The Monk Seal Conspiracy
13. The Top-Secret Report
On 25 February 1980 we drove down to Brindisi, and the following evening boarded the Espresso Livorno, an Italian car-ferry bound for Patras. As we walked up from the car deck, we dutifully lined up with all the other passengers who were handing in their passports to be checked by a Greek immigration official. Slowly the long queue diminished and I found myself before a makeshift little desk and an officious pair of eyes dulled with boredom. But as I handed over my passport and the official thumbed through its grubby, ink-stained pages filled with Greek stamps, he looked at me piercingly and said, with a mordant and cryptic edge to his voice, ‘I see you’ve been to Greece many times before, Mr Johnson…’
At about 10 p.m. just before the ship was about to sail, I was summoned to the purser’s office where the anonymous bureaucrat informed me that my entry to Greece had been refused. Since it was now too late for me to disembark, I would have to leave the ship in Corfu and return to Brindisi with the next ferry. I produced my credentials from the Ministry of Co-ordination which the official seemed to read with bewilderment. Apparently the bureaucrat was human after all; he gave a sigh of regret and a little cough of embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry,’ he declared at last, as he returned the ministry’s letter to me, ‘but the order I have comes from a higher authority.’
Fuming, we went up to the radio room and placed a call to Penny Marinos in Athens. But from the relay station in Corfu there came a nonchalant and jovial voice over the line, saying, ‘Sorry, we’re on strike.’
By 8 a.m. the following morning we had arrived in Corfu, but because our car was at the rear of the car deck, obstructed by other vehicles, we were told that we would be unable to disembark. At 9.30, sailing on for Igoumenitsa, I placed a call to Elias Kainadas at the NCPPE via a relay station in Bari, but the atmospheric static was so dense that we could hardly hear each other. Shouting at the top of my voice I finally managed to make him understand that YPEA had blocked my arrival. He then scurried off to inform Yeroulanos. By five o’clock that afternoon we had docked in Patras. As I was not permitted to leave the vessel, Rita disembarked, went through customs formalities and then rushed to the nearest telephone. Through the intervention of Yeroulanos earlier in the day, we learned that YPEA was indeed responsible for prohibiting my entry to Greece. This time, however, the situation was ‘extremely serious’, and we were advised to call the NCPPE again as soon as we had returned to Italy.
By five o’clock on 28 February we were back in Brindisi again, exhausted but still furious. At seven that evening Rita called Mr Yeroulanos’s private secretary, Harris Maroudis. It now transpired that I had been barred entry to Greece because my presence was deemed to constitute an ‘unacceptable risk to national security’. Apparently a top-secret report had been compiled against me and my alleged activities, and naturally its contents could not be divulged. However, an abstract of the report would be delivered to the permanent secretary the following morning, so that he too could browse through it at his convenience. Mrs Maroudis then continued, in a soothing and consoling voice, ‘But they have nothing against you, Miss Emch. You must realize that you can never know what people are really like. After all, Greek police is not stupid… Ti la kanoumay?’
The following day I called Yeroulanos who seemed subdued and even frightened, his voice cold and distant. Whatever was in the report, he clearly believed it or for the sake of his own career had no choice but to accept it. He curtly informed me that he could do nothing more to resolve the crisis, which he emphasized several times was ‘extremely grave’. I asked him what charges had been levelled against me, adding that I was quite willing to answer them all in a court of law if necessary, but to this he merely replied that he was ‘not at liberty to divulge the contents’ of the YPEA report since it was ‘top secret’.
As a result of this apparently hopeless situation, we informed IUCN/WWF and also sent telexes and letters to the Ministers of Co-ordination and Defence, to Prime Minister Karamanlis and President Tsatsos. In these we proposed a compromise solution whereby an official from the government would join the project, and at the same time monitor its activities. IUCN and WWF were horror-stricken that we could have done such a thing, evidently because it made mincemeat of sacred protocol. But we were convinced that only concerted international action could now save the project, and a short, sharp shock was necessary to overcome the YPEA conspiracy. Instead of supporting our pleas to the Greek government, IUCN and WWF were aghast at our insolence. It sent them scurrying into an emergency ‘damage control assessment’ in order to protect the hallowed image of the ‘world’s most influential conservation organization’. But the telexes and letters did have their effect, and might even have broken through the stalemate had they had the unequivocal support of our headquarters. This was borne out after we received a telegram from the president of Greece on 14 March, to the effect that ‘the competent authorities’ were now reviewing the matter.
