The "17. November Revolutionary Organization"? [Archive]

Sir Comradical

10th September 2012, 23:21

Their most famous attack was assassinating CIA Station Chief Richard Welch in 1975. I found this on my uni database. I can't link it direct because you need login details, but here it is copied. It chronicles the history of 17N.

It appears to be conservative leaning, definately not sympathetic, but it's the best one I could find.

Europe's Last Red Terrorists: The
Revolutionary Organization 17 November,
1975-2000
G. Kassimeris

The Early Years
17N used its first three attacks to gain public sympathy and galvanize left- wing extremists into action. From 1975 to 1980, 17N attacks were deliberately designed to identify the group with the concerns of the Greek masses, and to capitalize on public perceptions of US complicity in the emergence of the military dictatorship and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. The group targeted symbolic enemies of the Greek populace, such as the US and members of the 1967–74 dictatorship’s police apparatus, to demonstrate its ethno-patriotic credentials and to highlight the fact that the first post- junta government of Konstantinos Karamanlis had allowed ‘crimes committed against the Greek people to unpunished’. After killing Richard Welch, 17N declared that the ‘CIA was responsible for supporting the military junta’ and that this was ‘the first time in Greece that it paid for its contribution to the events in Cyprus’.1 The Welch communiqué charged that US imperialism was ‘the Number One enemy of the people’ and held the US responsible for ‘decades of innumerable humiliations, calamities and crimes’ inflicted upon the Greek people.2 The group believed that the continuing US presence humiliated Greek people and disfigured all aspects of national life. Conveying its rage through the dramatized style of the communiqué, 17N declared that:

... enough is enough. The American imperialists and their domestic agents must understand that the Greek people are not a flock of sheep. They must also understand that this time the people won’t swallow their lies, provocations and poisonous propaganda; they have realized that the Americans have tied the [Karamanlis] government’s hand behind its back so it has no independence of action and thus can do absolutely nothing. The main slogan of the 1973 Polytechnic uprising ‘out with the Americans’ remains today unfulfilled. The Americans are not out and what is worse, the government allows even more to come on national soil: multinational monopolies have moved here from Lebanon and the CIA moved its Middle East headquarters from Beirut to Athens. For the Americans, Greece continues to be a xefrago ambeli like it was throughout the dictatorship. A Latin American Banana Republic in the Southern Mediterranean.

At the same time, 17N deplored the way 104 junta ministers, military commanders and police torturers had received nugatory sentences in the courts, concluding that ‘the Greek people have now realized that they can expect nothing from the Government, the Parliament, the Judiciary and other institutions’.4 A year on, 17N assassinated Evangelos Mallios, who was a police captain during the junta.

In April 1977, the group released its manifesto, entitled Appantissi sta Kommata kai tis Organosseis (A Response to Political Parties and Organizations). The 28-page-long text presented the group’s analysis and interpretations of political realities in post-1974 Greece – a society requiring violence in order to be changed. The group saw violence as a logical and inevitable political consequence of national and constitutional processes. ‘Greece’s historical experience’, it explained, ‘had very clearly shownthattherecouldbenopeacefultransitiontosociali sm’.5 Atthesame time, 17N attacked all mainstream political parties, especially the two Greek communist parties (KKE). The group charged that KKE and the KKE- interior had become fully reconciled to the political institutions and practices of the post-1974 regime, and were continuing the work of the Karamanlis government by effectively sabotaging the dynamics of class struggle. Looking back on the seven years of military junta, 17N also said that KKE resistance against the dictators was non-existent. Attempting to discredit the KKEs, the group said that between the military coup d’état of 1967 and July 1974, ‘not only did they not carry out a single act of resistance, but at the same time they continued at every opportunity to denounce all those who did, which explains why Karamanlis legalized them’.6 17N also attacked the extra-parliamentary left for uncompromising ideological myopia. The group devoted 13 of its 28-page manifesto to challenging the extra-parliamentary left’s notion of them as utopia-driven militants. The main criticism by the extra-parliamentary left was that 17N- style terrorist violence was counter-productive: it could only provoke stronger state repression and have damaging consequences for the movement. Predictably, 17N dismissed that as a ‘classic revisionist argument’, arguing that its actions ‘shouldn’t be seen as isolated acts of violence, but as parts of a long-term, multi-faceted revolutionary process’.7 The group advocated revolutionary violence as a response to right-wing pressure and declining working-class radicalism. A belief that the organized proletariat could shape history allowed 17N to view violence as legitimate, heroic and politically effective, and thus the most vital instrument of social war against bourgeois democracy.

