The Monk Seal Conspiracy

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8. The International Marine Parks

By the beginning of July, Professors Keith Ronald and Fikret Berkes were moving into top gear with their imaginative yet perhaps rather mysterious plan for International Marine Parks. During the following months, like a roving diplomat or a Henry Kissinger, Ronald was to shuttle hectically back and forth between Athens and Ankara, and amidst a flurry of telexes and telegrams, would desperately try to stimulate political cooperation between the two hostile nations.

His-proposals were to meet with unabashed enthusiasm in Turkey but dismal failure in Greece. Whilst the Turkish authorities tentatively approved the sites of the four international parks, the Greek inter-ministerial committee predictably rejected them almost immediately. The Ministry of Defence in Athens was suspicious of Turkish intentions and of Professor Ronald’s high-level discussions with the Turkish Prime Minister, Bulent Ecevit, and his ministers of Foreign Affairs and Defence. Was Turkey interested in using the monk seal as a political pawn in the territorial rights issue, desperate for the oil that lay off its coasts in disputed waters? Certainly, the very notion of International Marine Parks seemed outlandish considering the belligerent political climate and the proud, self-professed policy of Realism reigning at IUCN/WWF headquarters.

On the Greek side, Ronald was virtually snubbed, unable to present his views to anyone higher than the Minister of Agriculture. The NCPPE soundly reasoned that adjacent national parks in both countries could achieve the same objective of protecting seal migration routes, and they were mystified by Ronald’s proposals. According to Penny Marinos, rumours were rife in the Ministry of Co-ordination that the international parks plan was a CIA plot, and this had given extra impetus to the inter-ministerial committee, this time with the unequivocal blessing of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to step up its support of our project on Samos. The Defence ministry, though probably of the opinion that we were in league with Ronald and the CIA, was outnumbered and had once again grudgingly acquiesced, biding its time no doubt while matters developed.

‘Very impressed by your reports,’ Ronald’s telex to us stated on 10 July. ‘Moving towards final plan for IUCN, choosing three major areas for international consideration, probably one in your vicinity but still need more analysis. Plans still slightly hazy but might visit Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Samos, Athens, in early August. In confidence advise best person for co-operative endeavour with Turks, Kainadas or Marinos?’

Two days later, just as our second team of university students and postgraduates were embarking on their research programme on the neighbouring islands of Patmos, Leros and Lipsi, we received another telex from Ronald: ‘Now attempting individual meetings with Turks and Greeks, Istanbul, Ankara, Athens and hopefully day in Samos if I can get there from Turkey. Please advise best method of reaching Samos from Turkey. Placing priority on international parks in the following order: 1) Samos, Fourni, Ikaria, Gulf of Kusadasi. 2) Lesbos, Turkish coast. 3) Kastellorizo, Turkish coast. Therefore your detailed efforts Samos etc. now doubly important.’ Within a few weeks another site was to be added to the list, with the two countries also being linked between the island of Simi and the Datca peninsula.

On 4 August we received yet another telex from the roving diplomat, now in Ankara meeting top government officials including Bulent Ecevit. ‘Allah and Turkish airlines willing,’ Ronald would be making a lightning visit to Samos three days later. ‘Would like to see as much of Samos as possible by plane, car, boat, anything but donkeys – they don’t appreciate my size. Will advise from Istanbul if hold in schedule.’ It did not take us very long to discover the reactions of YPEA when intercepting these curious messages.

6 August: the police refused to renew Rita’s visa. She was to be expelled within three days unless she left Samos of her own accord. On her protesting that this was insufficient time, the head policeman in Ayios Konstantinos replied that if she did not leave by the deadline she would be deported to Turkey, ‘and see how the barbarians treat you.’ We immediately contacted the NCPPE for their assistance, and Marinos Yeroulanos managed to have the deadline extended to one week while negotiations were in progress between the Ministry of Co-ordination and YPEA.

The following day we received heartening news from IUCN/WWF headquarters in Switzerland. The telex stated that the organizations had approved an additional grant of US $8,000 for our project.

