Stephen Saunders (British Army Officer) - Further Claims

Further Claims

In his 2009 memoir "Reluctant Spy" (Bantam), former CIA officer John Kiriakou wrote of driving past Saunders's blood-stained car the morning of 8 June. He claimed that the reason for his abrupt departure from Greece in August 2000 was the discovery that Greek terrorist group 17 November (17N) had been stalking him instead of Saunders. He quoted the 17N proclamation taking credit for the Saunders murder: “We saw the big spy, but he was in an armored car and we knew that he was armed. So we elected to carry out the sentence on the war criminal Saunders.” (p83) However, the sentence actually reads: "The moment of the operation, bottled up at the traffic light immediately in front, was an American armed mega-spy of the CIA, while about 100 meters back was Vardinogiannis with his armed escort." This proclamation was published in Eleftherotypia on 13 Dec 2000, four months after Kiriakou's departure from Greece. Kiriakou, who described himself as driving far behind Saunders that morning, could not have been the "mega-spy" 17N described. The original proclamation makes clear that 17N was intent on a British target.

Conspiracy theories regarding 17N abound, often spread by adherents of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) to discredit potential rivals to the KKE's role as revolutionary vanguard party. The evidence presented at the 2003 17N trial and 2007 appeal appears to confirm the insistence of 17N members that they were exactly what they claimed to be, revolutionary communists engaged in "armed propaganda."

One of many attempts to implicate the U.S. government as the sponsor of 17N appeared in December 2005, when Kleanthis Grivas published an article in To Proto Thema, a Greek Sunday newspaper. He claimed that "Sheepskin", the Greek version of Gladio, NATO's stay-behind paramilitary capability during the Cold War, carried out the assassination of CIA station chief Richard Welch in Athens in 1975 and also the assassination of Stephen Saunders more than a decade after the Cold War ended. This charge was denied by the US State Department, who responded that "the Greek terrorist organization '17 November' was responsible for both assassinations", and noted that Grivas's central piece of evidence was a disinformation document of Soviet origin (the so-called "Westmoreland Field Manual") which the State department, as well as a Congressional inquiry had dismissed as a Soviet forgery. It should be noted the documents make no specific mention of Greece, 17 November, nor Welch. The State Department also highlighted the fact that, in the case of Richard Welch, "Grivas bizarrely accuses the CIA of playing a role in the assassination of one of its own senior officials" as well as the Greek government's statements to the effect that the "stay behind" network had been dismantled in 1988.