Rather cynically, we wondered who these competent authorities might be, since we had been searching in vain for them throughout the previous year. But on the same day, Seitani was hurriedly declared ‘strictly protected’ by the NCPPE, and a few days later we were told by the agency’s legal adviser that, after appeals to YPEA, I was now permitted to return to Greece though not to the eastern border areas. This effectively prohibited me from visiting the monk seal’s most important habitat, a restriction that was to become especially significant over the next few months. After careful consideration, we rejected the offer, believing that our acceptance might appear to condone YPEA’s ludicrous ‘top-secret’ report. Naively, we still hoped that further pressure would rescind the restrictions entirely, but IUCN/WWF, like endangered ostriches, were still burying their heads in the sand as though waiting for the danger to pass.
In the meantime, some of the less serious allegations found in the report were revealed by the grapevine. Apparently I had been ‘brainwashing people to buy posters’, and, if this wasn’t absurd enough, I was also accused of ‘walking on Samos barefoot" and, on one occasion, of presenting myself before Clemenceau Phillipakis, the nomarchis of Samos, without shoes. I admit it. The incident in question took place in the summer of 1979 when, instead of driving by car to Vathi, we had taken the Zodiac and I had inadvertently forgotten to stow away my shoes. Since the interview with the prefect had been important for the Seitani seals, I had concluded that Mr Phillipakis would be broadminded enough to forgive this lapse in propriety. As for the more horrendous charges, they remained highly classified, top-secret information, though rumour had it that I had been in collusion with Ronald, Turkey and the CIA over the International Marine Parks affair.
On 16 March, our compromise solution was rejected by the director of the Intelligence Service for National Defence, General Kritikos. Evidently there was now little hope that the project could survive. But even so, at the beginning of April, Rita returned to Samos in a last-ditch effort to keep the project alive in the eastern Aegean. Neither the chief of police nor YPEA had expected her to return to the island. No doubt they assumed that they had succeeded in decapitating the project, and in their rather backward chauvinism, had not expected a woman, alone, to attempt to revive it. But it was IUCN and WWF who had blandly encouraged her to return to Samos while they themselves dithered, not knowing whether to kill the project, brace themselves for a major scandal, or as a last resort request their jealously guarded ‘top-level contacts’ in Athens to intervene.
In this dangerous vacuum, Rita’s presence on Samos had already infuriated Drumpis. She was under continuous surveillance by YPEA agents, her telephone calls were being tapped and even her mail intercepted. Letters would arrive that had been torn open and then crudely resealed with tape. YPEA-inspired rumours were now buzzing through the villages, eroding what little we had managed to achieve the previous year. Apparently the old Greenpeace Aegean Sea offices in Kokkari and Ayios Konstantinos had been nothing more than a front for a spy ring, and only the gallant and ever watchful police force had managed to prevent a major betrayal of Greek military secrets to the Turks. The prohibition of my entry to Greece and IUCN/WWF’s embarrassed silence also lent weight to the rumours, and without the backing of our organization we were powerless to stop them. I tried to convey this to IUCN/WWF on numerous occasions but to no avail. They were still paralysed with the fear of scandal, and in their pitiful inertia seemed to condone the actions of the police and the military intelligence agencies.
By 2 April it became obvious that IUCN and WWF were finally moving to protect their own image in the affair by denying any knowledge of the project’s difficulties with YPEA. I was to become their scapegoat – and if I had been consulted in this and assured that the organization would continue the work we had started, I would have gladly accepted the situation. But as things stood, it was soon to become a betrayal of staggering proportions – where the ultimate victim would be the monk seal. On 2 April 1980 Pierre Portas, IUCN/WWF project manager, wrote to me saying: ‘With regard to your aborted mission to Greece, circumstances suggest that you are unable to carry out your part of the project in Greece as originally planned, owing to personal difficulties…’ The letter also went on to prohibit me from using the IUCN/WWF letterhead, ostensibly because they wished to examine my future involvement in the project. I realized at once that this was another ploy, a well-known dumping procedure stretching over several months so as to dissipate the anger of the whipping-boy and to confine any possible scandal to manageable levels.