8 August: just as Professor Ronald was arriving on Samos, we were informed officially by the NCPPE that the Greek counterintelligence agency YPEA was involved in the recent actions against Rita, and that the situation was serious. She was apparently accused of spying for Turkey. None of us could quite understand why Rita alone had become YPEA’s target, unless they had mistakenly concluded that she was the head of the project and had decided to ‘decapitate’ it. Professor Ronald tried to camouflage his anxiety, but with little success. His dry and humourless jokes were so repetitive that it seemed obvious he was not only trying to console us but also to reassure himself and his own doubts. He quipped that, Rita had become ‘the Mata Hari of Greece’, but his usually relaxed and mordant wit had vanished, and so too had the drawling confidence which rooted his character. He was not the kind of man who could candidly voice and discuss his doubts; he preferred to be alone with them and tackle them with the power of his own intellect. As we ate together that evening, in a small taverna in the hills above Vathi, his concentration would wander back and forth between his pressing inner thoughts and the more superficial banter he chose to conduct around the table. In between, tremors of nervousness pinched his moon-round face. I could see why he had telexed, with his self-effacing humour, that donkeys wouldn’t appreciate his size. He would be tall and massively built even without the flab of over-eating and of exercising only the intellect. I recalled the fond description of him by Mrs Niki Goulandris, owner and director of the Natural History Museum in Athens: ‘Professor Ronald looks so much like a seal!’ Yes, but this was one very worried seal. Jarring through his mind no doubt was how to extricate himself from his own worst fears, a damage-control exercise which would, if need be, allay all suspicions of complicity with the spies of Samos. His reputation would emerge intact, despite the circumstantial evidence of his recent telexes, and the fact that he had just arrived by boat from Kusadasi after top-level government seances in Ankara. He would regain his composure, though he must have sorely regretted those telex messages, interpreted no doubt by YPEA as incriminating evidence, advocating some mysterious linkage between three Greek islands and the Turkish mainland. After all, he must have recalled with bitter regret, none of the telexes had even mentioned the monk seal. The dull and suspicious minds of YPEA might even conclude that they were staging points for an invasion, with Turkey finally making its territorial claims to the oil-rich continental shelf by sheer military might.

Local children and a  fisherman, attending the project’s World Environment Day exhibition on Samos, June 1979.

The following day, we received another telex from IUCN/WWF headquarters, to the effect that their first telex had been ‘unfortunately incorrect’ and that they had approved an additional grant of only US $4,000. Perhaps this was part of Ronald’s damage control; enough to keep us in place for the time being in the event of the crisis being settled, and yet not a large enough amount for us to ‘take the money and run’. It was insulting in the extreme and yet under the prevailing strain of our vulnerability, there was little we could do.

But to our great surprise and relief, on 10 August we were told by the NCPPE that our problems with the intelligence service had been resolved. Rita should report to Samos police headquarters and make ‘an application for re-examination of her application’ for a visa. YPEA had backed down in the crisis, and no longer mentioned Rita Emch as a ‘grave risk to national security’. Instead, they offered the ludicrously feeble explanation that she had been ‘forcing people to buy posters’, and in all seriousness, we were meant to believe that this had been a cause of great concern to the Intelligence Service for National Defence. The Kafkaesque absurdity of this face-saving formula was typical of YPEA. It reflected the agency’s suffocating obsession with secrecy and its unquestionable belief in its own infallibility. These were archetypal traits of the secret police everywhere, but YPEA seemed incapable of manufacturing believable evidence to support its spurious allegations. It did not even seem to cross their minds that the agency had been ridiculed by the affair, and they made no effort to explain how anyone could actually be forced into buying a poster.

I phoned Ronald at his suite in the Grande Bretagne in Athens and he answered with an uncharacteristically cold and wary voice. Perhaps he was bracing himself for the worst, but when I told him the news of YPEA’s backing down, he breathed a sigh of relief and recovered some of his lost charm and amiability. He would raise the matter with Yeroulanos, he said. Such interference couldn’t be allowed to continue.

