Richard Welch

Richard Skeffington Welch (December 14, 1929 – December 23, 1975) was a career Central Intelligence Agency officer. He was the Chief of Station (COS) in Athens, Greece, when he was assassinated by the Revolutionary Organization 17 November (17N). His assassination led to the passage of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, making it a crime to expose or identify officers working in covert roles who had not officially been acknowledged as such by the U.S. government. Early life and CIA career Welch, who was born in Hartford, Connecticut, was recruited to the CIA in 1951 upon graduation from Harvard, where he studied classics. His first assignment as a case officer was in Athens working as a civilian employee of the U.S. Department of the Army (1952–59). From 1960–64, he served in Cyprus, and then in Guatemala (1965–67), Guyana as COS (1967–69), Mexico (1969–72) and Peru as chief of staff (1972–75). He arrived in Athens, Greece, in July 1975, at a time when Greece had just come out of a period of dictatorship under the country's military junta. Welch stayed in the house occupied by several of his predecessors as chief of the CIA station. The night of December 23, 1975, five men in a stolen Simca automobile followed him home as he returned from a Christmas party. While two men covered his wife and driver, a third shot him dead with a .45 Colt M1911 pistol at close range. Welch's name and address had been published in the Athens News and Eleftherotypia in November 1975. However, a communiqué sent by 17N to the French newspaper Libération in March 1976 demonstrated that the group had been watching Welch's movements since the summer of 1975. Public exposure as a CIA agent By 1968, Welch had been publicly identified as a CIA agent in the magazine, CounterSpy. and in a book attributed to two Soviet bloc intelligence agents, Who's Who in the CIA. Former CIA agent Philip Agee published two books revealing the names of more than 1,000 alleged CIA officers in Europe and Africa, resulting in the revocation of Agee's passport Haig v. Agee. "[...]The practice of naming CIA agents allegedly led directly to the 1975 assassination of CIA station chief Richard Welch in Greece."