The Reluctant Spy (7 page)

“THIS IRAQ THING
is just plain boring,” I told my wife in late 1997. “Nothing's changed since we left for Bahrain three years ago. I want to do something different. I want to go overseas again.”

There it was, out on the table. Even if the Iraq account had stimulated every intellectual neuron in my brain pan, I hankered for an assignment abroad. Bahrain, a tame posting until the end, had planted a seed. I spoke a couple of difficult foreign languages; I had studied the Middle East, and I thought I understood the issues and threats confronting my country in some of the most dangerous neighborhoods of the world. It was where I could make a bigger contribution and, not coincidentally, test myself in employing skills I'd only read about in books.

JoAnne was even more skeptical than she was before Bahrain, which struck me as odd, given the happy days she had spent there even by her own admission. I guess it was because she didn't think lightning could strike twice. “The only place I'd go is Athens,” she said. Well, of course: She was a good Greek American girl with extended family ties in the old country—in effect, a ready-made support system of relatives and friends of relatives who would embrace her and make her feel as if she'd never left Warren, Ohio. Amazingly, Athens wasn't out of the question. The agency was seeking an officer for a special counterterrorism program; the right candidate would take specific assignments in Greece, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, and elsewhere in southern and eastern Europe, focusing on militant leftist and Arab terrorist groups in the region. If possible, the
pooh-bahs wanted someone who spoke Arabic as well as Greek. It was almost as if they were designing the assignment with me in mind, except for one rather important omission on my résumé.

I went to see Dan Praig, the official in the Counterterrorist Center responsible for filling the post, and introduced myself.

“Look, I've got to tell you up front, I don't have any operational experience at all.” I told Praig what I had done as an analyst, but that I had never been in the field as a covert operative.

Praig paused, frowning slightly, and I jumped back in. “But listen, I speak Greek and Arabic fluently.”

“You what? Greek and Arabic? You willing to be tested?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

It turned out Praig's secretary was a Greek immigrant whose brother lived on Rhodes, the island my grandparents came from. A nod from Praig, and she immediately started talking to me in rapid-fire Greek; in no time, the two of us got right into a conversation, complete with Rhodian accents. After two or three minutes, she stopped, smiled, looked at her boss, and gave him a thumbs-up.

“Are you willing to take an Arabic exam?” Praig asked.

I had just retested in Arabic and my scores showed that I was still completely conversant in the language; that was enough for Praig.

“Okay, I'm going to have to convince some of the Ops people that sending an analyst is the smart thing to do. But, believe me, it's a lot easier and a lot cheaper for me to train a linguist in operations than it is to take an operations guy and make him fluent in Greek and Arabic.”

Praig managed to sell me to the skeptics in Operations based mainly on my language skills, but there was a lot more I needed to bring to the table. One essential was a deep understanding of contemporary Greek politics. After my transfer to the Directorate of Operations in April 1998, I began to “read in” to all things Greek—that is, read and digest all the available files in the agency's archives on a country where I'd be spending time on special assignment.

Terrorism was a fact of life in Greece, dating back to the 1960s, when the military, led by a group of colonels, hijacked the national government and imposed a junta that lasted seven violent and repressive years, until 1974. Once, reading a file in the Counterterrorist Center, I responded to one awful episode with a reflexive “Oh, my God.”

“Are you reading the Greece files?” The question came from an adjacent cubicle.

“Yeah,” I said.

