Wolf Pelt: Cold War in Greece, Love, and Trust Revealed

Wolf Pelt is a cold war story and Book #3 in The Greek Stories four-book series. In 1951, the newly established American CIA is getting its feet on the ground. A bankrupt British empire sells its cash-happy cousins a mole-ridden campaign to overthrow the Albanian communist government. The Brits call this armed insurrection Operation Valuable, and the CIA Operation BG/Fiend. Infiltration and logistics flow from Greece, a country overrun with spies from far and wide.

The protagonist, Stavros, returns to teaching after World War II and his service in the OSS as commander of a Greek operational group. There he wreaks havoc on Germans, learns “the Greek way,” and falls in love with the captivating Dimitra. After the war, the couple remains in a long-distance romantic relationship. The CIA recruits Stavros to return to Greece posing as an academician working on his PhD. His actual mission is to organize a “cultural influence group” and support logistics for Operation BG/Fiend. He and Dimitra, now working with the Archeological Society of Athens, engage in a serious and challenging relationship.

Stavros encounters much local color as he winds his way through Greece. Personalities are not always what they seem, and Stavros falls into a precarious relationship with devious Penelope, “the mouse.”

A journey begins with The Greek Boxer.

A babe left forlorn in a defiled tent on an indifferent Colorado hillside, grows to adulthood. In American Andarte, Stavros joins other Greeks to battle Nazis in the Old Country as an OSS commando. As he leads his operational group in the mountains of Greece, a mythical kapetánios, Dimitra, captures his heart. Wolf Pelt unfolds in 1951 Greece, at the peak of American influence. Stavros, now CIA, orchestrates an influence campaign in Athens while covertly aiding the attempted overthrow of Albania’s Hoxha regime. The treachery of romance and espionage play side by side. Fifty-Seven caps the series, with Stavros returning to Greece. America is shaking in Sputnik’s shadow. Stavros must ferret Soviet agents in a vital NATO shipyard while Enosis, the Cyprus independence movement, intensifies. Threats loom over Stavros and friends, the stakes are high, and love endures.