Amid regional instability, the oldest US military installation in

Greece gets an upgrade

Steven Tagle November 2, 2023

CHANIA, Greece — I first visited Naval Support Activity (NSA) Souda Bay, an American
military installation on the Akrotiri peninsula in western Crete, while working as the
speechwriter for the US Embassy in Athens, when I facilitated former Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo’s two-day trip to Thessaloniki and Crete in September 2020.

The trip had the orchestrated chaos of a flash mob. Hundreds of government o!cials,
business leaders, diplomats, security forces and journalists converged on several sites for a
few hours, each with their own stake in the secretary’s packed itinerary. In the public
a"airs section, we liaised with local reporters, organized the cultural program and worried
over every detail of the optics, from the positioning of Greek and American flags to Covid
masks and social distancing protocol.

NSA Souda Bay’s stated mission is to project power and warfighting capability in the
eastern Mediterranean by providing logistical support, refueling and resupply services to
US, NATO and coalition forces. Geographically, the remote forward operating station
occupies the strategic central node where European, Africa and Central Command areas
of responsibility overlap.
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 I drafted the secretary’s tweets for each stop on his itinerary, as well as complementary
tweets for the State Department’s deputy spokesperson and Ambassador Geo"rey Pyatt. I
had often written about NSA Souda Bay for the ambassador’s defense speeches, and I used
the three tweets to reiterate the embassy’s main talking points: that it is the “crown jewel”
of US-Greece military cooperation, a relationship enhanced by recent updates to the
countries’ bilateral Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement (MDCA), and its operations
strengthen the NATO alliance and contribute to regional security and stability.

What I remember from that first three-hour visit to Souda Bay is largely impressionistic,
limited to my own minor role in the proceedings. I arrived at the installation early and
spent an hour in a holding room picking over a pile of American junk food. I remember
the brilliant blues of the NATO Marathi Pier Complex, where Pompeo and Greek Prime
Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis boarded a Combatant Craft Medium boat used for special
operations. And I stood on the sidelines in a Hellenic Air Force hangar while the secretary
announced that the USS Hershel “Woody” Williams, a massive Expeditionary Sea Base
ship assigned to US Africa Command, would be homeported at Souda Bay.

Some reporters saw the announcement as a show of support to Greece amid escalating
tensions with Turkey. That summer, the Turkish vessel Oruc Reis carried out seismic
surveys in waters disputed by the two countries, and a “mini-collision” of Greek and
Turkish frigates in August 2020 brought the NATO allies near conflict. Two weeks before
Pompeo’s visit, US Senator Ron Johnson claimed the United States was preparing to
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 withdraw from Incirlik airbase in southern Turkey, and rumors were circulating in the
press that one purpose of the visit was to discuss plans to transfer US military assets from
Incirlik to Souda Bay.

While living on Crete this past summer, I wanted to revisit NSA Souda Bay to gain a
fuller understanding of the US, Greek and NATO military facilities on and around the
Akrotiri peninsula. What role has Souda played in the ongoing war in Ukraine? Did the
2021 update to the US-Greece MDCA result in upgrades to site infrastructure as
promised?

After touring the installation and speaking with base commanders, sailors, journalists and
locals, I was impressed by the facility’s close collaboration with its Greek hosts and its
supporting role in the region’s most pressing conflicts. Indeed, since the outbreak of the
Israel-Hamas war on October 7, the United States has deployed two aircraft carrier strike
groups to the eastern Mediterranean to monitor the situation and deter Iran and
Hezbollah from escalating it. The Greek newspaper Kathimerini reported that NSA Souda
Bay was “on standby” to assist the strike groups. As regional instability necessitates a
greater show of US and NATO force, Greece and the US may find opportunities to deepen
their decades-long security cooperation at Souda Bay.

Itzentin fortress and the entrance of Souda Bay as seen from the Ottoman fortress of Aptera. Both fortresses controlled the strategically important bay. Across
the water is Akrotiri peninsula

‘Premier installation of choice’

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 Roughly 18 kilometers from Chania, the capital of western Crete, NSA Souda Bay
occupies a 1.1-kilometer strip within the Hellenic Air Force Base that is home to the 115th
Combat Wing. Sharing an airfield with both the 115CW and Chania’s civilian airport, it is
part of an ecosystem of Greek and NATO military installations that includes the Hellenic
Naval Base in Souda; the NATO Marathi Pier Complex; the NATO Missile Firing
Installation where allies test air defense, air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles; the NATO
Maritime Interdiction Operational Training Center, which o"ers training in surface, sub-
surface, aerial surveillance and special operations activities; and the new NATO Integrated
Air and Missile Defense Center of Excellence.