“That's what everyone says when they read the Greece files,” he said. Some of the episodes in the Greece files had been reported in the national and international media. And luckily, I was getting some informal help from one of the legends in the CIA's clandestine service. Gust Avrakotos had worked in Greece during the 1960s and beyond and probably knew as much about terrorism in the country as anyone around. His biggest coup, however, wasn't in Greece; it was in Afghanistan. After the Soviet Union invaded in 1979, Gust was one of the CIA's principal officers responsible for getting weapons to the mujahideen resistance, including shoulder-held Stinger missiles. Stung Soviet helicopters fell from the skies, Afghan fighters sliced and diced Soviet ground troops, and a defeated Soviet army marched out of the country a decade later, certainly one of the final nails in the coffin of the Evil Empire. Gust's exploits were featured in a book,
Charlie Wilson's War
, by the late George Crile, which focused on the efforts of the Texas congressman in the title to trump the godless Commies in Afghanistan. Both men grew thirty feet tall when they were played in the 2007 movie starring Tom Hanks as Wilson and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Gust.

By the time I met him in the late 1990s, Gust was a so-called Greenbadger—a retired officer still working for the agency under contract. He worked with me in the Counterterrorist Center as I began reading the Greece files, to which he had made many contributions, and his detailed, intimate knowledge of the country's
terrorist groups helped inform my thinking. Once I was actually on assignment in Greece, we kept in regular touch; even years removed, Gust provided valuable insights, guidance, and even the names of people worth contacting. He was an abrasive guy, who could swear with the best of them and who had a difficult personal life. He had grown up in Aliquippa, a tough steel town only thirty miles from my home in New Castle, but our connection went beyond geography and a common Greek heritage. To me, Gust was a mentor—almost a second father—who helped explain a country to which I was tied by ancestry and emotion, and which had fascinated me since long before I had opened the first agency file.

Growing up, how could I not be hooked on Greece? My immigrant grandfather and grandmother came to visit every Thursday, and our family would reciprocate at least once every weekend. My grandparents were rarely without small gifts or trinkets, sometimes books, almost always having some association with the land of their birth. I was nine or ten years old when my grandfather gave me a book on Alexander the Great—the greatest Greek of them all, the old man said. Of course, I read it from cover to cover.

This was the time of the junta, and members of the Kiriakou extended family were all over the place politically. My grandmother, who read prolifically, was quite conservative, but other relatives were evenly split between conservatives and Socialists; there was even one Communist. Then, in mid-November 1973, when I was nine years old, a group of leftists protesting the junta took over the student center at the Athens Polytechnic Institute in the central part of the city. They were unarmed and demonstrating peacefully, but the colonels were having none of it; early on the morning of November 17, they sent tanks to the campus, where they opened fire on the student center, killing several dozen and wounding as many as five hundred students.

The junta had come to power in reaction to leftist political agitation that included the Socialists, a real and active Communist
movement, and a near-paralysis in government. The Greeks accepted the junta partly because the colonels had the guns and partly because the military promised, in effect, to make the trains run on time. But the heavy-handed, unnecessary use of force at the student center inspired a national outcry. By the summer of 1974, the junta had collapsed, giving way to a democracy under former premier Constantine Karamanlis, who had lived in exile in Paris for more than a decade.

Democracy has prevailed ever since, but terrorism never went away. Across Europe, most of the radical groups of the sixties, seventies, and eighties—the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, Action Directe in France—had either disbanded or were brought to heel by law enforcement. The Irish Republican Army and ETA, in the Basque country between Spain and France, would survive into the nineties, only to diminish in influence at the dawn of a new millennium.

Greece was different. Maybe it's a part of ancestral DNA, something having to do with a rich heritage as the cradle of European civilization, but Greeks tend to hold grudges. Two groups, ELA (for Popular Revolutionary Struggle) and 17 November, named for the day of the 1973 assault on the student center, found fresh targets for their anger starting in the mid-1970s. Stocked with lefties who had fled or were exiled during the junta years, these violent fringe groups included among their imagined enemies the European Community (later to become the European Union), NATO, almost anything American, and almost everything capitalist. Bombs were set off, shots were fired, people were killed.

