GREECE: Mystery of Kopra

Two Greek generals and Greek Senator Gheka trudged with some embarrassment into the mountain village of Kopra last week, morosely hired a wagon, rattled off to the nearest railway that would take them to Athens.

At about the same time a clerk in the Ministry of Finance entered the round sum of two million drachmas ($26,000) in his ledger under the heading Secret Government: Expenditures. News organs throughout Greece were warned by the official censor to publish no account of the affair. Friends of Senator Gheka found him uncommunicative.

Few days later a cavalcade of jovial Greek bandits rode over the mountainous divide into Albania, foregathered in the cellar of the leading Greek restaurant in the Albanian capital of Tirana. There the bandit leader, one Constantine Bogdanopoulos, ordered Italian champagne and lamb kidneys broiled on skewers, flung on the table a money belt from which spilled many a drachma, and, later in the evening, boastfully unmasked to a pop-eyed Albanian journalist the mystery of Kopra.

“Most of the two million drachmas of course we hid in the mountains!” said Bandit Bogdanopoulos, winking shrewdly and wiping kidney grease from his sweeping yellow mustachios. “We asked the Greek Government for it and they gave it to us-just like that! It was an excursion. On this excursion was Senator Gheka and the two Generals, big stuck-up fellows. We held them for ransom, and we wrote to the Government: ‘Pay us two million drachmas or we send you your generals’ noses and your senator’s ears!”