Describing his posting to Athens as the Counterterrorism Center representative, John Kiriakou gives a single figure to convey the threat level.
The comparison
“Athens was so dangerous for Americans — well, was back then — we spent more money on security in Athens than we did in Beirut. That’s how dangerous it was, because of this group.”[1]
The group was Revolutionary Organization 17 November. Kiriakou describes it as so deadly that it had murdered 28 people and wounded hundreds, and had never been caught — indeed, “we were never able to identify a single one of them.” The assassinations were carried out in broad daylight in front of thousands of people, “and nobody saw a thing because they were so petrified of being the next victim.”[2]
What the spending bought
It bought armour and routine. Kiriakou drove a fully armoured BMW 540 — the first in Greece, and uninsurable there because there were no others, so it had to be insured through a company in Germany. He was armed with a 9mm in a tear-away waist pack, a .38 snub-nose on his ankle and a knife in his back pocket. Every day he left the house at a different time by a different route, on the standing principle that a pattern tells an assassin where to stand.[3][4]
What it did not buy
The one measure the danger ruled out was diplomatic plates: they were “too dangerous. It would allow them to more easily identify us as Americans.”[1]
What replaced them defeated the purpose. “The Greeks in their infinite wisdom gave literally everybody in the American embassy license plates that began with YHB. Everybody. It was worse than a diplomatic plate.”[5]
Kiriakou still remembers his own registration a quarter-century later, and his wife’s. The same convention identified the British embassy, and it is how he recognised the car in which Stephen Saunders had just been shot while he inched past it in traffic.[5]
That morning was the one on which he had overslept and skipped his two-hour surveillance detection route — the only reason he was on that road at all.[6]
The Greece that replaced it
Returning to Athens in August 2026, Kiriakou restated the comparison in its strongest form. His 1998–2000 posting was the most dangerous tour of his career — he had also served in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, and never feared for his safety anywhere as he feared for it in Greece — and while he was there the United States government spent more money on security than it spent anywhere else on the planet, including Beirut, which was exploding at the time. He attributes the whole of that expenditure to two groups, Revolutionary Organization 17 November and Popular Revolutionary Struggle, neither of which still exists.[7][8]
What replaced it, in his account, is a country with very little crime of any kind. Terrorist incidents still happen, but he attributes them to anarchist groups that want to throw a grenade into the middle of the room and see what happens rather than to organised terrorist groups. The neighbourhood he was filming in makes the same point: Psyri was almost a no-go area of abandoned warehouses and light industry when he lived in Athens, until artists began moving into the workshops around 2000 and the cafés, restaurants and young people followed. Those who lived in Greece in the 1990s, he says, used to call Athens a wannabe Rome, twenty or thirty years behind — “now Rome wishes it was Athens.”[9][10][11][12]