Secret War - Rigas Rigopoulos Obituary

SECRET WAR

Rigas Rigopoulos Obituary

Prominent social scientist, author, and World War II resistance fighter Rigas Rigopoulos passed away quietly on April 6, 2012, at the age of 98, having saved his writing file on his computer two hours before his death.

Rigopoulos was born in Athens in 1914. He was a graduate of the Athens University of Economics and Business Sciences and did postgraduate studies in the Sorbonne in Paris, and the London School of Economics.

During the occupation of Greece by the Axis powers, Rigopoulos led the “Hellenic Patriotic Society,” an independent resistance organization known simply as “Service 5-16-5,” because the three words in its Greek name, Ελληνική Πατριωτική Εταιρία, are the 5th, 16th, and 5th letters of the Greek alphabet. Although Service 5-16-5 refused British funding so that they could maintain their independence, they sent invaluable information on enemy troops and ship movements, maps of fortifications and mine fields, and other top secret material to the Middle East Allied Headquarters. Of all the ships whose sailings they reported to the Allied services, 55 were destroyed before they reached their destinations.

After the discovery of the organization’s wireless transmitter by the Germans and the arrest of six of its members – who were later executed – Rigopoulos fled to the Middle East to try to find another wireless set. There he enlisted in the Sacred Squadron as a reserve second lieutenant. He was trained as a commando and parachuted into Samos.

Rigopoulos then joined the Anglo-Hellenic Levant Schooner Flotilla, becoming commander of an armed caïque. With her crew of Dodecanesian sponge divers, Rigopoulos’s caïque transported Special Boat Service members (SBS, Britain’s maritime special forces unit) and supplies throughout the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean at a speed of eight miles an hour. “We were told that our war would be unconventional,” Rigopoulos said, “that we would be pirates. We raised the Turkish flag in Turkish waters, and in German-occupied waters we pretended to be fishermen.”

In 1947-48, during the Greek civil war, he served as Prefect of Ioannina. Despite the very difficult conditions of the civil war, Rigopoulos managed to stop the deportations from his Prefecture. He was later involved in journalism and radio, was a financial adviser to companies, and created an advertising firm.

Rigopoulos wrote two sociology books: Society – Social Science, General Weaknesses and Capabilities of Humankind, Social Upbringing, Where We Head (1954) and Left-Handedness: The Upbringing of Left-Handed Children (1977). He also wrote the history book Secret War – Greece-Middle East, 1940-1945, The Events Surrounding the Story of Service 5-16-5 (1973); the history novel Brothers, Brothers – Fictional Chronicle from a Paradox War (1987 and 2001), two collections of poems Altar and Toward the Summit (written between 1941 and 1944), and a play Tulpa (1973 and 1996). He translated Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” into Greek and three poems by Aloysius Bertrand. He published an essay on Aloysius Bertrand. In 1995 he published the essay Dialogue with Skopje, Uncompromising and Negotiable Positions, in which he proposed a renaming the then Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) to a single composite name, having the Macedonian component first as an adjective: Macedonoslavia.

Rigopoulos was honored in 1973 with an Award from the Academy of Athens for his book Secret War: Greece-Middle East 1940-1945, which was later translated into English. He was also awarded the Golden Cross of the Order of the Phoenix and Medals of Resistance.

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