounters with German planes and warships, wiping out a German observation post on the tiny (but quite real) island of Falconera, picking up the beautiful agent Marina (inconveniently, the pre-war beloved of both officers), and then navigating a minefield to ambush a German supply convoy bound for Crete.

Heroic courage does not, of course, guarantee a great novel. I began Falconera, with misgivings. Ladas’s English, though a product of Athens College, the British fleet, the United Nations mission in Palestine, and years in New York, sounds wordy and didactic when he grafts naval jargon onto a Greek storytelling style. But the deeper I read, the more I forgave Ladas’s unnaturally precise diction.

For me the test of a historical novel is the characters’ fidelity to time and known circumstance. When I pursued fleeting references Ladas tossed out, such as “the fantastic, homicidal Viking...who eliminated the whole two-hundred man German garrison of Amorgos a couple of months ago,” I was delighted but not surprised to learn on the internet of the exploits of Danish seaman and posthumous winner of the Victoria Cross Anders Lassen. Though events are compressed and redistributed for literary purposes, it is clear that Ladas’s depiction of an unknown naval war is utterly true.

A Reluctant Spy
The CIA case officers I met as a diplomat were good at telling stories that cast them in a heroic light. Intelligence analyst John Kiriakou yearned to be able to tell such tales himself. After he quit the CIA in 2007, he wrote A Reluctant Spy about his experiences pursuing terrorists in Greece and Pakistan. This book is generally well-intentioned, particularly Kiriakou’s worthy conclusion that the United States government should not engage in torture.

Kiriakou arrived in Athens in 1999 to try his hand as an operations officer pursuing Middle Eastern terrorists and the Greek group 17 November (17N). 17N’s exploits–23 murders, beginning with the CIA station chief in 1975, daring thefts, a rocket attack on the U.S. Embassy–were chilling. Kiriakou had good qualifications for chasing 17N. He knew the case files, spoke Greek, and yearned to make a heroic showing in his ancestral land. Indeed, I finished The Reluctant Spy convinced Kiriakou was living out a childhood dream to emulate the heroism of Alekos Panagoulis, who tried to kill Greek dictator Papadopoulos in 1968.

Unfortunately, the basis for heroic police work, including catching terrorists, is respect for dreary, unheroic facts. I became alarmed when Kiriakou explained his visit to Panagoulis’s grave, giving his hero the wrong profession, wrong year, wrong jail history, wrong political party, wrong death. I became annoyed, however, when Kiriakou misreported 17N’s most dramatic operations, always with the result of making Greek authorities sound more incompetent than they actually were. 17N did not tie up any guards when it stole 113 bazooka rounds from the undermanned Sepolia arsenal. It liberated from the Athens War Museum two semi-functional bazookas, not a whole working arsenal. Successful intelligence partnership is based on mutual respect, and distortions of this kind are a bad omen.

Kiriakou’s one claim with historical interest is an elsewhere unrecorded CIA contribution to catching 17N.

With [former Warsaw Pact general] Radomir’s invaluable help, we were able to identify the link between Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the infamous Venezuelanborn terrorist also known as Carlos the Jackal, and 17 November. The link was a fairly prominent Greek businessman who was important in PASOK and also had an office in [Radomir’s] country...we worked with his country in a joint operation to bring down this Greek conduit between 17 November and Carlos the Jackal, who had assisted the terrorist group in securing arms and gathering intelligence. (p. 64)

I am sceptical. Around 1990 the CIA gained access to East German intelligence files that documented Carlos’s cooperation in the early 1980s with another organization, 17N’s rival, called ELA. Carlos was arrested in 1994, five years before Kiriakou arrived. No such link with 17N emerged when 17N was put on trial in 2003. If Kiriakou intervened as described, then the CIA covered up a key investigative pathway. More likely, Kiriakou conflated ELA, defunct since 1995, with the sexier 17N.

