Costa G. Couvaras: A Greek Patriot
- Beverley Eddy
- Jun 26
- 33 min read
Even though he was not a native-born Greek, Costa Couvaras dedicated his life to pursuing causes that would promote the country’s liberal and progressive movements, preserve Greek culture, and enhance closer ties between Greek-Americans and their ancestral homeland. And Greece was the only homeland he ever knew when he was growing up. Although he was born on January 21, 1911 in Braila, Romania into a wealthy Greek family, he moved to Greece with his parents (George C. and Penelope [Phizis] Couvaras) and two older siblings when he was only two years old.
Costa’s birth city, Braila, was a major port city on the Danube River that maintained large grain-handling and warehousing facilities. Costa’s father had been a wealthy grain dealer, but, shortly after Costa’s birth, his business collapsed, the family lost all its money, and in 1913 they returned to their “ancestral family home” on Ithaca, a small island off the west coast of Greece.1 Disaster dogged the family throughout Costa’s early childhood. When he was eight, his mother fell victim to the Spanish flu, and in 1922, his father died unexpectedly of a stroke. Costa was suddenly on his own, with no financial support. Although he was only 11, he immediately left grammar school and began looking for work. He started out working full-time at the village general store. Then, at age 13, he went to Athens, where he got a job as a bell-hop in the Hotel d’Angleterre, one of the city’s two largest hotels. He eventually was promoted to elevator boy and remained at the hotel for five years.
It was work he hated, primarily because the hotel workers had it drummed into their heads that they must always be submissive to the hotel guests. When Costa complained to another worker about one guest who had treated him badly, he was told, “Keep always in mind that he is the master, and you are the slave. He can say only one word and you will lose your job […].”2 And his co-workers warned him, when he joined the Hotel Employees Union, that the hotel owner would fire him, if he became aware of this.
But these years were not lost on him. During this time Costa became acquainted with his first Americans. Of all the visitors to the hotel, he said he liked the Americans best: “They were unassuming and not in the least class conscious. They considered me with equality, which was a rare trait among the European customers.” By listening to the English-language conversations of these guests as they rode the elevator, by making frequent use of a Greek-English dictionary, then by attempting to converse with the people in his elevator, Costa managed during these years to attain some fluency in the language.
His American guests noticed. He earned by far the largest tips of all the young workers at the hotel, and “a number of people, mainly Americans” offered to send him to school. When he was 18 he accepted the offer of the American journalist Brainard P. Salmon to enroll in Anatolia College, an American missionary school in Thessaloniki. He remained there, under full scholarship, for five years and earned a Junior College diploma.
For Costa, Anatolia College was a revelation. Despite the pleasant contacts that he had made with Americans, Costa found that, overall, his years working in the hotel with overbearing and demanding tourists had “had a dehumanizing effect on me.” Anatolia, he said, “was Paradise, and the hotel had been hell. At Anatolia I met the nicest people I had met until that time in my life. The people treated me with equality and listened to what I had to say. […] My idea at the time was to absorb as much knowledge as possible, in the shortest time, because, having lost seven years of schooling during my working days, I felt that in some way I had to catch up with time!” During his five years of study there, Costa
experienced a number of changes in himself that took place “slowly and imperceptibly.” “This was a missionary school,” he wrote, “and religious education was its main characteristic. When I entered the school at age 18, I was a reasonably religious young man, with Greek Orthodox orientation. When I finished, I had lost my religion altogether. Another change that had taken place in me concerned my political ideas. I entered Anatolia as a faithful and loyal adherent of the royal institution of the country; I graduated as a democrat with leftist tendencies.”
Because of his hotel contacts, he began to serve American journalists and tourists as translator and guide to historic sites. One of these Americans, journalist Heinrich Diez, even helped shape his career plans. Diez hired the 19-year-old Costa as guide and translator for a trip to the 20 ancient monasteries on Mount Athos. Located on a rocky promontory in the Aegean Sea, Mount Athos was widely known as the “land without women,” since no females—human or mammal—were allowed there. Cameras were not allowed there, either, but Costa had a camera hidden in his knapsack. He not only managed to get the camera into Mount Athos; he even managed to persuade the policeman who had forbidden cameras to pose for a picture.3 Dietz sent Costa’s photos from Mount Athos back to New York to illustrate a story that he wrote for the Herald Tribune.
Anatolia College took notice. Costa was appointed the official photographer of the college and allowed access to a dark room. In the summers he returned to Athens, where, Costa said, “I managed to penetrate the small circle of news photographers in the capital. Photographers at that time were few and far between, and photography was not the craze that it is today.”4 He also worked for two summers as secretary to Herbert Lansdale, Director of the YMCA camps in Greece.
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Costa made such progress with his photography that, after his graduation from Anatolia College in 1934, he was able to open his own photo agency in the city, and to provide photographs for the Greek National Tourist Organization. He also worked as assistant to George Weller, a New York Times correspondent and, through him, sold photographs to the New York Times.
At this time, Greece was going through a period of extreme social turbulence, and factional disputes disrupted Greek’s parliamentary democracy. The government faced several coup attempts. In March 1935 the Royalists reached a majority and the exiled King George II returned to re-establish the monarchy. But factionalism and the rise in Communism prevented any restoration of social order and effective governance, and on August 4, 1936, Prime Minister General Joannis Metaxas declared a state of emergency, suspended Parliament, and established a staunchly anti-communist, ultranationalist government with strong Fascist tendencies. Metaxas banned political parties, prohibited strikes, censored the media, and exiled dissidents. Costa decided it was time to try his luck in America.
