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Who are the Conspiracy of Fire Cells?
(Fire Nuclei, Synomosia Pyrinon tis Fotias -- SPF -- Συνωμοσία Πυρήνων της Φωτιάς) 
updated 2 June 2010

The Greek educational system pours thousands of aspiring artists into a status-obsessed, highly politicized society that cannot afford to employ them. Banding together in collective contempt for capitalism and consumer society is one short-term solution for surplus young males (and a smaller female subculture). Members cut themselves loose from society's more onerous chains and hang out with age-mates in an abandoned building, ideally somewhere near Exarcheia, the anarchists' traditional neighborhood.

The anti-authority groups function essentially as artists' collectives, maintaining an inexpensive communal lifestyle through intermittent work, grants from tolerant relatives, or bank robbery. Within that counterculture, anti-authority violence is a rite of passage and group bonding, a form of multi-media performance art, and a chance for young males to rank themselves against their peers and rival groups in an informal but intense status competition. 

Ideology is crucial, in that it allows these (mostly middle-class) young men to overcome the moral instincts they and every other social primate are born with.  In Greece until 1990 or so, revolutionary communism  was the transcendental ideology that seemed to justify lethal violence against specific targets. As communism lost its legitimizing power, a reasonably vibrant anarchist/anti-authority subculture became more prominent.  Greek youth found gurus preaching the rejection of totalitarian social models in favor of self-liberation and an idealized model of communal self-management (e.g., bands of Neolithic hunter-gatherers whose i-Phones and birth control still miraculously function). 

The logic of libertarian individualism excludes murder as a tool of political discourse. This is not a guarantee of non-violence, in that some "anarchist" groups also reject logic as an unacceptable constraint on personal freedom. Young "anarchists" frighten their parents with a Nietzschean rhetoric of self-liberation through wanton destruction. Still, in practice the anarchist/antiauthority movement is constrained by the individualism of its ideology. Though it preaches "overthrow" (ανατροπή), the movement quietly recognizes that it has no moral basis for creating rivers of blood. Groups are too small, too anti-hierarchical, and too respectful of comrades' moral redlines to wage serious war on the Greek system.  Violence is self-limiting.

The Rise of the Fire Cells

Since the end of the 1970s, antiauthority groups in Athens routinely engage in stone-throwing, window-smashing, and fire-raising whenever a political protest has critical mass to take shelter behind. On non-demonstration days, an uneasy ceasefire prevails, with police and "anarchists" avoiding each other's territory except for occasional raiding parties.  A small group on motorcycles armed with gasoline bottles or gazakia (in simplest form a propane gas canister wrapped in a petrol-soaked rag) will destroy a bank branch, ATM, or parked car. The better-organized groups publish short proclamations on sympathetic web sites (often http://athens.indymedia.org) to explain those attacks.

The usual trigger for an attack is when a group member or friend is arrested, or when a group's territory is infringed. The group retaliates by demonstrating that police cannot protect their patrol cars or police stations from a drive-by firebombing. Police therefore think twice about arresting "anarchists" for any but the most blatant and serious crimes.

The "Conspiracy of Fire Cells" (Synomosia Pyrinon tis Fotias -- SPF) was an attempt to increase the political impact of anti-authority violence. SPF appeared on January 21, 2008, with a barrage of 12 gas canister attacks against widely dispersed banks, car dealers, and the Public Power Company in Athens and Thessaloniki, during a half-hour period just after midnight. The declared purpose of the first barrage was solidarity with Thessaloniki anarchist Vangelis Botzatzis (Μποτζατζής), arrested in November 2007 for gazaki attacks on banks (he was ultimately released). The number and coordination of SPF's attacks - multiple 4-person teams on motorbikes - alarmed police. 

SPF averaged one arson wave a month, often in Athens and Thessaloniki simultaneously. Solidarity with local and foreign anarchists and hatred of banks, police, prisons, the army, and consumer society were the themes of SPF's proclamations during its first year. SPF's early authors (there are multiple, writing in different styles, with different preoccupations) were uninterested in class struggle and the quest for a future utopia. They embraced urban warfare not as a means to an end but as an end in itself, resistance as art. Modern consumer society is "slow suicide." "The revolutionary element of arson is not only in its material destruction but also in the transgressiveness of the act."

