The Perfect Killers

By Anthee Carassava/Athens

In Greece, terrorists usually follow assassinations with explanations. The country's deadliest group, the Revolutionary Organization 17 November, is religious about ringing 929-6001 and notifying the Eleftherotypia, an Athens daily, of the whereabouts of its proclamations. But on the night of June 8, that decades-old practice took an unconventional twist. Fourteen hours after gunmen pumped four bullets into Brigadier Stephen Saunders, Britain's top military envoy to Athens, 17 November rang the cell phone of an Eleftherotypia staff writer. Apparently the terrorists were aware that police had, for the first time ever, tapped the newspaper's telephones. "If this leak isn't proof of collusion between state-run authorities and members of 17 November," says an intelligence expert too scared to be named, "then I don't know what is."

Law-enforcement authorities and the government did not respond to repeated requests for a comment on the apparent leak. But the incident follows reports from the State Department and Congress criticizing Greece for failure to act against 17 November, a Marxist-Leninist group that has operated with impunity since 1975. Some former U.S. officials now allege that past high-ranking members of the country's ruling Socialists have had links with the terrorist group. Since then, the group has killed an additional 22 Greek and foreign nationals, including four American officials. Saunders, 53 and the father of two, was the first British envoy to be slain by the notorious terrorists, who are occasionally portrayed by Greek media as latter-day Robin Hood ideologues, battling Western overlords and NATO in pursuit of Greek interests, and in defense of Greece's onetime close allies the Serbs. When NATO launched its 1999 bombing blitz of Yugoslavia, 17 November, plus a sideshow of some 80 extremist groups, retaliated in Greece with a spate of bomb and rocket attacks that led the U.S. State Department to rank Greece, a NATO ally, second only to Colombia in worldwide stings against U.S. interests last year. A congressionally mandated commission followed, recommending that the U.S. consider sanctions against Athens for its "disturbingly passive response" to terrorism. R. James Woolsey, former CIA chief and a member of the terror commission, testified after the report's release that though Greece had been given "substantial information" on 17 November, and had gathered much of its own, it had failed to act. Woolsey even broached a taboo topic in Greece--the fate of the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. "As long as 17 November is still potentially a greeting committee for Americans and others," he said, "people should at least begin to rethink the location of the Olympics."

What most infuriates the U.S. is that 17 November operates with a free hand. "It's not that Greece has the world's worst terrorist problem," says Wayne Merry, a former U.S. embassy official. "It's that Greece has the world's worst counterterrorism problem." What are Greek police doing? "Zilch, zip, zero," huffs a U.S. official. Not one arrest. Not one conviction.

The pattern is familiar. A year ago, a 17 November hitman was injured while launching a rocket against the residence of the German ambassador. Police found drops of his blood and collected it as evidence. Then everything went into slow motion. U.S. officials claim it took four months for a Greek police crime lab to type the blood. And when it did, says the State Department in an intelligence report issued in May, the authorities "did not follow up aggressively, and made no arrest."

"It's no wonder 17 November has been dubbed one of the world's most elusive terrorist organizations," says the intelligence expert, a former high-ranking Greek official. "It's being chased by incompetent, unprofessional police." The source adds, "We have a 50,000-strong police force. We know that these suspects circulate within a neighborhood a quarter the size of Central Park. And we still can't catch them." Part of the problem, according to the State Department report: Greek laws make it hard to arrest and hold terrorists and offer no safeguards for witnesses and prosecutors.

Possible past links between government and 17 November are another problem. "We know," says Merry, "that there were people in the government, in the party, who had more than a damn good idea" of the terrorists' identities. Tying powerful figures to the group could be a political nightmare for reform-minded Prime Minister Costas Simitis, but he may have no choice. Greece's antiterrorist performance isn't just risking the Olympics--it is killing the nation's reputation.

--With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington