Best Books on the Greek Military Junta and the Cold War Paradox

On April 21, 1967, a group of Greek colonels staged a coup. Within hours, tanks surrounded parliament, senior politicians were arrested, and a military junta declared martial law. The coup came just weeks before a scheduled election that polls suggested would be won by centrist politician Georgios Papandreou. The colonels, and their backers in Washington, found this prospect unacceptable. What followed was seven years of military dictatorship in a NATO member state, a country that had spent the postwar years held up as a symbol of Western democracy's victory over communist insurgency. Thousands of Greeks were arrested, tortured, and exiled. The junta censored newspapers, banned political parties, and supervised a secret police apparatus that made use of techniques taught, in some cases, by CIA advisers. This history sits uncomfortably alongside official Western narratives of the Cold War as a struggle between freedom and tyranny. ## Greece's Postwar Trajectory The context matters. Greece had fought a brutal civil war from 1946 to 1949, with the British and then Americans backing the royalist government against a communist-led insurgency. The communists lost, but the political culture that emerged from the civil war was deeply polarized and deeply suspicious. The Greek left was suppressed, monitored, and excluded from government employment through much of the 1950s. By the 1960s, centrist and left forces were reasserting themselves politically. Georgios Papandreou's Center Union won the 1964 election by a large margin. A constitutional crisis with the young King Constantine II led to his dismissal in 1965, setting off two years of political instability that the colonels used as justification for their intervention. The CIA's relationship with the Greek military establishment went back decades. American officials were alarmed by any Greek political shift that might threaten NATO cohesion or base access. Whether the CIA directly organized the 1967 coup remains disputed, though key American officials, including the CIA station chief in Athens, knew about preparations in advance and did nothing to stop it. ## Three Books That Examine the Junta Richard Clogg's **A Concise History of Greece** is not specifically about the junta but provides the best single-volume context for understanding modern Greek politics. Clogg, a British historian, covers the civil war, the postwar period, and the junta years with precision and without the nationalist distortions that affect some Greek accounts. The section on the 1967-74 period makes clear how the junta's collapse, triggered by its catastrophic mishandling of Cyprus, shaped contemporary Greek democracy. James Miller's **The United States and the Making of Modern Greece: History and Power, 1950-1974** deals directly with American policy. Miller worked through State Department and CIA archives and produced an account of how Washington managed Greek politics across three decades, supporting the monarchy when useful, tolerating the junta when strategically convenient, and rarely showing much concern for what ordinary Greeks wanted. The book is careful and well-sourced, and it explains the Cold War logic, however cynical, that drove American behavior. Nikos Alivizatos' work on the Greek constitutional order, particularly his contributions to edited volumes on southern European democratization, provides the legal and institutional dimension. The junta suspended the constitution, ruled by decree, and created a parallel security apparatus outside any legal framework. Understanding how Greek democracy was reconstructed after 1974, rapidly and with considerable success, requires understanding what the junta dismantled. ## The Torture Question The junta's use of torture against political prisoners was documented extensively and in real time. Amnesty International sent a mission to Greece in 1967 and published a detailed report on systematic torture in detention facilities, including the use of electric shock, beatings on the soles of the feet (falanga), and prolonged stress positions. The Greek military police used these techniques on lawyers, academics, trade unionists, and student activists. Greece was expelled from the Council of Europe in 1969 after a European Commission of Human Rights investigation found state responsibility for torture. It was the first, and for many years the only, such expulsion. The United States continued to supply military aid throughout. The Nixon administration, particularly under Henry Kissinger, was explicitly pragmatic about this: the junta was anti-communist, it controlled NATO airbases, and human rights were a secondary concern. Kissinger reportedly said, upon hearing of the junta's collapse, that it was "too bad" the colonels had failed. ## The Cyprus Disaster The junta ended because of its own overreach. In July 1974, the Athens government backed a coup in Cyprus aimed at uniting the island with Greece. Turkey invaded, citing its rights as a guarantor power under the 1960 Cyprus constitution, and occupied the northern third of the island, where Turkish Cypriots lived alongside Greek Cypriots. The military catastrophe destroyed the junta's authority overnight. Senior officers handed power back to civilian politicians, and Konstantinos Karamanlis returned from exile in Paris to oversee the transition to democracy. Greece joined the European Community in 1981. The Cyprus division remains unresolved. The Turkish-occupied north declared independence in 1983, recognized only by Turkey. The 1974 crisis, triggered by the junta's adventure, produced a frozen conflict that still shapes Greek-Turkish relations today. --- ## Further reading Browse more books on [Cold War Europe and the politics of democracy](/category/cold-war-history).