Title: S1E7 The Shadow Of Richard Welch
Show: John Kiriakou's Dead Drop
Date: 2025-12-22
URL: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/68e695c6d798804c9e4bbd13/e/6946fc7ee13e237fde179d12/media.mp3
Duration: 0:38:48

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[01:01] podcast. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You've motivated us to keep cranking them out. To close that circle, it would be awesome if you could like, review, comment on, or share the podcast on whatever platform you're listening. Think of it as extra motivation for us. A few episodes back, I told you the story of William Buckley, a terrific soldier, a skilled spy, and the CIA station chief in Beirut. In March 1984, Hezbollah kidnapped Bill, and over the course of the next year,

[01:33] they tortured him repeatedly, and produced videos of that torture. In the end, when Bill had clearly gone mad, and stopped being useful to them, they executed him. But as I arrived in Athens a few years later, the shadow of another assassinated CIA officer loomed large. At the time he was assassinated in December 1975, Richard Welch was the highest-ranking CIA officer ever to be killed in the line of duty. He was also the first CIA station chief to be murdered in a politically motivated assassination.

[02:06] As I was preparing to go to Athens, everything I did, everything I learned, I guess you could say was under the shadow of Richard Welch. Dick Welch was a major historical figure in the CIA. By all accounts, everybody who encountered him loved him. He was not a typical CIA officer of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. He had a degree in Ancient Greek. He got a master's degree in something like Greek mythology, or some obscure field. He loved Greece, and he loved Greeks.

[02:42] He was in the directorate of operations. He had come to the CIA from the military, served in Greece as a young man, as a junior officer, loved every second of it, and then served around the world wherever it was the CIA had sent him, always with the idea that he would eventually go back to Greece. And so he did go back to Greece in 1975 as the CIA station chief. This was a real homecoming for him. I just recently read an interview with his son. His son is now in his 70s. He said his father loved Greece more than he loved

[03:13] anything else on earth. He spoke fluent Greek. He spoke fluent Ancient Greek, which no Greek does. He was just an average American white guy who had this deep and abiding love of everything Greek. He really celebrated this appointment. For some reason, it was slightly off cycle. So he only arrived in Greece in November of 1975. Now the Greek military junta lasted from 1967 to 1974. The Greeks were so traumatized by it. They've made up a word in the Greek language

[03:52] that means it's a compound word and it means the seven year nightmare. So he arrived in Greece after the junta had collapsed. The CIA and the American embassy made several immediate mistakes. Number one, all station chiefs lived in the same house and it was known in the Greek media. And the location of the house was known to the Greek media. It was in a very, very upscale area immediately outside of Athens called Palio Psihiko.

[04:25] I'm going to call them minor secrets, sometimes get out there. Like maybe in Washington, people are going to know where the Mossad representative or the KGB resident, where they happened to live. It's just one of those things that sort of slips out over the years. But you counter that by moving him to different houses. But that didn't happen. As far as I know, no one even considered it. It's a mistake that should never have been made. That is intelligence 101. Also, something else was happening around the same time. There was a, I'm going to call

[05:00] him a rogue CIA officer by the name of Philip A. G. Philip A. G. was assigned to a station in Latin America. He objected to what the CIA was doing in Latin America, which kudos to him. But his response was to resign from the agency and to write a book called inside the company, where he in an appendix, he listed the names of every undercover CIA officer he could recall.

[05:31] And there were hundreds of them. For many of them, their careers were ruined. Dick Welch was one of those names. So not only is the CIA station chief's house now known in Athens, but it is widely known that Richard Welch is a CIA officer. And then the Greek media says, oh, a new diplomat is arriving from the United States, Richard Welch. He's going to be living in Baleopsy, Hickeau. Well, it doesn't take a genius to put two and two together. That Dick Welch is the new CIA

[06:03] station chief. So he was only there for about six weeks. Greece had just returned to democracy. Konstantin Garamannis, who's one of the fathers of the state as we know it today, had returned from self-imposed exile in Paris to become the prime minister. He was a right-of-center politician, but universally loved and respected because he had stood up to the Nazis just a few decades earlier. Two things happened. Garamannis was elected prime minister in a landslide

