[ALBSA-Info] Trainspotting in Albania...The Times

[Agron Alibali]

The Times (London) 
December 14, 2001, Friday 
Features 

Spot the difference 

Ben Macintyre 

The British enjoy the thrill of taking photographs of foreign military planes and noting down their numbers. The Greeks think those who do so are either spies or mad. Ben Macintyre in Athens reports on the cultural differences that divide the two countries, while Penny Wark talks 

Everyone has a bad holiday story, about the inedible food, the truculent natives, the hotel like a prison, the peculiar companions. But Lesley Coppin's story goes one worse: her accommodation was a prison and the past month abroad has been spent in the company of a woman who diced up her husband and buried him under an onion patch. 

In early November, Mrs Coppin set off with her second husband Paul for a relaxing week in Greece, part belated honey-moon, part hobby tour: while her planespotting spouse and his friends visited the military airfields that are their passion, she planned to read a few books on the minibus, and then spend the last days of the holiday touring ancient Greek ruins. Today Mrs Coppin, 51, was finally hoping to leave Korydallos high-security prison, one of the nastiest jails in Europe, after five weeks behind bars on charges of military espionage for looking -or in her case not looking -at elderly Greek aircraft. Mrs Coppin had planned to explore the Acropolis; instead she found herself sharing a fetid cell with 13 women and facing a possible prison sentence of 20 years. 

The decision this week by Greek judges to reduce the charges and allow the Coppins to be released on bail, along with ten other planespotting Britons and two Dutchmen, has brought to an end one of most bizarre international legal disputes of modern times, but it has left Mrs Coppin, a grandmother who works as the deputy manager of Domino's Pizza in Mildenhall, Suffolk, with the sort of holiday memories that nightmares are made of. Perhaps the cruellest irony is that she, unlike her husband, is very bored by military aircraft and does not know an AH49 from a B52. 

The incarceration of the planespotters has driven the Daily Mail into an anti Greek frenzy, prompted questions in Parliament, diplomatic representations by the Foreign Office and Prime Minister, and enraged comparisons between the Greek Government and the Taleban; it has angered and confused many Greeks, provoked resentment within the Greek military establishment, exacerbated tensions between Greece and Turkey and brought relations between Athens and London to their lowest ebb for years; it has cast a light into the strange world of the planespotter, and another into the paranoid mind of Greek military officialdom; it has spawned some familiar jokes and some pompous newspaper columns. 

But above all, the incident has revealed the unbridgeable cultural gulf between two exotic European species: the average British planespotter and the typical Greek military policeman. European commissions, parliaments, courts and currencies may seek to bring Europeans closer, but these two creatures simply do not inhabit the same psychological universe -which is why Mrs Coppin ended up in a dank cell with prostitutes and murderers. 

Mr Coppin runs a travel company, Touchdown Tours, specialising in excursions to airshows, military installations and, most importantly, to foreign airfields in order to spot military jets. 

Planespotters deem themselves a more glamorous version of trainspotters -if such a distinction is possible -but the object of the hobby is much the same: see an aircraft, note down its identification number and, if possible, take a photograph; then spend hours in arcane conversation with other planespotters, over Thermos and sandwiches, often in the rain. This uniquely British pastime follows a grand tradition of eccentricity: it is not complicated, physically dangerous or athletic. In the minds of most people it is merely harmless, pointless, and mind-crushingly boring. 

But to its most enthusiastic practitioners it verges on compulsion, and of all the myriad varieties of planespotters, the most obsessive are the "militaries", who spot military planes. Not for them the humdrum pleasures of a Heathrow passenger jet; they long for the forbidden thrill of a Mirage glimpsed across barbed wire on a cold East European runway, the smell of military jet fuel in the morning, the challenge of getting around the guards to jot down that elusive tail number. These men -and they are almost all male -are the uber-nerds of planespotting, anoraks with attitude for whom no military plane is too dull or obscure, no airfield out of bounds. 

Mr Coppin knew what he was up against in Greece, and his account of a similar planespotting visit to the country last year now reads like pure irony. "I would warn that spotting in Greece is still not particularly liked by the authorities and without our contacts in the Greek Ministry of Defence, which helped on a number of occasions, the trip might have been a little longer than anticipated." Mr Coppin even appears to have relished the risks. On his website he eagerly records a visit to an F104 storage area at Araxos last year: "This was our closest call with the security forces during the whole trip, so care is definitely needed here." 