With George Weller’s encouragement, Costa wrote a letter to the administration of Cornell University, in which he stated that he was a native of Ithaca. Would there, he asked, be any scholarship money available for a Greek from Ithaca who was intent on coming to study in Ithaca, New York? Rather to his surprise, Cornell responded in the affirmative, granting him free tuition for study there. He would have to come up with his own living expenses.
At first, he seemed to have that problem solved. His American contacts had arranged a job for him at the home of a Cornell professor. There, in exchange for a couple hours of work a day, he was given a room and breakfast. He also got a job washing dishes at a fraternity house, which took care of his noon and evening meals. But soon everything began to unravel.
First, the professor and his wife, both former missionaries in Turkey, were deeply religious, and they expected Costa to join them at church on Sundays, and to participate evenings in the church’s youth activities. After five weeks, he felt he could not keep up pretenses, and asked them that, since religion had no meaning for him, he be relieved of these duties. The relationship cooled immediately. Next, without any explanation, he was fired from his dish-washing job at the fraternity. Nor could he find new employment. Despite the depression in America, it seemed to Costa almost incredible that he was not able to find a menial job, such as washing dishes, or cleaning homes. But, “as time went on, I felt there was more to it than
met the eye. I can’t tell what started the ball rolling against me, [or] if things started in Greece or in the United States.” But there was no doubt in his mind that “there was a great deal of communication between my American sponsors in Greece and my hosts in the United States,” and “that some of my sponsors in Greece were local operatives of United States Intelligence Bureaus. Some of these people must have been working for either the FBI, Army Intelligence, or State Department Intelligence.” He later confirmed this during the war when he discovered one of his former sponsors occupying a high position at the Middle East Office of the Office of Strategic Services. It seems, he said “that some of these people must have considered me detrimental for the American system.” He admitted to expressing leftist ideas, but, he added, he had never belonged to the Communist Party, either in Greece or America, and never attended one of its meetings.
Costa finally managed, through the help of a Jewish friend and fellow student, to secure a job working in the check-room of the Student Union. This student, who, at the time, went around “with patches at the back of his pants” later became an important union executive in Washington, D.C.
Later on in life Costa speculated that his problem during his student years was that he believed that “American democracy was a true one, where every one could express his ideas freely and openly.” The disinterested political reticence of the Americans clashed with “the character of the Greek people, who like to discuss their ideas openly and with fervor.”
Costa’s suspicions of being under surveillance were confirmed when he learned that the FBI went around to Costa’s acquaintances to gather information on him and even interviewed him “surreptitiously.” And FBI surveillance continued even after Costa graduated from Cornell in 1939 with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in political science. It reached a climax during the 1950s when Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy led his public investigations into those deemed to be either Communists or merely “Communist sympathizers.”
Costa did manage, though, to find work after graduation—through Greek contacts and his own photographic/journalistic talents. He got a job in public relations for the Greek Pavilion at New York’s 1939 World Fair. In 1939-1940 he returned to Athens, Greece to work as a correspondent for the daily paper Assyrmatos. Then he returned to the States in 1940 as assistant to the publisher of the Greek daily National Herald, a liberal Greek-language newspaper published in New York.
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In 1942 America chose to disregard Costa’s allegedly leftist views. Unlike prospective American employers, the American military had no problem finding work for Costa. On August 13, 1942 he was inducted into the US Army as a corporal and, at the completion of his basic training, was sent to Camp Ritchie, Maryland, to be trained in military intelligence, despite any concerns the FBI might have had regarding his politics. During that training, which recognized his fluency in French and Greek, his studies focused on Southern Europe. He received his American citizenship during his training and graduated on March 6th from Ritchie’s fourth class.
Already by late 1942 the OSS, or Office of Strategic Services, was eager to recruit Greek Americans into its service. It recruited Costa and he was transferred to OSS headquarters in Washington D.C. in April 1943, where he served under Major Arthur J. Goldberg. Goldberg was chief of the OSS’s Labor Desk; this was an autonomous division of the OSS that was charged with cultivating contacts with labor groups within the Nazi-occupied countries of Europe and getting them to share intelligence with the American forces.
After two months of “office work,” Costa grew impatient at the slow pace at which matters moved in Washington, and applied to go overseas. On September 2, 1943, Major Goldberg sent him to the Labor Desk’s office in Cairo, assuring him that he could retain his assignment there throughout the remainder of the war.
Costa found life in Cairo “exciting at first,” since it brought him into contact with a different world. “This was the world of the fighter, the ordinary soldier, who would return from the front for a short rest.” It was also the world of the resistance fighter and the world of the spy.
As Costa told it: “Five months after my arrival in Egypt, I asked for an assignment behind the enemy lines. What the decisive factor was that prompted me to such action, I am still unable to determine. It might have been rather a combination of factors—a desire to help more actively in the cause I believed in […], and a certain love of adventure. Last but not least was the idea of going to Greece, hoping to be able to help its gallant people in their fight for freedom.”5 Costa, who was by now a second lieutenant, was made the commander of a
three-man mission team named “Pericles.” Together with the guard, Labor man Iacovos Yacoumis (“John”), and radio man Constantine Papadopoulos (“Alex”), Costa was sent into Greece with the guerrilla liaison man Yannis Kakosaios to make contact with the head of the National Liberation Front (Ethnikó Apeleftherotikó Métopo, or EAM) and to establish good relations “in order to achieve the best possible results in collecting intelligence; and to explore the possibility of setting up new American intelligence groups all around the country that would cooperate with the guerrillas in collecting intelligence about the enemy.”
