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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 . . ."