Throughout Apantissi sta Kommata kai tis Organosseis, 17N remained very critical of Karamanlis. It saw authoritarianism in every action of the Karamanlis government. The Greek premier and New Democracy leader was portrayed as a bigot and a dangerous despot cut off from daily political reality. Karamanlis, the group claimed, in his determination to consolidate and perpetuate the regime used his authority to supersede the normal functioning of a parliamentary democracy. Employing the coercive apparatus of the state, 17N argued, Karamanlis sought to crush working- class challenges to the existing system. Karamanlis was also accused of ‘selling Greece’s national interests to the US’ and turning the country into an American ‘lackey’.8 In the manifesto’s final section, 17N stressed its determination to foment revolution. At the same time, the group denounced finance capital, the consumer society and parliamentary democracy. Lauding trade unionism and left-wing political activists for seeking greater social justice through the dominant bourgeois culture, 17N made it clear that socialist reformism and old-style Marxist internationalism were completely discredited. In combative tone, 17N concluded that the ‘junta years and the violent repression of the Athens Polytechnic uprising were useful reminders of the imperative need for strategy and organization if armed struggle were to be sustained and waged more effectively’.9

17N in the 1980s
After the electoral landslide of the Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK) in October 1981, which gave Andreas Papandreou a majority of 52, 17N disappeared for two years. Like Francois Mitterand in France five months earlier, Papandreou had promised to regenerate the country through a full- blooded socialist programme. From October 1981 to mid November 1983, 17N carried out no acts of terrorism and released no documents, leading the security services and the media to presume that the organization had dissolved. However, the assassination of US Navy Captain and head of the Joint US Military Advisory Group in Greece (JUSMAGG) naval division, George Tsantes, and his Greek driver in November 1983 came to demonstrate the exact opposite. In a seven-page, densely written communiqué the group explained its three-year operational silence and launched a vitriolic attack against the Papandreou government. The group believed that PASOK had betrayed the electorate’s trust and abandoned socialism. 17N attacked Papandreou for renewing the US base agreement and for breaking his pledges to pull out of both NATO and the European Community (EC). To 17N, Papandreou’s ‘betrayal’ was sufficient justification and became the ideological catalyst that confirmed the group’s view that ‘popular revolutionary violence’ and not parliamentarism was the only road to socialism.10

The Tsantes attack heralded the transition of 17N revenge terrorism into a full-scale terrorist campaign. The group used the assassination as an occasion to declare war against the Americans, inaugurating a campaign of violence to remove them from Greece. Less than five months after the Tsantes hit, in April 1984, 17N attacked but failed to assassinate JUSMAGG Master Sergeant Robert Judd in a fresh attempt to draw attention to the continued operation of the US bases in Greece. Both the Tsantes and Judd communiqués opened with identical paragraphs: ‘The bases will not leave with either elections or with parliamentary methods ... Only dynamic mass struggle and justified revolutionary violence will force them out’.11 The core argument of the communiqués was that ‘imperialist dependence is the main problem of the country’.12 17N argued that decades of Western imperialist exploitation and oppression had deformed national political life and blocked the country’s economic system. Adapting a classic Marxist-Leninist analysis of imperialism, the group also pointed out that this ‘specific model of economic development imposed by the American- led imperialist katestimeno (establishment)’ had durable consequences for the development of both social relations and the productive forces in the country.13 Atthesametime,17NemphasizedPASOK’sideologicalbetra yal and its retreat from traditional socialist objectives. Reaching the conclusion that Papandreou was happy to manage the system rather than transform it, the group said that it made his government look nothing less than a committee managing the affairs of the ‘lumpen big bourgeois class and imperialism’. This meant that what was initially a military campaign against US imperialism became also an attack against perceived servants of the Greek political establishment. From now on, 17N would be systematically killing on those two fronts.

