22 Facts About Georgios Papadopoulos

Georgios Papadopoulos joined the Royal Hellenic Army during the Second World War and resisted the 1940 Italian invasion; in so doing he obtained honors and became a hero.

Georgios Papadopoulos remained in the army after the war and rose to the rank of colonel.

Georgios Papadopoulos was born in Elaiohori, a small village in the Prefecture of Achaea in the Peloponnese, to local schoolteacher Christos Georgios Papadopoulos and his wife Chrysoula.

Georgios Papadopoulos was the eldest son and had two brothers, Konstantinos and Haralambos.

Georgios Papadopoulos was promoted to captain in 1946; and in 1949, during the Greek Civil War, to major.

Major Georgios Papadopoulos, as he then was, was a member of the court-martial in the first trial of the well-known Greek communist leader Nikos Beloyannis, in 1951.

In 1956, Georgios Papadopoulos took part in a failed coup attempt against King Pavlos.

In 1964, Georgios Papadopoulos was transferred to an artillery division in Western Thrace by a decree of Defense Minister Garoufalias, a member of the Centre Union.

The ten were imprisoned and tortured, but it was eventually proven that Georgios Papadopoulos himself had sabotaged the vehicles.

Andreas Papandreou wrote in his memoirs that Georgios Papadopoulos wanted to prove that under the Centre Union government, the Communists had been left free to undermine national security.

Georgios Papadopoulos used his power gained from the coup to try to place Papandreou under house arrest and re-engineer the Greek political landscape rightward.

On 17 November 1968, Panagoulis was sentenced to death but was personally pardoned by Georgios Papadopoulos, served only five years in prison, and after democracy was restored was elected a member of Parliament.

Georgios Papadopoulos was regarded as an emblematic figure of the struggle to restore democracy, and as such has often been paralleled to Harmodius and Aristogeiton, two ancient Athenians known for their assassination of Hipparchus, brother of the tyrant Hippias.

Georgios Papadopoulos had indicated as early as 1968 that he was eager for a reform process, and even tried to contact Spiros Markezinis at that time.

Georgios Papadopoulos was confirmed in office via a controversial referendum.

Georgios Papadopoulos furthermore sought the support of the old political establishment, but secured only the cooperation of Spiros Markezinis, who became Prime Minister.

The decision to return to civilian rule and the restriction of the army's role was resented by many of the regime's supporters, whose dissatisfaction with Georgios Papadopoulos would become evident a few months later.

Georgios Papadopoulos is widely reported to have had certain ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, and has been reported to have underwent military and intelligence training in the United States during the 1950s.

On 1 July 1973, The Observer published an investigative journalism article that accused the Central Intelligence Agency of engineering the 1967 coup, further writing that Georgios Papadopoulos was known among senior officials in the Joint United States Military Aid Assistance Group in Athens as "the first CIA agent to become Premier of a European country".

The outcry over Georgios Papadopoulos's extensive reliance on the army to quell the student uprising gave Brigadier Dimitrios Ioannidis a pretext to oust him and replace him as the new strongman of the regime.

Georgios Papadopoulos was put under house arrest at his villa, while Greece returned to an "orthodox" military dictatorship.

Georgios Papadopoulos remained in prison, rejecting an amnesty offer that required that he acknowledge his past record and express remorse, until his death on 27 June 1999 at age 80 in a hospital in Athens, where he had been treated for cancer since 1996.