[06:35] and a national referendum throughout the royal family. In a political sense, this was important because, number one, this is a NATO country returning to its democratic roots. But number two, there's now an underlying distrust and dislike of the United States. That dislike was more of a hatred in some circles. That came from the fact that it was the United States that had supported the junta. Now, there's a widely held belief that it was the CIA that installed the junta. That is

[07:06] not true. It was the White House and the State Department that had installed the junta. And Henry Kissinger, even though he did not have an official title at the time, was an advisor to President Johnson in 1967. And it was Kissinger who told Johnson to go ahead and overthrow that government. The communists are going to win the next election anyway. There's kind of a famous story where the king was invited to the White House for dinner and he went to the White House thinking he was going to be feted as this European leader. He's a crowned head.

[07:40] He's going to meet the president of the United States. It's going to be a big deal. It's going to be on all the front pages of the papers. And instead, Johnson pulled him aside and said, if you don't stop those fucking communists, I'll stop them for you. It was a direct threat. The king said, look, I'm just a constitutional monarch. I don't have any control over who wins the election. The truth is the communists had no hope of winning an election. They were going to win a few seats, but it was the slightly left of center social democrats who were actually going

[08:13] to do pretty well. That was terrifying enough to the US government to actively overthrow Greece's democracy. My mentor at the CIA in operations was a legendary officer by the name of Gust Avricatus. Gust became so famous that he was portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film Charlie Wilson's War. Gust and I were both Greek Orthodox, both from Western Pennsylvania, both went to second tier schools, not Ivy League schools like the old boy network members

[08:48] in the CIA had done. So he took a real liking to me and volunteered to be my guiding mentor in operations. I learned more from Gust than I learned from any other person in in my entire adult life. So Gust told me this story and I believe him. He said that he heard a rumor on the 20th of April 1967. He was stationed in Athens. He heard a rumor there's going to be a coup tonight. He said a coup launched by whom? By the military. Well, he was handling a major military official

[09:23] who was a recruited agent and he triggered an emergency meeting at 11 o'clock that night. The source comes to the meeting and Gus says, so help me God, you better not overthrow this government tonight. And he said, Gus, what are you talking about? Nobody's going to overthrow this government. At 2am, tanks rolled into the streets and the military overthrew the government. Gus said he later learned that the CIA did not have a role in this coup because the CIA was opposed to the coup. It was the State Department and the National Security Council being egged on

[09:58] by Henry Kissinger that led to the coup. A group of generals briefly took power. They were almost immediately overthrown by a group of colonels and the colonels held the government for the next seven years. The generals were too liberal. The colonels wanted to crack heads. I can sum up the organizing principle of the coup in a single word, communism. The Greeks were obsessed with communism. They had fought a bloody and bitter civil war immediately after the Nazis were

[10:32] driven out. The Nazis left in 44. The civil war broke out in 46. It pitted brother against brother and it lasted until 49 with thousands of people massacred, mostly by communists. The Greek right was determined not to allow the Communist Party or Communist Stooges or outside Communist leaders to gain any foothold in Greece. Anybody who was to the left of Attila the Hun was either a communist or a communist sympathizer. One of the things that the

[11:05] Hunta did was they published a book called The Undermining of the Greek State by Communism and they published it in as many languages as they possibly could. I have a copy. My grandmother gave it to me because my grandmother, God bless her soul, was tricked into thinking that this was a good thing for the country. My grandfather never believed it. My grandfather was a Republican with a small r. My grandmother was a royalist and became a Huntest. My cousins in Greece would write letters back and forth with my grandmother and they would say, no, no, you're

[11:37] wrong. There is no communism here. They're pretending that there's communism. It gives them a reason to keep us down. She had this copy of this book, The Undermining of the Greek State by Communism and she said, but it says in this book it has these photographs of these documents saying that we should do this in the name of Marx and Lenin and they were telling her, no, no, this is propaganda. One of her cousins sent her a book in English that I still have that was the other side. I've read both of these books. The first is clearly fascist propaganda.