Kiriakou writes that the reason for his abrupt departure from Greece in August 2000 was the discovery that 17N had been stalking him. He describes driving past the blood-stained car of British defence attaché Stephen Saunders the morning of June 8, 2000. He paraphrases 17N’s proclamation taking credit for that murder: “We saw the big spy, but he was in an armoured car and we knew that he was armed. So we elected to carry out the sentence on the war criminal Saunders.”

But 17N’s sentence actually reads: “The moment of the operation, bottled up at the traffic light immediately in front, was an American armed megaspy of the CIA, while about 100 meters back was [shipowner] Vardinogiannis with his armed escort.” (Eleftherotypia, 13 Dec 2000). 17N was not lamenting its inability to kill Kiriakou but boasting about its operational awareness. And Kiriakou could not have been the mega-spy 17N spotted because he was driving far behind Saunders. Worse, 17N wrote that sentence four months after Kiriakou left Greece, in a follow-up proclamation the CIA (like everyone else) first read on December 13, 2000.

Kiriakou indulged in a fantasy adventure roleplaying game in which he and the terrorists were in each others’ gun sights. In Kiriakou’s case, blurring the difference between fact and fiction was relatively harmless. He nobly admits in his book to apologizing to the drivers of the cars he rear-ended while watching for 17N in his rear-view mirror. But not all boasting is harmless.

Charlie Wilson’s War
Kiriakou wrote that his “mentor–almost a second father–” was the late Gust Avrakotos, a foulmouthed Greek American Cold Warrior. Author George Crile immortalized Avrakotos in Charlie Wilson’s War, portraying him as a key figure in the CIA’s secret war in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s. Avrakotos learned his trade as a first-tour case officer in the Athens CIA station in the 1960s.

Crile records uncritically Avrakotos’s version of his role during the 1967-74 Greek military dictatorship:

For the next seven years, the colonels insisted on dealing with Avrakotos as their principal American contact…He was, for all practical purposes, an invisible member of the ruling junta…Avrakotos tells of driving up to the Athens Hilton, where he lunched every day. The doorman saluted the CIA man and took his keys just as one of the colonels came up to meet him for lunch. “How come they let you park your car here?” the colonel emanded. “They won’t even let me do that.” “Well, I don’t know what you do, but I run the country,” Avrakotos growled, and his buddy laughed with delight.

But this is a libel against the United States. After the Colonels’ coup caught the CIA flat-footed in 1967, the U.S. mission struggled to manage a politically very problematic relationship with the prickly nationalist dictator Papadopoulos. Cold War realpolitik was at war with U.S. domestic politics. No ambassador or station chief would trust sensitive messages to a junior CIA case officer busy whoring with his Greek colleagues.

Following 17N’s murder of his boss, station chief Richard Welch, in 1975, Avrakotos claimed he “wanted to go out and hit thirty-five or forty of the 17 November people. We had a list, and I didn’t care if we hit some of the wrong ones. So what?...But I was ordered down.” This is hogwash. The CIA and Greek services had almost no idea who was behind 17N, which never numbered more than eighteen members. The Junta had never used death squads, and the restored democracy could not either. Equally a fantasy was the deadly cat-and-mouse game Avrakotos told Crile he played with 17N terrorists after his name and address were published in a (non-existent) communist newspaper. Anti, the actual publisher of inaccurate lists of American “spies”, missed him completely. Criles offers us a comic book version of U.S.-Greek history. It would be risky to assume his book is more accurate on events elsewhere.

For Alexis Ladas’s two young surrogates, the most damning epithet available was “ungentlemanly”. Both Greece and the United States now reject the elitism that word implies. And yet, heroism modestly disguised as fiction is a gentlemanly solution to the age-old problem faced by historians of terrorism or espionage, that “those that know don’t talk, and those that talk don’t know.” Scrupulous historical novels like the Falconera of Alexis Ladas are a safer guide to history than the memoirs of most of history’s frustrated makers.