Pod Insights John Kiriakou's Dead Drop S1E7 The Shadow Of Richard Welch About this episode THE BLURB: On the one hand, being assigned to handle counter-terrorism in Athens was a dream job. On the other, it had nightmarish implications and very real dangers up to and including assassination. That's what happened to a former Athens station chief, the highly regarded Richard Welch. A Greek terrorist group assassinated Welch outside his residence after he attended a Christmas party. In this episode, John comes face to face with Welch's shadow - and begins to sense something of his own future in it.
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0:00 Speaker 00 Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasia pro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.
0:33 Speaker 01 Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.
1:06 Alan Katz? This podcast, it's a Coster and Touchstone production.
1:16 John Kiriakou? Hi, I'm John Kuriope. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick. Before we get started, I want to say again how incredibly moved I am by your reaction to this podcast. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You've motivated us to keep cranking them out. To close that circle, it would be awesome if you could like, review, comment on, or share the podcast on whatever platform you're listening. Think of it as extra motivation for us. A few episodes back, I told you the story of William Buckley, a terrific soldier, a skilled spy, and the CIA Station Chief in Beirut. In March 1984 Hezbollah kidnapped Bill and over the course of the next year they tortured
1:59 John Kiriakou? him repeatedly and produced videos of that torture. In the end, when Bill had clearly gone mad and stopped being useful to them, they executed him. But as I arrived in Athens a few years later, the shadow of another assassinated CIA officer loomed large. At the time he was assassinated in December 1975, Richard Welch was the highest ranking CIA officer ever to be killed in the line of duty. He was also the first CIA station chief to be murdered in a politically motivated assassination. As I was preparing to go to Athens, everything I did, everything I learned, I guess you could say was under the shadow of Richard Welch. Dick Welch was a major historical figure in the CIA.
2:44 John Kiriakou? By all accounts, everybody who encountered him loved him. He was not a typical CIA officer of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. He had a degree in ancient Greek. He got a master's degree in something like Greek mythology or some obscure field. He loved Greece and he loved Greeks. He was in the Directorate of Operations. He had come to the CIA from the military, served in Greece as a young man, as a junior officer, loved every second of it, and then served around the world wherever it was the CIA had sent him, always with the idea that he would eventually go back to Greece. And so he did go back to Greece in 1975 as the CIA station chief.
3:28 John Kiriakou? This was a real homecoming for him. I just recently read an interview with his son. His son is now in his 70s. He said his father loved Greece more than he loved anything else on earth. He spoke fluent Greek, he spoke fluent ancient Greek, which no Greek does. He was just an average American white guy who had this deep and abiding love of everything Greek. He really celebrated this appointment. For some reason, it was slightly off-cycle. So, he only arrived in Greece in November of 1975. Now, the Greek military junta lasted from 1967 to 1974.
4:11 John Kiriakou? The Greeks were so traumatized by it, they've made up a word in the Greek language that means, it's a compound word and it means "the seven-year nightmare." So, he arrived in Greece after the junta had collapsed. The CIA and the American Embassy made several immediate mistakes. Number one, all station chiefs lived in the same house. And it was known in the Greek media. And the location of the house was known to the Greek media. It was in a very, very upscale area, immediately outside of Athens called Palio Psichiko. I'm gonna call them minor secrets, sometimes get out there. Like maybe in Washington,
4:56 John Kiriakou? people are gonna know where the Mossad representative or the KGB resident, where they happened to live. It's just one of those things that sort of slips out over the years. But, you counter that by moving him to different houses. But that didn't happen. As far as I know, no one even considered it. It's a mistake that should never have been made. That is Intelligence 101. Also, something else was happening around the same time. There was a, I'm gonna call him a rogue CIA officer by the name of Philip Agee. Philip Agee was assigned to a station in Latin America. He objected to what the CIA was doing in Latin America, which, kudos to him.