EAM was the largest and by far most effective of Greek anti-Nazi groups, and a majority of its members were communists. To achieve his mission, Costa would need to persuade the EAM leaders that intelligence gathering was the sole purpose of the mission. As he put it, “Once I can persuade the resistance leaders that our purpose is strictly the collection of intelligence and that their internal affairs are of no interest to us, we can expect a good reception” (May 2, 1944). For his work with the resistance fighters Costa adopted the name “Ulysses,” a name that recalled the legendary Greek king of Ithaca who was known for his eloquence, cunning, and resourcefulness.
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In April 1944 Costa and his three companions set out by motorboat from Smyrna, Turkey for Evia, the second largest island of Greece. “I have never made such a difficult and dangerous a trip before,” he reported. “The trip from Smyrna here, which under ordinary circumstances would have taken about three hours, took us eight days” (Apr. 30, 1944). In addition to it being a period of unusually violent storms, they could avoid detection only by sailing at night. Looking back on his trip several weeks later, Costa commented: “Making three unsuccessful trials to cross the Aegean was no fun, especially in that thirty-foot motor boat with the bad engine, and with the sea full of mines and German patrols” (June 3, 1944).
Upon landing late at night on Evia, Costa and his team were escorted to a stable, where they were bedded with a “light-haired donkey, good and kind but full of fleas.” The next morning they had their first encounter with the guerrillas: eight young men, who had come to escort them to their mountain post. There they quickly learned that the EAM guerrillas “live badly, eat little, and don’t have enough arms” (Apr. 30, 1944). In the months that followed Costa endured the same hardships as the EAM leaders on their travels and in their overnight sleeping arrangements, and frequently experienced crude lodgings, bedbugs and lice, cold, and hunger. Costa was particularly disturbed by the fact that the guerrillas had very little ammunition with which to carry on their fight against their wartime enemies. These enemies included not only the German, Italian, and Bulgarian occupation forces, but also the paramilitary quisling “Security Battalions” set up by the Greek collaborationist government in support of the German occupation. Costa reported that the EAM guerrillas fought their enemies by ambush; as a result they “suffer light losses,” while they “usually inflict severe losses on the enemy.” And they possess a “certain amount of fatalism,” as shown “in their almost total lack of fear” (July 10, 1944). When they captured German soldiers, they shot them.
Throughout his stay in Greece Costa came to rely heavily on his EAM general assistant, “Barba” (Uncle) Costas Lycouris. A former furniture polisher from Athens, Barba Costas had been imprisoned for seven years under the Metaxas regime. Prior to prison he’d had only a grammar school education, but during his imprisonment he was thoroughly schooled by Communist fellow prisoners in history, sociology, and political science. As a result, he left prison a highly educated and refined man. He was also a fully committed Communist. He had left the prison in poor health, which kept him from fighting in the front lines, but that made him an invaluable companion and secretary for Costa. Costa noted, “He was dependable and extremely efficient. He copied documents by hand better than could be done by typewriter and without errors.”6
Costa was the only operative to reach the wartime headquarters of the EAM, and he remained with it until Greece was liberated. As a consequence, he was able to supply the Cairo office with much valuable intelligence not only regarding enemy movements, but also regarding EAM’s supplies, its morale, its strategic aims, and its conflicts with other guerrilla groups. Costa attended the meetings of the EAM National Council, and passed on to Cairo the dissatisfaction of its leaders with the Lebanese Conference then meeting to form a so-called unity Greek postwar government. The EAM leaders, Costa reported, and all parties of
the guerrilla civil government (the Political Committee of National Liberation, or PEEA), were opposed to the push by the British to promote George Papandreou as premier of post-war Greece. Papandreou, as the guerrilla leaders saw it, was not only a staunch anti-Communist, but was believed to have tacitly approved the establishment of the country’s notorious Security Battalions.
In general, the PEEA and the EAM were strongly anti-British, since they believed the British were treating Greece more as a British colony than as an independent, democratic nation. And they had basic demands to make of the postwar Greek government: namely that the king should not return to Greece until after a plebiscite had taken place, that members of the EAM and the Communist party should be represented in the government in proportion to their strength and numbers, and that EAM’s military branch, the Greek People’s Liberation Army or ELAS, should be strengthened and maintained as a people’s army. These demands were never taken entirely seriously, either in Lebanon or at the follow-up Greek unity talks in Cairo.
Still, Costa continued to report faithfully on the discussions and actions of EAM and the personalities of its leaders. When the failed Lebanon Conference was followed up with unity talks in Cairo, Costa responded to the OSS’s concern as these talks, too, started breaking down. He wrote: “The break in the Cairo talks is leading Greece into a terrible abyss. There are two forces working hard against each other. EAM on the one side and on the other, most of the old politicians, together with the hundred percent quislings and reactionaries. It is really an unhealthy situation. Today Greek is killing Greek, and the fight will intensify as time passes and turn to civil war when liberation comes. This is the way I see things from here” (July 21, 1944).