In February 1985, 17N killed Nikos Momferatos in central Athens. He was the main shareholder of the mass-circulation conservative newspaper Apogevmatini and president of the Athens Newspapers Publishers’ Union. Momferatos, 17N claimed, was a CIA agent who bought Apogevmatini with CIA money and ‘who, being in the employ of US imperialism, the major enemy of the people, daily ridiculed, lied, poisoned and deceived the people for the purpose of guiding them in their political views’.14 The group substantiated its claims by pointing out that Momferatos, ‘absolutely aware of his criminal role and [the] nature of his job, was not only protected by a bodyguard but was constantly armed’.15 Yet again, 17N used the attack to castigate the PASOK administration. The communiqué charged that, in spite of their messianic rhetoric, the Socialists in office had come to emulate New Democracy governmental ethics and practices. For the group, the shift from ‘Karamanlist democracy to Papandreou-ite socialism’ over the past three years had conclusively ‘proved not only that reformism [was] condemned, but also that its practice invariably converts naive, well-intentioned armchair socialists ... into vulgar politicos who, in parliament, have sold out all their principles and contracts with the people’.16

17N Adopts Car-Bombing
New austerity measures introduced by the Socialist government, aiming to bring the runaway public sector and account deficits under control, provoked huge public dissatisfaction and nation-wide labour unrest. Having been voted back to power for a second four-year term on a platform promising the Greeks ‘better days to come’, Papandreou explained his abrupt U-turn in economic policy as a necessary attempt to rescue the country from bankruptcy. In June 1985, soon after a TWA hijacking, the US State Department advised Americans to avoid Athens airport for the summer, which strained relations between Athens and Washington and cost the Greek tourism industry $300m in foreign exchange. A second hijacking of an EgyptAir flight within months of the TWA incident placed Athens alongside Lagos and Bogota as possessing airports with the worst security in the world.
In November of the same year, 1,000 left-wing extremists were barricaded in the Athens Polytechnic in protest at the killing of a 15-year-old demonstrator, Michalis Kaltezas. Kaltezas was hit by a stray police bullet during a march to the American Embassy to mark the anniversary of the November 1973 student revolt. The Minister of Public Order and his deputy submitted their resignations, but Papandreou refused to accept them. A week later, on 26 November, 17N detonated a remote-controlled car-bomb against a Greek MAT (riot) police bus, fatally injuring one of the 22 officers inside and wounding another 14. Drawing parallels with Pinochet’s dictatorial regime in Chile and South African apartheid, 17N claimed that the Kaltezas murder was not accidental but reflected instead a deepening ideological process of ‘social fascistization’ which the Socialists both inspired and instrumentalized. The group bitterly damned the ‘PASOK government and Papandreou’ for preserving and perpetuating ‘a purely fascistic system of police methods and practices’.17 The attack, the bloodiest on the police force for forty years, shocked the authorities and indicated that 17N was determined not only to raise the level of its tactical sophistication but also to carry out attacks which resulted in mass casualties. The car-bomb was to become an operational model for future 17N attacks. From this point onwards, 17N military activity increased in number, frequency and lethality.

In April 1986, 17N carried out its tenth political assassination since its Christmas 1975 debut. Leading industrialist Dimitris Angelopoulos, chairman of Halivourgiki Steel company and personal friend of the Greek premier, was shot dead in a central Athens street. Angelopoulos, aged 79, had played a prominent role in Greece’s steel industry since Halivourgiki, which he had founded in the early 1950s, accounted for 60 per cent of the country’s production. In a 12-page-long text, which read more like an academic monograph than a communiqué, the group made an attempt to develop and give substance to the view that the deep polarizations in Greece’s inequality-driven society were the product of systemic economic causes. The group devoted several pages to explaining how the country’s plutocrats, the LMAT or ‘lumpen big bourgeois class’, used their ailing companies to enrich themselves at the expense of the working-class people. Although these companies, 17N argued, faced massive financial difficulties, their chairmen (like Angelopoulos) diverted enormous sums of state subsidies, intended for restructuring and modernization, into bank accounts abroad. 17N defined LMAT as ‘100 families attached onto the country’s flesh like leeches, sucking its labour and preventing any autonomous development if that ran against their interests’.18 Because of LMAT’s relentless exploitation, 17N concluded that the country was ‘heading with mathematical precision towards economic bankruptcy and catastrophe’.19 The assassination of Angelopoulos was undertaken to halt Greece’s economic downward slide and prevent the crisis from becoming more acute. By attacking ‘one of the main representatives of LMAT’, 17N believed it attacked ‘deceit, self-interest, scandalous privileges of tax exemptions, capitalist exploitation and corporate greed’, which were the root causes for the country’s economic decline, de-industrialization, total stagnation and miserable working-class living standards.20