The December 2008 Challenge

The December 2008 Athens riots overwhelmed the anti-authority movement with new recruits hungry for a revolutionary program. Forced to broaden its aims, SPF pledged to join with other groups and wage a "new, rabid (lyssasmeno) urban warfare ... now and until our last breath." The next wave of gazakia, on February 11, 2009, was the first SPF attack to capture major public attention, because it served the media's breathless narrative of reborn Greek terrorism. SPF struck targets with (loose) connections to the 17N prosecution, and dedicated those attacks, in a long, newly sophisticated proclamation, to jailed 17N spokesman Dimitris Koufodinas.

In May 2009 SPF escalated its capabilities with its first use of home-made explosives, causing minor damage to two police stations under construction in Athens and Thessaloniki. The proclamation was a more mature theoretical tract on upgrading "revolutionary terrorism" (terorismos, a word other groups rigorously avoid). 

In June 2009 SPF evolved further, with its first attack on a political target. A small time bomb (home-made gunpowder in a glued-shut pressure cooker) was hung from a staircase outside the home of ex-deputy minister of public order Hinofotis. SPF and "Nihilist Fraction" jointly claimed responsibility. On September 2, a similar bomb caused trivial damage to the heavily-guarded Ministry of Macedonia-Thrace in Thessaloniki. Another damaged the door of PASOK MP candidate Louka Katseli on September 23.

A presumed SPF safe house in Halandri was already being watched by police before the Katseli bomb. When police raided the house that same afternoon, they found one ready pressure-cooker bomb and various bomb-making scraps. Four young people, age 20-21, were arrested. One is a self-proclaimed revolutionary anarchist, Panagiotis ( Panos) Masouras. The others are students from prosperous backgrounds: Haris Hatzimichelakis, the owner of the apartment; his cousin Manos Giospas, a design student who lives with his mother upstairs; Manos's girlfriend, a photography student. Others, sought on the basis of fingerprints found there, have been hiding from police since the date of the raid. 

On October 2, 2009 SPF and "Nihilist Fraction" struck back with another pressure cooker bomb, that destroyed two motorbikes and broke windows while Prime Minister Karamanlis was giving his final election speech in the Pedio tou Areos 150 meters away. Their purpose was to deny the government any electoral benefit, proving the four arrests were not a breakthrough against SPF. A similar bomb protesting the educational system did minor damage to the entrance to the unguarded apartment building of MEP (former ND Education Minister) Marietta Giannakou on October 30, 2009.

On December 27, 2009, a four-person team struck again, with a much more powerful bomb that destroyed the entrance of a building on Syngrou Blvd. housing the Ethniki Asfalistiki insurance company and a National Bank of Greece branch. A warning call to a newspaper reduced the risk of casualties. The proclamation claiming credit was signed Guerilla Team of Terrorists/SPF (ΑΝΤΑΡΤΙΚΗ ΟΜΑΔΑ ΤΕΡΡΟΡΙΣΤΩΝ - ΣΥΝΩΜΟΣΙΑ ΠΥΡΗΝΩΝ ΤΗΣ ΦΩΤΙΑΣ). The group claimed to have gained access to powerful explosives through cooperation with other revolutionary comrades. 

The same two groups claimed credit for a harmless explosion outside Parliament on January 10, 201o, making the point that they were able to strike one of the most heavily guarded sites in Athens. Since then, SPF has struck the offices of neo-fascist Chrysi Avgi, Korydallos Prison, and the Thessaloniki courthouse complex with explosives, in each case calling in a warning beforehand. When a bomb killed a young Afghan immigrant on March 28, 2010, SPF issued a proclamation criticizing the bombers for their carelessness. 

SPF in 2010

Arrested SPF suspect Masouras produced (or parroted) SPF's early strand of Nietzschean pseudo-philosophy:

"We execute morality, prefacing catastrophe, whispering rabidly, biting the words: WAR ATTACK because only beauty and strength exist, but the cowards to balance [them] invented justice." Εκτελούμε την ηθική,προλογίζοντας την καταστροφή, σιγοψιθυρίζουμε λυσσασμένα δαγκώνοντας τις λέξεις: ΠΟΛΕΜΟΣ ΕΠΙΘΕΣΗ γιατί υπάρχει μονάχα η ομορφιά και η δύναμη,αλλά οι δειλοί για ισορροπήσουν επινόησαν τη δικαιοσύνη. (Masouras's 10/09 letter to Indymedia) 

