by Stephen Grey
At different times, the young Antoniades was a petty criminal, a terrorist, a man who shot at British soldiers and planted bombs. He also became a nightclub host, a gambler, a fixer of sports matches and a gangster. He was shot on a number of occasions, including in the head, and survived. He also became a spy. The one-time hit man who fired at Stanley Hollowday would go on to work undercover for decades as a secret agent for Her Majesty.
Antoniades came to exemplify the New Spy – the sort of person who became a top priority once the secret services turned their attentions away from their old Cold War adversaries and governments woke up to the dangers of a more open world where money, people and therefore crime could move more freely.
Although Antoniades worked briefly for the CIA, he was a very different spy from those the agency had employed to collect military and political information. He would spy on organized crime, and his case reveals both what can be achieved by using one gangster to catch another and also the pitfalls involved when the world of espionage comes up against the chaotic, violent and unfamiliar criminal mind. Finally, it also provides some clues as to the wider role that spies in the criminal world might play in reporting on those who have come to be seen as the biggest modern threat: terrorist groups.
To some in the British state, Antoniades was one of the best spies they ever had in the criminal underworld. To others, he was a simple rogue who hoodwinked them all and became one of the country’s top drug importers.
From the beginning in Cyprus, he had an angry nickname: Keravnos, which means Black Lightning or Thunderbolt. When I met him, he was eighty-three years old and still as angry as ever. ‘I will kill them all,’ he said of his enemies.
* * *
Snitch, snout, tout, informer, grass, sneak, stool pigeon, double-crosser, canary, nark, rat, squealer, turncoat, weasel: criminals use many words to describe those who betray them. The British police came to prefer civil service jargon. In their world, a spy was called a covert human intelligence source or CHIS.
Law enforcement – whether police or national agencies such as the customs or National Crime Agency – has always had its own sorts of spies. As the saying goes, there is no honour among thieves, and as criminal organizations struggle to control a larger share of territory and illicit earnings, tipping off the cops has always been part of the game. But those called informers by the police were usually a different breed of people from those defined as secret agents or spies by secret services.
Some of the difference was in the language. Policemen and spymasters used different terms. In ‘spy-speak’, an informer was often a mere tipster, someone who sold titbits of information, as opposed to an agent, whose activities were more closely directed. A former senior French counterintelligence officer put it like this: ‘In our work an agent is at a much higher level than an informant. An informant gives you local information and points out targets. Then you can send in an agent and he’ll make contacts and work his way up.’ But in other secret services, the terms were not so tightly defined. One former head of CIA covert operations said that ‘source’, ‘informer’ and ‘agent’ were used interchangeably. Some were just more reliable and more under control than others.
A bigger difference was that while the police in most countries both needed and had the legal authority to pay active criminals to be their sources, most secret services were barred or, as a matter of good practice, simply shunned contact with criminals. Working with criminals was seen as too risky because they were deemed unreliable and likely to reveal secrets. Such work could bring the agencies into disrepute or, when their agents got into trouble, draw them into revealing their hand in a courtroom. As part of its covert attempts to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro, the CIA made contact with several members of the US Mafia. This revelation dogged the agency for years, illustrating the cost of such relationships. In all, then, police informers were usually a different breed from the people recruited by secret services as agents.
As the twenty-first century approached, however, some of these distinctions were challenged as the lines between policeman and intelligence officer started to be blurred. One impetus was the growing political power of gangsters. Several leaders of organized crime had reached such powerful and influential positions in their countries that it became of strategic value to infiltrate their circles. One example is Russia, where in the 1990s barely disguised mobsters became billionaires and began to wield huge influence in the Kremlin.
But the biggest driver of this blurring of the lines came in domestic politics with a push to use intelligence tactics to reduce crime on the streets of America and Europe. It was a two-pronged assault: the secret services were redirected towards crime fighting, and law enforcement tried to emulate them.
The collapse of the Iron Curtain and international agreements to liberalize trade helped to free up the movement of people and goods across borders and, as a by-product, also let well-organized criminals like drug smugglers roam freely and establish allies or branches of their gangs in other countries. And drug addiction – fuelled by this illegal international drugs trade – was commonly held to be behind most burglaries and robberies in the US and Britain. These patterns led influential people in law enforcement to argue that effective action against crime in local communities meant taking the battle to the ringleaders of the trade. Raymond Kendall, secretary-general of the international police agency Interpol, urged ‘using intelligence to crack the criminal at source’.
Kendall and others argued that the tried-and-tested methods of solving crimes were failing to catch the most serious offenders, particularly those who operated across borders, as well as gangsters at the top of large criminal empires who let their henchmen do their dirty work. The solution was to use more aggressive methods: proactively targeting criminals by tapping their telephones, bugging their cars and homes, putting them under surveillance, recruiting spies within their gangs and networks, and introducing undercover operatives to collect evidence and mount sting operations.
