Greece: The Hidden War

Greece: The Hidden War  (documentary)
Type	video
Publication date	1986
Author(s)
Producer(s)	Channel 4,  Jane Gabriel
Subjects	Greek Civil War,  Greece,  Monty Woodhouse,  Syntagma Square Massacre
1986 Channel 4 television documentary exposing the British dirty role in the Greek Civil War. After pressure from deep state, Channel 4 promised that the 'offending series' would never be shown again.

Greece: The Hidden War is a 1986 television documentary series about the background to the British-directed Greek Civil War, created by Jane Gabriel. It was originally shown in three parts on 6, 13 and 30 January 1986 on Britain's Channel 4.

The film's exposure of deep British involvement in handing power to the most reactionary right-wing elements in Greek society angered the British deep state. After pressure from officials, an informal agreement was reached with C4 leader Jeremy Isaacs: "Channel 4 shamefully promised that the 'offending series' would never be shown again."

As of 2023 available on YouTube

Suppression

Tariq Ali writes how the documentary was suppressed after official pressure:

The movies showed interviews with both SOE agents and Greek partisans. The film's exposure of deep British involvement in handing power to the most retrograde right-wing elements in Greek society angered those whose role it had laid bare. Sections of the 'great and the good' had been stung in public, and letters on gilded stationary poured in. Having handed over Greece to the far-right in this 'cradle of democracy', they had been rewarded on their return home with knighthoods and peerages, and many were given prominent posts in political, academic and civil service establishments. Several had written or collaborated with other authors to produce Chatham House versions of history.

The official spook version was Bickham Sweet-Escott's effort, published by Chatham House in 1954. Sir Geoffrey Chandler published The Divided Land in 1959. Sweet-Escott's brother-in- law, Eddie Myers, published Greek Entanglement in 1955. Even Sweet-Escott was compelled to admit that, under the British,'resistance became very nearly a crime and collaboration very nearly a virtue'. A British soldier interviewed for the documentary, Chris Barker, expressed the confusion in the ranks: 'I thought we'd come to liberate the Greeks, but within what seemed to be a short space of time, we were actually killing them. And, more to the point, British chaps were dying in a cause that I couldn't quite understand.' This was the source of the 'outrage'.

Nicholas Henderson (ex-Foreign Office) demanded and obtained a meeting with Isaacs to register his own complaint first-hand. Noel (Lord) Annan, who had drafted the Broadcasting Act that created Channel 4, went slightly berserk, as revealed by his letter to Jane Gabriel. The guru of the 'great and the good' cast aside the mask:

You are either very naïve or an unashamed fellow-traveller - which is it? Your series on the return of the Greek Communists was the most scandalously biassed [sic] programme I have seen for sometime...suspect that you will answer by saying that all you were doing was to depict the tragedy of those Greeks who were forced into exile for thirty years... implicitly you portrayed the British officers and officials as either fools or Nazi collaborators. Greek politics are very difficult for those who don't know Greece to understand.

An informal agreement was reached: Channel 4 shamefully promised that the 'offending series' would never be shown again.

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