Getting It Wrong

About the Author

Martin Packard, the son of a country parson, joined the Royal Navy at the age of fourteen as a Dartmouth cadet. In 1950 he served on anti-opium patrols from Hong Kong and then in Korea for the first year of the war there. Later he trained in America as a Fleet Air Arm pilot and, after front-line carrier service, qualified as flying instructor. In 1956 he married Kiki Tsatsoulis, whom he had met in Greece while on a Navy assignment. In 1963 he was appointed to the NATO staff in Malta as an intelligence analyst, a title that led the uninformed to the mistaken supposition that he was part of the British Intelligence Service. From Malta he was seconded, as a Greek interpreter, to the staff of General Peter Young in Cyprus. The ensuing months provide the material for this book.

   After a proposal for his permanent transfer to the UN he read Arabic at Durham University, but the seizure of power by the army in Greece led to his involvement, in support of his family and friends there, in their struggle against  dictatorship. Demands by the Foreign Office that he be court-martialled, for interference in politics, were refused by the Admiralty, which instead approved his retirement at the age of 36.

   Joining the textile business of his wife’s family in Greece, he took the agency for Levi Strauss, for which he set up a factory in Kalamata. In 1975 he was asked by Karamanlis to help counter a CIA demand for an enhanced presence in Greece. This led to his categorisation as a CIA target and a period of extreme harassment.

   A family introduction led to friendship with Dom Mintoff, at whose request he set up a Levi’s factory in Malta and assessed possibilities for the establishment there of a new University of the Mediterranean. He again ran foul of the CIA when asked for advice in the face of foreign efforts to destabilise the Mintoff government. In the meantime his Malta factory had become a major supplier of jeans-wear to the Soviet Union.

   When USSR buying was cut because of a hard-currency shortage, he was told in Moscow of the changes to come in five years and asked, under sponsorship of the USSR Olympic Committee, to assess and develop opportunities for linkage between Russian and EU companies. The outcome was a $2 billion per year trade proposal to run through Malta. This led to him being approached by a bevy of US agents, told he was damaging Washington’s plans for a comprehensive destruction of the Soviet economy and asked to terminate the proposal.

   Packard’s history is one of principled motivation running into the buffers of virulent opposition from those who wanted to manipulate events for their own interests.