Law enforcement called these tactics ‘intelligence-led policing’ and both police and customs units created new departments devoted to intelligence collection and covert operations. But such theories were also sweet music to agencies like SIS, MI5 and the CIA: assisting the police or customs by taking on an anti-criminal caseload was a way of staying in business in the absence of the Soviet threat. When talking to the press and lobbying politicians, intelligence officers floated the theory that spying on gangland might be at the heart of a new form of espionage.
Getting involved in crime fighting meant, for example, MI5 sharing some of the technology they had developed against the Russians: helping to install covert bugs to listen in on a drug dealer’s conversations, electronic surveillance to watch his every move or computer analysis to map out his network of contacts. It meant SIS (which established an ‘organized crime operations group’) offering techniques of ‘disruption’, covert actions like emptying a criminal’s foreign bank account or liaising with foreign agencies to raid drug factories.
The new role for SIS required a change in the law, which took place in 1994. Its role was now defined as being not only to protect national security and the economy but also to act ‘in support of the prevention or detection of serious crime’.5 Within two years, other legislation was amended to give MI5 the same tasks.
There were some fundamental cultural clashes that took years to resolve. Intelligence officers, for instance, had little experience of the process of bringing their targets to justice in a courtroom. ‘They couldn’t really get their heads round it. I had to explain our world, working towards evidence and court cases,’ said one former customs officer. As for MI5, ‘They were terrified of courts. They didn’t altogether understand why you had to finish up before a judge.’
In the years ahead, MI5 surveillance officers became accustomed to appearing in court to give evidence. But a more delicate problem for the new crime fighters was how or if to deploy secret agents in the criminal un
derworld. While it was obvious that a spy inside an organized crime group could be invaluable, recruiting or deploying such agents meant dealing with thorny questions that secret services had rarely had to think about before, such as how a court would react to the presence of a government-employed agent inside a gang. Would they have to disclose the presence of that agent to lawyers defending a criminal? Or would the agent be considered a provocateur that had instigated the crime? These questions were just as challenging for the police and customs, as they too began to make more use of human intelligence. The increased use of intelligence methods in law enforcement came at a time when, in Western legal systems, judges in criminal cases were requiring prosecutors to disclose more details of any undercover work used during an investigation to lawyers for a criminal defendant. This would require careful handling.
In the past, secret services like SIS and the CIA had shied away from recruiting criminals. They were dangerous, unreliable and their mindset was just too different. As they pitched to get involved in crime fighting, intelligence officers tried to think laterally. They suggested hiring people on the edge of gangs who might be more reliable and who could avoid participating in the crimes, such as the girlfriends of gangsters, or their accountants, or shopkeepers who sold them mobile phones. Another option for police and law enforcement was to expand their army of professional undercover operatives – policemen or customs officers who lived under an assumed identity, organized sting operations and could then testify against criminals in court. Peripheral agents and undercover operatives were tried out, but, as when confronting any serious adversary, sometimes only a real insider, a trusted member of the gang who was privy to secrets, would really do as an agent. As both intelligence agencies and law enforcement sought to expand their ways of gathering human intelligence, they needed to ask whether it was possible to handle spies among criminals when the danger was the operation could backfire, particularly in a courtroom. But while working with criminals might be unpalatable for most intelligence officers, they had to work with the intelligence targets they were given by governments. As non-state groups, whether crime gangs or terrorists, began to be designated the new threat and the new main target, would men like Keravnos turn out to be the spies they needed?
To rely on such men was to enter a violent and chaotic world.
* * *
Andrew Antoniades might be unknown in the wider world, but under his nickname Keravnos in his native Cyprus he is both legendary and unforgiven by many. The only thing that seems to divide some old comrades is whether or not he had always planned to betray them. Some even wonder if, should he return, it is not too late to kill him in revenge.
Antoniades was born in 1932 in Foini (also spelled Phini), a village about fifteen miles north-west of Limassol, one of six children. His father died when he was five years old and he left school early to become an apprentice tailor. By all accounts, he was the classic tearaway, often in trouble with the police. His greatest love was motorbikes. One day he was arrested by police after climbing down the chimney to burgle a house. One of the police officers asked him to fix his bike, but after he had done so Antoniades jumped on it and roared off, crashing through the gate. The policeman said he sped away ‘like black lightning’ – which is how he earned the name Keravnos.
He was twenty-two when the war broke out in 1955. Fighting the British Army was the Ethnikí Orgánosis Kipriakoú Agónos (EOKA) – the National Organization of Cypriot Struggle. Its aim was to eject British colonial forces and to unite the country with Greece. A total of 371 British soldiers died, but over the course of four years EOKA – led by General Georgios Grivas – proved equally ruthless when killing Cypriots. While EOKA recorded that 108 of its members had died, it also claimed to have executed some ninety ‘traitors’ among over 200 Greek Cypriots who perished in the violence.
Joining a secret society such as EOKA was supposed to involve a long initiation, but Antoniades simply forced his way in. He and his friend Alexandros Michaelides, code-named Koungas, headed into the hills and started planting Greek flags high in the trees near the Amiantos mine. It was a provocation certain to draw the attention of British troops. EOKA fighters, who were hiding nearby, were afraid it exposed them to discovery and capture.
