Terror a Big Athens Worry

Concerns over terrorism in Greece have surfaced over the last few weeks in the United States and Britain as Olympic officials turn their focus to Athens and the 2004 Games.

The safety of U.S. and British athletes, officials and spectators is under review as security experts assess the risk from a left-wing, vehemently anti-American terrorist group called 17 November. It is Greece’s deadliest, Europe’s most elusive.

Among its victims: Dimitrios Angelopoulos, an elderly Greek industrialist assassinated on an Athens street in 1986. A close relative--Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki--now leads the Athens Organizing Committee for the 2004 Games.

That link has added to the mounting list of challenges the Greeks face as they try to show the International Olympic Committee that they have what it takes to stage the Games. An IOC inspection team is due in Athens next week.

Aiming to ease international anxieties, Greek officials have insisted in recent weeks that the Games will be carried out in “absolute security.”

But former CIA director R. James Woolsey said in an interview, “Unless Greece breaks the power of 17 November within the next year or two, I would predict that there are going to be a large number of Americans and Britons . . . who are going to worry about whether or not their athletes and spectators are going to find 17 November as part of their reception committee in Athens in 2004.”

Seven months ago, IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch said the situation in Greece was the worst organizational debacle he’d seen in his 20 years atop the IOC.

Other Olympic officials ticked off their worries over security and dissatisfaction with other issues, including the city’s transport system, the pace of venue construction and the number of available hotel rooms.

Athens won the 2004 Games in 1997. But Samaranch made it plain in April that the Greeks had frittered away three years and he expected “drastic changes” by the end of 2000.

The inspection team--which the IOC calls a “coordination commission”--will assess the situation before a meeting of the IOC’s ruling Executive Board beginning Dec. 12 in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Samaranch has not said what the IOC will do if Athens fails to deliver.

In public, senior Olympic officials discount the possibility of moving the Games elsewhere.

Jacques Rogge, the influential IOC delegate from Belgium who heads the coordination commission, says flatly, “There is no Plan B.”

Behind the scenes, however, anxiety over Athens is considerable, and Seoul and Los Angeles are often mentioned as the most likely sites to take the Games on short notice.

“I don’t want this franchise we’ve spent [104] years building up getting [messed up] by Greeks who can’t get their act together,” said one Olympic insider, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The security issue, after the massacre during the 1972 Munich Games of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches, has been sensitive in the run-up to virtually every Olympics since.

The issue has taken on added import in the wake of accusations leveled earlier this year by two U.S. government reports that the Greeks lack either the will or the skill to break 17 November--which in security circles often goes by the shorthand “N17.”

N17 takes its name from a student revolt against the U.S.-backed military dictatorship that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1973. The junta crushed the revolt on Nov. 17, 1973; dozens of demonstrators were killed.

In 1975, N17 killed the CIA station chief in Athens, Richard Welch. Since that first known slaying, the terrorist group has been linked to 21 other deaths. In all, four Americans have been killed.

No one has ever been arrested.

On April 8, 1986, an N17 gunman shot Dimitrios Angelopoulos to death. Angelopoulos, 79, a Greek steel magnate, was walking to his office, unaccompanied, on a downtown street. The gunman escaped.

Angelopoulos and his brothers had built a family hardware business into an international steel-making concern.

Last May, a few weeks after Samaranch’s public scolding, Angelopoulos-Daskalaki took over the 2004 organizing committee. Dimitrios Angelopoulos was her husband’s uncle; the family, by all accounts, is remarkably close.

Through a spokesman, Angelopoulos-Daskalaki declined to comment on the slaying.

N17 has also been tied to dozens of bombings, including a 1991 rocket attack against American Express offices.

Terrorism in Athens has not been limited to N17, however. In April 1999, a bomb went off at the Intercontinental Hotel, killing a woman. A group calling itself “Revolutionary Cells” said it had set the bomb to protest NATO attacks against Yugoslavia.

Last April, the U.S. State Department issued a report that described Greece as “one of the weakest links” in anti-terrorism efforts in Europe.

Then, on June 5, a congressionally mandated report issued by the independent National Commission on Terrorism proposed sanctions against Greece and Pakistan--both longtime U.S. allies--for “not cooperating fully on counter-terrorism.” Sanctions have not been imposed.