Combating LMAT-led capitalist exploitation was also the alleged motivation for the bomb attacks against four separate tax-revenue offices that year. Describing the country’s taxation system as ‘a mechanism of robbing the people’s income’, 17N used the bombing as a device to bring to wider attention what it saw as blatant provocation.21 The group charged that ‘the swindler-state’ used taxation to ‘steal from the working people to give back to the sharks of LMAT and international imperialism’.22 17N believed that Greek society should no longer tolerate tax evasion on the present massive scale. To make the point clearer still, 17N said that more than ‘450 billion drachma [US$ 1.45bn] in tax revenues flew abroad each year’ with disastrous effect on the population’s living standards as it undermined ‘the provision of essential public services such as education, health, welfare, infrastructure and national security’.23

The national health service, in particular, was a central concern for 17N: the group held that Greece’s health system was a disgrace. Public expenditure on health was extremely low and the quality of services dismal. Health professionals and managers, according to 17N, were primarily responsible for the poor quality of care and shambolic services. Instead of delivering decent health care to patients, 17N declared, doctors ruthlessly exploited them. The knee-capping attack of well-known neurosurgeon and owner of Engefalos medical centre, Zacharias Kapsalakis, in February 1987 was both ‘an act of protest and dynamic resistance’ against dehumanization and ‘a warning to all those doctors – big and otherwise – pocketing brown envelopes from desperate patients in public hospitals and private clinics’.24 The Kapsalakis communiqué closed with 17N demands for universal and equal health-care provision and ‘modern, clean and comfortable hospitals’.25

Increased tension in the Aegean between Greece and Turkey over oil- drilling rights and other territorial disputes absorbed most of the group’s attention during 1987–88. Its response to the Sismik-I crisis in March 1987, which brought the two NATO allies close to war, was to attack US military targets in Athens. Holding NATO and – the United States in particular – responsible for the crisis, 17N bombed two US military buses in the space of four months. 17N believed that the US was behind ‘expansionist Turkish militarism’. Referring to the Sismik-I episode, the group claimed that Washington was deliberately instigating Turkey’s expansionist designs in the Aegean and in Cyprus to increase Greek reliance on US military protection.

Opposition to US imperialism and impending Greek–American talks over the extension of the 1983 US military bases agreement in Greece motivated a barrage of 17N attacks. The 17N leadership assumed that a consistent level of military activity against US targets would put pressure on the US and the Greek governments. From April 1987 to the end of June 1988, five of the group’s six attacks were against American and Turkish targets. 17N declared that Greek national sovereignty was non-negotiable and warned that it ‘would not allow any Papandreou to sell it off’.26 Until the Papandreou government closed all American bases, removed the Americans’ 164 nuclear warheads and took Greece out of NATO, 17N was determined to continue its battle against ‘the murdering American imperialists’ stationed on Greek soil at all costs.27

17N’s single-minded determination was dramatically illustrated in June 1988, with the well-planned and masterfully executed assassination of the US Embassy’s military attaché, US Navy Captain William Nordeen, whom the group decided to eliminate because he was ‘a high-ranking official of US imperialism’s military forces’ in Greece.28 Driving to work in his bullet- proof limousine, Capt. Nordeen was hurled over 15m from the roadside when a car-bomb parked on his route exploded by remote control. The operation was conducted with precision and efficiency: the 17N terrorists had piled bags of cement against the pavement side of the vehicle to ensure that the full force of the detonation tore into their target. In the Nordeen communiqué, 17N called for the Greek military to take a series of ‘military dynamic actions’ that would counter Turkish violation of Greek airspace (by shooting down, for example, Turkish aircrafts) and Turkish aggression in northern Cyprus (by sending commandos to conduct sabotage operations).

After 1988, the Bank of Crete scandal became the focus of attention for the group. The collapse of the Socialist government – and the prosecution of Papandreou and four of his senior ministers on corruption charges related to the multi-billion drachma Bank of Crete embezzlement and illegal phone-tapping – confirmed the group’s belief that there were deep flaws in Greek democracy. The Bank of Crete scandal, 17N explained in a communiqué commentary, was symptomatic of ‘a society in a political, financial, cultural and moral crisis’.29 Greece, 17N argued, was in desperate need of catharsis, but ‘effective catharsis and corruption-cleansing had to go hand-in-hand with the wholesale change of its political and judicial world’.30 Before 1989 was out, 17N had targeted two state magistrates, a former PASOK minister (one of the four Socialist ex-ministers indicted on bribery charges) and New Democracy’s chief parliamentary spokesman and son-in- law of the party’s leader, Pavlos Bakoyiannis, for their alleged involvement in the scandal. The aim of 17N’s intensive military activity was to keep popular attention focused on the underlying political causes of the crisis and unmask the key figures responsible for the ‘looting’ of the Bank of Crete. These attacks were also intended to destabilize further the state and dictate the course of events. 17N used the Bakoyiannis assassination, in particular, to send a clear warning against the ‘corrupt and rotten establishment’.31 Soon afterwards the Cabinet, in an emergency session, increased the information-reward to 200m drachma, changed the entire police leadership, announced a new set of counter-terrorism measures and began a serious hunt for 17N militants.

