entourage, was revealed. Giorkatzis attempted to appease Makarios by leaking the plan for Operation Hermes to Speaker of the House of Representatives Glafkos Klerides, who forwarded it to Makarios. Makarios did not need to see the plan to know that the Greek officers in the National Guard and the junta of Athens were behind the attempt. He also did not want to escalate the crisis in his relations with the junta. Via selective leaks to the press from the Presidential Palace, the plan for Operation Hermes was exposed publicly, but denounced as a fake designed to shatter the confidence of the people in the National Guard. Makarios publicly stated his confidence in the National Guard to defuse the crisis, temporarily at least. Assassination A week later, Giorkatzis drove to a secret night rendezvous in an open area outside the village of Mia Milia. He asked a close associate to accompany him, but dropped him off some distance from the meeting point and drove on alone. As Giorkatzis' car approached another car parked at the meeting point, the occupants of the other car opened fire with automatic weapons. One of them then walked up to Giorkatzis' car and delivered a coup de grâce. They then drove off leaving Giorkatzis dead at the scene. Fanis Demetriou, the police officer in charge of the investigation, quickly found evidence pointing towards the same two Greek officers in Makarios' entourage who had been found to be involved in the Hermes plot. After he reported this to his superiors, Demetriou was ordered off the case. The two particular Greek officers were eventually only questioned several weeks later, at which time they gave identical accounts of their whereabouts on the night of the murder. They both left the island shortly thereafter and never returned. In the trial of the men in the teams that shot at the President's helicopter, the court noted the leading part Giorkatzis played as chief instigator and planner of the attempt, but did not call him to account as he was already deceased. Giorkatzis' widow Fotini married Tassos Papadopoulos, then Minister of Labour, two years after her husband's death. Papadopoulos and Giorkatzis had been close friends, and Papadopoulos had been best man at Giorkatzis' wedding. Though Giorkatzis planned and executed an operation to assassinate the President of the Republic, and though his role in this has been acknowledged by the courts, the yearly