Revolutionary Organization 17 November (also 17 November, 17N, or N17) was a Greek far-left urban guerrilla group active between 1975 and 2002. It was the deadliest terrorist organization in the history of Greece, responsible for roughly 27–28 confirmed murders including the CIA Athens station chief Richard Welch, two American defense attachés, a U.S. Air Force technical sergeant, and the British defense attaché Stephen Saunders.[1][2] The group took its name from the date in 1974 when the ruling military dictatorship crushed a student uprising at the Athens Polytechnic University with tanks — killing, by the students’ own account, as many as 500, against the dictatorship’s claim of three dozen.[3]
During the late 1990s the group’s continued operation caused Athens to be rated “critical threat” — the highest classification — for terrorism against American personnel. The U.S. embassy in Athens spent more on security during this period than its counterpart in Beirut.[4] Kiriakou has described Athens as “a terrorism candy store” for a counterterrorism officer: alongside 17 November, the city hosted Libyan, Iraqi, Palestinian, and Syrian operatives, “some with each other, some against each other, but invariably against us.”[5]
Origins in Paris (1967)
Kiriakou traces 17 November’s roots to an opposition movement that formed among Greek students in Paris in 1967, radicalized by the military coup that installed the junta (“the Hunta”) that same year — a coup the CIA went along with, but which Kiriakou says was actually first recommended to the Johnson administration by Henry Kissinger, then an unpaid White House adviser, and endorsed by the State Department; the CIA itself only “jumped in with both feet” after the fact.[6][7] The Paris movement split into two factions: the “1 May” movement, which Kiriakou’s analysis concluded eventually became 17 November, and the “20 October” movement (“Tom”), which became Popular Revolutionary Struggle (ELA).[8] Before returning to Greece, the group carried out what Kiriakou describes as a 1968 practice hit in Paris — the assassination of the Uruguayan defense attaché, a proud, self-described fascist — done specifically to test whether they could get away with political violence before beginning their Greek campaign; they found “it was easier than they thought.”[9][10] The group could not immediately return to Greece because the junta had closed the borders, and only renamed itself Revolutionary Organization 17 November after the military sent tanks against a peaceful pro-democracy student demonstration at the Athens Polytechnic on November 17, 1973 — a crackdown whose death toll Kiriakou says is still unknown, with estimates ranging from the military’s claim of about three dozen to student accounts of as many as 500.[11]
Membership and identification
17 November was extraordinarily successful at concealing the identities of its members. Despite a quarter-century of operations and an extensive U.S.–Greek intelligence effort, no member was identified prior to the group’s accidental exposure in 2002. Western intelligence services maintained a list of approximately 500 suspects; the group ultimately turned out to have only about a dozen members.[12] Kiriakou believes not all of them were ever caught — probably five to seven members got away — because the group was so secretive that even members who quit were never ratted out by the others who remained.[13][14] One shooter from the Richard Welch killing voluntarily left the group, joined the Greek Communist Party, and became president of Greece’s largest labor union, escaping prosecution entirely under Greece’s statute of limitations on murder.[15]
Kiriakou has given varying figures for the scale of the mismatch between suspects and actual membership across different interviews — in one telling, roughly 1,000 suspects against nine actual members, of whom investigators were correct about only three; in another, 1,200 suspects against seven actual members, of whom only two names were correctly known.[16][17] Investigators correctly identified the group’s leader, Alexandros Yotopoulos, but never identified its lead hitman — nicknamed “the black hand” because everyone he touched died. The group’s core membership, per Kiriakou, included three sons of a priest from Thessaloniki, alongside members who cycled in and out, including a labor leader, a sixth-grade teacher, and a mechanic.[18] Evasion was aided by members not actually living in Greece: two were mathematics professors at universities, one lived in Sweden, and one was the mayor of a Greek island, flying in only to carry out hits before flying home.[19] Because none of its members were ever caught or even identified for so long, the group was known in Greek as “the Phantom Organization.”[20]
