Richard Welch
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Richard "Dick" Welch was the Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Athens at the time of his assassination on December 23, 1975, at the time, the highest-ranking CIA officer ever killed in the line of duty, and the first CIA station chief murdered in a politically motivated assassination. Described by Kiriakou as beloved by everyone who knew him and "just an average American white guy" who nonetheless had "this deep and abiding love of everything Greek," Welch was a Philhellene with a degree in classics and a master's in a field close to Greek mythology, and he spoke both ancient and modern Greek. He had, in fact, been outed by name in the Greek press before he even arrived to take up the post, and was named station chief in October 1975, killed only six weeks later.

Welch had come to the CIA from the military and served in Greece as a young officer early in his career, loving every moment of it; his 1975 posting as station chief, after decades of assignments elsewhere, was in his own telling "a real homecoming." He arrived a little over a year after the fall of the 1967,1974 military junta, a period Greeks came to describe with a coined term meaning "the seven year nightmare." All CIA Athens station chiefs before him had traditionally lived in the same house, in the upscale Athens suburb of Palaio Psychiko, a fact publicly known and reported in the Greek media. His public exposure was compounded by Philip Agee, a rogue former CIA officer who had objected to agency activity in Latin America, resigned, and published a book, Inside the Company, naming hundreds of undercover CIA officers he could recall, Welch among them, an outing that damaged many careers.

He was the first victim of Revolutionary Organization 17 November. The .45 caliber pistol used to kill him would subsequently be used in every confirmed 17 November murder over the following twenty-seven years and is referred to in CIA records as The Welch .45.

Assassination

On the evening of December 23, 1975, Welch and his wife attended the U.S. ambassador's Christmas party at the residence in Athens. Afterward they were driven back to their home in the close-in, high-end Athens suburb of Psychiko. At the time, the residence had a manual gate; their driver pulled the car up to the gate, put it in park, and got out to open it.

Across the street, a second car was waiting with two occupants, a male driver and a female passenger, serving as the getaway team. Two other men exited the waiting car and approached. One was armed with a .45 caliber pistol, the round that would later be named the Welch .45; the second carried a 9mm (some accounts give a .38 revolver).

The driver fled. One of the gunmen shouted "Richard Welch, get out of the car." Welch exited the vehicle with his wife. After Mrs. Welch had also stepped out, one of the assassins announced:

> Richard Welch, you have been convicted of crimes against the Greek people and you have been sentenced to death.

The gunman shot Welch three times in the chest. The four operatives then calmly returned to the second car and drove away. Greek police were initially unable to locate the getaway car, until one of the shooters himself telephoned police to mock them and give them the car's location.

Mrs. Welch, described as "very stoic and very strong", was the only direct witness to her husband's killing. She deliberately memorized the attackers' faces to help identify them later, and ran into the house to call the U.S. embassy. She later reported that there were four assailants in total, including a blonde female lookout, and that the shooter resembled a young Mikis Theodorakis, the celebrated Greek composer.

The group's manifesto claiming responsibility was hand-delivered to a Paris sympathizer, who passed it to the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre; Sartre dismissed it and put it in a desk drawer, forgetting about it for a year until his assistant, Bernard-Henri Lévy, recognized a later manifesto and sent both to a Paris newspaper. See Revolutionary Organization 17 November for the full story of that episode.

Cable traffic and initial response

The embassy's first cable to CIA headquarters was a flash, a precedence indicator high enough to require waking the entire agency leadership regardless of hour and to require the director to brief the President. The next-higher precedence is critic. The contents of the cable were a single sentence:

> Chief Welch shot and killed in front of home in Psychiko.

Headquarters initially responded with the assessment that the assassination "had to be the Russians." This was inconsistent with a standing operational understanding between the CIA and Soviet intelligence services that neither would kill the other's personnel. The next morning, of their own volition, Soviet representatives approached the U.S. and stated explicitly that they had had nothing to do with the killing and would assist the investigation in any way they could.

The killing of Welch remained unsolved for the duration of 17 November's operational life. The group as a whole was not identified or rolled up until 2002. See Revolutionary Organization 17 November.

The neglected witness

On the night of the assassination, a man was walking his dog in the vicinity of the Welch residence and witnessed the assassins' getaway car. He was the defense attaché of a country considered an adversary by both the United States and Greece, and consequently was never interviewed by Greek or American investigators at the time.

In 1998 or 1999, twenty-three or twenty-four years after the killing, John Kiriakou, then working the 17 November case at the U.S. embassy in Athens, reviewed the original cable traffic and identified the unnamed defense attaché as a potential witness who had never been canvassed. Kiriakou located the man, by then retired and in his eighties, by sending name traces and inquiries to allied services, the FBI, and foreign governments.