17N on the Offensive
Despite police pressure, the tempo of 17N attacks increased and operations became more spectacular. Raids against an Athens police station, a military warehouse and the National Museum expanded the group’s arsenal considerably and suggested the lengths to which 17N was prepared to go in order to influence everyday political discourse. In April 1990, after three elections in 10 months and with the country still in a state of shock, the New Democracy leader, Konstantinos Mitsotakis managed to form a government with a parliamentary majority of one. 17N’s ideological antipathy towards the new government was fortified by Mitsotakis’s dogmatic free-market approach. New Democracy’s determination to privatize or close 40 heavily indebted industries under state control infuriated the group. Although these companies had been draining state resources for years, 17N saw New Democracy’s economic policy as a sustained assault against the labour force and the public sector. On 10 June, 17N responded to the government’s privatization programme (‘the policy of selling out Greece’, in 17N’s words) by firing a rocket against the offices of multinational company Procter & Gamble. According to 17N, the US-based firm had bought the Greek Koupa company, valued at least 1.3bn drachma, for the ridiculous amount of 454m drachma.32 The attack communiqué condemned the ‘scandalous sale’ of profitable industrial units and public enterprises, and maintained that this constituted stealing from the Greek people.33 At an ideological level, 17N believed that New Democracy’s conservatism with its neo-liberal, integrationist policy, served the interests of foreign capital and multinationals and aided American global economic hegemony.

17N’s determination to sustain a high level of anxiety among the political and business elites culminated in a spectacular multi-rocket attack against the Greek shipping magnate Vardis Vardinoyiannis, who miraculously escaped death when the missiles failed to penetrate his armour-plated limousine. The attack communiqué characterized Vardinoyiannis as ‘a gangster Mafia shipowner who endangered sailors’ lives through his ready-to-sink old rotten ships ... and unsafe working conditions’.34 The attack was essentially designed to strike at the heart of Greece’s LMAT. The group held that ‘the de-Hellenization and sell-out of the Greek economy’, together with ‘the generalized attack on working-class lives by LMAT ... were the central themes of the age’.35 17N concluded that a combination of unbridled capitalist restructuring, fiscal conservatism and continuing EC membership was economically exhausting the country.

Not surprisingly, the next international institution to be targeted was the EC. In December 1990, two 17N rockets smashed through the empty European Community offices in central Athens. The group said that a decade of Greek membership in the EC amounted to nothing. Full commitment to Euro-integration ‘did not bring about the much-touted economic convergence nor did EC membership rescue the country from its structural weaknesses’.36 On the contrary, the group explained, Greek governments became progressively more unable to exercise sovereignty in the economic sphere and other key policy areas, and Greece became a weaker country that it was before it entered the Community in 1981. 17N concluded that the trajectory of the Greek economy had been downwards ever since.

17N in the 1990s
17N opposition to EC financial arrangements and the US-led Operation ‘Desert Storm’ in the Persian Gulf motivated a wave of attacks on ‘European’ and ‘Atlanticist’ targets throughout 1991. Strikes on British and American banks, the offices of British Petroleum (BP) and the French military attaché maintained an astonishing momentum and expressed the group’s angry reaction against Western military intervention against Iraq. 17N saw the 1990–91 Gulf War as a classic case of military aggression by the American imperialist machine. The symbolic assassination of US Air Force Sergeant Ronald Stewart in March 1991 confirmed this view. 17N used the attack on Stewart to underline that fact that the Kuwaiti crisis ‘had nothing to do with respect of international law and everything to do with the imposition of an American-dominated “new world order” in the region’.37
After the war, US President George Bush became a particular focus for denunciation by the group. The United States’ ideological triumph in the Cold War and its emergence in the early 1990s as the sole superpower was greeted with deep disdain. The July 1991 US presidential official visit in Athens aggravated 17N’s resentment for ‘Bush and American imperialism’ and its ‘self-serving’ global vision of a ‘New World Order’. The group tried to use the Bush visit to force the ‘Cyprus issue’ to the forefront of national debate. After targeting three Turkish diplomats, 17N declared that Bush had come to impose (through ‘the agent government of petty Mitsotakis’)38 a partition-confederation solution to the Cyprus problem, ‘which does not include full withdrawal of the Turkish occupation troops and the return of all Greek Cypriots refugees to their homes’.39 Comparing Saddam Hussein’s attack on Kuwait to the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus, 17N accused the Euro-Atlantic community of double standards in the application of international law.