On a Zoom call, Hellenic Air Force Colonel Christos Grigoroudis, commanding o!cer of
the 115CW, described how Souda’s location at the crossroads of Europe, the
Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East gives the bay a unique geostrategic importance.
“This area has been a key point for trade, energy and transport for centuries,” he said.
Crete’s warm climate provides a comfortable year-round training environment. In
addition, Marathi has the only deep-water pier in the Mediterranean Sea capable of
berthing aircraft carriers like the two sent to support Israel.

Two weeks after the Hamas attack, Athens signed o" on the construction of a new pier at
the Hellenic Naval Base in Souda, part of a 188 million euro e"ort to expand and
modernize the base so roughly half the Greek fleet can be stationed there by 2030.
Commodore Nektarios Limperakis, commandant of the base, shared the thinking behind
the decision. Compared to the Salamis naval base near Athens, where a majority of the
fleet is stationed, “Crete is closer to hotbeds of unrest and conflicts that a"ect regional
security, like Libya and the Middle East,” he explained. “Therefore, holding the Hellenic
fleet in a strong forward position in Crete facilitates our role as a maritime security
provider in the region.” Upgrading Greece’s second-largest naval base would give the fleet
direct access to the eastern Mediterranean while relieving pressure from Salamis.

The collocation of military bases and installations facilitates collaboration and “provides
extensive combined capabilities” continually used by the United States, NATO allies and
partners, Grigoroudis said. “Souda is a very small place,” he added. “All the commanders
are only a few kilometers away, and the actions of one facility may a"ect another. So we
must be in close coordination.”
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 Zoom interview with Hellenic Air Force Colonel Christos Grigoroudis, commanding o!cer of the 115th Combat Wing

NSA Souda Bay was originally commissioned in 1969 as a 16-person naval detachment and
became a naval support activity in 1980. Today, some 1,000 people including active-duty
military, US civilian employees, contractors, family members and local Greek employees
provided through the Hellenic Air Force work at the facility. It contributed some $158
million to the local economy in fiscal year 2022, including lease agreements and local
purchases, local national employee salaries, concessionary sales, and service and
maintenance contracts.

When I arrived for a visit, Public A"airs O!cer Carolyn Jackson escorted me through
two security checkpoints, the first for the Hellenic airbase and the second for NSA Souda
Bay. The facility itself consists of pastel two and three-story buildings on either side of a
single street, surrounded by a high chain-link fence. As we drove past a Liberty recreation
center with its library and video game consoles, a Creamsicle-colored barracks building
and a Navy Exchange minimart, I felt I’d entered a simulacrum of small-town, middle
America.

Captain Odin Klug, commanding o!cer of NSA Souda Bay, met me in the skipper’s cabin,
and together we took the “long walk”—as he joked—next door to the galley for lunch. The
installation is small by design, he told me, which gives it agility and allows it to maintain a
low profile. NSA Souda Bay is an unaccompanied tour of duty, meaning there are limited
services for sailors’ dependents. There are no schools or childcare facilities on site, and
many are deployed here on their first tours, as Klug was in 2006. He assumed command of
the installation in July 2022.

In the serving line, he greeted colleagues and made an e"ort to speak to local sta" in
Greek. Over a meal of lobster tacos and chicken quesadillas, he said he felt language
training was essential for developing relationships with local sta" and community
o!cials.
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 Klug wanted NSA Souda Bay to be the “premier installation of choice” for the US Navy
and its allies and partners. “They choose whether or not to base aircraft out of here,
whether they fly missions out of here, or sortie or bring ships in which can project
significant power,” he said. “They could go to Palma de Mallorca. They could go to Malta.
They could go to Split, Croatia. Why would they want to fight to come here?”

Interviewing Captain Odin Klug, commanding o!cer of NSA Souda Bay (Nicholas S. Tenorio)

To help attract interest, the commander says he has focused on building and sustaining the
installation’s readiness, prioritizing security, operations and most important, personnel.
Since the base is shared with the Hellenic Air Force and hosts tenant entities that report to
separate chains of command, he needed buy-in from many di"erent stakeholders. That’s
why understanding the locals and nurturing relationships at the municipal and regional
levels have been important to him. A fan of extended metaphors, he described his job as
pruning the branches of a tree so “everyone understands the way going forward.”