The CIA chief of station in the country where the witness lived initially declined to participate, citing lack of interest or funding in a twenty-five-year-old case; he authorized Kiriakou to travel and conduct the meeting only on the condition that Kiriakou's home station pay all costs.

Kiriakou flew in during heavy winter weather, trudging through snow above his knees to the witness's apartment. The witness was not at home; his wife, who also spoke broken Greek from years living in Greece, directed Kiriakou to the bank where her husband worked nights as a security guard. Kiriakou located the bank, knocked, and was met at the door by "an 80-year-old man in an ill-fitting night watchman's uniform."

Kiriakou introduced himself using his real name and stated, "I'm John Kiriakou from the CIA and I'm here to change your life." The witness replied:

> My friend, I've waited thirty years for this day.

The witness became Kiriakou's first formal recruitment as a CIA case officer. Real-name approach was deemed appropriate because the witness was elderly, in poor circumstances, and considered to pose no threat, using real credentials also let the source verify through the American Embassy that Kiriakou was not a KGB or MOSSAD plant. The witness habitually insisted that operational meetings begin with a drink, refused to discuss business beforehand, and on at least one occasion took Kiriakou to a lodge in his mountainous hometown for dinner, where he ordered wild boar steak.

The Agee myth and the CIA's own leak

The popular account, repeated even inside the CIA, is that Welch's death was caused by Philip Agee's outing of undercover officers. During his first week on the job, Kiriakou was told in a security briefing that "the traitor" Agee's revelations had led to Welch's death; Kiriakou, who had read Agee's books before joining, already knew this was false, and pointed out that Agee's family had won a lawsuit on the very issue. The lecturer waved him off, telling him he didn't know "the inside story." Roughly seven and a half years later, Kiriakou joined the CIA's own 17 November task force, the unit set up to investigate Welch's killing, and got access to the full file. What he found was that the CIA itself, not Agee, was responsible for the leak that led to Welch's death. A previous Athens station chief's identity had been picked up by the Greek press, which identified both the house he lived in and the house of the U.S. defense attaché, yet the CIA changed nothing. Every station chief who subsequently cycled through Athens, Welch included, kept living in that same publicly known house, which is how his killers found him. The pattern proved fatal again: the U.S. defense attaché in Athens was killed five years after Welch, coming out of the same publicly known house, and the next defense attaché was killed five years after that by a bomb so large that his head was found on a neighboring rooftop, a killing also blamed, per Kiriakou wrongly, on Philip Agee.

Legacy

Kiriakou states plainly that the Welch assassination "changed the course of Greek-U.S. relations." Kiriakou had personally promised Mrs. Welch that the CIA would not stop looking for her husband's killers. 17 November was finally arrested in 2002; the two shooters received sentences of 1,765 years.

The cable from Moscow

Kiriakou, who read the reporting on the killing during his own service, says the very first cable to arrive after Welch was shot dead on 23 December 1975 came from Moscow, the KGB, unprompted, saying "we promise it wasn't us."

He offers it as an instance of a standing arrangement rather than an isolated courtesy, pairing it with an identical message he says the agency received after the killing of John F. Kennedy: neither service harms or interferes with the other's people, and each says so when the question could arise. The pattern is treated at the KGB denial cables.

The killing, as Kiriakou tells it

Welch was the CIA's station chief in Athens in 1975. On 23 December 1975 he attended a Christmas party at the ambassador's residence; he, his wife and their driver returned to their own home, where, "the old days, you know, 1975, where there were no automatic gates", the driver got out to open the gate by hand. Three men and a woman got out of a car parked across the street and one of them shouted Welch's name. Both Welch and his wife got out of the car, and one of the Greeks said: "Richard Welch, you have been found guilty of crimes against the Greek people and you have been sentenced to death." He was shot four times in the chest with a .45 calibre semi-automatic and killed instantly.

Kiriakou is emphatic that Welch had done nothing to invite it, and that the target was the post rather than the man: he had only just arrived in Greece, held a degree in the classics, was fluent in ancient Greek, was trained in archaeology and antiquities, and "really loved Greece." Asked whether the group had a personal grudge, the answer was "no, it wasn't against him. It was against the CIA."

The Welch case is also the reason Kiriakou went to Greece at all, "the reason why I was so interested in Greek terrorism and the reason why I went to Greece was to work on the murder case of Richard Welch."

See also

- Revolutionary Organization 17 November
- The Welch .45
- John Kiriakou
- Athens station