5:40 John Kiriakou? But, his response was to resign from the agency and to write a book called "Inside the Company", where he, in an appendix, he listed the names of every undercover CIA officer he could recall. And there were hundreds of them. For many of them, their careers were ruined. Dick Welch was one of those names. So, not only is the CIA Station Chief's house now known in Athens, but it is widely known that Richard Welch is a CIA officer. And then the Greek media says, "Oh, a new diplomat is arriving from the United States, Richard Welch. He's gonna be living in Palio Psichikos."
6:24 John Kiriakou? Well, it doesn't take a genius to put two and two together, that Dick Welch is the new CIA Station Chief. So he was only there for about six weeks. Greece had just returned to democracy. Konstantinos Garamanlis, who's one of the fathers of the state as we know it today, had returned from self-imposed exile in Paris to become the Prime Minister. He was a right-of-center politician, but universally loved and respected, because he had stood up to the Nazis just a few decades earlier. Two things happened: Garamanlis was elected Prime Minister in a landslide, and a national referendum throughout the royal family.
7:05 John Kiriakou? In a political sense, this was important because, number one, this is a NATO country returning to its democratic roots. But number two, there's now an underlying distrust and dislike of the United States. That dislike was more of a hatred, in some circles. That came from the fact that it was the United States that had supported the junta. Now, there's a widely-held belief that it was the CIA that installed the junta. That is not true. It was the White House and the State Department that had installed the junta. And Henry Kissinger, even though he did not have an official title at the time, was an adviser to President Johnson in 1967. And it was Kissinger who told Johnson, "To go ahead and overthrow that government.
7:50 John Kiriakou? The communists are gonna win the next election anyway." There's kind of a famous story where the king was invited to the White House for dinner, and he went to the White House thinking he was gonna be feted as this European leader. He's a crowned head, he's gonna meet the President of the United States, it's gonna be a big deal, it's gonna be on all the front pages of the papers. And instead, Johnson pulled him aside and said, "If you don't stop those fucking communists, I'll stop them for you." It was a direct threat. The king said, "Look, I'm just a constitutional monarch. I don't have any control over who wins the election." The truth is, the communists had no hope of winning an election. They were gonna win a few seats,
8:34 John Kiriakou? but it was the slightly left-of-center social democrats who were actually gonna do pretty well. That was terrifying enough to the US government to actively overthrow Greece's democracy. My mentor at the CIA in operations was a legendary officer by the name of Gust Avrakatos. Gust became so famous that he was portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film Charlie Wilson's War. Gust and I were both Greek Orthodox, both from western Pennsylvania. Both went to second-tier schools, not Ivy League schools like the old Boy Network members in the CIA had done. So he took a real liking to me
9:16 John Kiriakou? and volunteered to be my guiding mentor in operations. I learned more from Gust than I learned from any other person in my entire adult life. So Gust told me this story, and I believe him. He said that he heard a rumor on the 20th of April, 1967. He was stationed in Athens. He heard a rumor, "There's gonna be a coup tonight." He said, "A coup launched by whom?" "By the military." Well, he was handling a major military official, who was a recruited agent. And he triggered an emergency meeting at 11 o'clock that night. The source comes to the meeting, and Gust says, "So help me God, you better not overthrow this government tonight."
10:00 John Kiriakou? And he said, "Gust, what are you talking about? Nobody's gonna overthrow this government." At 2:00 a.m., tanks rolled into the streets, and the military overthrew the government. Gust said he later learned that the CIA did not have a role in this coup because the CIA was opposed to the coup. It was the State Department and the National Security Council being egged on by Henry Kissinger that led to the coup. A group of generals briefly took power. They were almost immediately overthrown by a group of colonels. And the colonels held the government for the next seven years. The generals were too liberal. The colonels wanted to crack heads. I can sum up the organizing principle of the coup
10:44 John Kiriakou? in a single word: communism. The Greeks were obsessed with communism. They had fought a bloody and bitter civil war immediately after the Nazis were driven out. The Nazis left in 44, the civil war broke out in 46. It pitted brother against brother and it lasted until 49 with thousands of people massacred, mostly by communists. The Greek right was determined not to allow the Communist Party or communist stooges or outside communist leaders to gain any foothold in Greece. Anybody who was to the left of Attila the Hun was either a communist or a communist sympathizer.
11:28 John Kiriakou? One of the things that the junta did was they published a book called "The Undermining of the Greek State by Communism", and they published it in as many languages as they possibly could. I have a copy. My grandmother gave it to me. Because my grandmother, God bless her soul, was tricked into thinking that this was a good thing for the country. My grandfather never believed it. My grandfather was a Republican with a small r. My grandmother was a royalist and became a junta. My cousins in Greece would write letters back and forth with my grandmother and they would say, "No, no, you're wrong. There is no communism here. They're pretending that there's communism. It gives them a reason to keep us down."
12:10 John Kiriakou? She had this copy of this book, "The Undermining of the Greek State by Communism", and she said, "But it says in this book, it has these photographs of these documents saying that we should do this in the name of Marx and Lenin", and they were telling her, "No, Thea, this is propaganda." One of her cousins sent her a book in English that I still have, that was "The Other Side". I've read both of these books. The first is clearly fascist propaganda. The second is a well-considered rebuttal by an academic who was based in the United States. So, the democratic government is taking root. It had been around for barely over a year.
12:49 John Kiriakou? When Dick Welch arrives in Greece, the ambassador invites Dick and Mrs. Welch to his Christmas party on December 23rd, 1975, and they go to the Christmas party. By all accounts, they have a grand old time. They get back in the car and the driver takes them back to their house in Pisehiko. Back then, gates were not automatic. You couldn't just press a button and your gate opens, so... The driver parked the car at the entrance to the house, got out to open the gate, didn't notice that there was a car parked across the street with three men and a woman inside. Two of the men get out and shout, "Richard Welch, get out of the car." The driver runs for his life, but Dick and Mrs. Welch got out of the car.
13:33 John Kiriakou? Both of the men are pointing guns at Dick. One was a 45 that later became known as the Welch 45, and one was a 9mm. There was a man in the car that remained in the car as the driver, and there was a woman who we believe was acting as the lookout. One of the men says, "Richard Welch, you have been found guilty of crimes against the Greek people, and you've been sentenced to death." And then shot him three times in the chest with a 45, killing him instantly. Mrs. Welch stood there like a statue. She told us later that she wanted to burn their images into her mind so that she could help us identify them. The most important thing that she told us was that there were four of them,
14:18 John Kiriakou? that one was a blonde woman. She remained in the car with the driver, but that the shooter looked like a young Miki Stel Dorakis. Miki Stel Dorakis, just died a year ago at the age of 96, was the most important composer in the history of Greece. A more beloved figure does not exist. And I have to tell you, I was one of the biggest Miki Stel Dorakis fans that existed. So he's dead. They get back in the car. They drive away. She runs in the house, calls the embassy. The embassy calls the police. Everybody converges on the house. This event changed the course of Greek-US relations.
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16:04 Alan Katz? I'm Alan Katz.
16:05 Speaker 05 And I'm GD Thinderson.
16:06 Alan Katz? In our new podcast, What Makes Us Laugh: A Serious Look at Comedy, we're going to do exactly that.
16:12 Speaker 05 Take a serious look at the things that make us laugh, both personally and culturally.
16:16 Alan Katz? We'll talk about the whole discovery process, how we found our comedy inspirations.
16:21 Speaker 05 And how they inspired us to create comedy of our own.
16:23 Alan Katz? Favorite movies, favorite TV shows, favorite stand-ups.
16:27 Speaker 05 And our favorite audiences. But more importantly, we'll explore why our favorites are our favorite and what that means about us.
16:33 Alan Katz? Here's a sampling of what you'll hear.
16:37 Alan Katz? A minister and then a stripper.
16:39 Speaker 05 You had to pay for school somehow. I'm so damaged. I don't know why I'm not depressed.