This past summer, as wildfires in central Greece triggered an explosion at an air force
ammunition depot just six kilometers from the Nea Anchialos airbase, Colonel
Grigoroudis requested NSA Souda Bay’s assistance to clear out brush from F-16 fighter jet
magazines north of the Souda airbase. In early August, American sailors and their
counterparts from the 115CW participated in joint live firefighter training exercises.

Since the eruption of war in Ukraine, NSA Souda Bay has also played an integral role
supporting NATO and the US Sixth Fleet’s enhanced presence in the region, according to
Vassilis Nedos, the political editor, diplomatic and defense correspondent for Kathimerini.
This summer, the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group conducted operations in the
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 Mediterranean Sea, part of the consistent carrier presence the US Navy has maintained
there since December 2021, right before Russia’s invasion. Around the time of my visit,
NSA Souda Bay hosted a detachment tasked with supporting the strike group’s forward
operations in the Mediterranean.

Given the looming presence of a Russian fleet stationed in Syria, Souda’s logistics
capability is “crucial for all these war games that are happening in the eastern
Mediterranean, where we have submarines chasing other submarines and NATO warships
monitoring where Russian destroyers and frigates are moving,” Nedos told me. NATO
operations in the Mediterranean have become so routine since the start of the war, he
said, that “it’s no longer news.” The strike group’s deployment was extended in October,
and it was sent to waters near Israel.

A C-2A Greyhound departs NSA Souda Bay with cargo destined for the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford in August 2023 (Nicholas S. Tenorio)

Upgrades to NSA Souda Bay

Following a briefing in the skipper’s cabin, Klug and Jackson took me on a windshield
tour of the operational side of the installation. Together, we drove onto the apron where
aircraft are parked, refueled, loaded and unloaded. NSA Souda Bay shares the runway with
the Hellenic Air Force and the civilian airport, and it can get busy in the summertime
when there are many more commercial flights to Chania. The installation submits its
flight schedule to the 115CW and communicates with them about arrivals, departures,
local operations and movement from the apron to the runway or taxiway.
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 One of the first aircraft Klug pointed out to me was the State Department’s cone-nosed
Gulfstream III, which is used for contingency medical operations not just within Greece,
but around Europe, Africa and the Mediterranean. I remembered that Covid vaccine
distribution through NSA Souda Bay was the reason our embassy in Athens was one of
the first in Europe to get jabs in early 2021. Now I was looking at the plane that had
transported the vaccines.

As we drove across the apron, Klug indicated bright yellow areas painted on the concrete.
These contained hookups to an underground fuel hydrant system, a $6.5 million project
completed in December 2021. Instead of bringing out a fuel truck, personnel can simply
put a hose down, lock it into place and start refueling an aircraft. “A lot of thought goes
into the process of future investment,” he said. “All this used to be unimproved earth.”

Before expanding the apron and adding the underground system, the installation
conducted environmental studies to model how the project would be a"ected by
earthquakes and temperature changes, and whether the ground could absorb enough
water in the event of heavy rains. “Not only do we adhere to American universal facility
code standards but we also act in concert with our Hellenic partners in the civil apron and
the 115CW,” Klug told me.

The current air terminal has a capacity of 170. It will be expanded into a two-story structure

In October 2021, the United States and Greece signed a second protocol of amendment to
the Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement that has enabled US forces to train and
operate within Greece since 1990. The update extended the duration of the MDCA from
one to five years, consistent with other bilateral defense agreements between NATO allies.
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 A big selling point of the deal here was that the longer term would allow Congress to
make greater investments in Hellenic installations where Washington is authorized to
operate military and supporting facilities, including Souda Bay.

The following month, the Hellenic National Defense General Sta" (GEETHA) and US
European Command (USEUCOM) signed an implementing arrangement to facilitate US-
funded military infrastructure projects in Greece.

During my visit, NSA Souda Bay was abuzz with construction projects begun prior to the
2021 update. The largest was a three-story communications center that had broken
ground last November. A tall crane stood over the site, and Captain Klug told me
construction crews were getting ready to finish the second story. The $34 million project
is scheduled for completion in fall of 2024. It will contain a telephone exchange,
electronics maintenance shops, an electronic key management system vault and storage
for equipment to be used by the installation. Klug sees it as a “facility for the future” that
will a"ect operations for the next 10 to 20 years.

I also visited the air terminal, a white one-story building with the gloomy gray interior of
a ’90s o!ce building. It has a capacity of 170 people, but there are plans to replace it with a
two-story Joint Mobility Processing Center, which will include an air passenger terminal,
air cargo terminal, air operations, a naval supply warehouse and administrative spaces for
the Red Cross and United Service Organizations.