On November 8, the 14 tourists, having paid Pounds 650 for the week-long trip, arrived at the military airbase in Kalamata in the Peloponnese. Mrs Coppin stayed in the minibus, doing a crossword puzzle, while the others trooped off to see what they could see. By this point, the spotters had already visited airbases at Tanagra, Andravida and Araxos, and Mrs Coppin was bored stiff. 

Greek officials say the group had been repeatedly warned that its activities were suspicious and told not to take photographs; it had been detained, cautioned and released once already. But the "militaries" laughed in the face of danger: this, after all, was the annual feast of Saint Michael, patron saint of fighter pilots, when the Greek Air Force traditionally (if cautiously) opens its doors to visitors. 

"We had an invitation to attend the open day at Kalamata that was signed by a Greek Air Force brigadier. We left the cameras in the minibuses as we were told," Mr Coppin says. Within minutes the entire group, including the hapless Mrs Coppin, were rounded up, marched off to a Greek military police station and accused of espionage or, more exactly, "walking suspiciously" through a military area. 

The British tabloid press immediately leapt to the defence of the "Kalamata 12", insisting that innocent, if somewhat quirky, Britons were being cruelly used by barbaric foreigners. From the Greek perspective, matters looked rather different. Photographic equipment, whether used or not, near military installations is suspicious, but, in the wake of September 11, Kalamata airbase, the home of the Greek Air Force academy, was on the highest security alert. Despite repeated warnings, the group persisted in its quest for sensitive aircraft serial numbers. If a group of foreigners had been noticed lurking around the perimeter of a British military airbase armed with binoculars, notebooks and telephoto-lenses in the wake of the terrorist attacks, the British police might also have taken an interest; at least one sincerely hopes they would have. Spies have been known to use spotters as cover before, and during the Cold War spies pretending to be trainspotters gathered useful military information in Albania. 

There is also one other crucial factor: Britain has roughly 10,000 planespotters; Greece has precisely none. In Britain people who hang around airbases spotting military planes are benign, Bovril-drinking eccentrics; in Greece they are spies. 

What the Greek authorities subsequently discovered redoubled their suspicions. 

Inside the planespotters' luggage was a shortband radio scanner, used for eavesdropping on conversations between pilots and ground control. Their notebooks were full of the serial numbers of army helicopters operating out of Megara, a high-security base near Athens that is off-limits to civilians. 

During interviews with police, Mr Coppin neglected to mention that the group had been to Megara; more importantly, he failed to mention that earlier this year he had toured airbases in Turkey, which has not always had the most cordial relations with Greece, as a guest of the Turkish military. Nothing could have looked more dodgy in Greek eyes, and Mr Coppin's excuse that he had been in similar contact with the Greek military did nothing to dampen suspicions. 

Greece is gearing up to host the Olympic Games in 2004 and issues of security are high on the national agenda. Moreover, the country has just taken delivery of a secret new aircraft: an adapted Embraer jet, modified to carry an airborne early-warning system. According to some reports, the Greek authorities believe the group took photographs of the new plane. Another factor contributing to Greek sensitivity may be the fact that it has already supplied two of its aged Huey helicopters to neighbouring Macedonia, which is facing deep internal conflict with ethnic Albanians. 

The arrested planespotters insisted that the radio scanner had not been used. 

Mr Coppin said he had not told the authorities (or his lawyer) about going to Megara because the top-secret airbase had not been on the original itinerary. 

He said they had simply seen planes as they were driving along the road, and got out of the minibus with their binoculars and notebooks and got spotting. 

The unconvinced Greek authorities called in the prosecutors, and Mrs Coppin was bundled off to Korydallos prison while the men were incarcerated in Nafplion. 

On November 12 they were charged with espionage, the ponderous Greek legal system lumbered into action and Britain erupted in self-righteous fury. 

Planespotting is pursued by relatively few Britons, but bashing foreigners who arrest Brits is a sport the whole nation can enjoy. The Daily Mail began a campaign to force the release of the Kalamata 12 -and may be negotiating to pay some of their bail as a publicity stunt -to the point where the Greek Embassy is getting thousands of e-mails and letters, and sales of Greek products are falling. Edward Heathcoat Amory invoked Palmerston, recalling for Mail readers the occasion when the then Foreign Secretary sent a naval squadron to blockade the Greek coast in defence of a lone British citizen. The Spectator issued a ferocious harangue against the "sadistic and moronic" actions of the Greek authorities, insisting that the Taleban treated their foreign prisoners better and demanding a boycott of the Olympic Games. 