16:44 Alan Katz? Groucho Marx was a huge, huge early influence.
16:48 Speaker 05 I went for Captain Spalding, the African explorer.
16:50 Alan Katz? If you can't laugh at yourself, that's probably the tell that you don't have a sense of humor.
16:56 Speaker 05 My mother punished us. As soon as she closed the door, my brother looked at me and goes, "Make me laugh. I'm gonna punch you in the face."
17:03 Alan Katz? The comedian is the person whose bullshit meter is cranked to 11.
17:07 Speaker 05 I was 14 years old. It was the first time I ever literally fell into the aisle laughing onto a guy who had fallen out of his chair laughing from the other side of the aisle.
17:20 Speaker 05 That's what makes us laugh. A serious look at comedy.
17:23 Alan Katz? Find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costardandtouchstone.com.
17:30 John Kiriakou? This is where the story becomes somewhat comical. The group that killed him, we later learned, was calling itself Revolutionary Organization 17 November, or 17 November for short. It was named after the 17th of November 1974, when there was a peaceful, pro-democracy demonstration at the Athens Polytechnic University in central Athens. The military junta used tanks to destroy this peaceful, pro-democracy demonstration. Now, to hear the students tell the story, 500 were killed. To hear the military tell the story, 30 were killed. The number is probably somewhere in the middle.
18:14 John Kiriakou? Greeks were so aghast at what had happened that it very quickly led to the collapse of the junta. We learned later that the four terrorists drove the car about a mile, parked it on the side of the road, and abandoned it, okay? Cops never found the car. It's sitting in plain sight, a mile from the shooting. Cops never found the car. So the terrorists called the police and said, "You morons, the car is located at the intersection of A and B." Well, there were no clues in it. They had wiped it down. There was nothing. But it made the cops look even more stupid than they otherwise would have. But then what they did was they wrote a manifesto.
18:57 John Kiriakou? This becomes a theme in the group's attacks over the next 27 years. But they didn't drop the manifesto at the site of the shooting. What they did is they sent it to a colleague or a sympathizer in Paris, and they asked him to deliver it to Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher. They somehow believed that Sartre would be sympathetic to this killing. The manifesto was delivered to Bernard Henri Lavi, who is now an old man and one of the most celebrated poets in the history of modern France. Lavi was Sartre's assistant at the time. He gave it to Sartre. Sartre didn't read it. He put it in a desk drawer. 17 November...
19:41 John Kiriakou? believed that Sartre would go to the media with it. And he didn't. He didn't even bother to read it. He just stuck it in a pile of papers and just forgot about it. In April, four months later, the chief of police, his name was Malios, the chief of police during the junta. He had been fired, of course, because he was a torturer and a criminal. And he walked out of his apartment like he did every single day at 10 o'clock to get his newspaper and walk to the coffee shop and get a coffee and read the paper. He told us later, as he was taking his final breaths, that he saw a man and a woman making out. And he smiled and thought to himself, "Young love."
20:26 John Kiriakou? The moment he walked past them, the man pulled out the Welch 45 and shot him in the back three times. He lived about four hours. A station officer was able to get to him on the operating table before they put him under to try to save him. And he said that the man who shot him looked like a young Miki Stolodakis. Miki is apoplectic by now. It's like, why does he have to look like me? I mean, everybody knew it wasn't Miki's. He's like one of the greatest heroes that ever came out of modern Greece. But that's two killings. Well, they write a second manifesto. And their man in Paris delivers it to Jean-Paul Sartre. And Sartre says, "What is this?" And Le Vie says, "You know what? I think we received one of these before."
21:11 John Kiriakou? So they go through the desk drawer and they find the previous one. And they said, "What should we do?" It says on the manifesto, "Please give this to the newspaper Libération in Paris." Well, instead, they called the cops. And they said, "Look, this may be a prank. It may be a joke, or it may be real. We don't know." Sartre didn't want any part of two political assassinations. He's a philosopher. He's not a murderer. So they call the cops. The cops then turn it over to the Greeks. But word leaks out. It ends up in Libération. And 17 November gets the publicity that it was seeking from the outset. As you can imagine, at the CIA, they set up a task force.