Only three days after the commission’s report was released to the public, two gunmen on a motorcycle ambushed a British defense attache, Brig. Stephen Saunders, 52, while his car was stuck in morning traffic near Athens’ Olympic Stadium. He was shot four times with a .45-caliber handgun and died later at a hospital.

The next day, an N17 communique appeared in an Athens newspaper, claiming responsibility for Saunders’ death. It said he had been singled out because of Britain’s role in the “barbaric” NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia.

The N17 communique also said that the policies expressed by British leaders, including Prime Minister Tony Blair, “surpassed the audacity and cynicism even of the Americans.”

In Britain, reaction to Saunders’ assassination included an editorial in the Times of London that referred to the 2004 Olympics: “No government should encourage its citizens to attend [the Games] while fanatics are free to murder with impunity.”

Calling the Greek record on fighting terrorism “outstandingly pathetic,” the Guardian newspaper said, “If they really expect to host a safe, successful Olympics, they have a lot of work to do before 2004.”

Even in the Greek newspaper To Vima, traditionally a supporter of the socialist party of Prime Minister Costas Simitis, editorials suggested that Greece had to own up to the record.

“We are incompetent to provide protection to the families we host in our country,” said one editorial. “Twenty-five years now this same group of terrorists are moving around freely, killing anyone they desire, and then sending their proclamations to the press. This is the sign of a bankrupt society.”

Greek officials now point to the Saunders slaying as a turning point.

Simitis promised to take the necessary steps to “eradicate the scourge of terrorism” and Foreign Minister George Papandreou has vowed that the government will cooperate with British authorities and find Saunders’ killers.

In Washington in September to sign an agreement broadening cooperation between the FBI and Greek police in fighting terrorism and other crimes, Michalis Chrysohoidis, Greece’s minister for public order, said the nations were taking steps to end a “climate of distrust” on terrorism issues.

He also told reporters that fighting terrorism was a “top political priority” in Greece and that the government had increased the reward to $4.2 million for information leading to arrests of members or the dismantling of N17.

“We feel the urgency,” Chrysohoidis added in a speech in Washington.

At the recent Sydney Games, a delegation of Greek police and anti-terrorism officials was on hand to consult with their Australian colleagues. And Greek officials repeatedly point out that the 1997 world track and field championships in Athens went off without a significant security hitch.

A few days ago, the Greek government announced that a special security force--including police, coast guard and military officers--had been detailed to Games security.

Nonetheless, the lengthy history of terrorism in Greece--combined with the link to Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, which has become more widely known in Olympic circles only since the end of the Sydney Games--has given U.S. and British observers pause.

Wayne Merry, formerly a U.S. diplomat who was assigned to terrorism issues while in Athens in the late 1980s, said his fear is less for the athletes than for the corporate interests that finance the Games. Nine of the IOC’s 11 key corporate sponsors are American. In addition, NBC is the IOC’s largest financial underwriter.

“In the years leading up to 2004, many of the corporate sponsors and their facilities and personnel are potentially in great peril,” said Merry, now senior associate at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington.

“I think 17 November will feel it can rationalize attacks against corporate sponsors of the Games by arguing it is thereby attempting to protect the purity of the Olympic movement on the movement’s native Hellenic soil.”

As for the teams, Simon Clegg, secretary-general of the British Olympic Assn., said he expects that all the “necessary security arrangements” will be “put in play.”

But he also said, “Obviously there is some historical background here [that] would be irresponsible to ignore.” And if the Greeks “don’t address [the issue] seriously,” he warned, “it will create a very unstable environment.”

Larry Buendorf, director of security for the U.S. Olympic Committee, said he has reason to believe the 2004 Games can be made safe. A former U.S. Secret Service agent--he wrestled the gun out of Lynnette “Squeaky” Fromme’s hand when she tried to kill President Gerald Ford in 1975--Buendorf said, “It’s almost like a code amongst police to make it happen.”

But if the Games were today, he said, “I would have some reservations about their ability to accept the task of protecting all the athletes from all the countries--of which we would have the largest team. I would want to be convinced their plan is sound and they were capable of implementing the plan.”

And, he added, “I’m a tough guy to convince sometimes.”