Kitromilides has been in the States over six years also and he says he feels at home in this society. He values the "informality and friendship" he says are inherent to the culture but notes that this breeds superficiality. And Kitromilides says he is one of "very few Greeks" who have close friends who are American.

Kitromilides is a Greek-Cypriote, and this summer he was in uniform in his native land. Since the fall of the junta in July, he says, he feels relieved.

"People feel much freer here in America now. Our main source of concern was always the police state in Greece," he says.

Savakis, Caramanis and Kitromilides speak of the oil fields in northern Greece as the next target of U.S. multinational corporate growth and they anticipate arrangements, between the right-centrist government of Caramanlis and American interests, that will leech the Greek homeland.

Athanasios Hadzilacos '75, however, warns that the radical rhetoric of Greeks who come to the United States for an education can be trusted no more than the promises of corporations that cross the ocean in the other direction. Hadzilacos is one of the only genuinely-middle-class Greeks at Harvard. He came from Volos, a small town 200 miles up the east coast of Greece from Athens.

Why do Greek students come to the United States to go to school, Hadzilacos throws up his hands and asks. When he gets no response, he grins triumphantly then goes on only to ask more questions: "Why is Harvard paying me $5000 a year scholarship? Is it because they are good? No, they want to have cadres for the corporations and the universities. Upper-class students come here to become cadres of imperialism."

One of the eight Greek undergraduates at Harvard, Hadzilacos lives off-campus and, like an incredible proportion of the rest of the Greek men in the association, wears both a beard and an expensive wrist watch. He came here "a liberal," Hadzilacos says.

When I came here I was very much fascinated by the freedom here, all these opportunities, all these choices," Hadzilacos says, with a sarcastic lilt to his voice. "The change came through the influence of other Greeks and what happened in Greece."

He boasts that he has never bought clothes in America and that he has not been in the Coop yet this year, for "specific ideological objections to commercialism. And he says that when an American friend asked him what the association has been doing, he would not answer, explaining that it is "too serious to talk about over dinner."

Perhaps because he does not know what he will do when he returns to Greece, he does not seem to trust his own or his friends' intentions. After speaking with him, it is easy to emerge with the belief that the Greeks who are in the Hellenic Students Association--and he says 90 per cent of the Greeks who are at Harvard and MIT are--are rich kids indulging themselves the fervor of radicalism during their stints in the United States. When they return to Greece and what he predicts will be a "new dictatorship," Hadzilacos suggests that he and his comrades might just look complacently to secure and nonsubversive jobs.

In the meantime, though, the Association is controlled by a bloc of radicals for whom the difficult choice regarding Greece is not the easily-answered question of alignment with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (the answer is no) but the question: Should Greece ally with Russia?

Like other radical Greeks, Hadzilacos says he is committed to the "progressive movement" world-wide. He notes specifically his protest both of the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in Chile one year ago and of racism in the United States, and his support for Puerto Rican independence.

The radical students' stance is not ignored. Some more conservative Greeks are put off by the "totalitarian radical" nature of the association, ever since Harvard progressives wrested control of the association from less-activist MIT leadership nearly two years ago. And Greek-American radio stations and communities in the area do not like to entertain the association's opinions.

One Greek-Cypriote undergraduate who says he once attended meetings of the association says that the group is too "political." He adds, "There was a lot of work and talk, but there was nothing coming out of it." He also preferred to remain anonymous.

Members suggest that the Greek consulate has tried to isolate the association by urging community rejection of the group. Most agree that they are under a certain amount of surveillance from the consulate--if not within their meetings, then certainly at association-led demonstrations.

John Fotopolous, the Greek consul in Boston, denies that the consulate would ever send information on the Hellenic Students Association back to the Greek government. "We are not involved in their affairs," he says. "We try to assist them in their studies."

To an agonizing extent, their fortunes are tied to the fate of the junta which they are convinced has not yet fully been "dismantled" in the homeland. The CIA-junta nexus still exists, they say, and the consulate, with its paternalist attention to their activities in Cambridge, is still linked with the secret police network in Greece. And so some members of the association receive mail from abroad at American friends' names and addresses, in the fear that correspondence is examined.

Babis Savakis says, "This article will appear, with my name in it, and in a few months, or a few weeks, a piece of it [he operates an imaginary scissors in the air] will be back in my file in Greece." Whether they like it or not, what radical Greeks say and do at Harvard today may have terrible significance in their own and their country's future.