Members' Voices

Greece’s Unfinished Reckoning With Political Violence 

By Derek Owen

The May 21st, 2026 release of Alexandros Giotopoulos—the convicted mastermind behind 17 November, the far-left terrorist group responsible for decades of assassinations and bombings—may be legally permissible under Greek law. But legality alone does not erase broader questions about whether Greece ever fully confronted the moral and institutional failures surrounding 17 November. The deeper issue is about how democracies decay when trust in institutions collapses and societies apply different moral and procedural standards depending on who commits crimes—especially acts of political violence.

For 27 years, 17 November carried out assassinations, bombings, and executions across Greece, killing diplomats, intelligence officers, politicians, journalists, and civilians—including CIA station chief Richard Welch in Athens in 1975. Yet a host of former intelligence and law enforcement officials involved in investigating the group have described to me reluctance and a litany of missed that allowed the network to survive far longer than it should have. One former CIA officer I interviewed—whose work against 17 November remains so sensitive he still operates under a pseudonym—described egregious investigative lapses, including bombing scenes being cleared within hours and evidence disposed of before meaningful forensic analysis could be conducted. In 2001, even former U.S. Ambassador Thomas Niles told The New York Times he believed elements within Greece’s political establishment had discouraged serious investigation of the group for years.

What ultimately dismantled 17 November was not the culmination of a relentless manhunt, but an accident: a bomb prematurely exploded in the hands of operative Savvas Xiros in 2002, leading authorities to core members of the organization, several of whom lived under their true identities for years.

Greek researcher Angelos Nastoulis described the atmosphere surrounding the group’s legacy as one of “private mourning” and “collective silence,” where many victims of terrorism were denied full public empathy because violence was too often viewed through ideological and political lenses rather than condemned on universal moral grounds. The danger of that kind of moral corrosion is hardly new to democratic societies—or to Greece itself.

More than 2,400 years ago, the Athenian general and statesman Pericles argued in his famous Funeral Oration that democracies survive only when citizens are willing to defend their laws and institutions, even at great cost. In the decades that followed, Athens gradually abandoned many of the civic virtues and restraints Pericles championed, descending into factionalism, political vengeance, and instability before ultimately falling under the rule of the Thirty Tyrants.

That is why 17 November still matters to Greece and beyond. Democracies rarely collapse in one dramatic moment. They erode through selective justice, institutional cowardice, and loss of trust. Once societies stop defending the rule of law, the death knell has already sounded.