Costa was actually able to initiate new contacts between the United States and Greece that led to a resumption of the Greek unity talks. The sticking point was the insistence of the EAM that George Papandreou not return to Greece after the war as the country’s prime minister. This demand was countered by Winston Churchill’s equally forceful insistence that Papandreou be reinstated. It was, Costa believed, the guerillas’ strong resentment of British high-handedness that led to the EAM’s decision to fight a civil war rather than continue to give in to British pressure.7
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Costa’s fears regarding civil war proved correct. Although a unity agreement had been achieved in late August and EAM ministers left for Cairo to assume roles in the new government, Greece erupted in a fierce civil war just six weeks after Germany and Bulgaria withdrew from the Greek mainland.
The immediate cause was the British-backed demand that the military arm of EAM—ELAS—lay down its arms.
As Costa told it, a planned leftist demonstration in Athens against the Papandreou government was approved, then suddenly forbidden on the eve that it was slated to occur. Its organizers were demanding that George Papandreou resign and that a new government be constituted. On December 3, 1944, Costa was standing on the balcony of the Grand Bretagne Hotel and was witness to the events that followed on that day. “I saw people coming in formation with their banners—Greek, American, British, and Russian flags—in the front,” he said. It was a huge line but the people were orderly, singing guerrilla songs and shouting slogans.” At the same time, he saw that “the police were in full force, sporting new British rifles and sub-machine guns for the first time. Also, there were British tanks and armored cars all around. The first tank at the curb in front of us had a man standing in its open turret in constant telephone communication with HQ, reporting the happenings.” The situation rapidly escalated, as the police cut off the routes of the demonstrators. “Suddenly an order to ‘fall back’ was given in a shrill military tone, and all policemen withdrew about fifty feet, fell on their knees, and started shooting! The shooting was heavy. Two hundred policemen were firing, the majority with automatic weapons.” At first Costa thought the police were attempting to frighten the demonstrators by firing into the air. But then someone called out about a policeman kneeling just a few feet from him: “‘He is firing straight into the crowd!’ Then we looked more carefully and saw blood. A kid of about fifteen was lying just ahead with a red pool around him; a girl of twenty was bleeding a little further down.”
After the shooting, the city’s Constitution Square was cleared of the dead and injured, and the crowd returned, knelt down, and sang “a moving dirge […], the words of which caused shivers to run down my spine. ‘We mourn you brothers and sisters, in a worthy cause you fell….’” Then the demonstrators held their planned speeches, and Costa left the square to
see what was going on elsewhere in the city. Two occurrences struck him with particular force. One was a meeting with a policeman in civilian clothes who told him that, because he was known to be pro-EAM, he and all the other EAM sympathizers in the Athens police force had been given two-days leave “while the rest were being instructed in the use of new British automatic weapons and in how to deal with the demonstration. In place of the pro-EAM policemen, new and trusted ones had been taken in lately.” The other surprise—a far more agreeable one—was the response of the demonstrators to his American uniform and the chanting of crowds outside the American embassy who were all shouting: “Roosevelt, Roosevelt!” and “Long Live America!” The Roosevelt doctrine was one of giving unquestioning support to all those who opposed Nazi Germany; Churchill’s was one of foreseeing—and suppressing—the spread of Communism in Greece. Ironically, the Allied war against the Nazis was still raging at the very time Churchill was working to suppress Greek anti-Nazi forces.
Twenty-eight protestors were killed on December 3, and 148 were wounded. This bloody massacre ushered in the so-called Dekemvriana, a full-blown confrontation between the EAM, the Greek government, and the police, with British forces ordered into action on December 4 by Winston Churchill, under the leadership of General Ronald Scoble. Churchill gave the order that the British Army maintain order in Athens by “neutralising or destroying all EAM-ELAS bands approaching the city.” He added, “It would be well of course if your command were reinforced by the authority of some Greek Government…. Do not, however, hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress….”8 He then diverted 75,000 troops, planes, and arms from the Italian front to reinforce the British troops in Greece.9
On December 22, 1944, Costa wrote that “these are undoubtedly the most terrible days of my life.” He was rapidly becoming disillusioned. “I have been full of idealism about this war so far,” he wrote, “but I am losing it fast lately. In fact, I am getting very pessimistic about the result of the war, and the ideals we are fighting for. We have been led to believe that we are fighting for freedom and democracy, but the last few days make me think that we are fighting to make the world safe for fascism and imperialism.” He was worried about what the British were telling their American Allies, since Roosevelt seemed indifferent to events in Greece. “I hope that people in the States get the facts of the Greek situation and don’t get confused by propaganda from the other side,” he said. “Once the people at home know what is happening over here things will change.”
The brutal fighting continued. Once the EAM-ELAS forces realized that the Soviets were not going to supply aid, they were forced on January 11 to accept final defeat and the disarmament of their members.
War might have ended here, but the Greek government denied Greek leftists their political and legal rights, and right-wing groups began to systematically hunt down and imprison members of the EAM-ELAS for their action in the Dekemvriana. This was followed by the rise of right-wing death squads that were active throughout continental Greece and various Greek islands. Eventually this situation led to the third phase of the Greek Civil War, in the spring of 1946. Costa witnessed the deterioration of the situation firsthand when, five months after he had photographed and spoken with the guerrilla leader Ares Velouhiotis in February, “his head was hauled up on a telephone pole in the same city of Trikalla in which we met.”10 And Costa’s reliable general assistant, “Barba” Costas Lycouris, was arrested and “spent many years in concentration camps and island exile.”11 During the period from the liberation of Greece until his release from active duty in October, 1945, Costa crossed the lines of fire at least 15 times to determine EAM intentions regarding cooperation or resistance to the new Greek government. In addition, he managed to visit his sister Anastasia in May 1945. She was still living on Ithaca. This was Costa’s first return visit to Ithaca in ten years.