I quietly decided to comply with the restriction, but in the absence of any intelligible response or commitment to the seals of Samos and the eastern Aegean, I was determined that something had to be done to awaken the organization from its slumbers and self-delusion.
A few weeks later, Rita and I decided that it was time to release information to the press. We advised IUCN/WWF of our intentions and the following day a telegram of protest arrived from Pierre Portas: ‘There are other ways to deal with the matter. We are in the process of taking the necessary measures.’ The telegram invited me to Gland to discuss what sounded like a new IUCN/WWF initiative.
I was both intrigued and sceptical regarding the organization’s intentions. After consulting Rita, who was still endeavouring to breathe life into the carcass of the project on Samos, we decided to go ahead with our press release, reasoning that now, after all else had failed, only public pressure could save the monk seal.
The following day, 29 April, I travelled to Gland and IUCN/WWF’s new $2 million headquarters. A quickly assembled reception committee of about ten IUCN/WWF officers ushered me into a conference room and urgently began to ask whether Rita Emch was facing danger by being on Samos. I replied that without the organization’s full support it was a distinct possibility. At first I did not quite understand their sudden anxiety and their barely concealed contempt for the articles that had appeared in several newspapers that day. I was then told that on that very morning IUCN/WWF had received a surprise visit from a Mr Danellis of the Permanent Greek Mission to the United Nations in Geneva. According to those who were present at the meeting with Danellis, IUCN/WWF was warned that if I persisted in publishing information embarrassing to the Greek government, IUCN/WWF would also appear to be implicated, with possibly damaging repercussions for their other conservation objectives in Greece. It was hardly the most subtle form of blackmail but, perhaps rather predictably, IUCN/WWF quickly decided upon their policy line, preferring, as they said to me, ‘to give Mr Drumpis the benefit of the doubt’.
I was told that Mr Danellis had informed the organizations that I had been refused entry to Greece because of my ‘lifestyle’, and that the police had accused me of ‘brainwashing people to buy posters’ and ‘walking on Samos barefoot’. I was also accused of ‘conducting research without a permit’, even though we had never been asked to apply for one, and, most incredibly, that I did not keep the police constantly informed of my whereabouts. Despite the absurdity of these allegations, IUCN/WWF decided to accept them in full. It was obviously convenient for them to declare that the project had been sabotaged by my ‘lifestyle’. They expediently ignored their own evidence of the YPEA harassment campaign, the fact that I was now only barred from the eastern Aegean, and the obvious conclusions to be drawn from this: if my lifestyle was supposedly so horrendous that it had to be contained in a top-secret report, it was certainly strange that it was only considered shocking in Turkish border areas. When confronted with this, one officer, Richard Herring, who was in charge of ‘damage control’, grudgingly admitted that national security concerns had also been discussed with Danellis but told me, ‘We felt unable to state categorically that you were not a spy.’
For the sake of public relations, the involvement of YPEA had been conveniently forgotten. Ignored too, was Professor Ronald’s own confidential report to the organization which I only managed to obtain by stealth in 1987: ‘It is again necessary to note that the police in Greece are still not responsible to the local government, and are indeed responsible, as far as I can ascertain, to themselves… After considerable investigation it was found that the chief of police in Samos believed that the Greenpeace group were spies… This meant the total collapse of the Greenpeace-Aegean programme and I, Johnson and Emch were not ready to accept such a collapse.’ Also ignored was a confidential internal memo dated 6 March 1980, recording a telephone call from IUCN headquarters to the permanent secretary of the NCPPE in Athens: ‘Yeroulanos indicated that William Johnson was definitely persona non grata on Samos for a number of reasons. He mentioned that he could not himself say if these reasons were valid or not but they were certainly exacerbated by the fact that Samos is in a border and very sensitive region.’ Furthermore, the memo went on to say: ‘Mr Yeroulanos wishes us to keep details confidential.’ And indeed, honouring YPEA’s top-secret report, those details would never be divulged.