21:56 John Kiriakou? And they begin to follow all these leads. Because God knows the Greeks weren't. It's not that the Greeks didn't care. It's that the Greeks did not have the expertise to investigate a crime of international import.
22:10 John Kiriakou? The people who would have done the investigation had all been fired because they were all Huntas torturers. The French were like, you know what, this isn't our problem. These crimes happen in Greece, we have our own problems. So, everybody that is in a position of authority now has zero experience, especially in complicated investigations. They couldn't even find the getaway car. They had to be told where the getaway car was. Well, this hits the Greek media, which was full of yellow journalists anyway. And all of a sudden, 17 November becomes the ghost organization, the phantom organization. No one knows who they are, no one knows where they live, who's gonna be their next target?
22:53 John Kiriakou? In the end, they killed something like 27 people. After Dick Welch and Malios, it was two US Defense Attache's. It was an American technical sergeant in the Air Force who was just doing his laundry in the basement laundry room of his apartment building, Ronald Stewart. It was the Turkish ambassador, the Turkish deputy ambassador, the Minister of Communications, the Minister of Finance, the governor of the Central Bank. They fired rockets at the German ambassador, they fired rockets at the Minister of Finance, they fired rockets at the British Embassy, the French Embassy, they blew up tax offices. They were confident to the point of brazenness.
23:37 John Kiriakou? The Greeks made additional, very stupid mistakes. We were never sure if it was just a fundamental Greek inability to crack this group, or if the Greek police were infiltrated, or if they were on the payroll, or if there were ministers who were, who had been infiltrated, who were telling the Greeks to back off. Could the Greeks really be that stupid, that incompetent? And we later learned that, yeah, they could be that stupid and that incompetent. Athens has a fantastic museum called the War Museum. It's got tanks, and armored personnel carriers, and fighter jets, and cool...
24:20 John Kiriakou? Weapons and stuff, it never occurred to them to deactivate the weapon. And so, all of these weapons that are on display in the museum are live weapons. I'm talking about rocket launchers, I'm talking about rocket propelled grenade launchers, machine guns, sniper rifles. And one day, just as the museum was opening, 17 November, walks in, takes all the security guards and museum employees hostage, locks the door, drives a truck up to the entrance of the museum, steals all the weapons and drives away. Now they have all these weapons, so what do they do about ammunition?
25:04 John Kiriakou? In the middle of the night, they go to the local police station in the Athenian neighborhood of Vironas, Byron, named after Lord Byron, another great hero of the Greek revolution. They take the four cops who are on duty on midnight shift hostage, and they steal all the cops weapons and all of the ammunition. Then, they raid a military depot in central Greece and take all of the ammunition for the entire military base. How many people would be in an organization like this? At the CIA, we had literally thousands of suspects. In the end, there were seven or eight.
25:46 John Kiriakou? We used to have this joke at the CIA, "It can't be these same people from 1975, they've got to be in their 70s by now." Well, you know what? They were in their 70s, still carrying out hits and ops. And then when they needed cash, they would just take all these weapons and rockets and they would rob banks and just clear the banks out of hundreds of thousands of euros over the years. They got more and more involved in politics.
26:17 Speaker 00 Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasia pro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.
26:50 Speaker 01 Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to build Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.
27:23 John Kiriakou? The Greeks, more than any other European Union country, hate paying taxes. For example, Greece has a tax on swimming pools. If you've got a private swimming pool, if you're wealthy enough to have a private swimming pool, you've got to pay a tax on it. It's just a couple thousand dollars when you build a pool. There are about 30,000 private swimming pools that rich people have. 16 people in the country admit to having pools. 60 Minutes did a story once, in the 80s or 90s, about how Greeks don't pay taxes. And they had this group of just average Greek people, and they're sitting around a fire pit, and they're talking about taxes. The interviewer said, "Why don't you pay your taxes?" And this woman said, "What do you care if I pay my taxes?
