Mission to Markos

What George Polk (see above) and every other Balkan correspondent yearned to do, the New York Herald Tribune's Homer Bigart up & did. He found and interviewed Greek guerrilla General Markos in his Grammos Mountain stronghold. This week, after sitting on it for more than a fortnight (presumably to avoid competing with convention news), the Trib ran his interview as a four-part series. It tingled with some of the cloak-&-dagger thrills of an Eric Ambler novel.

To score his beat, Reporter Bigart had to "disappear" for two weeks. He was in Belgrade, and had told his office he was going to Rome to buy clothes. The first the Trib knew of his perilous mission was when the visit was broadcast over the rebel radio. (The U.S. Embassy at Athens, still nervous after Folk's murder, passed the word to the Trib that it would not be responsible for Bigart's safety.)

Konspiratsia. At 11 p.m. the night of June 13, wrote Bigart, there was a knock at the door of his room in Belgrade's Hotel Moskva. "A young man of perhaps 20 ... pushed past me ... fell into a chair . . . 'Comrade,' he began, 'you had planned to return to Athens via Rome. Instead you will go via free Greece and interview General Markos. Is that agreeable?' Very tentatively, I said yes."

Why was he invited? He was not told, but presumed that his criticism of Dwight Griswold's American Mission for Aid to Greece had impressed Markos favorably.

Bigart was warned to employ the strictest konspiratsia, "that favorite Balkan term for secrecy." Next day the stranger brought a guide, a stocky, studious youth named John. He told Bigart to buy a ticket to Rome and get an Italian visa, to make things look legitimate, then lie low.

The night of June 16 John secreted Bigart in a compartment, marked "reserved for invalids," of a train bound" for Macedonia. Next afternoon, at stocky, he was transferred to a battered UNRRA truck, and hidden under a tarpaulin. For the next eleven days, after dodging Yugoslav border patrols, he traveled by mule and on foot over rugged mountain trails, always in guerrilla hands, never sure that he would not meet the same fate as Polk.

End of the Line. In a little village beyond the Pindus range, the footsore and dog-tired Bigart found his man. Bigart met Markos and his foreign minister Roussos there. With a woman of the town as interpreter, they sat on the grass in a shady churchyard and talked.

"Markos looks so unlike the published photographs of him," wrote Bigart, "that I failed to recognize him. The spreading moustache which he affected two years ago has been closely cropped. [At 41] he is solidly built and of medium height. His eyes are closely set and deeply lined . . . The brown hair under his partisan cap was long and bushy; rebellious strands kept sliding down his forehead. His mouth is broad and expressive. He has the gift of a quick and charming smile that can alter instantly a face which, in repose, seems hard, impatient, pitiless . . ."

Bigart found the wily Markos serenely confident that "by judicious economy in men and ammunition, he could persevere . . . until the Greek Army campaign collapsed through attrition of manpower or was bogged by autumn rains."

His mission accomplished, Bigart was given a guerrilla guard for the 50-hour walk to government territory near Ioannina. There U.S. officers put him on the plane for Athens, where he cabled the Trib. It cabled back: "Thank God you're alive and please take all precautions, including a bodyguard." The Trib did not have to worry. The Greek government put a guard on Bigart--to keep him from slipping away again--until he left for Rome.

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