Nov17’s leader Cuban-trained?
A tall, mysterious, unnamed man with curly hair and strong features, who was last sighted near Athens’s Lycabettus Hill in the mid-1980s, is believed to be the leader of the shadowy November 17 terrorist organization, the daily Ta Nea reported in its weekend edition. Citing «sources aware of the course of the investigation,» the unsigned article says that the man believed to be the «lost leader» of the gang, would be in his sixties now. He is believed to have been born in Thessaloniki, lived in Paris and traveled to Cuba for urban guerrilla training, along with about 10 other Greeks in the late 1960s. «The group of Greeks left Paris for Cuba and appears to have returned to Paris,» the report said. It notes that November 17’s first claim of responsibility for a killing (that of CIA station chief Richard Welch in Athens in December 1975), was sent to the French newspaper Liberation. Long before 1975, Ta Nea said, the shadowy leader slipped underground, living in other people’s homes, using false passports and fake names, so that even those who knew him would not be able to name him. Turkey’s claim to have European orientation provides no guarantees for Greece since the fact that both states were NATO members did not prevent Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the continued occupation of the northern part of the island, nor Turkish expression of claims on the Aegean Sea, even though it has undoubtedly headed off an all-out war between Athens and Ankara.