28:06 John Kiriakou? What business is it of yours if I pay my taxes? I don't ask you if you pay your taxes. You stay out of my tax business, I'll stay out of your tax business." But that's the attitude of all Greeks. They don't want to pay their taxes. And so, anytime Parliament would consider a bill to raise taxes, 17 November would go out in the middle of the night and fire rockets at the tax offices. Or they would murder the Minister of Finance, or blow up the car that's carrying the governor of the central bank. One of the problems that we ran into early on was that most Greeks saw this group as a Robin Hood kind of group, stealing from the rich to give to the poor.
28:50 John Kiriakou? They weren't giving to the poor, but they're blowing up the tax office. They really did win the messaging war. The Turks, once in the 80s and then again in the mid 90s, landed troops on a little uninhabited island, islet, in the Aegean called Emea. There's a herd of goats on Emea, there's nothing else, there are no people. They put the Turkish flag. Then the Greeks sent a ship and they put the Greek flag back and next thing you know, they're on the brink of war. Bill Clinton calls both the Turkish president and the Greek prime minister, negotiates a backing off, and the Greeks get their island back. After the Emea crisis, as it's called, at least in Greece, the Turks decided, well, that can't be the end of it, we're gonna murder the Turkish ambassador.
29:35 John Kiriakou? And so they did. And then they murdered the deputy ambassador. His title was Deputy Chief of Mission. There was an announcement of a trade deficit, where the Greeks had exported fewer goods to the United States than they thought they would. Okay, no big deal, maybe you're gonna spend five seconds reading the first sentence or two of an article about that. 17 November, blew up a branch of Citibank that night. And then they fired a rocket at the Inter-American Insurance Company, thinking that it was American, not knowing that it's actually a Dutch company that's just called Inter-American Insurance. So this is what we had to deal with.
30:16 John Kiriakou? You never knew where they were gonna strike, you never knew who they were gonna kill. They shot our DEA officer in the embassy and almost killed him, but he lived and he said that he had noticed two guys on a motorcycle that were trying to stay in his blind spot. And so, at a red light, they pulled up next to the car and he jotted down a license plate number. So we went to the Greeks, we said, "We wanna know who this license plate number goes to." Well, it went to a Greek guy, of course, and we asked the Greeks to put out an APB. They found him. Two guys on the motorcycle turned out to be first cousins.
31:01 John Kiriakou? They ran in separate directions. The Greeks caught up with the one of them. He said, "No, I didn't shoot anybody. I didn't shoot the DEA guy. I'm not in this 17 November." "17 November, what is that? I don't know what that is. I'm not a member." Of course, 20 years later, yeah, of course, he was a member of 17 November. He was the only one that we really had a bead on. Because he was exposed, he sort of dropped out. He went quiet for a number of years. This was an organization that was so well-run and so well-organized that in the end, it made the CIA look like fools. When there are seven or eight members of the organization and we have 12 or 1300 suspects, it just shows you what little intelligence we had.
31:46 John Kiriakou? I was going to Athens in a brand-new position where the slot was owned by the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. I was the only person who was actually trained as a counterterrorism officer. Everybody else was just a generic or general intelligence officer, whose job it was to recruit spies to steal secrets. My job was to recruit spies in terrorist organizations to steal their secrets, and that made it much more difficult. It's one thing to meet an interesting target at a diplomatic cocktail party and invite him to lunch and have a lovely lunch in the lobby of some fancy hotel. It's an entirely different thing to identify somebody
32:29 John Kiriakou? that may have fired a rocket at the British ambassador and introduce yourself and try to recruit him. From outside appearances, I was a mid-level staff member at the American Embassy. Nominally, I was working again for the State Department, but I didn't have any State Department duties this time. And don't forget that 17 November is not the only terrorist group that's active in Athens and out there murdering people. There was another Greek group that was more focused on the Greek police and killing as many Greek policemen as they could called ELA. E-L-A stood for Popular Revolutionary Struggle. Myriad Arab groups were talking about the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,
33:14 John Kiriakou? the PFLP General Command, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Libyans, the Abunidal Organization, and, last but not least, Carlos the Jackal.
