On August 13, 1968, exactly 58 years ago today, Alekos Panagoulis came within a tenth of a second of killing Greek dicta...

On August 13, 1968, exactly 58 years ago today, Alekos Panagoulis came within a tenth of a second of killing Greek dictator Georgios Papadopoulos. The assassination attempt on the Athens-Sounio highway failed by the narrowest possible margin, and Panagoulis spent years in prison as a result. Panagoulis told the full story in February 1975 to the magazine Tachydromos, just months after the junta's collapse. He described how he had placed mines at the 31st kilometer of the Athens-Sounio road, near Lagonissi, where Papadopoulos traveled each morning from his summer residence to his office. His plan was to detonate them the moment the dictator's car passed over them, using a roadside sign as his visual cue. Everything began to unravel that morning before the attempt even happened. A tangled cable forced Panagoulis to move his detonation point from roughly 200 meters away to just 15 meters from the road. From that position he could no longer see the sign he was using to time the blast. He detonated at 8:20 a.m. and missed the car by a tenth of a second. The broader diversionary plan, which called for thousands of nails to be scattered across central Athens and Molotov bombs to be set off at Lycabettus, Filopappou Hill, and the National Garden to bog down junta forces and cover his escape, never materialized. The cells assigned to carry it out hesitated at the last moment. His getaway boat left without him. He was found hiding beneath a rock near the shore when a gendarmerie officer spotted his foot sticking out. Panagoulis was arrested, tortured, and sentenced to death, though the sentence was never carried out. He was freed in 1973 and died in a car accident in 1976. His own verdict on the failure was blunt. He said failure was always preferable to inaction, and that a single bomb could undo years of junta propaganda overnight. #AlekosP anagoulis #GreekHistory #Junta