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Costa received some recognition for all his work in Greece, but he was also denied the ultimate awards. He was made a first lieutenant on December 1, 1944, just two days before the Athens massacre. As the date of his release from active duty approached, he was recommended for promotion to Captain, but did not receive it.
He was also recommended for the Silver Star by the chief of OSS’s Secret Intelligence Branch, Whitney H. Shepardson. In detailing Costa’s work, Shepardson wrote that Costa had not only established the “necessary confidential relationship” with the EAM leaders, but obtained “their complete cooperation.” This had allowed him to maintain a “constant flow of valuable military and political intelligence which theretofore had not been available to the American services.” He had sent in 350 separate intelligence messages by radio, and approximately 100 lengthy intelligence reports by courier. He had “lived in the vicinity of the headquarters and remained in civilian clothes over a period of seven months enduring the great hardships of the primitive life of a native.” During the Dekemvriana, he had volunteered to cross back and forth between enemy lines so that the American Ambassador and the American services would “be in the best possible position to assess the local situation.” In doing this, “he was subject to extreme hazard and actually was shot at many times.”12
In an October 22 memo, Brigadier General John Magruder, Director of the War Department’s Strategic Services Unit, supported Shepardson’s recommendation to give Costa the Silver Star Medal “for gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States.” Costa had, Magruder, wrote, “completed his dangerous missions with a sustained display of gallantry,” “disregard[ing] personal danger and ably secur[ing] the vital intelligence which was desired.” Magruder wrote that he was making this recommendation, based not only on Shepardson’s letter, but also on the records of the OSS and “on personal knowledge.” A November 5 memo indicated that the recommendation had been approved.
After no further action was taken, Major Arthur J. Goldberg stepped in a second time to support Costa “in the highest possible terms.” Noting that he had already recommended Costa for a military award “to which, in my opinion, he is justly entitled,” he stated that he would “unhesitatingly recommend him for any appropriate employment in civilian life.” He related that Costa had volunteered “for a most secret and dangerous mission,” and performed his work “with thoroughness and dispatch,” all the while demonstrating qualities of “integrity, leadership, resourcefulness and administrative ability.”13
It appears that Costa never received the honor for which he had already been approved; it was ostensibly withheld “because of previous recommendation for BSM [Bronze Star Medal] submitted in the Theater.” OSS records indicate that this recommendation was made on November 20, 1945, long after the recommendation for the Silver Star had been approved; as a result, Costa had to be content with a Bronze Star Medal and not the Silver one that was his due.14
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Although he was invited to enter the Military Intelligence Service in July 1945, Costa chose to leave active army service in October 1945 and return to the States.
And, on January 28, 1946 he married Maria Aurelia Fassoulis, the daughter of Greek immigrants.
Maria’s parents, Peter G. and Anastasia [Limpert] Fassoulis, had emigrated to the States in 1907; they had settled in New York state, where her father became a successful wholesale grocer in Syracuse. Maria was born there in 1916.15 The family encouraged her artistic interests, and Maria received harp lessons and dance instruction as a child. Already at age 6 she was performing on the dance stage as a star performer for a Shriners benefit in Syracuse, and at 10 she performed two harp solos for a benefit tea her mother held in support of St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Church.
As a young adult, Maria continued the family tradition of charitable work, especially regarding Greece. In 1940, for example, she became active in raising funds for the Greek War Relief Fund. This was an organization that focused on providing food and medicine to the people of occupied Greece, especially during the severe famine that occurred in the winter of 1941/42. Her activities included everything from hosting a benefit tea at her home to performing a Greek classical dance number in a gala benefit show.
But Maria also had a pragmatic side and graduated from Syracuse University in 1938 with a major in business administration. On their marriage license, Costa listed himself as a “newspaperman,” Maria as “auditor.”
And it was to be a marriage of equals, with Maria continuing to work and she and Costa both actively supporting the Greek cause. Costa became secretary of the American Relief for Greek Democracy, an organization under the honorary chairmanship of Eleanor Roosevelt that tried to send food, clothing and medicine into Greece—an effort hampered by the Greek government, which not only held up delivery of these items to the needy, but raided, imprisoned, and murdered the very people responsible for delivering them.
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And Costa saw that the country was changing. In the winter of 1944/45 most Americans opposed British and Soviet interference in the internal affairs of the freed European nations, but this mood changed, especially after the death of President Roosevelt. Now, instead of condemning British involvement in Greece, Americans began to argue that the United States should have as big a say in the future of Europe as that being exercised by Britain and Russia.
President Roosevelt had been determined to return to a world of peace as soon as the war was over. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had already assembled twenty-six “United Nations” as part of a great coalition to defeat Germany and Japan. This became the basis for the United Nations and its Security Council when the war was over. Roosevelt was convinced that this organization could protect the peace that came after the war—with Soviet Russia as a fellow participant.
