In the mid-1980s, Greece was affected by the wave of terrorism that originated in the Middle East and swept Western Europe. Terrorist incidents declined elsewhere in Western Europe in the early 1990s; however, the rate remained quite constant in Greece, bringing accusations that Greek governments had created a permissive atmosphere for such acts of violence.

In the 1990s, two domestic terrorist organizations have been active. The 17 November organization is a small Marxist group (membership estimated at below fifty) established in 1975 and named after the student uprising that protested against the military regime in November 1973, contributing to the regime's fall the next year. Within its general opposition to any foreign military and economic presence in Greece, the group's position is anti-United States, anti-Turkey, anti-NATO, and antibusiness. It is committed to violent overthrow of the government and removal of all United States military bases. The 17 November group may have links with the Red Brigades terrorists in Italy and Middle Eastern terrorist groups. The main activities have been bombings and assassinations of politicians, business executives, newspaper publishers, and United States citizens living in Greece.

The second group, the Revolutionary People's Struggle (Ellinkios Laikos Agonas--ELA), is a small, left-wing, anticapitalist, anti-imperialist revolutionary group. Its primary mode of operation is bombing buildings after giving half-hour warnings, apparently to avoid endangering lives. Connections have been established between ELA and 17 November, although the precise relationship is not known. A total of sixteen smaller terrorist organizations have been identified in Athens and Thessaloniki; all mimic the tactics and the anarchistic posture of the larger groups.

The two most serious terrorist incidents of 1994 were assassinations in Athens. The 17 November organization claimed responsibility for (and apparently used the same gun in) the January killing of a former director of the Greek National Bank and the July killing of an undersecretary of the Turkish Embassy in the name of Kurdish and Cypriot victims of Turkish "ethnic cleansing." The latter act was the third assassination of a Turkish official in the last five years. (In the fall of 1993, the newly elected PASOK government had repealed the law prohibiting media publication of terrorist statements of responsibility for assassinations, a move that brought substantial criticism when the January 1994 assassination occurred.)

The United States personnel and facilities have been frequent targets of terrorist attacks. In June 1988, a United States military attaché was assassinated. In 1994 a series of rocket attacks struck United States business establishments. Among United States offices and property attacked in 1994 were the American Life Insurance and IBM offices in Athens. An unsuccessful rocket attack at Piraeus on the British aircraft carrier Ark Royal was discovered only later. There also were frequent bombings of diplomatic, business, and government cars and buildings, often with prior telephone warnings. Almost all such incidents were traced directly or indirectly to one of the two terrorist organizations; both 17 November and ELA took credit for one bus bombing in September. Experts noted that most targets were European, and the acts of 1994 were defined as statements on Europe's role in Bosnia or on the treatment of Kurds in Europe (especially Germany).

Meanwhile, Turkish authorities have accused Greece of supporting the Kurdish Workers' Party (Partiya Karkere Kurdistan-- PKK), which has operated to destablize Turkish society, and tourist trade in particular, in its terrorist campaign for separatism for the Kurdish minority in southeastern Turkey. The PKK mode of operation often has included the killing of Turkish security personnel and the planting of explosives in urban areas. Turkey has cited the existence of a Greek-Kurdish Solidarity Committee and visits to Greece in 1994 by a top PKK official. In 1994 Turkey accused Greece of training PKK terrorists and then allowing them to cross the border into Turkey.

In the 1980s and the early 1990s, Greek antiterrorism measures received substantial international criticism because of the frequency of terrorist incidents after new enforcement campaigns had been announced. To combat terrorism, the EL.AS operates an Antiterrorist Service, which cooperates closely with its American counterparts, as well as with agencies in the other member-states of the EU and in Russia, Israel, Turkey, and Armenia. The terms of United States cooperation, which has focused on elimination of 17 November, caused controversy in Greece in 1994 when the level of involvement by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was disclosed publicly for the first time. The four-year-old agreement, never formalized to avoid the impression of United States intrusion in Greek domestic affairs, was revised in the fall of 1994 as part of the reorganization of the Antiterrorist Service. The revision, like its predecessor a nonpaper agreement, calls for a more equal sharing of intelligence (the Greek service had complained that their American counterparts were not disclosing information and that information leaks were jeopardizing operations.) The other steps of the reorganization added analytic staff and streamlined nonessential functions.

Data as of December 1994

NOTE: The information regarding Greece on this page is re-published from The Library of Congress Country Studies and the CIA World Factbook. No claims are made regarding the accuracy of Greece Terrorism information contained here. All suggestions for corrections of any errors about Greece Terrorism should be addressed to the Library of Congress and the CIA.