Treason Trial

Seven officers of the Greek army strode into a dingy courtroom in Athens one day last week and took seats near a dirty brown wall under a painting of the Sacred Heart. With the clang of a big brass bell, a colonel called the court martial to order. In the front row, 29 defendants (seven of them women) smirked, joked, smiled at friends or relatives in the crowd. Despite their elaborate show of unconcern, the 29 were on trial for their lives. It was the biggest treason trial in any Western nation since the cold war began, and the first attempt to document what the world has long known: that local Communists are financed and directed from abroad.

Armed with sheaves of evidence and backed by 52 witnesses, the prosecutor began unfolding an imposing story of Communist espionage and intrigue. It began more than 2 1/2 years ago, after the U.S.-bolstered Greek army had crushed the Communist guerrilla revolt. Greek intelligence officers began picking up coded radio conversations between a station near Bucharest, in Communist Rumania, and clandestine stations near Athens. For more than a year they tried without success to track down the source, meanwhile collecting scores of messages in a code they could not decipher.

Smoke from a Crypt. Finally, with radio direction-finder cars, Greek army and police officers got on the trail. One beam led to an obscure chicken farm in the seacoast village of Glyfada, eight miles from Athens; another pointed to a carpenter's modest house in an Athens suburb. One night last November, the government raided both.

At the chicken farm they found a busy Red rooster named Philip Lazarides and, artfully concealed behind a wall of his house, a crypt equipped with a high-powered American radio transmitter, a newly made Russian receiving set, and a file of ciphers which gave them the key to the government's collection of coded messages. At the carpenter's home, at first they found nothing. But after searching, a policeman spotted a hole no larger than a golfball at the rear of the house. He shouted down the hole, "Come out!" and jumped back with astonishment when a muffled voice replied: "I have work to do." Then smoke curled from the small opening; the trapped man had started to burn secret papers. Police rushed for water and poured it down the hole. An instant later, a revolver cracked in the depths of the crypt.

With a crowbar, police wrenched at the hole, unexpectedly setting off a mechanism which slid back some steps and opened a hidden door. Inside the underground room, they found an oldtime Greek Communist named Nicholas Vavoudis dying from the bullet he had fired into his mouth. Near him was a radio receiver and sender, and more records showing how the underground got its orders from Bucharest, dispatched in return reports on politics and troop dispositions.

Messages from Exile. Director of the underground's theory and watchdog of its discipline was, the prosecution charged, a fairly successful Athens doctor. Also on trial last week was a socialite lawyer charged with being the party's finance boss. A well-known Athenian actress was accused as one of several couriers who supplied the Communists with funds smuggled from Paris. Captured messages, many of them signed by exiled Greek Red Boss Nicholas Zachariades, showed that the Communists, outlawed as a party since 1947, had manipulated the United Democratic Left, a supposedly non-Communist political party which attracted 10% of the vote and elected ten members to parliament last September.

The Greek government guessed that the trial, a court-martial instead of a civil proceeding under terms of a 1936 Greek law, would last a month. It would prove "highly instructive," promised Interior Minister Constantine Rendis, "to all countries which have not so far experienced the activities of an ... organization which is called a political party but is, in actual fact, a fanatic and disciplined enemy army . . ."

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