The Welch .45 is the name given by Central Intelligence Agency and Greek counterterrorism personnel to a single .45 caliber pistol used by Revolutionary Organization 17 November to carry out every confirmed assassination in the group’s twenty-seven-year operational life.[1]
The weapon was first used on December 23, 1975, in the assassination of Richard Welch, CIA station chief in Athens, from which the weapon takes its name. It was thereafter used in each of 17 November’s 28 confirmed murders, including the killing of Stephen Saunders in March 2000, until the group’s rollup in 2002.[2][3]
The continued use of the same weapon across decades and operatives served as the primary forensic signature linking individual hits to the same organization in the absence of any successful identification of members.
At the Welch killing
At the assassination of Richard Welch, the .45 was carried by one of two gunmen who exited a parked vehicle across from the Welch residence in Psychiko. A second gunman carried a .38 revolver. The .45 was the weapon used to fire the three rounds into Welch’s chest after the formal announcement of his “sentence” by 17 November.[1][4]
At the Saunders killing
Twenty-five years later the .45 was used to fire the initial shots through the driver’s-side window of Stephen Saunders’s vehicle. A second operative on the same motorcycle then fired an armor-piercing round from a long gun that severed Saunders’s right hand from his body.[5]
Never recovered
Investigators never recovered the typewriter used for 17 November manifestos nor the firearm known as the Welch 45. [6]
Eighteen more killings (Jay Dyer)
John Kiriakou says the Welch .45 — the pistol used to assassinate Richard Welch in 1975 — was used by 17 November to kill 18 more people between 1975 and 2002. When the group was finally broken up, it was one of only two items the police never recovered, along with the typewriter used for the manifestos; the gun “is out there somewhere.”[7][8]