Rumors long circulated that 17 November had ties to Greece’s Pasok (Panhellenic Socialist) party or the prime minister’s office; Kiriakou says the CIA had no undisclosed information beyond what became public, and was surprised highly classified material on the subject leaked at all — probably from the Greek side.[21]
Investigation
Because the Greek police purge after the fall of the junta had removed most of the officers with real investigative experience — many were tainted as junta-era torturers — Greek authorities had little capacity to investigate a crime of this scale; the CIA formed its own task force to chase leads, while French authorities, asked to help, declined on the grounds that the killings were a Greek problem.[22] A joint US-UK team — after Stephen Saunders’s assassination in 2000, when all CIA officers in Athens Station were ordered by headquarters to formally declare themselves to MI6 — went to the Greek Intelligence Service to press the point directly: 25 years, 27 assassinations, still no arrests.[23] Greek investigators were, in Kiriakou’s assessment, sympathetic but incompetent — it remained unclear for years whether the group’s long evasion of capture reflected Greek police incompetence, infiltration, or outright corruption.[24]
A rare investigative break came after 17 November shot and nearly killed a U.S. DEA officer near the embassy. The officer noticed two motorcyclists trailing him and, stopped at a red light, jotted down their license plate. Greek authorities traced the plate to a pair of first cousins; one was brought in and denied membership in the group, but it later emerged that he had in fact been a member, and he went quiet afterward once he knew he had been exposed.[25]
Methods and weapons
17 November hits typically used two operatives on a motorcycle — a driver and a shooter on the back — who would approach the target’s vehicle, place two rounds in the victim’s head, and depart. No witness ever produced a usable identification of either rider.[26]
Every confirmed 17 November hit was carried out with the same .45 caliber pistol, which Western intelligence came to refer to as the Welch .45 after its use in the group’s first murder. See The Welch .45.[27] In some operations the group also used long guns; the round that killed Stephen Saunders in March 2000 was armor-piercing and severed Saunders’s right hand from his body, leaving it on the floor of his vehicle.[28]
The group self-financed by robbing banks and post offices in broad daylight — this was still a cash-based era — and by raiding police stations at night to steal weapons and ammunition.[29] In one operation, four members raided Athens’s military museum just as it opened, taking hostages and stripping the walls of live weapons — rocket launchers, RPGs, machine guns, sniper rifles — that, unknown to the museum, had never been deactivated for display.[30][31] Separately, the group took four police officers hostage during a midnight shift at a station in Vironas (Byron), a neighborhood named for Lord Byron, and stole their weapons and ammunition, then raided a military depot in central Greece for ammunition to match, and a follow-up raid on a depot near Larissa secured further stock.[32][33]
Funding and weapons sourcing
Western intelligence suspected during the 1990s that 17 November received weapons from Carlos the Jackal and from Libya. The Carlos connection turned out to apply not to 17 November but to a separate Greek group, Popular Revolutionary Struggle; the Libyan connection was partly accurate as a source for other Greek groups. 17 November itself was funded and armed entirely domestically, via the bank and depot robberies described above.[34] The CIA initially also suspected the KGB was behind the group; both the Russians and, later, the Bulgarians proactively denied any involvement, and 17 November’s funding source remained officially a mystery for years.[35] In a separate telling, Kiriakou has described Greeks training at facilities in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and in Libya before returning home to carry out attacks under the 17 November and Popular Revolutionary Struggle banners, together killing dozens and wounding hundreds.[36]
Operations
December 23, 1975 — Richard Welch
The group’s first attack was the assassination of Richard Welch, CIA station chief in Athens, in front of his home in the suburb of Psychiko. The hit was carried out by two gunmen on foot with two more operatives in a getaway car (a male driver and a female lookout). One gunman shouted “Richard Welch, get out of the car,” announced “Richard Welch, you have been convicted of crimes against the Greek people and you have been sentenced to death,” and shot Welch three times in the chest in front of his wife.[27][37] Greek police were so inept in the aftermath that the killers themselves had to telephone in a week later to tell them where they had abandoned the getaway car.[38] See Richard Welch for the full account.
