In Athens, a city where "everybody knows everybody else," almost everybody has heard of Brigadier General Dimitrios loannidis (pronounced Ee-o-ahn-ee-dis). A spectral, Beria-like figure who commands Greece's military police force—the feared ESA—loannidis was not seen by the public even at the swearing-in ceremony of Phaedon Gizikis, the colorless army general who is Greece's new President. He did not really have to, since it is loannidis and not Gizikis who runs the junta.
Despite his notoriety, loannidis is a man few Greeks have actually seen. "Well, he is about 5 ft. 9 in. or 10 in. He is thin, looks about 52, and has graying hair," goes one grudging description. An austere, hard-lining rightist, who lives alone, loannidis is described by one Washington military official as "a real tough cookie." Other acquaintances emphasize his reputation for being wholly incorruptible.
Little is known about loannidis' past. Born in 1923, the son of a moderately well-off businessman, he entered the Greek military academy in 1940, shortly before his country was attacked by Italy. During World War II, loannidis served with an anti-German (and antiCommunist) resistance unit. After the war, he was assigned to a succession of low-profile and lusterless army jobs.
loannidis was rescued from obscurity by George Papadopoulos as a reward for having helped him come to power in 1967. Papadopoulos made him chief of the military police, which gradually had been transformed into an internal security army. When Papadopoulos declared martial law after the 1967 coup, he increased ESA'S power even further by making it the junta's chief arm of law and order. Many of the allegations of prisoner torture under the Papadopoulos regime involve ESA.
loannidis used his power base as the nation's police chief to oust his old boss, who he felt was liberalizing life in Greece much too quickly. Just what plans loannidis now has for Greece remain unclear. Some observers consider him a rigid, puritanical xenophobe—he has never been outside Greece or Cyprus —who might try to turn Greece into a European equivalent of Muammar Gaddafi's Libya. One thing is certain: he does not plan to return Greece to democracy any time soon.