aspripetraxexaspri

Sam was good-looking, brilliant, endlessly curious and inventive, and a glutton for research. He had a wonderfully self-deprecating sense of humor. He was almost childlike in his eagerness to discover things and share his discoveries with everyone around him. He was also obsessive, stubborn, quixotic, and disheveled to the point of slovenliness. He was incapable of marching to any drummer but his own. [...] His story raises important questions about the relationship between intelligence and policy that persist to this day.

To piece together this story, we have pored through hundreds of pages of depositions, taken by the Greek parliamentary committee investigating the affair, obtained through a freedom of information request filed with the Greek Parliament. We also read through hundreds of pages of documentation and other records, supplemented by publicly available information and interviews with independent experts and sources associated with the case. What emerges are the technical details, if not the motivation, of a devilishly clever and complicated computer infiltration.

First, there were the devious [devious = μυστικές, μάλλον] attempts [of Nixon and Kissinger] to send messages to Beijing without the State Department being aware of what exactly was afoot [επίκειται], using high-level Romanian and then Pakistani channels to signal their desire for talks. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were less scrupulous than their diplomatic colleagues. They planted a navy man as a clerk at the National Security Council; he made copies of all documents that crossed his desk and passed them to Admiral Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. [Αντιλαμβάνεσαι; Το Γενικό Επιτελείο κατασκοπεύει τον Πρόεδρο! Αν η πληροφορία είναι ακριβής...]On one occasion, this enterprising sailor got into Kissinger's room, rifled [rifle=search through someone's belongings in an unauthorized way] through his suitcase and briefcases, and purloined [υπέκλεψε] his secret memo to Nixon about his talks with Zhou [Enlai].
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Among intimates, [Henry] Kissinger was heard to refer to the President as "the madman" or "our drunken friend." Years later, Nixon said: "I will be fair to Henry, even if he isn't always to me."