The group’s manifesto after the Welch killing was sent to a Paris sympathizer, who hand-delivered it to the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre; Sartre dismissed it and filed it in a desk drawer, forgetting about it for a year. A second manifesto, following a later killing, was recognized by Sartre’s assistant at the time — Bernard-Henri Lévy — who retrieved the first manifesto from the drawer and sent both to the Paris leftist newspaper Libération, which published them and put 17 November on the public map for the first time.[39][40]
April 1976 — Mallios
In April 1976, the group assassinated Mallios, the former chief of the Greek National Police and a torturer under the recently fallen military dictatorship. He was ambushed on his daily walk to a coffee shop, shot three times in the back by a gunman posing as one half of a making-out couple, using the same pistol that had killed Welch — the Welch .45. He lived two hours.[41]
Other American victims
In addition to Welch, 17 November killed two American defense attachés in Athens — Bill Nordeen and George Santis — permanently disabled the embassy’s DEA representative, and attempted to kill a State Department officer.[42][43] The bomb that killed Nordeen was so large that his head was found on the roof of the neighboring house.[43] An Air Force technical sergeant, Ron Stewart, was killed doing his laundry in the basement laundry room of his apartment building.[1][44]
Beyond these, the group’s Greek victims included the Turkish ambassador and deputy ambassador (the latter’s formal title was deputy chief of mission), the head of the federal tax office, the governor of the central bank, and the ministers of finance and communications — a target list broad enough that the group was popularly viewed by much of the Greek public as Robin Hood-like, attacking the state’s elites rather than ordinary people, and it fired rockets at Greek tax offices whenever parliament considered raising taxes.[45][46] Kiriakou has pointed to Greece’s pervasive tax evasion as context for the group’s popular framing: a private-pool tax of a few thousand dollars per pool existed, and a 1980s/90s American television segment found roughly 30,000 private pools nationally but only sixteen owners nationwide who admitted to owning one.[47]
The Turkish ambassador killing followed the Imia/Kardak crisis, a standoff in the 1980s and again in the mid-1990s over an uninhabited Aegean islet — home to nothing but a herd of goats — where competing Greek and Turkish flag-plantings brought the two countries to the brink of war until President Clinton negotiated a stand-down. Afterward, 17 November murdered the Turkish ambassador and, later, the Turkish deputy chief of mission.[48][46] Separately, after a Greek trade-deficit announcement, the group bombed a Citibank branch and mistakenly rocketed the Dutch-owned Inter-American Insurance Company, believing it to be American.[46]
The West German ambassador and “Make like Lafargue”
17 November also fired a rocket at the residence of the West German ambassador in Athens; the ambassador survived. The manifesto left at the scene contained a line that baffled CIA analysts for some time — “Make like Lafargue.” Kiriakou eventually got the explanation from a communist source: Paul Lafargue married Karl Marx’s daughter, brought Marxism to France, and founded the French Communist Party; after thirty years the couple concluded Marxism was hollow and jumped hand-in-hand off the roof of their apartment building in a joint suicide. The manifesto was calling on the German ambassador to do the same.[49][50][51][52]
March–April 2000 — Stephen Saunders
The British defense attaché Stephen Saunders — Kiriakou’s next-door neighbor in Athens, whose backyard abutted his own — was assassinated by 17 November in heavy morning traffic on Kifissias Avenue. The original target for that morning’s operation had been John Kiriakou himself, the U.S. embassy’s lead CIA officer working the 17 November problem; the group switched targets on seeing that Kiriakou was armed and driving an armored car, killing Saunders — a softer target — instead.[53][54] Two weeks earlier, at a diplomatic cocktail party, Saunders had teased Kiriakou for his newly delivered armored BMW: “You Americans, you’re so paranoid about security. This is an EU country. It’s a NATO country. What are you so afraid of?” Kiriakou had replied: “You Brits live in a dream world if you think that because they have pretty beaches and palm trees that they’re not going to kill you if they have the chance. Believe me, if they have the chance, they’re going to kill you.”[55][56]
In a manifesto mailed to a Greek left-wing newspaper months after the attack, the group explicitly stated they had identified “the big spy” (Kiriakou) but elected to kill the “war criminal Saunders” instead because Kiriakou’s armored vehicle and arms made the hit too risky.[57][58] The manifesto read, in Greek, “Είδαμε τον μεγαλοκατάσκοπο” — “We saw the big spy” — and named Saunders’s killing a “revolutionary sentence.”[59]
The naming of Kiriakou triggered the emergency exfiltration of his family from Athens within hours; embassy staff packed and shipped their household possessions in their absence. See Stephen Saunders for the full account.[60] Kiriakou has separately said he survived two active assassination attempts over his career; the Saunders killing was one of them, and he says he thinks about it every single day.[61]
Saunders’s killing — unlike most 17 November attacks — began to turn Greek public opinion against the group for the first time since its 1975 founding; see Heather Saunders for the aftermath.