[12:11] The second is a well considered rebuttal by an academic who was based in the United States. So the democratic government is taking root. It had been around for barely over a year when Dick Welch arrives in Greece. The ambassador invites Dick and Mrs. Welch to his Christmas party on December 23rd, 1975 and they go to the Christmas party. By all accounts, they have a grand old time. They get back in the car and the driver takes them back to their house in Psehikol.

[12:42] Back then, gates were not automatic. You couldn't just press a button and your gate opens. So the driver parked the car at the entrance to the house, got out to open the gate. Didn't notice that there was a car parked across the street with three men and a woman inside. Two of the men get out and shout, Richard Welch, get out of the car. The driver runs for his life, but Dick and Mrs. Welch got out of the car. Both of the men are pointing guns at Dick. One was a 45 that later became known as the Welch 45 and one was a nine millimeter. There was a man

[13:19] in the car that remained in the car as the driver and there was a woman who we believe was acting as the lookout. One of the men says, Richard Welch, you have been found guilty of crimes against the Greek people and you've been sentenced to death and then shot him three times in the chest with a 45, killing him instantly. Mrs. Welch stood there like a statue. She told us later that she wanted to burn their images into her mind so that she could help us identify them. The most important thing that she told us was that there were four of them, that one was a blonde

[13:54] woman. She remained in the car with the driver, but that the shooter looked like a young Miky Stel Dorakis. Miky Stel Dorakis just died a year ago at the age of 96 was the most important composer in the history of Greece. A more beloved figure does not exist and I have to tell you I was one of the biggest Miky Stel Dorakis fans that existed. So he's dead, they get back in the car, they drive away, she runs in the house, calls the embassy, the embassy calls the police, everybody converges on the house. This event changed the course of Greek-U.S. relations.

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[22:42] out. It ends up in Libération and 17 November gets the publicity that it was seeking from the outset. As you can imagine, at the CIA, they set up a task force and they begin to follow all these leads because God knows the Greeks weren't. It's not that the Greeks didn't care. It's that the Greeks did not have the expertise to investigate a crime of international import. The people who would have done the investigation had all been fired because they were all huntess torturers.

[23:15] The French were like, you know what? This isn't our problem. These crimes happen in Greece. We have our own problems. So everybody that is in a position of authority now has zero experience, especially in complicated investigations. They couldn't even find the getaway car. They had to be told where the getaway car was. Well, this hits the Greek media, which was full of yellow journalists anyway. And all of a sudden 17 November becomes the ghost organization, the phantom organization. No one knows who they are. No one knows where they live. Who's going to be their

[23:50] next target? In the end, they killed something like 27 people. After Dick Welch and Malyos, it was two U.S. defense attachés. It was an American technical sergeant in the air force who was just doing his laundry in the basement laundry room of his apartment building. Ronald Stewart. It was the Turkish ambassador, the Turkish deputy ambassador, the minister of communications, the minister of finance, the governor of the central bank. They fired rockets at the

[24:21] German ambassador. They fired rockets at the minister of finance. They fired rockets at the British embassy, the French embassy. They blew up tax offices. They were confident to the point of brazenness. The Greeks made additional very stupid mistakes. We were never sure if it was just a fundamental Greek inability to crack this group, or if the Greek police were infiltrated, or if they were on the payroll, or if there were ministers who had been infiltrated, who were telling

[24:59] the Greeks to back off. Could the Greeks really be that stupid, that incompetent? And we later learned that, yeah, they could be that stupid and that incompetent. Athens has a fantastic museum called the War Museum. It's got tanks and armored personnel carriers and fighter jets and cool weapons and stuff. It never occurred to them to deactivate the weapon. And so all of these weapons that are on display in the museum are live weapons. I'm talking about rocket launchers.

[25:34] I'm talking about rocket-propelled grenade launchers, machine guns, sniper rifles. And one day, just as the museum was opening, 17 November walks in, takes all the security guards and museum employees hostage, locks the door, drives a truck up to the entrance of the museum, steals all the weapons and drives away. Now they have all these weapons. So what do they do about ammunition? In the middle of the night, they go to the local police station in the

[26:07] Athenian neighborhood of Vironas, Byron, named after Lord Byron, another great hero of the Greek Revolution. They take the four cops who are on duty on midnight shift hostage and they steal all the cops' weapons and all of the ammunition. Then they raid a military depot in central Greece and take all of the ammunition for the entire military base. How many people would be in an organization like this? At the CIA, we had literally thousands of suspects. In the end,

[26:44] there were seven or eight. We used to have this joke at the CIA, it can't be these same people from 1975. They're going to be in their 70s by now. Well, you know what? They were in their 70s, still carrying out hits and ops. And then when they needed cash, they would just take all these weapons and rockets and they would rob banks and just clear the banks out of hundreds of thousands of euros over the years. They got more and more involved in politics.