Costa believed in Roosevelt’s New World Order, and had assured the EAM leaders that they would never be betrayed by America. But in post-war Europe the new American president, Harry S Truman, caused a shift in American foreign policy with his introduction of what became known as the “Truman Doctrine.” In a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947, Truman declared a grave situation threatening America’s national security. And he named as immediate cause the situation in Greece and Turkey.
Until then Great Britain had been providing financial aid to the official governments of Greece and Turkey ostensibly in order to defend these countries from Russian incursion, although most of this aid went to armaments to put down the resistance of the EAM. Then, on February 21, 1947, the British Embassy had informed the American Department of State that Great Britain could no longer bear this financial burden. The uneasy truce between the Allied nations—Britain and the United States on the one hand, Soviet Russia on the other—had ended with the successful conclusion of the war, and Russia had quickly moved to install communist regimes in the nations that had been freed by the Red Army. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania all came under firm Russian control. And it appeared to Churchill—and to Truman— that Greece and Turkey might also fall to communism.
Up until this point President Truman had tolerated British actions in Greece, even if he did not entirely approve of them. Now, as he presented the situation to Congress on March 12, Greece’s liberators had found that the Germans had “burned more than a thousand villages” and “destroyed virtually all the railways, roads, port facilities, communications, and merchant marine” in the country. And, “as a result of these tragic conditions, a militant minority, exploiting human want and misery, was able to create political chaos which, until now, has made economic recovery impossible.” Greece required American support in order “to restore the authority of the government throughout Greek territory.” While acknowledging that the Greek government “ha[d] made mistakes,” and was “operat[ing] in an atmosphere of chaos and extremism,” it was necessary to support the government so that it could “become a self-supporting and self-respecting democracy.”
Truman’s speech horrified Costa as much as the scene of British-supported troops firing on peaceful demonstrators in December 1944. On March 31 he went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to make his case that the present Greek government was full of collaborationists, while the EAM had been the one unified force that had battled the Nazis throughout the war. Costa came to the committee armed with a German army report on German General Headquarters Stationary that was dated July 8, 1944. This report stated that the military arm of EAM, ELAS, was causing the Nazis “considerable losses,” through “mine explosions, blow-ups and general sabotage,” while Napoleon Zervas, the chief of the nationalist guerrilla groups known as EDDES, had, after a few days of half-hearted sabotage, caved to the Nazis: “After a few days he stopped the fighting and since then has kept a neutral position and does not follow any more the orders of the Allies to start again his attacks against German troops.” The German army report summed up the situation by saying that the German army must expect “continuous activities from the Greek communist bands in the entire sector of this corps, if these forces are not stopped with frequent mopping-up operations (by the Nazis), or if they are not distracted by attacks on the part of the Zervas forces.”
Napoleon Zervas, Costa said, was now the new Greek minister of public security, in control of about 30 deputies in parliament and holding a post “like that of J. Edgar Hoover, but with cabinet status and much more power.” He asked, “Could you expect a man who fought the Germans for five years to hand his gun over to such a minister of public security?” In his present position as chief of police and other security forces, Zervas “has imprisoned and exiled thousands of the adversaries he could not destroy in battle.” He stated that the former Greek elections “were not democratic,” and warned that “sending military aid to Greece would aggravate a bad situation. […] We have an opportunity to bring democracy to Greece—the one gift that I know the Greek people want most from America. If we bring them guns instead, they are going to hate us, just as they hated the Germans and now hate the British. If we put this aid in the hands of the Royalist government, we will have to pour in more and more guns, and more and more money to keep a clique in power, instead of a representative government.”16 Costa’s plea went unheeded. His report was buried by the press, and 67 US Senators voted in favor of the “Truman Doctrine,” which, in the words of one historian, “set a precedent for American assistance to anticommunist regimes throughout the world, no matter how undemocratic, and for the creation of a set of global military alliances directed against the Soviet Union.”17 It was, in other words, the start of the Cold War. On a more positive note, the Marshall Plan—or European Recovery Plan—was established a month later to extend this program of massive economic assistance to all the devastated nations of Europe in a far more positive effort to help all of them to recover and rebuild.
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It is not surprising that the FBI resumed its surveyance of Costa when he returned from the war, and that his defense of the EAM would make him particularly suspect of harboring Communist tendencies. Furthermore, he was blunt and outspoken, especially regarding issues relating to Greece, “voic[ing] his opinion honestly and unequivocally, whether popular or unpopular, sometimes gently and sometimes abrasively; but he made his point.”18
When he first returned to the States he was able to resume his work at the liberal-leaning National Herald. Even here, though, Costa got into trouble when the FBI, unable to find any proof of Costa’s Communist leanings, told the paper to get him to write an article denouncing Stalin. “When I was approached on the subject by the editor of the paper,” Costa recalled, “I told him that I was no Communist and never belonged to the Communist Party, but I wanted my freedom to believe and act the way I wanted, and that Stalin never bothered me personally, and [I] wasn’t going to bother him either. Of course,” he added ruefully, “eventually I had to get out of the newspaper business.”19
A series of jobs—and job interviews—followed, intensifying during the 1950s. “Whenever I went for a job agents would soon creep up and warn my new employer on me and ask for information.” The 1950 US census reveals that, at that time, he held a job as office clerk at the Commerce International Corporation of New York City, where Maria was working as office manager. This foreign business corporation, which came into being in 1948, arranged for the shipment overseas of government goods. Even here it was possible to be challenged for one’s role in arranging these shipments—and even when these shipments were being sent into non-Communist hands. In November 1949, for example, the corporation was reported to have shipped thousands of dollars worth of American goods, including “some war material” to Nationalist China, and, as office manager, Maria Couvaras was called upon to describe and defend the type of war goods purchased by Chiang Kai-Shek’s government. It seems unlikely that Costa would have remained working very long for this company; his heart would have been with the Chinese Communists who had born the brunt of the fighting against the Japanese, rather than with the vain and ineffective ruler of the Nationalist Chinese.