Baron Lamont of Lerwick fulminated about the dangers of European-style justice, and Boris Johnson MP declared the judges, in a region famed for its olives, to be the pits: "Are these Greek judges just a few olives short of a picnic?" he demanded. 

"I am not a spy. All I want to do is go home," Mrs Coppin wailed from her cell, as Britain's media enjoyed the pungent tang of taramasalata jokes and planespotting witticisms: Greek meets Geek was irresistible, but here, too, was an opportunity to bring other sins into account. Why were a few harmless enthusiasts being persecuted in the name of anti-terrorism, when Greece has so signally failed to tackle the November 17 Marxist-Leninist terrorist group, despite a string of horrific attacks, including the still-unsolved murder 18 months ago of Brigadier Stephen Saunders, the British military attache? 

Others pointed out that Britain could have precious little interest in spying on the tatty and outdated Air Force deployed by Greece, a fellow member of Nato. If the serial numbers of the 35-year-old Huey helicopters were so secret, why were they painted in large white letters on the side of each aircraft? And if Megara is such a sensitive site, why is it visible from a busy road, and how come it has been used as the location for a popular Greek television drama series about fighter pilots? Almost all Greek military serial numbers are available in defence manuals and aircraft directories anyway, and if Britain had really wanted to spy on a Greek military base, the job could have been done far more easily by satellite than with a bunch of ill-dressed tourists in a minibus in broad daylight. 

"Planespotting must be one of the most eccentric hobbies known to mankind, but it is not an indication of ill-will or a threat to Greek national security," insists Denis MacShane, the junior Foreign Office minister. 

Some in Greece responded angrily to the British barrage, with one Greek newspaper claiming that Britain was deliberately trying to undermine the tourist trade (2.5 million Britons visit Greece annually) ahead of the Olympic Games. There was, clearly, grandstanding on the Greek side, too, most particularly from the Kalamata investigating magistrate, Panayiotis Poulious, who seized his 15 minutes of international fame with both hands. The Greek Government was plainly embarrassed, particularly after the personal intervention of Tony Blair, but rightly pointed out that the Greek judiciary is independent and politicians may not interfere with the law, however slow and misguided that law may appear. 

The reaction of most Greeks, however, was simply one of bafflement: not at the scale of British fury, but at the depths of British peculiarity. John Nikiteas, the lawyer representing the Kalamata 12, put it simply: "This hobby is completely unknown to the Greeks, and it is very strange for us to understand the attraction." 

Indeed it is not easy to explain to a patriotic Greek why one might come to this cradle of civilisation not to admire or explore, nor even to sunbathe, but to stand by an airfield jotting down the numbers of identical planes. 

As we waited for Mrs Coppin to be released today outside the prison, I tried to convince my taxi driver, Michalis Mitropoulos, that in Britain there really are people who live for the thrill of photographing a foreign military plane of no importance, even in defiance of the law. He made no attempt to hide his incredulity and then, after a few moments of reflection, declared: "There are only two places for such people: prison, or hospital." 

Planespotters are widely regarded in Britain as amusing entertainment, but ultimately pretty silly; the idiotic actions of the Kalamata 12 have done little to shift that perception. Greece is widely regarded as a fine holiday destination, but a place of slow and uncertain justice; the events of the past month have also done little to change that view. The only person to emerge blameless from the saga is Mrs Coppin, whose cultural priorities are unimpeachable, and who wanted only to see the remnants of the glory that was Greece. 

Mrs Coppin's holiday from hell is finally coming to an end: her bills are huge (although they no longer face criminal charges, the accused must each stump up Pounds 9,000 bail), she does not feel well, the souvenirs are lamentable and her memories of Greek architecture extend no further than the inside of Korydallos prison. The Kalamata 12 will spend Christmas at home, but may have to return to face misdemeanour charges, which would probably carry a suspended sentence. 

In the wake of the imbroglio, Greek and Briton remain deeply confused and suspicious about each other's customs and peculiarities, but two thing are certain: Mrs Coppin will be going elsewhere for her holidays next year, and planespotting won't catch on in Greece any time soon. 2 cover story 


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