[27:33] The Greeks, more than any other European Union country, hate paying taxes. For example,

[28:05] Greece has a tax on swimming pools. If you've got a private swimming pool, if you're wealthy enough to have a private swimming pool, you got to pay a tax on it. It's just a couple thousand dollars when you build a pool. There are about 30,000 private swimming pools that rich people have, 16 people in the country admit to having pools. 60 minutes did a story once in the 80s or 90s about how Greeks don't pay taxes. And they had this group of just average Greek people and they're sitting around a fire pit and they're talking about taxes. The interviewer said,

[28:37] why don't you pay your taxes? And this woman said, what do you care if I pay my taxes? What business is it of yours if I pay my taxes? I don't ask you if you pay your taxes. You stay out of my tax business. I'll stay out of your tax business. But that's the attitude of all Greeks. They don't want to pay their taxes. And so anytime parliament would consider a bill to raise taxes, 17 November would go out in the middle of the night and fire rockets at the tax offices.

[29:08] Or they would murder the minister of finance or blow up the car that's carrying the governor of the central bank. One of the problems that we ran into early on was that most Greeks saw this group as a Robin Hood kind of group dealing from the rich to give to the poor. They weren't giving to the poor, but they're blowing up the tax office. They really did win the messaging war. The Turks once in the 80s and then again in the mid 90s landed troops on a little uninhabited island

[29:38] Islet in the Aegean called Emiya. There's a herd of goats on Emiya. There's nothing else. There are no people. They put the Turkish flag, then the Greeks sent a ship and they put the Greek flag back and next thing you know, they're on the brink of war. Bill Clinton calls both the Turkish president and the Greek prime minister negotiates a backing off and the Greeks get their island back. After the Emiya crisis as it's called, at least in Greece, the Turks decided, well that can't be the end of it. We're going to murder the Turkish ambassador. And so they did.

[30:11] And then they murdered the deputy ambassador. His title was deputy chief of mission. There was an announcement of a trade deficit where the Greeks had exported fewer goods to the United States than they thought they would. Okay, no big deal. Maybe you're going to spend five seconds reading the first sentence or two of an article about that. 17 November blew up a branch of Citibank that night and then they fired a rocket at the Inter-American Insurance Company,

[30:42] thinking that it was American not knowing that it's actually a Dutch company that's just called Inter-American Insurance. So this is what we had to deal with. You never knew where they were going to strike. You never knew who they were going to kill. They shot our DEA officer in the embassy and almost killed him. But he lived and he said that he had noticed two guys on the motorcycle that were trying to stay in his blind spot. And so at a red light, they pulled up next

[31:15] to the car and he jotted down a license plate number. So we went to the Greeks. We said we want to know who this license plate number goes to. It went to a Greek guy, of course, and we asked the Greeks to put out an APB. They found him. Two guys on the motorcycle turned out to be first cousins. They ran in separate directions. The Greeks caught up with one of them. He said, no, I didn't shoot anybody. I didn't shoot the DEA guy. I'm not in this 17 November. 17 November,

[31:46] what is that? I don't know what that is. I'm not a member. Of course, 20 years later, yeah, of course he was a member of 17 November. He was the only one that we really had a beat on. Because he was exposed, he sort of dropped out. He went quiet for a number of years. This was an organization that was so well run and so well organized that in the end, it made the CIA look like fools. When there are seven or eight members of the organization and we have 12 or 1300 suspects, it just shows you what little intelligence we had. I was going to Athens

[32:22] in a brand new position where the slot was owned by the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. I was the only person who was actually trained as a counterterrorist officer. Everybody else was just a generic or general intelligence officer whose job it was to recruit spies to steal secrets. My job was to recruit spies in terrorist organizations to steal their secrets. And that made it much more difficult. It's one thing to meet an interesting target at a diplomatic