For Americans and especially for Greek Americans, it became personal on December 23, 1975. Richard Welch, the CIA's senior officer in Greece, had attended a Christmas party at the U.S. ambassador's residence. He and his wife and driver had returned to his home in northern Athens. These were the days before electronic gates, so the driver pulled up and got out to open up. Four people—three men and
a woman—were parked in a car directly across the street. Two masked men emerged from the backseat, and one of them shouted as they approached Welch's vehicle: “Richard Welch, get out of the car.” Welch, who spoke excellent Greek, got out of the car with his wife. Their driver, meanwhile, had run for his life. One of the men said, “Richard Welch, you have been found guilty of crimes against the Greek people and you have been sentenced to death.” With that, he shot Welch three times in the chest at point-blank range with a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun. As Welch's wife screamed, the two men returned to their car, and their driver sped off.

The CIA promised Welch's widow it would do everything it could to find his killers. Meanwhile, more bombings, attacks, and other killings of Americans took place, among them navy captain George Tsantes, a U.S. defense attaché, in 1983; navy captain William Nordeen, another U.S. defense attaché, in 1988, and air force tech sergeant Ron Stewart in 1991. Everyone had a tough time tracking down the assassins, and there was widespread speculation that local law enforcement was complicit in the killings or at least tolerant of them. What's more, the terrorists were using more than small weapons like the “Welch .45”—so memorialized because the gun that killed Welch in Athens had never been found and was used time and again in other assassinations.

How the bad guys got their bigger guns amounts to a kind of comedy of terrors. Athens has a military museum right in the center of the city, an institution with a tank outside and a collection inside that would delight even the most knowledgeable armchair general. The collection includes swords and shields, battle-axes, longbows, catapults, and more. It also features an extensive array of sophisticated modern weapons—for example, rocket launchers and rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs. Most of this stuff was displayed on the museum's walls. There was only one problem: Apparently, it never occurred to anyone at the museum to deactivate these weapons.

So there they hung, functional weapons just waiting for ammunition, until early one morning when members of 17 November descended on the museum just as it opened, tied up the security guards, and locked the door. Then they calmly and methodically removed all the live weapons from the walls, hustled them into a truck, and left without so much as a drachma for the contribution box. Next thing anybody knew, they had invaded a military depot in Larisa, a town about 150 miles north of Athens, tied up the privates and corporals on guard duty, and stolen all the rockets and grenades in sight. Later, they also attacked a police station, tied up the cops inside, and walked away with every gun and bullet in the place. When all this work was done, they were set for a couple of decades. Access to weapons would not be a problem for 17 November.

All of this information was in the public record. The Greece files at the CIA contained much more detail, based on the work of clandestine operatives and agency analysts, including the use of Athens as a kind of branch office for certain Muslim and Arab terrorist groups. But those details cannot be revealed here. Bottom line: Greece was not a patty-cake assignment, not by a long shot.

ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1998
, I began the operations course at CIA training facilities in the mid-Atlantic states, including one facility widely known in press accounts as the Farm. Actually, I had been to this facility several times before for course work in writing analytical papers and learning leadership techniques. This time, I was there for weapons training, lessons in counterterrorist driving, a special operations course, and more, including instruction in a set of skills America's enemies employed far too often—the fine art of acquiring and running foreign agents to work for your country or cause.

The first day of weapons training was certainly an enlightening experience for me. I was in a group of twenty or twenty-five people, most of them ex-military, several from Special Forces
units. Still, the head instructor was taking no chances. He asked two questions:

“Anybody here not own a gun? Raise your hand.” My hand was the only one airborne.

“Anybody here not ever fire a weapon?” Again, one raised hand was conspicuously alone.

“Oh, Jesus, okay, we're going to start at the beginning.”

Members in our group were trained in three weapons—two pistols and a shotgun. It turned out I tested at the top of the class with 100 percent on all three weapons. That was in marksmanship. But I also topped the class in the shooting gallery. This is the drill sometimes featured on television adventure shows and in the movies, where the shooter moves through a maze of fake buildings, and lifelike images of people pop up in a window or a doorway or around a corner—a woman holding a baby, for example—and the trainee has a split second to decide whether to fire.