Shortly after NATO's birth, its true function as a Cold War political tool was revealed when Greece and Turkey, decidedly not on the North Atlantic, joined the alliance in 1952. Both countries had been supported by American military aid since the declaration of the Truman doctrine in March 1947, which pledged to protect the two states from communist influences. For Athens, this meant conducting a brutal civil war against the Greek communist party, the KKE, and its National Liberation Front (EAM) militia. Historian Gabriel Kolko writes of this period:
The throttling of the opposition and the Left certainly provides the overriding framework within which one must assess the events in Greece; the repression persisted as the source of the domestic turmoil because it drove people to the mountains in desperation. After the United States proclaimed the Truman Doctrine in March 1947 and assumed the military and economic costs that Greece's venal rules generated, the regime's incentive to find nonviolent, political solutions disappeared, and from the very beginning the U.S. consistently opposed a negotiated peace. The cycle of repression and responses to it increased the scale of violence and eliminated human and civil rights, but the successive rightist regimes clearly initiated the casual chain...
Given their corruption and their inability to survive in a democratic political context, and the condition of the economy and the weakness of their army, repression was the Greek authorities' only recourse. American officials nominally supported the demand of basic liberties but at the very same time encouraged a policy of massive forces evacuations in the regions where the rebels were strongest (Kolko, Century of War, 378).
