The group took its name from November 17, 1973 - the day a tank crashed through the gates of the Athens Polytechnic to crush a student uprising against Greece's military dictatorship, the Regime of the Colonels. That uprising was a genuine moment of national grief and courage, and many Greeks died or were wounded. When the dictatorship fell in 1974, the country began rebuilding its democracy. The men who formed 17N in 1975, led by Alexandros Giotopoulos, claimed the date and its martyrs as their own. But the students of 1973 had marched for freedom and an open society. The group that borrowed their date answered the return of democracy not with politics but with pistols.

Behind the group's communiques were real people, killed going to work or arriving home. Richard Welch was murdered outside his door. In 1989, three gunmen shot and killed Pavlos Bakoyannis, a journalist, publisher, and member of parliament who had once broadcast against the junta from exile - he died at his office entrance, leaving a wife and children. In June 2000, Brigadier Stephen Saunders, the British defence attache, was shot dead by two men on a motorbike as he drove to work through the Athens suburb of Kifissia. Across 103 known attacks, twenty-three people in all were killed - diplomats, military officers, police officials, businessmen, a publisher-politician. Each was someone's husband, father, colleague. The group cast them as symbols; they were not symbols, but men with lives that ended in the street.

What made 17N notorious was not only its violence but its endurance. The Encyclopedia of Terrorism called it durable, lethal, and successful - a group that evaded the authorities for more than twenty-five years. Its grievances were drawn from Cold War Greece: it demanded the removal of American military bases, denounced NATO and the European Union, and framed its killings as retribution for foreign interference in Greek affairs. It tried to publicize a manifesto through the European press, even reaching the publisher of a Paris newspaper through the office of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. But the leaflets and slogans never changed the arithmetic on the ground. The bodies accumulated, year after year, and the group remained faceless.

The end came not through a grand investigation but through a single mistake. In June 2002, a bomb the group was handling went off prematurely at the port of Piraeus, badly injuring one of its members. That man was taken to a hospital, and the thread investigators pulled from that one accident finally began to unravel the organization that decades of detective work had not. Arrests followed quickly. A group that had operated in near-total secrecy for twenty-seven years collapsed within weeks, its members named, its safe houses found, its weapons recovered - including pistols whose ballistics tied them back to killings stretching across the decades.

The trial of nineteen suspects opened in Athens on March 3, 2003. A twenty-year statute of limitations meant the earliest crimes, including the murder of Richard Welch, could no longer be prosecuted - a hard limit that denied some families the verdict they had waited a quarter-century for. Still, the court reached its judgment. On December 8, 2003, fifteen of the accused, including Giotopoulos and the confessed gunman Dimitris Koufontinas, were found guilty; four others were acquitted for lack of evidence. Several received multiple life sentences. The convictions were upheld on appeal in 2007. For the families of the murdered, it was a measure of justice arriving late - but arriving.