Zealot's End

As he faced the firing squad, in the brown hills outside Athens before dawn last week, there seemed little reason for Nicholas Ploumbides to remain loyal to Communism. Behind him lay 28 years of service to the Red cause; he had been No. 2 man in the Greek Communist Party and chief of its underground espionage system. For more than six years, the tubercular Ploumbides had hidden in the squalid back alleys of Athens, playing cat-and-mouse with police, while he and his illegal spy ring sent information across the border. His sister had been executed for Red activity; his wife Julia was in prison awaiting the same fate.

Yet from his own masters, after three decades of subservience, came only denunciations. For he had run afoul of Nicholas ("Nico") Zachariades, the real strong man of Greek Communism, who operates from the safety of the satellite countries.

Violent Denunciation. When Greek police arrested Old Party Wheelhorse Ploumbides last year for high treason and espionage, Zachariades joined in with a violent campaign against him. Ploumbides, cried Iron Curtain radio stations, was a stooge, an agent provocateur in the pay of the U.S., Britain and the Greek police.

Zachariades had long ago learned that in the internal struggle for party power, success means the survival of the shiftiest. His formula was impressively simple: never let anyone else get too strong; heap the blame on someone else when things go wrong. For 20 years the technique kept Zachariades all-powerful in Greek Communism. In 1950 he used it on the "old man" of Greek Communism, the late George Sianto's, who was head of the party in Greece during the years of Nazi occupation. When the tide of war started going against Greece's Communist guerrillas early in 1949, Zachariades knew at whom to point the finger: Guerrilla Leader Markos Vafiades, who mysteriously disappeared about that time and has not been heard from, since.

Dumb Loyalty. Nicholas Ploumbides knew all this when he went to trial in July 1953, but his loyalty was unswerving. He appeared in, court daily in a well-pressed white linen suit and a red carnation in his lapel.; Greek Communism, he told the court, owed its allegiance to the Kremlin and Nico Zachariades. He took the stand only once in the nine-day proceedings. Then, toughing softly into a bloodstained handkerchief, he limited his remarks to a textbook eulogy of world Communism and an attack on "American imperialism."

Zachariades carried his campaign against Ploumbides right up to the end. After Ploumbides was found guilty and confined to a sanatorium to await his execution, Zachariades broadcast taunts at the Greek police: "Why does Ploumbides live? He will be taken secretly out of Greece to reap his reward for betrayal of the Communist Party."

Late one night last week, Ploumbides was nudged awake to be told that his appeal had been denied. He had time to scribble notes to his five-year-old son Dimitrakis and his wife Julia. Then an armed guard drove him through Athens' deserted streets to a remote spot in the suburb of Daphne, stood him in a shallow gully and shot him. But not before, dumbly loyal to the end, he could shout three times: "Long live the Communist Party!

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