After 1991, 17N’s attitude towards the practice of violence changed. The failed rocket attack against Finance Minister Yiannis Paleokrassas in the rush-hour Athens city-centre in July 1992, which resulted in a civilian death and numerous casualties, signalled an apparent inability to impose control over the military instrument. Subsequent efforts by 17N to defend its action and transfer blame for the casualties onto the police authorities also revealed a growing detachment from reality. The knee-capping of a little-known New Democracy backbencher, Eleftherios Papadimitriou, four months later, for endorsing his ‘leader’s policy of selling off public property’ and his part in ‘the corruption and depravity of the political world’, also indicated that the 17N mindset was changing and that the leadership’s cool analytical logic had been displaced by a more emotional and nihilistic rationale. Even a ‘relaunch’ document of new political objectives was released, called Manifesto 1992. Security was stepped up with high-visibility police presence, and the authorities publicly accepted that a more militant and fundamentalist faction within 17N was now in command of its operations.

In 1993, security authorities expected yet more serious and callous violence, but instead 17N carried out a series of sporadic, low-level bombings against tax-offices and vehicles. Group communiqués became more bombastic, less jargonistic and made little sense. However, the assassination of the former National Bank of Greece governor, Michalis Vranopoulos, in January 1994, marked a temporary return to more traditional targets. Vranopoulos, when still the governor in 1992, had presided over the controversial sale of 70 per cent of the AGET-Heracles state-owned cement company to the Italian Calcestruzzi consortium and the National Bank of Greece for 124bn drachmas – a deal entangled in allegations of bribery and corruption in both Greece and Italy. In a six-and- a-half page communiqué, 17N characterized the AGET-Heracles sale as ‘criminal’ and named, along with Vranopoulos, the outgoing Premier Konstantinos Mitsotakis and his Finance Minister Stephanos Manos as primarily responsible for the disintegration of Greece’s cement industry.

Meanwhile, Papandreou’s emphatic prime ministerial comeback in October 1993 made little impression on the group. Despite the trade embargo imposed on Macedonia, verbal attacks against the Socialist leader and criticism over Greek foreign policy vis-à-vis the EU, Washington and Ankara continued. Throughout 1994, powerful blasts devastated the Athens branches of Alico (American Life Company), Nationale Nederlanden, Mille and IBM. The choice of targets was typical, the attacks mechanical and lacking symbolic force. The abortive missile attack in April against the British aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal (under NATO command and temporarily docked at Piraeus) also demonstrated logistical gaps in the group’s operational planning. The media covered the failure exhaustively, and some newspapers even argued that 17N had become arthritic and was drifting into operational decline. Realizing that the Ark Royal failure had placed it centre-stage in the media but for the wrong reasons, a publicity- conscious 17N turned again to political assassinations to restore its organizational prestige. On 4 July, Omer Haluk Sipahioglou, a senior Turkish diplomat, was shot dead in a 17N ambush outside his home as he got into his car to drive to the embassy. The three-man hit squad pumped six bullets into Sipahioglou and drove away casually into the heavy morning traffic.

In spite of 17N pledges to sustain a consistent level of military activity, the rate of violence continued to decline. By 1995, the annual number of 17N attacks had fallen to just one: down from a peak of 22 in 1991. At the same time, 17N motives became more difficult to decipher. The mortaring of MEGA TV studios in March 1995 during the station’s main evening news bulletin confirmed the impression that 17N’s attachment to unregulated violence had become the only way for the group to maintain its ideological identity and preserve its raison d’être. Claiming credit for the attack, 17N tried to deflect criticism and vindicate its extremism by suggesting a conspiracy to misrepresent the group by the CIA, the Greek media and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and by specifically attacking the management of the Eleftherotypia and To Vima newspapers. The mortaring of MEGA TV confirmed the group’s obsessive hunger for publicity and emphasized its clouded strategic thinking. Its once lengthy Marxist diatribes on crucial contemporary socio-political issues were now replaced by conspiracy-theorizing and political paranoia.