The crimper peripheral
John Kiriakou’s sole confirmed recruitment of a 17 November–adjacent individual was of a peripheral figure — not a group member — who had nonetheless personally built and planted several of the bombs Western intelligence had attributed to 17 November on the basis of a recurring forensic signature: a distinctive crimp in the way the bomber twisted the wires inside each device. “He had a very unique way of connecting the wires and twisting them. So we could tell — in fact, we had a name for him based on the style of the crimp.”[62][63]
On recruitment in approximately the late 1990s the asset volunteered, unprompted, that he had personally built and planted the bombs that detonated at a Citibank branch, a McDonald’s, and an Inter-American Insurance Company office in Athens — closing six years of forensic guesswork. He demonstrated the bomb-construction technique in front of Kiriakou at a subsequent meeting using supplies he had brought along.[63][64]
The asset was, in 17 November’s organizational typology, “one of the many many peripheral figures that … had kind of brushed up against 17 November but never were asked to join the group.” He had then migrated to a separate anarchist circle — “what they wanted to do was just blow shit up for no reason other than to shout ‘yay anarchy.’”[65][66][67]
His on-the-spot recruitment vulnerability was financial — he had impregnated his girlfriend and could not afford his daughter’s care. Kiriakou paid him regularly, and on one occasion bought $5,000 of the asset’s wife’s jewelry at the station chief’s authorization (“call it an early Christmas bonus”) when the asset turned up at a 2:00 a.m. meeting in a desperate state with a paper bag of gold pieces.[68][69][70]
Kiriakou attempted to contact the asset on a post-CIA Greece visit and learned from his son that the asset had died of lung cancer two years earlier.[71]
Dissolution
The group was rolled up accidentally in April 2002. A 17 November operative was carrying a bomb concealed in a paper bag, intending to place it under the car of a Greek shipowner in Piraeus, when the device detonated prematurely. The blast severed both of the operative’s hands and destroyed his right eye. Believing himself to be dying, he confessed to a policeman who ran across the street and used his own shirt to staunch the bleeding, named every other member of the group, and disclosed the locations of the safe house, the weapons cache, and the bombs. He survived. Greek authorities used the confession to arrest the entire membership; the founder, the lead assassin, and the three lead bomb-makers received sentences totaling 1,765 years.[72][73][74] Police were never able to recover two items: the typewriter used to type the group’s manifestos, and the Welch .45 itself.[74]
Related groups
Several other Greek far-left organizations operated alongside 17 November during the same period, including:
- Popular Revolutionary Struggle — recipient of weapons from Carlos the Jackal
- ELA (Epanastatikos Laikos Agonas, “Popular Revolutionary Struggle” in English translation, distinct from the above group despite the similar name), which focused on killing Greek police
- Revolutionary Nuclei
- Sons of the Anarchic (full name uncertain)[12][75]
Athens in this period also hosted operatives from the PFLP, PFLP-General Command, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Libyan agents, the Abu Nidal Organization, and Carlos the Jackal himself, who supplied weapons to several of these groups — though not to 17 November.[75] Most of the Greek groups were primarily anarchist; 17 November and Popular Revolutionary Struggle were the only ones Western intelligence regarded as full terrorist organizations during this period.[34]
A long-held but, in Kiriakou’s assessment, likely false belief held that Greek socialist Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou (elected 1980/81) struck an informal deal, via one of his ministers, allowing terrorist groups — including 17 November — unmolested passage through Greek airports so long as they did not kill Greeks. In fact, both 17 November and ELA killed many Greeks regardless.[76]
Kiriakou’s Athens posting