America’s anti-Communist furor reached a high point when, in 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy publicly charged that 205 communists had infiltrated the US State Department; two years later he became chair of the Senate’s subcommittee on investigations, inaugurating what would become known as the Red Scare. Costa was working for an insurance company at the time, and lost his job when agents began an investigation of him.
It was time for a change. In 1954, during a month-long holiday with Maria in California, the two decided to move there and get a fresh start on the West Coast. They settled in Los Angeles, and quickly became part of the Greek community, forming firm friendships with Greek academicians and artists. Costa, who was now determined to be independent of outside influences and government oversight, designed and constructed a coin-operated laundromat on Sunset Boulevard. This was only the second laundromat to open in Los Angeles. For the next ten years Costa lay low politically while developing his business, at one
time having as many as four laundromats in operation. He broke into the press only in the summer of 1955, when Paramount Pictures released the film Ulysses, starring Kirk Douglas, Silvana Mangano, Anthony Quinn, and Rosanna Podesta. None of these stars was available to tour for film openings around the country, but Costa was willing to step in for them, playing upon the facts that a) he was from Ulysses’ home island of Ithaca; b) that his undercover name with the OSS had been “Ulysses,” and c) that his mother’s name was Penelope. Maria gave him her blessing to undertake the tour, saying: “The men of Ithaca today—just as with the original Ulysses—are good wanderers.”20
Costa loved California—its blue skies, mountains, and ocean reminded him of his homeland. But he also remained attuned to developments in Greece. He had already returned to Ithaca in 1951 to visit his sister; on this trip he donated 142 volumes to the Stravros library and, with his camera, immortalized the first election in which women were allowed to vote. And when in August 1953 Ithaca was devastated by several violent earthquakes that killed an estimated 400 people, destroyed all but ten houses, and left the entire population homeless, Costa helped organize the Ithaca Earthquake Relief Fund.
But Maria and Costa also tried to bring Greek culture to the Americans. In 1961 they joined community members and two UCLA scholars in the effort to bring the languishing Hellenic University Club of Southern California back to life; this was a cultural organization which, according to its web site, had the mission of “promoting the study and understanding of Hellenic culture by sponsoring events featuring distinguished speakers and artists and to raise funds for grants to organizations and institutions promoting Hellenic culture in Southern California.” In summation, “The Club provided the Hellenic Community of Southern California with a forum to explore, understand, appreciate, and celebrate Hellenic cultural heritage.”21 Costa and Maria were particularly interested in giving support to young Greek-American writers and artists. Their home in Glendale, California became a showcase for works that they purchased from them; they also provided them with financial support. As one appreciative beneficiary wrote, Maria and Costa’s work “is a small unquenchable source of hope for every young, creative spirit, because with their kind gesture and financial sacrifice they give courage and strength to each new effort, so that the writer or artist can continue his or her work.”22
In the 1960s Costa also tried to make a difference politically, especially after April 21, 1967, when a military junta seized power in Greece and began a brutal seven-year regime. He helped initiate a Southern Californian anti-junta campaign, and gathered together articles that appeared in the American press decrying the despotic rule that had overtaken the country. He had them printed at his own expense and tried to organize a committee of academicians to circulate them. As one friend and colleague later put it, “Costa conducted what eventually had turned into a one-man crusade until he himself had to concede that the Greek-Americans were not too interested one way or the other. Here was a clear-cut illustration of Costa committed to a principle fighting almost single-handed[ly] against an evil others ignored.”23
Costa was more successful in 1974 when two illegal invasions of Cyprus resulted in Turkey’s
seizing nearly 40 percent of the island. He, along with members of the Hellenic University Club, founded the Save Cyprus Council of Southern California. This non-partisan group came together to advocate for Cyprus and try to influence the policy put forth by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a policy which Costa considered “both undemocratic and immoral.” This movement outlived its immediate cause by reconfiguring itself as The American Hellenic Council whose declared goal was “to promote democracy, human rights, peace, and stability in Southern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, with an emphasis on Greece and Cyprus, by informing the American public and the government about on-going issues and conflicts in the area.”24This organization remains an active force to this day.
By the mid 1970s Costa’s health was beginning to fail, and he devoted the final years of his life to preserving the record of the EAM as a patriotic movement dedicated to the liberation of Greece. In 1976 he wrote OSS: Me ten Kentrike tou E.A.M. (Athena: Exantas, 1976); this was a reworking of the diary he had kept in Greece during the period when he was serving the OSS as head of Operation Pericles and sending secret reports to Cairo on the personalities and activities of the EAM (April 30, 1944-July 14, 1945). After his death, this work was published in English translation as OSS with the Central Committee of EAM (San Francisco: Wire Press, 1982). And then, shortly before his death in 1979, the photos that Costa had taken during this same period were published under the title Photo Album of the Greek Resistance (San Francisco: Wire Press, 1978).
