It is rare for a serving officer of Greece’s National Intelligence Service (EYP) to walk into an Athens courthouse and accuse anyone of spying on him. Yiannis Papadopoulos did exactly that, in a complaint that leans heavily on his own service record: he has served in the EYP since September 2001, led counterintelligence at its Patra unit from 2014, and commanded the unit from Jan. 7, 2021, until Jan. 29, 2024.
Those dates matter because they place him, at the exact moments he was targeted with Predator, in a sensitive post, one where, as he states in the complaint, he handled classified national security material.
There is another detail in his account of events that Papadopoulos says points to how much the sender already knew about him. The infected phone was registered in his wife’s name. She was the one that was told, in a confidential letter from the Greek data protection authority, that the phone had been compromised by the Predator spyware. But Papadopoulos claims that he was the one who had actually used that line for years, making him, in his words, the real target and recipient of the messages sent to install the spyware.
The first arrived on March 17, 2021, at 6:40 p.m.: “What happened there with our guys?” The second reached the phone on Nov. 18, 2021, at 8:50 p.m., in three parts: “Yianni, the issue is going international.”
Both messages, Papadopoulos notes, were received while he was still leading counterintelligence work for the unit, and that timing sits at the heart of his complaint. Given his post and his work handling sensitive national security information, he argues, any breach of his communications, particularly one carried out by private individuals, amounts to a leak to unknown third parties and rises to the level of espionage against the state.
Why the first-instance verdict mattered
Papadopoulos points to one thing in particular behind his decision to go to the courts now: the first-instance verdict that convicted four private individuals in the wiretapping case and handed them heavy sentences. His complaint accuses those four individuals of espionage and of forming a criminal organization, arguing they acted together, in a coordinated and organized way, specifically to breach his personal communications and seize sensitive personal information for a purpose that remains unknown to him. He is also asking prosecutors to pursue any other accomplices who may be behind the offenses he describes.
The unanswered questions
The complaint has revived a question lawyers keep raising: what became of the personal data and files pulled from the phones of confirmed Predator targets. Those targets, were identified by the Greek data protection authority, in a report that was compiled under its then president, Konstantinos Menoudakos, a former honorary president of the Council of State, the country’s supreme administrative court.
Where those files, covering politicians, military officers and figures from the EYP and the judiciary, have sat for the years since remains unknown. Legal sources told the newspaper TA NEA that had the phones on the data protection authority list been examined earlier, and had the victims been called to testify at the first stage of the preliminary inquiry, the case might have taken a very different path through the courts.
Legal sources expect prosecutors to weigh Papadopoulos’s complaint carefully, both on its own claims of espionage and as a possible trigger for reopening the wider wiretapping file, which has sat in the Supreme Court prosecutor’s archive.
That file remains active in the courts regardless. The four individuals already convicted are due to appeal before a three-member Athens court in early December 2026, and three other Predator victims, PASOK leader Nikos Androulakis, former minister Christos Spirtzis and journalist Thanassis Koukakis, have separately taken their own cases to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Source: TA NEA