Recent SPF proclamations have been longer, less immature, and more revolutionary in content, suggesting a new sense of collective responsibility in response to the belief, fueled by the economic crisis, that Greece has entered or will soon enter a "revolutionary period." Both in tactics (symbolic bomb attacks on buildings) and rhetoric the group is slowly evolving to resemble Revolutionary Struggle (EA) or Revolutionary Popular Struggle (ELA), both of which were uneasy coalitions between communist theoreticians and anarchist/anti-authority bombers

It may be a mistake to look for a formal membership of SPF. A more likely model is overlapping groups of friends, each with a specific set of motivations. One of SPF's main writers is older than 25, capable of disciplined, analytical Greek and with enough historical knowledge to make valid comparisons with Greece and Italy of the 1980s and 1990s. SPF proved, however, that it has no direct connection with members of ELA or older groups, by making an embarrassing mistake in its January 2010 proclamation. It quoted a pretentious phrase from a March 1985 proclamation by the Christos Kasimis Revolutionary Team (Επαναστατική Ομάδα Χρήστος Κασίμης). ELA had deduced by April 1988 that this particular proclamation was drafted by Greece's most celebrated KYP informer. 

Links with Other Groups

Greek police routinely try to link armed groups into a single umbrella organization, ignoring the philosophical differences reflected in their manifestos. The upgraded SPF hoped to help form such an umbrella, writing in February 2009 "Here there is no room for agreement or disagreement on political correctness. The important thing is our eyes behind the hoods, shining so beautifully when we fight." SPF announced in May 2009 that it had joined a new "Arsonists' Cooperative." A month later the Cooperative had vanished. However, cooperation with the "Nihilist Fraction" continued. SPF may have absorbed "Gangs of Conscience" (Symmories Syneidisis -SymSyn), which surfaced in March 2008 with a molotov attack on the Aigaleo police station. SymSyn proclaimed the "new urban guerrilla war" in December 2008, but dropped out of sight after its March 3, 2009 torching of two metro trains prompted public fury.

SPF's pressure-cooker bombs resembled four bombs planted by Armed Revolutionary Action (Enopli Epanastatiki Drasi - ENEDRA) in 2007-9. ENEDRA, with its "collective vision" -- a self-governed society in harmony with nature -- would find SPF's nihilist allies unpleasantly militarist. The real explosives used in the December 2009 bombing instantly prompted fears that SPF had joined forces with Revolutionary Struggle (EA). However, EA would be uncomfortable with SPF's nihilism and rejection of class consciousness while SPF would find EA's proclamations unreadable.

SPF carefully refused (July 2009 Hinofotis proclamation) to criticize Revolutionary Struggle (EA) and Sect of Revolutionaries (Sehta) for their deadlier violence. Still, SPF never echoed Sehta's ostentatiously brutal contempt for life, despite shared rhetorical nihilism. For bombs, SPF typically calls in two separate telephone warnings.

By their nature, anti-authority groups that espouse ambitious violence tend to be short-lived. Christos Tsoutsouvis and Mihalis Prekas, still the Greek poster children for "anarchist" violence, undervalued their own lives as well as others'. They were both shot dead by police mere weeks after unveiling their organizations in 1985 and 1987 respectively. Most rebels of Exarcheia lack the sense of long-term mission (and also the memory of Junta-era police torture) that kept traditional leftist revolutionaries like 17N disciplined and vigilant. 

After the September 23 2009 arrests, it became clear that the suburban fringe of SPF violated basic security rules of the underground armed struggle: using mobile phones, keeping incriminating materials where they lived, and being conspicuously involved in protests. I therefore predicted the arrests would probably drive SPF underground. Instead, SPF seems to have opted for a more careful and disciplined approach as it has moved beyond the territorial/tribal goals of most anarchist groups to challenge the Greek political establishment. Though SPF's operational environment is far more difficult than that ELA or 17N faced (thanks to DNA testing and sophisticated network analysis tools), it may be able to survive. It has no message, however, that can make it politically relevant.

*"Anarchist" is a generic term used by the Greek media and police to refer to ominously dressed youth who congregate in Exarcheia and throw rocks at police. True anarchists (as opposed to children who like to paint the symbol on walls) are a minority in Exarcheia's wide spectrum of anti-establishment ideologies from libertarian socialism to murderous nihilism. Members often use the term "antiexousiastes" (anti-authoritarians).

Attacks by Conspiracy of Fire Cells (SPF), Symmories Syneidisis (SymSyn), Nihilist Fraction