Greece Tightens Noose on Guerrillas

Greek police arrested a suspected leader of the November 17 terrorist group Friday and identified another key figure already in custody as a gunman in the first of its more than 20 assassinations--that of the CIA station chief here in 1975.

Together, the steps represent a breakthrough in the effort to crush one of the longest-lived groups to emerge from Europe’s radical-left ferment of three decades ago.

After making no progress for 27 years, Greek police in recent weeks have made stunning advances, arresting suspected leaders and rank-and-file members alike. The latest is Nikos Papanastasiou, 50, arrested Friday, who has been running a souvenir shop in central Athens and who police believe is an important first-generation leader of the group.

Named after the date of a 1973 student uprising that was violently suppressed by the military junta that then ruled Greece, November 17 burst into prominence with the killing of CIA agent Richard Welch. Operating since then with seeming impunity, it was blamed for nearly two dozen killings as well as many bank robberies and the theft of weapons. It last struck in June 2000, authorities say, killing British defense attache Brig. Stephen Saunders.

In a predawn statement to police Friday that was quickly leaked to the media, a suspect arrested this week, Pavlos Serifis, 46, confessed to having been a lookout at the Welch killing and said that co-defendant Alexandros Giotopoulos was a gunman in that killing. Giotopoulos, 58, was the leader of the group, police said at the time of his arrest this month.

In the statement, Serifis also admitted being a lookout in the 1980 slayings of two Greek policemen, and he identified Giotopoulos as a gunman in that incident as well.

Greece’s 20-year statute of limitations means that suspects cannot be charged with murdering Welch or the other victims before 1982, but police appear to believe that those involved in the early killings also committed crimes in the last two decades for which they can be prosecuted. Greece does not have the death penalty.

November 17 took pains to cultivate a kind of Robin Hood image, releasing stridently Marxist proclamations defending its deeds as revolutionary violence aimed at oppressors of the people. Combined with its members’ ability to avoid capture, it developed an aura of invincibility that raised suspicions that leftist politicians were somehow protecting the group.

Over the years, U.S. officials repeatedly complained that Greek authorities showed insufficient determination to track down the killers. During the group’s early years, a significant portion of the Greek public--angered by American support for the 1967-74 military dictatorship--appeared sympathetic to November 17’s ideology, if not its methods.

Public opinion began to swing against it in the mid-1980s when the group targeted prominent Greek businessmen, and sympathy was further eroded in the last two years as relatives of victims spoke out about their suffering. With the Greek government also under pressure to prove that it can hold a safe Olympics in Athens, the capital, in 2004, police work has been stepped up. Police also accepted help from Britain’s Scotland Yard and the FBI.

Late last month, a suspected November 17 member, Savas Xiros, 40, was arrested after he was injured, allegedly when a bomb he was carrying went off prematurely. His capture led police to safe houses and the arrest of more than a dozen other suspects. Most of them talked, apparently because a new anti-terrorism law permits authorities to be lenient with suspects who cooperate.

Those Greeks who romanticized the group have been shocked to see that its ordinary members seem to be non-ideological criminals who simply took orders to kill or steal, and who were held together by family, friendship or shared guilt. Suspected members now in custody include a hospital telephone operator, an elementary school teacher, a painter of religious icons and a bus driver.

Among what is being called the second-generation “operational group” that carried out killings and robberies in the 1980s and 1990s, three suspects are brothers and several others are distantly related. Most of the rest are friends associated with these two family groupings. These relationships are seen as central to how the group maintained secrecy for so long, but the ties also promoted the chain of rapid arrests.

Giotopoulos, a translator of French, is the only suspect arrested so far to fit the expected profile of an aging leftist radical. He has denied any involvement in November 17 and charged that he is being framed.

“I have never seen any of my fellow accused before,” Giotopoulos said this week in a statement to an examining judge. “I believe this is a frame-up by my fellow accused and that their depositions are the product of a deal between them and the police in order to secure better treatment for themselves.”

Confessions by most of the suspects have been leaked by authorities to local media, apparently with the intent of discrediting the group and perhaps to keep up the momentum of their investigation.

Many Greeks “expected the people arrested to come out with heroic statements, for example, ‘We delivered blows to the murderers of the people, the Americans,’ or, ‘We killed businessmen who were stealing money from the people,’ ” said Manolis Vasilakis, author of a book about Greek attitudes toward terrorism.

“The press had presented them as heroic and bold,” and people imagined that they “would kill a couple of policemen while police were trying to arrest them,” he said. “Instead they saw people who are nothing but common murderers and bank robbers, [including] a brother who would turn his brother in. There is nothing heroic about them.”

One alleged gunman, Patroklos Tselentis, 42, was charged Friday with taking part in five killings, including that of a defense attache to the U.S. Embassy in Athens, Navy Capt. William Nordeen, in June 1988.

Many Greeks say that what has been seen so far must be an incomplete picture of the group.

“I don’t believe that a case that has been in the shadows for 30 years can in 10 days be brought out into the open and solved,” said Yannis Michaloudakis, 29, a restaurant manager. “I feel that deep down there’s something [the authorities] keep as a secret and don’t want to come to the surface. I can’t say what, but I feel there are political interests behind it.”

A man interviewed on a street in Athens, who would give only his first name, Vasilis, voiced a widely held suspicion: that Socialist politicians with roots in the anti-junta resistance are somehow connected to November 17.

“Now they are trying to use those people [who have been arrested] as the ‘real leaders’ and save their skin by stopping it there,” he said. “These are my feelings. I don’t have the proof.... But they cannot stop November 17 unless they stop the real leaders. If they don’t get the real leaders, it will start up all over again.”

Clearly aware of such suspicions, Public Order Minister Mikhail Khrisokhoidis, who has led the stepped-up effort against the group, pledged in a nationally televised speech this week that authorities will pursue leads until all those associated with the group are caught: “The case of November 17 and of terrorism in general in Greece will be closed only when it is irrefutably certain that all the culprits have been led to justice.”

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Attacks Linked to November 17

The Greek terrorist group November 17 is named for the date of a student uprising in 1973. Major attacks blamed on the group include:

Source: Associated Press

Feb. 21, 1985: Newspaper publisher Nikos Momferratos shot in car. Driver Panayiotis Roussetis dies of injuries nine days later.

April 8, 1986: Greek industrialist Dimitris Angelopoulos shot in shopping district.

Dec. 23, 1975: CIA station chief Richard Welch shot outside house in Athens.

July 4, 1994: Turkish Deputy Chief of Mission Haluk Sipahioglu shot while getting into car.

May 28, 1997: Greek ship owner Constantinos Peratikos shot while

leaving office.

June 28, 1988: U.S. Embassy defense attache Capt. William Nordeen killed in car bombing outside home.

Sept. 26, 1989: Pavlos Bakoyiannis, spokesman for then-governing New Democracy Party, shot in office lobby.

June 8, 2000: British defense attache Brig. Stephen Saunders shot in car.