Down at the NATO Marathi Pier Complex, new warehouse facilities are also in the works.
In January 2022, NSA Souda Bay broke ground on a logistics support center that includes
dry goods storage, cold storage for fresh fruits and vegetables, a mail processing center and
logistics management o!ces. The $4.9 million center was identified as an “absolute need,”
Klug said, and is expected to be completed in March 2024. A project to renovate Marathi’s
sewage treatment plant is scheduled to begin in 2026. When complete, it will cut
treatment time in half.
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 Meeting Deputy Regional Governor of Chania Nikos Kalogeris in his o!ce

Locals’ reactions to the US presence

As a Greek-American child visiting relatives in Chania, Gregory Pappas, founder of the
Greek America Foundation and publisher of the news site The Pappas Post, recalled
seeing gra!ti on the mole leading to the city’s iconic lighthouse that read “ΕΞΩ ΟΙ
ΑΜΕΡΙΚΑΝΟΙ” or “AMERICANS OUT,” referring to the nearby installation at Souda
Bay. While US support for Greece during its decade-long debt crisis largely ended the
widespread anti-Americanism that had taken hold of the country since Turkey’s invasion
of Cyprus in 1974, Greek parties of the far left continue to protest Greece’s involvement in
NATO-led maneuvers.

The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and other groups staged one such protest last
February, when the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush stopped at the port of Piraeus
before arriving in Souda Bay for a scheduled visit. Demonstrators called on the
government to withdraw from “imperialist interventions” in Ukraine and eject NATO
from Greek bases. In a keynote speech at the rally, Nikos Ambatielos, a member of the
KKE’s central committee, criticized NATO for using Greece as a “bridgehead against other
peoples” to serve capitalist interests, making the country a target for Russian retaliation.
He decried what he called political games that have led Greece to arm itself against its
NATO ally Turkey at the expense of the Greek people.

The KKE forms a small but vocal minority against the “expansion and upgrading of NATO
bases” in Greece. While in Chania, I met with Deputy Regional Governor Nikos
Kalogeris, who told me that 95 percent of Greeks don’t have a problem with NSA Souda
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 Bay, while the 5 percent who object are mostly communists. “Others believe the base
makes Chania a target, but I think it actually makes our region safer,” he said.

On the day parliament ratified the 2021 update to the MDCA, the KKE unfurled banners
on the Acropolis that read “No to war. No to involvement. No to the bases of death.” The
conservative New Democracy party, which had an absolute majority, approved the
amendment with a vote of 181 to 119, while leftist Syriza, Greece’s main opposition party,
voted against the update despite collaborating with the US while in power.

With Giannis Kasimatis, owner of Irene Tavern, and a photo of his grandmother, who founded the kafeneio serving her recipes

Most of the residents I spoke with on Akrotiri, who are in closest contact with Americans
from the installation, appreciated and benefited from their presence. Giannis Kasimatis,
the tall, personable owner of Irene Tavern in the village of Chorafakia, where many sailors
and civilian employees rent apartments, remembered being treated to chocolates by an
American couple when he was a kid. “The Americans have done good for Akrotiri,” he
told me. “They rent houses. They spend at shops and restaurants. They donate clothes to
local associations. They’re our friends, and for over 50 years, they’ve supported us and the
region.”

Giannis’s grandparents opened the tavern as a small kafeneio serving his grandmother’s
recipes in 1979. Growing up, he spent lots of time there and took it over in 2014. The
afternoon I came for lunch, he moved from table to table, chatting with customers and
surprising children with balloons. For dessert, he treated me to loukoumades, fried dough
balls drizzled with chocolate and honey. “We’ve had American customers for years,” he
said. “They love our food.”
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 I considered how a lifetime of interactions with Americans might have shaped this
outgoing young man. He told me one of his relatives has worked in the galley at NSA
Souda Bay for 20 years. I met her in the serving line the following day when I had lunch
with Captain Klug. Giannis also mentioned visiting New York, especially the Greek
neighborhood of Astoria in 2016, and I hoped the constant stream of customers from
Souda had helped give his family some stability during the turbulent years of the Greek
debt crisis.

“Stronger together” is a popular catchphrase for describing cooperation between NATO

allies. But in Souda Bay, it seems to capture a truly symbiotic network of relationships that
is likely to deepen given the ongoing conflicts in the eastern Mediterranean.

Top photo: The orchestrated chaos surrounding former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s visit to the NATO Marathi Pier Complex in

September 2020
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