‘The choice was to co-opt him or to kill him,’ said Renos Kyriakides, then the area commander for EOKA. He chose to co-opt the pair, and they swore allegiance to the rebels before a priest.
The first thing Antoniades was ordered to do as a fledgling EOKA member, he recalled, was to plant a bomb in Akrotiri, a town with a large British base. ‘Then they sent me to shoot somebody, a Greek man who was supposed to be an informant, and I did it.’ He also joined a raid on the explosive store at the Amiantos mine. Then he volunteered for the mission to kill Hollowday.
Antoniades said he received orders directly from General Grivas. He was to go with his pal Koungas. He remembered Hollowday’s whitewashed bungalow as being surrounded by a fence, with a dog and noisy ducks running about inside. The plan was to get there early and lie in wait. They hoped to shoot him when he returned at dusk, meaning it would be getting dark as they escaped.
Remarkably, Zanina Hollowday already knew much about the young Antoniades who was on his way to try to kill her husband. In the diary she kept of her time in Cyprus, she wrote how that very day she had been warned he was in the neighbourhood:
In the morning our good gardener told me the feared guerrilla ‘black lightning’ [Keravnos] was once more in Amiantos. He worked on his own, used arms, terrified the villagers, stole, set fire to houses, and gloried in his evil deeds … Nobody dared to spy on him. It was said it was he who killed our policeman. Only recently was he discharged from prison … He was barely twenty-two, slim, small in build, and very agile. We did not like having him in our neighbourhood.6
The EOKA duo crept up behind the compound about 4 p.m. Antoniades recalled he had a Swedish sub-machine gun. ‘Hollowday stopped the car and he came out. He was a big man. I could see him from here. Next I shot him. Maybe six bullets.’ Hollowday fell. Antoniades dropped down from the tree and fled.
Barely three months later the British employed Antoniades. It happened in the classic way that spies in rebel groups are recruited, while he was under arrest. After a series of what the British called ‘sweeping operations’ through the Troodos Mountains, many EOKA fighters had joined up with their leader, General Grivas, in a hideout above the village of Spilia. When the British attacked Spilia on 12 December, some remained and fought, while most of the group split. Many returned to hideouts near their own villages. Antoniades returned to Foini, but, after staging a lone attack on a British patrol, he was captured again.
He was now in the hands of what he remembered as a Scottish regiment of the British Army, whose crude interrogation methods were freshly honed from fighting Mau Mau rebels in Kenya. ‘They break my teeth. You know these Scottish. They beat me up for two days.’ He said it was not the beating that made him change his allegiance, but a friendship he struck up in the cells with a young Englishman. Lionel Savery was a 27-year-old army captain who was already a veteran of another insurgency in Malaya. He had been posted as a district intelligence officer to Pano Platres, about two miles from Foini. The pair forged an immediate and lifelong bond.
Antoniades was allowed to escape, jumping into a van that came to collect the prison dustbins – ‘They arranged it for me,’ he said – and, back in EOKA, he set to work as an informer. Years later, when I interviewed him, Antoniades was still coy about how far he had gone in helping the British. Wary of being labelled a traitor, he suggested that he had been working for both sides, keeping his British handlers happy but inflicting no harm on EOKA. ‘I was stuck in the middle,’ he said. (To some Cypriots, that would merely make him a double traitor.)
During this time, he and Savery grew closer. The defining moment came in 1957, when they went out on a patrol to hunt EOKA and were ambushed. One Englishman was shot dead and Savery, who was on a h
it list drawn up by Grivas, took several bullets in his leg. Antoniades and another man dragged him to safety. It was about the best decision he made in his life. ‘After that we became very close. I had saved his life and because of that he saved mine.’ Savery himself was awarded a Military Cross for the incident.7
Antoniades, now openly working with the British, became one of EOKA’s prime targets. They tried to kill him three times, including in two roadside ambushes. One would-be assassin found him in a café in the village square. ‘I felt someone touch me in the back … then, bang, he shot me in the head. He dropped the gun and I saw him run. I recognized him – he was my second cousin.’ Antoniades later showed me the scars on the back of his neck. The bullet just missed an artery and came out through his mouth. ‘It was a million to one.’
It was clear that Antoniades needed to be extracted, so Savery arranged for him to obtain a British passport and a plane ticket to London. He was waving goodbye to his life as an informer against terrorists and beginning a new one as a renowned criminal. But it was not the end of his spying.
* * *
Antoniades arrived in England on 29 November 1958. The army had rented a house for him in Wembley, but even before he arrived he got into a fight in the West End. And so it continued. Within a year he was in court at the Old Bailey, accused and then convicted of organizing a drive-by shooting that wounded a Greek café owner in Camden, north London, with a volley from a sub-machine gun. At his trial, Captain Savery gave evidence to defend his former agent’s character and explain the dangerous work he had done previously. The Times reported that Savery ‘agreed that Cypriots who were loyal British subjects might well have been described as traitors by other Cypriots in Britain’.8