The following day, he met with government officials, including the permanent secretary of the NCPPE. Records of the meeting, which I did not obtain until much later, are very enlightening since they prove that both IUCN’s international co-ordinator and the Greek government were fully aware of the harassment our project was suffering on Samos. Nothing was mentioned of ‘personal problems’, which was only to come later when both the government and IUCN/WWF disavowed all knowledge of YPEA’s harassment campaign. Moreover, although couched in typically vague and circumspect language, the documents reveal just how deeply involved the Ministry of Co-ordination and IUCN were in their tug of war with YPEA over the monk seal issue. In effect, we had already become little more than unwitting pawns in their struggle with the Ministry of Defence. Only when they realized they had lost the battle did they abandon us, quite content that we should become the scapegoats for the failure of the monk seal project in the eastern Aegean. Records of the meeting state: ‘The major activity which has taken place since the Rhodes conference was the initiation of the Greenpeace programme in co-operation with the Ministry of Co-ordination… The sensitivity of certain areas was considered to be a critical factor. This is already apparent in Samos with the response which Greenpeace-Aegean has received in regard to some of its activities.. There was, however, agreement that the project should be kept on Samos as long as possible… There is a need to expand this programme and support it more fully and ensure it would have continuity rather than being impeded by local pressures…’

Back on Samos, however, YPEA was now embarking on a defamation campaign against the project. Burning the midnight oil, sinister meetings were held in the local police station in Ayios Konstantinos, presided over by Kyrios Drumpis who, on several evenings, had driven to the village from Vathi in his Landrover. The seances had stretched well into the night, and by the look on their faces as we passed by, grave discussions were being conducted. A week later, rumours abounded in certain parts of the village, though our many Greek friends, who brought us the news, refused to believe them – in part because YPEA had once again shown its bizarre notion of what was conceivable and what wasn’t. Apparently the police suspected Greenpeace Aegean Sea of being a front for a spy ring, a drug-smuggling ring and a prostitute ring. We were not sure whether all of these undercover operations were supposed to be practised simultaneously or whether the three policemen of the village all had different ideas when applying their superior’s instructions. But judging from the reaction in the village, the malicious gossip rapidly began to backfire on the three policemen. Elpeda was furious and for several days refused to connect phone calls to or from the police station, screaming raucously down the line that the exchange had again ‘come down with a bad stomach.’

World Environment Day exhibition on Samos, June 1979.

On 18 August I returned to London for consultations with Greenpeace. Rita accompanied me as far as Athens where she was to have further discussions at the university and the NCPPE.

Greenpeace was now in an even greater state of disarray, with Allan Thornton only hanging onto his position by the skin of his teeth. The David McTaggart juggernaut was on the point of taking over the whole of the international Greenpeace movement. Furthermore, although the organization was still unwilling to sink funds into the project, it was eager for us to remain under the Greenpeace banner because of a prestigious association with IUCN. Fed up with such petty wrangling and a litany of empty promises, I decided it was time to break with the organization. By the end of the month we would be working solely for WWF and IUCN. In many ways it was a sad decision, but we had always been unable to convey to any of the groups our project’s attempts to set a precedent for inter-organizational co-operation on a practical level, and how portentous this could have been for a holistic and powerful movement of the future.

On 22 August I received an urgent call from Rita, who was now in Switzerland. Breathlessly, she told me she had just received word from Samos that some of our project volunteers had been involved in an inexplicable car accident. From the first sketchy reports that had reached her, four of the volunteers, including Penny’s friend Galatea, had been driving to Ayios in the early morning to open the Greenpeace office. But on the straight stretch of road on the outskirts of the village, Galatea’s boyfriend Nikos, who was driving, suddenly discovered that the steering had gone. The car then veered violently and uncontrollably to the right, and even though he jammed on the brakes, it all happened too quickly to prevent the car from slamming into a stationary three-wheeler at the side of the road. Both vehicles had then fallen down an embankment and into a field. Mercifully, no one had been killed or seriously injured. They had escaped with only minor scratches and bruises – almost miraculous since the car was now a total write-off. Almost anywhere else on that road, the accident would have been fatal. Rita and I were living above Konstantinos in the mountain village of Ambelos, up a steep and narrow road with hairpin bends. Had the accident been intended for us?

