‘Success Begets Success’

When Richard Welch, the CIA's station chief in Athens, was assassinated in 1975, few had ever heard of the terrorist organization called 17 November that claimed responsibility. Even fewer would have believed it would take the persistent efforts of a tireless FBI agent to help dismantle the group nearly three decades later.

Robert Clifford was in high school when Welch was assassinated. Clifford was commissioned in the Navy in 1981, the peak of the Cold War. He left the service in 1988 and the following year joined the FBI, embarking on a career in counterterrorism that would take him around the globe. But it was his work in North Carolina in the late 1990s that became his ticket to Greece. There Clifford supervised a counterterrorism team that penetrated a Lebanese Hezbollah cell that was trafficking in tobacco in a scheme to fund terrorist operations in the Middle East.

FBI officials in Washington on June 2, 2000, asked Clifford if he would consider taking the job of U.S. legal attaché to Greece after he wrapped up the Hezbollah case in North Carolina. They specifically wanted him to resurrect the case against 17 November and improve a faltering relationship with Greek legal authorities. Clifford was still selling the idea to his wife and young children six days later when 17 November members assassinated Brigadier Stephen Saunders, the British defense attaché in Athens.

"You can imagine I had some explaining to do," he says. Whatever his family's trepidations were, they moved to Athens that fall and Clifford launched into the challenge of unraveling the workings of a group about which very little was known. By then, 17 November had claimed responsibility for dozens of bombings and assassinations. The organization had killed five U.S. embassy employees and wounded dozens more Americans in Greece. The Marxist organization blamed the United States for supporting the military junta that came to power in Greece in 1967 and collapsed seven years later.

"For close to 25 years, 17 November was killing Americans without ever having a single member identified," Clifford says. "There were several attempts between the United States government and the government of Greece to follow through on these investigative leads, but there was really no comprehensive, focused, intelligence-driven effort to do this."

One of the first things Clifford did was to work with Greek law enforcement officials to establish a strong training program in forensics, crime-scene management and developing lines of questioning. He also helped Greek officials craft laws that would give the government expanded authority for terrorism investigations. After democracy was restored following the junta in 1974, the Greek police services had largely been stripped of power.

Clifford reviewed the entire case file, from the initial assassination of Welch in 1975 to the most recent assassination of Saunders in 2000. It was a large file: The Center for Defense Information reports that 17 November was believed to have been responsible for more than 100 attacks and 23 fatalities during that period. "I defined what leads had been pursued and what leads had not been pursued, and provided a complete re-view of what evidence could be examined again. I was trying to bring this all together and provide a strong plan to start pursuing these terrorists," Clifford says.

He worked closely with his British counterparts, some of whom he had collaborated with on previous terrorism investigations. At the same time, public ambivalence in Greece toward 17 November began to change, after Heather Saunders, the widow of the assassinated British defense attaché, spoke publicly about her anguish and created a victims' lobbying group.

A break in the case came in June 2002, when a member of 17 November accidentally detonated a bomb he was setting. "These bombings happen all the time in Greece," says Clifford. But this time, police discovered a .38-caliber revolver on the bomber and ran a ballistics check on it, "a logical step but something that is not always done here," Clifford says. It turned out that the revolver was forensically linked to slugs removed from past victims of 17 November.

One thing led to another. Safe houses were discovered. Identifications were made. Greek authorities established a toll-free number for people to call with information. "Success begets success. It all started coming together," Clifford says. Within months, 19 members of 17 November had been arrested, and by December 2003, 15 of those cases had been successfully prosecuted. U.S. Ambassador to Greece Thomas Miller credits Clifford's extraordinary leadership and productive relationships with Greek authorities in breaking 17 November after 25 years of dead ends in the case.

"Bob's efforts will be remembered for years to come," says Gary Bald, the FBI's assistant director for counterterrorism.