In l977 Costa gave a speech summarizing the disturbing postwar trend in American-Greek relations,; he said: “[During] all the years that intervened from the introduction of the Truman Doctrine, we helped all the reactionary governments of Greece, culminating finally with the Junta, through which we exercised seven years of total control. The results have been catastrophic for that small country. […] The Greeks today feel that it was the United States policies that imposed on them the oppressive military regime, that engineered the coup against Makarios in Cyprus, and the consequent conquest of 40% of the island of Cyprus. A country where each citizen has only one vote, should be willing to apply the same principle concerning other countries in addition to its own. This is the democratic way and the ethical way. Other considerations are secondary.” Costa’s only hope for Greece was the election of President Jimmy Carter: “It can only be hoped that the new Democratic administration in Washington will manage to veer away from our postwar foreign policy, and thus create a new spirit of good-will around the world.”25
This was Costa’s last public speech. As his physical condition continued to decline he tried to resign from the Board of Directors of the Save Cyprus Council — a resignation that the board refused to accept. He also tried to resign from the presidency of the Hellenic University Club, but, as one colleague put it, “the board in this instance, too, refused to hear anything like this, because the board members wanted him to continue serving as president in spirit if not in the flesh.”26
As Costa spent more and more days in the hospital, he composed a poem that expressed his state of mind. He wrote that from his hospital window he could see a girl crossing the road, causing him to speculate, “Where is the girl going? Is she driving her car? Or is she walking home?” These questions “had no merit,” and yet he continues to “watch life flow along its path. This is what I wish for and it brings me contentment.” “Death,” he wrote, “is not scary.” “I have not made an agreement with anyone about how many years I will live; I have lived enough so far.”27
He wrote this poem in July 1978. He died on April 23, 1979.
Beverley Driver Eddy
June 2023
Short autobiography of Couvaras. This, like a good deal of the material gathered for this study, is housed in the Costa G. Couvaras Collection, Number TSAK 2002/5, Box 1, Folder 1, in the Donald & Beverly Gerth Special Collections & University Archives, University Library, California State University, Sacramento. I will refer to this collection throughout this study as the CGC Collection, Sacramento. I am particularly indebted to Brianna Loughlin for gaining access to this material.
Costa G. Couvaras, OSS with the Central Committee of EAM. San Francisco, Wire Press, 1982, “Nov. 17, 1944,” 101.
Heinrich A. Diez, “Europe’s ‘Land Without Women’ Is Threatened by Modernization,” Kansas City Journal, 17 Aug. 1930, 15.
“Photojournalist Costa Couvaras: Chronicling Greek Life and Events, The Hellenic Journal, 12 Jan. 1978, 7.
Costa G. Couvaras, OSS with the Central Committee of EAM. San Fancisco, Wire Press, 1982, “May 2, 1944,” 20. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations covering Costa’s war career in Greece are taken from this volume. Diary entries will be given by date rather than by page number.
Costa G. Couvaras, Photo Album of the Greek Resistance, Preface by L. S. Stavrianos. San Francisco: Wire Press, 1978, 78.
Costa G. Couvaras, OSS with the Central Committee of EAM. “Note,” 79.
Cited in Joëlle Fontaine, “How Churchill Crushed Greece’s Anti-Fascist Resistance,” originally published in Le Monde diplomatique. https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/05/how-churchill-crushedgreeces-anti-fascist-resistance/
See Joëlle Fontaine, “How Churchill Crushed Greece’s Anti-Fascist Resistance” for discussion of the escalation of anti-EAM forces in Athens.
Costa G. Couvaras, OSS with the Central Committee of EAM. “Mid-February 1945,” 117.
Costa G. Couvaras, Photo Album of the Greek Resistance, 78.
Letter from Whitney H. Shepardson, Chief, SI, to the Citations Officer, 10 Sept. 1945. OSS Personnel File.
Letter from Arthur J. Goldberg, 29 Dec. 1945. CGC Collection, Sacramento.
The information regarding the recommendations for the Silver Star come from Costa’s OSS Personnel File.
The year is tentative; some sources list her birth year as 1918. She entered 1916 as her date of birth on her marriage license.
“Greek Minister A Collaborationist, OSS Report Shows,” The Gazette and Daily [York PA, April 21, 1947, 31, and “Ex-OSS Man Says Greek Police Chief Aided Nazis in War,” 21 July, 1947, CGC Collection, Sacramento.
Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History (end ed., 2009, 892. Cited in https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_Doctrine
Theodore Saloutos, “Costa Couvaras (1911-1970), 24 may 1979, 8. CGC Collection, Sacramento.
Untitled autobiography, 8. CGC Collection, Sacramento.
"Laundromat Owner Out To Exploit New Movie,” Battle Creek Enquirer, 7 Aug. 1955, 17.
https://hellenic.ucla.edu/hucucla-formerly-the-hellenic-university-club/
https://hellenic.ucla.edu/hucucla-formerly-the-hellenic-university-club/
Theodore Saloutos, “Costa Couvaras (1911-1970), 7.
American Hellenic Council of California, “Our History,” https://american hellenic.org/history/
CGC Collection, Sacramento.
Theodore Saloutos, “Costa Couvaras (1911-1970), 8.
Translation by AI, edited. CGC Collection, Sacramento.
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