[32:54] cocktail party and invite him to lunch and have a lovely lunch in the lobby of some fancy hotel. It's an entirely different thing to identify somebody that may have fired a rocket at the British ambassador and introduce yourself and try to recruit him. From outside appearances, I was a mid-level staff member at the American Embassy. Nominally, I was working again for the State Department, but I didn't have any State Department duties this time. And don't forget that 17 November is not the only terrorist group that's active in Athens and out

[33:30] there murdering people. There was another Greek group that was more focused on the Greek police and killing as many Greek policemen as they could called Ella, ELA, stood for Popular Revolutionary Struggle. Myriad Arab groups were talking about the popular front for the liberation of Palestine, the PFLP General Command, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Libyans, the Abu Nidal Organization, and last but not least, Carlos the Jackal,

[34:02] who was supplying all these groups, except for 17 November, with weapons. This was a big job. Greece elected a socialist prime minister in 1980 or 81 named Andreas Papandreou. There's always been this belief, I'm going to call it an urban legend, that he reached out to these groups, including 17 November, through one of his ministers. We believed this for many years. It probably didn't happen, but the belief was that he reached out to all of these terrorist groups

[34:35] and said, so long as you don't kill Greeks, you can come and go through the airport unmolested. Now, 17 November and Ella aside, they were killing lots of Greeks. The Arab groups pretty much did whatever they wanted. Greece is only an hour flight from Cairo, an hour and 15 minutes from Amman, it's an hour from Tripoli. It's right in the heart of things, and it's the gateway to Europe. My wife Joanne and our two sons arrived in Athens in the evening for bureaucratic

[35:09] reasons that I never understood. The embassy didn't realize we were coming. There was nowhere for us to live. So they put us for a night or two nights in the Hilton and then they found us a temporary apartment. It was four months before they put us in a house, which was difficult, but that very first morning I walked to the embassy in my very best suit and introduced myself to the chief. He said, why are you wearing a suit? Well, what else would I wear? And he said, listen, no more suits.

[35:40] You're going to freak people out because they're going to think that you're in the FBI. The FBI wears suits. What do we wear? Blue jeans. Okay, well, I actually am more comfortable in blue jeans. I'm a blue jeans and t-shirt kind of guy, but that very first day, I'm in my best suit with my favorite tie and a crisp white business shirt, and I'm going office to office introducing myself as the new guy. I'm there for one hour. One of the other CIA officers comes up to me and says, excuse me, are you the new guy? I am. I shook his hand. Are you from CTC, the

[36:16] counterterrorism center? Yeah, I am. Well, we have a walk-in and he only speaks Arabic, so you're on. The walk-in volunteer downstairs would end up epitomizing both how intriguing and how dangerous this assignment could be. The walk-in said he was an agent of a big-time terrorist group sent to Athens to do harm to the United States and its friends, but he said he'd had a change of heart and now he wanted to warn us about his group and to work with us. This was not uncommon in Athens.

[36:48] Terrorist groups regularly probed Americans looking for openings to exploit. Their mission might be simply to observe us from within during an interview, maybe observe our security systems so as to bypass them later during an attack. I wasn't about to be played like that on day one. I told the walk-in that we would have our conversation elsewhere outside the embassy. You've got social dialed in. Search is doing its thing. So why do your marketing results

[37:54] That we'd pick him up on a certain street corner and at a specified time. Be there or forget about it. I'll be there, he said. And just like that, my counterterrorism career began. Athens, man. As much as I loved being there, my spidey senses were on edge from that moment on, and they had every reason to be on edge, starting with that very walk-in. We'll get to that story and the assassination attempt and how being in Athens wrecked my marriage and how that nearly wrecked my CIA career all in the episodes ahead.

[38:27] But in the next episode, we need to backtrack to one of the most intense but enjoyable experiences of my entire CIA career, my counterterrorism training. Hell, let's call it what it is. It was the James Bond Academy, the best toy a spy in training could wish for. I told you we'd get there. That's next time on Dead Drop, what makes this spy tick. See you then. I'm John Kiriakou.