With Rita in Switzerland and myself in England, there was little we could do except speak to the volunteers by phone. Tearfully, Galatea reported that the police had already collected and impounded Rita’s car without even bothering to interview them or let them know. It was as if they were expecting it to happen…

I was preparing to rush back to Samos when a telex arrived from Professor Ronald, suggesting that I visit IUCN/WWF headquarters. ‘By now they have my report,’ it said, ‘and the only problem was the matter of the police… You might also discuss moving in the future to the Ionian islands if you feel there is any sense in getting away from the border islands and their problems of nervousness with the Turks being so close…’ After more phone calls with Galatea, I decided to postpone my return to Samos. As the car had already been impounded and the volunteers had calmed down, I concluded that more could be achieved with a visit to IUCN/WWF. I told Galatea to close down the office and spend some days on the beach until we returned. And so three days later, on 6 September, I visited IUCN/WWF headquarters in Morges, where I discussed the project and the harassment it was experiencing with Dr Hartmut Jungius, a project co-ordinator. Although I avoided mentioning the car accident, since our suspicions at this time would hardly have justified it, I was quite candid about the problems we were facing on Samos, and these were also outlined in Professor Ronald’s confidential report to the organization. Yet despite our predicament with YPEA, IUCN was adamant that we should stay on Samos. They reasoned, quite rightly, that as the eastern Aegean was the habitat of three-quarters of the entire monk seal population, it was here that a network of sanctuaries had to be created. As ours was an ‘action priority’ project, shifting it to the Ionian islands now, after all our promising achievements, was out of the question. Hopefully, said Jungius, international pressure would halt YPEA’s harassment campaign.

On 13 September, Rita and I returned to Greece in a new car which had been kindly donated by her parents. We encountered no problems at the border and were back on Samos two days later.

Arriving in Ayios, I was in a sullen and determined mood and for once, ordered everyone inside the office and closed the doors. We would go through this step by step. Things were getting dangerous and if, by the end of our discussions, anyone wanted to leave the project, they should do so immediately.

Again the volunteers told us about the car accident. They all insisted repeatedly that they hadn’t been driving fast, and by Galatea’s lost and sorrowful expression, and Nikos’s dismay, I believed them implicitly. The car had now ended up at the customs authorities in Vathi, but Rita was never to hear one word from the police about the accident.

Had the car been sabotaged? We had no proof, but the circumstances surrounding the accident had been undeniably suspicious. ‘Was it another puncture?’ Rita demanded, her emphasis on the word conveying all the sinister implications of that incident in July, the garage mechanic in Vathi showing her the piece of electric wire and his now haunting and ominous words of warning, ‘See what they are doing to you.’ But could this have been a puncture? I doubted it. The road on the outskirts of Ayios was unusually smooth and straight, with no potholes. I found it inconceivable that a puncture, or even a completely flat tyre, would have caused the car to swerve so violently. A sudden blow-out of the tyre was feasible, but then the driver and passengers should have heard it go. It was much more likely that the steering had been tampered with. Again and again we racked our brains for the causes of the YPEA campaign against us. Was it only a vendetta by the chief of police who, through loyalties, nepotism and trumped-up allegations, had lured YPEA into strong-arm tactics to chase us out of Samos? But how likely was it that a regional chief of police could hold out almost single-handedly against the Ministries of Co-ordination and Foreign Affairs? If on the other hand the Ministry of Defence was behind it all, and perhaps their own shadowy and infamous intelligence service KYP, then how was it that the weaker ministries could continue in their support for us? Was it perhaps a backstage game of brinkmanship, with both sides unwilling to back down? Or had the Ministry of Defence surreptitiously commissioned YPEA to do their dirty work for them, so that on the interministerial committee, at least, they could feign innocence, washing their hands of the affair? Or was it simply that YPEA was too powerful to control, even for its own minister, a law unto itself, a state within the state? It was impossible to tell. The puzzle was simply missing too many of its pieces, so that every question seemed to harbour a hidden and daunting maze of complications. Furthermore, there was still no conceivable reason why the Ministry of Defence should want us out of the eastern Aegean, barring perhaps some high-level political intrigues which we were unaware of. Even so, our integrity had been vouched for by IUCN and WWF, the Council of Europe and the EEC, not to mention the country’s own high-level interministerial committee. Both YPEA and KYP, monitoring our activities, could determine quite well that we were not engaged in espionage.

Whatever the intentions of the YPEA campaign were, I told our volunteers, our defensiveness and dodging arrest was consuming too much time, diverting our attention away from saving the monk seal. But unable to see the wood for the trees, perhaps this is what YPEA had intended all along.

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