The Athens position was advertised as requiring either Greek or Arabic language fluency, covering two Greek groups — 17 November and Popular Revolutionary Struggle — as well as several Arab organizations including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) General Command, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the Abu Nidal organization, and Libyan networks. Kiriakou was the only CIA officer fluent in both Greek and Arabic and received the posting on that basis; he was stationed in Greece from 1998 to 2000, and said his entire reason for being there was to infiltrate and destroy 17 November, fulfilling a promise made to Mrs. Welch in 1975.[77][78][79] Shortly after his arrival the Arab side of his target list effectively dissolved — the PFLP, DFLP, and Abu Nidal organization had all aged into irrelevance, their members retired and living in Damascus — and his focus shifted entirely to the Greek groups.[78][80] As protection, he took delivery of a fully armored, Level IV, CIA-provided BMW 540 — the first of its model in Greece, requiring insurance through a German company because no Greek insurer would cover a vehicle carrying that much armor.[79]
Kiriakou has called his work against 17 November the most fascinating and important of his CIA career — more so than his Pakistan counterterrorism work — because it required immersing himself in Marxist and Eurocommunist ideology to an extent he never had before, while reconciling that ideology with the group’s use of it to justify political assassination.[81][82][83] He also described Greece as a harder recruitment environment than the Middle East, despite his personal love of the country, because the leftist militants he needed to befriend were genuinely dangerous, and his Greek-American background — seen by them as “the worst part of both Greece and America” — generated hostility more intense than anything he met in Arab countries.[84][85] The threat 17 November posed as “masters” of pre-operational surveillance stayed with him after he left Greece: on returning from Athens, he became a surveillance detection instructor at the CIA, saying the discipline had been so “burned into” his consciousness that he still practices it every day.[86]
Cofer Black, then head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, personally approved one of Kiriakou’s proposed 17 November operations in a hallway conversation, telling him “whatever it is, just do it” before Kiriakou flew to Europe for a couple of weeks of related travel.[87] On that trip Kiriakou also tracked down, in Los Angeles, the husband of the woman believed to have served as the lookout in the Richard Welch assassination; the man provided useful information the CIA had not previously had, though it did not crack the 17 November case.[88]
He also recalled facilitating the hypnosis of a witness to a 17 November-linked assassination. The hypnotist — president of the American Society of Hypnotists, with fifty years of experience — needed Kiriakou to translate and to count backwards softly in Greek to bring the non-English-speaking witness under. The subject held his arm raised for four hours under hypnosis; when snapped back to partial consciousness, he immediately ran to the bathroom and vomited — a reaction the hypnotist said he had read about but never once witnessed in fifty years.[89][90][91][92]
The mastermind’s release (May 2026)
John Kiriakou disclosed — as current news at the time of recording — that Alexandros Yotopoulos, the mastermind of 17 November and architect of all its assassinations, had been released from prison three days before the episode recorded, and described his own reaction as genuine distress, to the point of losing sleep.[93][94]
The mechanism: Greece is the only country in the European Union with a statute of limitations on murder — twenty years. The five principal 17 November members had been sentenced to 1,765 years, which in practice meant twenty years under Greek law. When that period ended in 2022, the American Embassy protested and the releases were initially blocked, but the delay did not hold. Separately, one of the shooters in the Richard Welch assassination, Yiannis Serifis, had already been released on the same statute-of-limitations grounds.[95][96][97]