Free The Company We Keep by Robert Baer

starts again.
    “And whatever you do, don’t take pictures. Don’t even take a camera with you. Just find out what the neighborhood’s like. But no, repeat no, pictures—17N are cold-blooded murderers.”
    I bite my tongue. This is what we do for a living: take pictures without anyone seeing us do it. It also annoys me that he talks as if we don’t know what November 17 is, the Greek terrorist group that assassinated a CIA operative here in 1975. I concentrate on my souvlaki.
    It was a little after ten on December 23, 1975, when the driver pulled up in front of the Athens villa of Richard Welch. Welchtold the driver he and his wife would walk the rest of the way. The driver got out to open the gate for them.
    The Welches were coming back from a reception, happy that the Christmas season was winding down. It had been pretty much dinner parties and cocktails every night for the last month. They still had not gotten used to the Greek custom of eating late.
    A Harvard-trained classicist and fluent in modern Greek, Welch had joined the CIA when America’s elite still believed in careers in intelligence. Now his star was on the rise. Athens was an important assignment. Two years here, and he could pretty much count on getting a flagship posting.
    Just as the driver swung the gate open, a car pulled up behind the Welches. Two men got out. The chauffer would later say one was tall and the other short. But that was all he could see. They were just shapes, dark on dark. The tall man walked toward Welch and told him in Greek to put his hands up in the air. The short one covered Mrs. Welch with his pistol.
    The tall man fired three quick shots into Welch’s chest. He and the other man walked back to their car and drove away. Welch died on the spot. The police found casings on the ground but none with a fingerprint.
    A group calling itself November 17, or 17N as it would become known, claimed responsibility in a communiqué. No one had heard of the group, but the communiqué made it clear from where it took its name: November 17, 1973, the day the Greek military junta violently put down a demonstration at Athens’s polytechnic school. Subsequent communiqués led to the belief that 17N held some odd Trotskyite ideology, and, needless to say, the United States was its main enemy.
    Welch was the first of more than a dozen similar assassinations, many with the same .45 semi-automatic, which put 17N near the top of the CIA’s target list. But we are still struggling to know justthe basics, even the name of 17N’s leader. Each and every lead, no matter how tenuous or implausible, has to be followed up on. That’s what Jacob and I are here to do, all the while trying to make ourselves as invisible as 17N.
    The next morning Jacob and I start out for Koukaki early enough so people will still be on the street going to work, but we catch rush-hour traffic on Konstantinou Avenue and end up lost. By the time we get to the 17N house’s street, the neighborhood is quiet—we don’t have the protective screen of people on the street we were counting on. The only person in view is an old woman in a black shawl hanging laundry on a second-floor balcony of a house next to the 17N house. There’s an occasional passing car, but that’s pretty much it.
    Jacob finds a parking place fifty yards down the street from the 17N house, but a truck partly blocks our view. Jacob starts to move the car, but I tell him to let it go. We should do what Tom said, and only get a feel for the street. I watch the house for a while and then notice that Jacob has his camera out, loading it with film. “Come on, no pictures,” I say. I look around to make sure no one is looking at us.
    Jacob mumbles something in Dutch about Tom and clicks the camera shut, the film loaded. He’s fiddling with a jacket on the dash, which he’s going to use to conceal the camera, when I see a flatbed truck backing down the street, loaded with twenty sacks of something. The truck