Yet it did not seem entirely plausible that damage control alone could have induced IUCN/WWF to ‘give Mr Drumpis the benefit of the doubt’. Neither gullibility nor the effects of a sudden state of shock could entirely explain their obvious fears. Did they perhaps mask other more urgent concerns which, like YPEA’s allegations against me, had to be concealed in the organization’s own secret files? Why did they suddenly ask me about Rita’s safety on Samos unless perhaps Danellis had alluded to YPEA’s unpredictable reactions? And why were those officials who attended the Danellis meeting so reticent regarding discussions over national security? Was I really supposed to believe that a representative of the Greek Mission to the United Nations had urgently been dispatched to IUCN/WWF headquarters, on the very day of the publication of our press release, simply to discuss my lifestyle? Governments after all come under a barrage of criticism from different quarters almost every hour of the day. Was it likely that the Greek government found this apparently minor affair so irritating that it had to take such extraordinary steps to censor publication? Certainly, I could soon be portrayed as merely a disgruntled former employee of IUCN/WWF, making my story all the more suspect. But it seemed likely to me that Danellis had also discussed other matters with IUCN/WWF, specifically relating to their international monk seal co-ordinator’s plans for marine parks stretching between Greece and Turkey. Priding themselves as Realists, why had IUCN/WWF ever committed themselves to such an ostensibly idealistic and even naive scheme? Were the rumours we had overheard in Athens, linking the plan to the CIA, also discussed? It can hardly have been pure coincidence that several months later a blazing row broke out between Keith Ronald and IUCN/WWF, and that the international co-ordinator was summarily relieved of his duties. Nor can it be wholly coincidental that the organization’s ‘action priority’ aims for the monk seal were suddenly to become buried in the back of their filing cabinets, and that within a year, the monk seal would privately be declared an ‘unsaveable species’.
The ‘necessary measures’ referred to in Portas’s telegram actually amounted to nothing more than dispatching a letter to Marinos Yeroulanos, apologizing and meekly requesting his opinion on how matters should proceed.
On 7 May, Rita met the NCPPE’s legal adviser, Mr Pavlopoulos, who attributed his failure to get the YPEA order lifted to the fact that no official letter requesting such action had been received from IUCN/WWF. Rita telexed this hopeful news to Gland but to no avail. Yet on this very same day, the first official response of IUCN/WWF was forthcoming: letters to His Excellency A. Chorofas of the Permanent Greek Mission to the UN in Geneva, and to Marinos Yeroulanos of the NCPPE. The letter to Chorofas read: ‘Your Excellency, On 28 April we received Mr Danellis of your Mission who wished to discuss with us matters relating to the work of Mr W. Johnson, co-ordinator of the IUCN/WWF Monk Seal project in Greece. We would like to emphasize our regret that actions involving our contractor may have caused embarrassment to the Greek government; we recognize that his further involvement in the project on Samos may no longer be acceptable to the Greek authorities…’
The letter to Yeroulanos was almost identical but also included the following gem: ‘We told Mr Danellis that Mr Johnson has acted in a purely personal capacity in sending telexes and letters to the highest Greek authorities and issuing a press release dated 29 April 1980. These actions were neither advised nor condoned by IUCN/WWF…’ As a limp face-saving gesture, the organization implied that it would like the project to continue under the guidance of Rita Emch, but made no request that support be given to her troubled endeavours on Samos. Both letters were signed by David A. Munro, then director-general of IUCN. Paradoxically, when discussing marine pollution a few weeks later, the same Munro stated to the press: ‘As for the Mediterranean, quite frankly we are a bit frustrated at the slowness of the pace…’ According to their own public relations blurb, the most ‘significant achievement’ of IUCN, the world’s ‘largest alliance of conservation organizations’, was to ‘bring members together to tackle controversial topics, where the views of governments and private associations tend to differ’.
On 15 May I finally relented under the pressure of the project’s volunteers and returned to Greece to help organize our World Environment Day concert at Lycabettus amphitheatre in Athens. But the early June weather was unusually cool and windy with sporadic showers of rain, and in the end, on the night of the concert, the amphitheatre was half empty. After the 18-hour days we had been putting in to arrange and promote the event, it was bitterly disappointing. In a last-ditch effort to sell-off tickets we had even roamed the Athens streets at two or three o’clock in the morning, putting advertisements under car windscreen wipers and dashing into the shadows whenever our lookout spotted a police patrol car. The only consolation was that the concert was broadcast in its entirety over national radio, reaching many homes with its message ‘The Seas Must Live’. Those that did brave the elements came equipped with blankets and winter coats. But even so, the concert, perched high above the glittering lights of Athens on Lycabettus hill, was exhilarating, with the soulful electric guitar of John Martyn and later the orchestra of Yannis Markopoulos, its traditional Greek music echoing out into the night.
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