One-year-long lulls between one action and another continued. Eleven months after the attack on MEGA TV, 17N marked its 20-year anniversary of violence with an IRA-style mortar attack against the heavily guarded American Embassy in Athens. Although the attack was designed to provide high-profile evidence of the group’s undiminished penchant for prestigious targets, the operation failed disastrously as the rocket rammed into a security wall and exploded 100m from the embassy compound. The group did not claim responsibility for the attack until May 1997, when it ambushed and killed ship-owner Costas Peratikos in broad daylight in a busy Piraeus street. In its first attack communiqué in over two years, 17N said that Peratikos was targeted because he was responsible for ‘the fraught “privatization” of the Elefsis shipyards’, which his shipping group bought in 1992 and closed three years later with approximately $17bn accumulated debts.40 Greece, 17N contended, was not:

... a banana republic. Its institutions, political world, justice, mass media, might be those of a banana republic, but the Greek people are not going to allow the ship-owners to deceive and rob them repeatedly of billions of drachmas and go unpunished, while small toilers are thrown into jail for small debts of a few thousand drachmas to the State.41

In 1999, the abduction of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader, Abdullah Ocalan, and the NATO airstrikes against Serbia motivated a series of rocket attacks against the PASOK party headquarters in downtown Athens and against three branches of American, English and French banks (Chase Manhattan, Midland Bank and the Banque Nationale de Paris respectively) in the space of 35 days. The capture of the Kurdish rebel leader by Turkish agents while supposedly being escorted across Nairobi by Greek diplomats infuriated 17N. A communiqué expressed the group’s ‘deep regret’ and accused Premier Simitis and his government of betrayal for colluding in the rebel Kurd’s capture. In May, as a retaliation against NATO’s continuing bombardment of Yugoslavia, 17N fired a rocket attack on the German ambassador’s residence in Athens which hit the roof but failed to detonate. The attack was designed to intensify pressure on a Greek government which, given the overwhelming opposition of public opinion to NATO’s campaign, was struggling to balance its obligation as a NATO member with its reluctance to put pressure on Yugoslavian President Slobadan Milosevic.

17N’s reaction to NATO’s strategy towards the Balkans led to further violence in 2000. On 8 June, the British embassy military attaché in Athens, Brigadier Stephen Saunders, was shot dead in an ambush as he drove to work. 17N justified its act as a response to ‘a murderous imperialist war’.42 NATO’s military campaign in Yugoslavia, the group declared, was never a humanitarian mission in the region but an attack on a sovereign state, in blatant violation of long-standing international agreements and conventions. Presenting the NATO leaders as a self-constituted posse of international vigilantes, 17N further argued that NATO’s strategy towards the Balkans had been shaped by the United States’ strategic interests and geopolitical ambitions in Europe, rather than by the local needs for conflict resolution and peacekeeping. According to the group, the West’s failure to seek authorization from the UN Security Council for the 78-day campaign of bombing against targets in Kosovo and Serbia represented the spirit of the new globalized international conscience. By attacking Saunders, 17N thought it attacked the inbred arrogance of the Anglo-Saxon political and military establishment and its ‘deeply-rooted belief that they are superior people and are therefore legalized to annihilate’ ‘pariah nations’ through sanctions and bombardment, bringing misery, disease and death upon innocent people (‘... Arabs, Palestinians, Libyans and Iraqis yesterday, Yugoslavs today, Chinese, Russians and others tomorrow’).43 Seeing its struggle as a part of a new global political struggle for sovereignty, national self-determination and human dignity, 17N hinted at further ‘just, armed popular resistance’ unless the behaviour of ‘USA and Co.’ altered.44

