GREECE: Red Sky at Morning

Just before dawn, three grey-hatted gendarmes rapped sharply at the door of a modest Athens villa. Kosta Tsakolos, head of OPLA (Communist execution squad) during the 1944 leftist revolution, opened the door. “Come with us,” ordered a policeman. “I am not coming with you,” said the terrorist chief. “Under Greek law you cannot make an arrest at a home during the hours of darkness.”

“We’ll wait,” said the police. Twenty minutes later they carried off Tsakolos. An hour later he was at Piraeus, headed for exile on an Aegean island.

He was one of 4,000 Greek leftists arrested by the Greek Government on charges of conspiring to set up a Communist state. Biggest catch in the net was 42-year-old Demetrios Partsalides, dapper, white-haired secretary general of the EAM, Communist-controlled leftist coalition. (Partsalides, also arrested a few minutes before dawn, did not quibble about the time of day.)

Swarthy, stocky Napoleon Zervas, soldier of fortune and Greek Minister of Public Order, charged that the Communists had a detailed plot, known by the code name “Plan F,” for sabotage and seizure of Government posts. His predawn raids, said Zervas, had been in the nick of time. The plot had been timed to support Russia at the United Nations; there Russia’s Andrei Gromyko last week opposed the U.S. plan to set up a permanent border commission to watch Greece’s northern frontiers.

Greek leftists accused Zervas and the reactionary Greek Government of inventing the plot as an excuse to jail their opposition. But after the raids, Nicholas Zachariades, top Greek Communist, ended any lingering doubts about Communist intentions. From his hiding place he sent a message to the Communist paper Rizospastis, calling for the “creation in free democratic areas of Greece of a free democratic government.” This week the Greek Government announced that forces had crossed the border from Albania to join guerrillas fighting the Greek Army in northern Greece. Moreover, the Government claimed, a leftist international brigade including men recruited from all over Europe was gathering in Albania. While the U.S. Congress delayed in voting the aid to Greece which President Truman had called for three months ago, Communists were acting to split Greece, bring the northern part within the Iron Curtain.