33:27 John Kiriakou? Who was supplying all these groups, except for 17 November, with weapons. This was a big job. Greece elected a socialist prime minister in 1980 or 81 named Andreas Papandreou. There's always been this belief, I'm gonna call it an urban legend, that he reached out to these groups, including 17 November, through one of his ministers. We believed this for many years. It probably didn't happen, but the belief was that he reached out to all of these terrorist groups and said, "So long as you don't kill Greeks, you can come and go through the airport unmolested." Now, 17 November and Ella aside, they were killing lots of Greeks.
34:10 John Kiriakou? The Arab groups pretty much did whatever they wanted. Greece is only an hour flight from Cairo, hour and 15 minutes from Amman, it's an hour from Tripoli. It's right in the heart of things, and it's the gateway to Europe. My wife Joanne and our two sons arrived in Athens in the evening. For bureaucratic reasons that I never understood, the embassy didn't realize we were coming. There was nowhere for us to live. So they put us for a night, or two nights, in the Hilton, and then they found us a temporary apartment. It was four months before they put us in a house, which was difficult, but that very
34:50 John Kiriakou? first morning, I walked to the embassy in my very best suit and introduced myself to the chief. He said, "Why are you wearing a suit?" "Well, what else would I wear?" And he said, "Listen, no more suits. You're gonna freak people out, cuz they're gonna think that you're in the FBI. The FBI wears suits." "What do we wear?" "Blue jeans." "Okay, well, I actually am more comfortable in blue jeans. I'm a blue jeans and t-shirt kinda guy." But that very first day, I'm in my best suit with my favorite tie and a crisp white business shirt, and I'm going office to office, introducing myself as the new guy. I'm there for one hour.
35:33 John Kiriakou? One of the other CIA officers comes up to me and says, "Excuse me, are you the new guy?" "I am." I shook his hand. "Are you from CTC, the Counterterrorism Center?" "Yeah, I am." "Well, we have a walk-in." And he only speaks Arabic. "So, you're on."
35:49 John Kiriakou? The walk-in volunteer downstairs would end up epitomizing both how intriguing and how dangerous this assignment could be. The walk-in said he was an agent of a big-time terrorist group sent to Athens to do harm to the United States and its friends. But, he said, he'd had a change of heart and now he wanted to warn us about his group and to work with us. This was not uncommon in Athens. Terrorist groups regularly probed Americans looking for openings to exploit. Their mission might be, simply, to observe us from within during an interview. Maybe observe our security systems so as to bypass them later during an attack. I wasn't about to be played like that on day one.
36:31 John Kiriakou? I told the walk-in that we would have our conversation elsewhere, outside the embassy.
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37:44 John Kiriakou? That we'd pick him up on a certain street corner and at a specified time. Be there or forget about it. "I'll be there," he said, and just like that, my counterterrorism career began. Athens, man. As much as I loved being there, my spidey senses were on edge from that moment on. And they had every reason to be on edge, starting with that very walk-in. We'll get to that story and the assassination attempt and how being in Athens wrecked my marriage and how that nearly wrecked my CIA career, all in the episodes ahead. But in the next episode, we need to backtrack to one of the most intense but enjoyable experiences of my entire CIA career: my counterterrorism training. Hell, let's call it what it is.
38:28 John Kiriakou? It was the James Bond Academy, the best toy a spy in training could wish for. I told you we'd get there. That's next time on Dead Drop: What Makes This Spy Tick? See you then. I'm John Kiriakou. Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costart and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kiriakou, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.
39:08 Alan Katz? This podcast, it's a Costart and Touchstone production.
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