When Will 17N Stop Killing?
Throughout its long campaign, the group has maintained an extremely one- dimensional view of a world peopled by clearly demarcated heroes and villains. Combining fanatical nationalism, contempt for the existing order and a cult of violence for its own sake, 17N never realized that its eclectic belief system was incompatible with modern democratic principles. At the same time, despite the contemporary quality of its concerns, 17N leaders never had a discernible plan. Unlike the Red Brigades in Italy and the Red Amy Faction in Germany, which both took on ‘the capitalist state and its agents’, 17N hoped to create an insurrectionary mood which would empower people into revolutionary political action without promoting a generalized sense of chaos within Greek society. As such, 17N’s violence was an audacious protest which aimed to discredit and humiliate the Greek katestimeno (establishment), but it never moved beyond terrorism to reach the stage of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. 17N’s conception of the political environment was and remains one of protest, resistance and violence. From the outset, 17N saw the application of violence as the most effective form of political pressure against the regime and an unresponsive international order. The failed rocket attack on the German ambassador’s residence and the Saunders assassination in retaliation to NATO’s bombardment of Yugoslavia aimed to demonstrate precisely that nihilistic spirit of resistance. As such, it is very unlikely that 17N will voluntarily abandon its campaign of violence. The terrorists will continue to attack the people and the institutions they consider to be the enemy for several years to come – at least until Greece’s established political class decides to get a grip on its terrorism problems.

Greece’s Anti-Terrorism Strategy
Terrorism, the noted American historian Walter Laqueur once wrote, is an attempt to destabilize democratic societies and to show that their governments are impotent. In Greece, 17N has certainly accomplished the latter. Although terrorism in the mid 1970s and early 1980s could probably not have been prevented altogether, Greece should have defended itself and the lives of its citizens better. The Greek state and its security organizations should have had enough indications by the end of 1983 (when US Navy Captain George Tsantes and his Greek driver were assassinated) to reorganize its security systems and introduce organizational measures to counter the terrorism that was to follow. Until the mid 1980s, domestic incidents of terrorism were regarded as casual events perpetrated by isolated anarchic agitators rather than a sustained campaign of violence directed at the Greek government. At the same time, the country’s security services appeared to have difficulties understanding what the terrorists wrote in their manifestos and communiqués. The inability on the part of the Greek intelligence community to read into the texts the meanings of 17N’s offensive plans and to assess the nature and potential of the threat gave the terrorists invaluable time to organize themselves.

The early development of an intelligence infrastructure and proper co- ordination between government, the police and the judiciary might have enabled the terrorist organization to be identified and eliminated before its violent tactics could be firmly established. However, owing to a continued diffusion of authority and responsibility, intelligence remained ineffectively integrated – particularly in its dissemination and actual operational use. Moreover, corruption within the security services limited the extent to which intelligence was collected even further. As in most security policy matters, personal integrity in counter-terrorism is as vital as organizational and administrative ability. Although astronomical amounts of money changed hands over the years between the security services and a variety of informers/agents/operatives, the total lack of success has reinforced the view that both information and informers were being manufactured for the absorption of state financial rewards. It might have been better to dissolve the security services and to set up a totally new organization rather than periodically reorganize them in an attempt to change attitudes in the force and remove corruption. However, according to former governmental advisor on terrorism Mary Bossis, ‘Governments, both left and right, generally agreed that it was much safer to keep the secret services faction- riven, inefficient and dependent on political control and patronage than to modernize them into a powerful intelligence apparatus’.45

Dealing with experienced and heavily armed terrorists, like the members of 17N, requires a combination of discipline, alertness and operational proficiency on the part of the security forces. Despite claims to the contrary, government security forces were – and continue to be – structurally weak. Anti-terrorist strategy, for most of the past 25 years, has been carried out by an under-resourced, under-trained and ill-equipped police force which lacks the motivation, discipline, dedication and expertise to wage an effective war against the professionalism and sophistication of 17N.

There can be little doubt that the capacity to protect its citizens against terrorism and subversion is a necessary attribute of any modern state. Whenever faced with a severe test of that capacity, the Greek state has failed to pass it. The histories of the Red Brigades in Italy, Red Army Faction in Germany and Action Direct in France suggest that while liberal democracies are initially uncertain in their handling of domestic violent political organizations, they overcome them in time. Over the past twenty-five years, successive Greek governments have deployed a variety of measures to meet the violence of 17N but have failed to demonstrate a firm grasp of the essentials, a clear sense of strategic priorities and a coherent approach to achieving them. Greece’s anti-terrorist policy and planning has been characterized by an incrementalism, fragmentation and occasional sheer ineptitude which are the primary characteristics of Greek public policy. Far from sending an early and clear signal that violence would not be tolerated by taking a clear-cut stand and effective measures to confront the problem, state authorities and political parties allowed terrorism to grow so uncontrollably that it finally became a routine element of the nation’s life.