Stephen Saunders was a British army brigadier general serving as the United Kingdom’s defense attaché in Athens at the time of his assassination by Revolutionary Organization 17 November in March 2000. The hit was originally intended for John Kiriakou, the Central Intelligence Agency officer working the 17 November case at the U.S. embassy; the group elected to kill Saunders instead because Kiriakou’s armored vehicle and personal arms made the operation too risky.[1]
Saunders is described as “a great guy — just funny and fun and gregarious and outgoing, the life of the party kind of guy,” though Kiriakou has also called him “a media whore” who sought out television cameras — in training and temperament the opposite of Kiriakou’s own effort to avoid drawing attention.[2][3][4] Saunders — a Brigadier General — moved into the house diagonally behind Kiriakou’s, with backyards touching, in January 2000, replacing the previous British defense attaché, and quickly became a close friend.[5] His wife and two teenage daughters had recently arrived in Athens with him.
Diplomatic cocktail party
At a diplomatic cocktail party in early 2000, shortly after his arrival in Athens, Saunders publicly teased Kiriakou about the latter’s fully armored BMW 540 — the first 540 in Greece, requiring its larger engine to bear the weight of the armor and so heavy it could only be insured through a German company.[6] Saunders said:
You Americans — you’re so paranoid about security. This is an EU country, it’s a NATO country. What are you so afraid of?
Kiriakou’s reply: “You Brits live in a dreamworld if you think because they have palm trees and pretty beaches that they’re not going to kill you if they get the chance. Take my word for it — if they do get the chance, they’re going to kill you.” Saunders was assassinated two weeks later.[7][8]
Assassination
The hit took place in heavy morning traffic on Kifissias Avenue, the main artery from the suburban hills down to the U.S. embassy. Saunders was driving alone in his white Rover, a vehicle bearing a license plate beginning with the prefix YBH — the British Embassy’s plate range. The American and British embassies had both elected to forgo diplomatic plates in Greece on the assessment that diplomatic plates were too alerting; instead, both embassies’ vehicles bore distinct three-letter prefix ranges (American: YHB; British: YBH).[9][10]
The attackers used 17 November’s standard motorcycle-team method. Saunders was first shot with an anti-tank round that blew off his right hand entirely; the attackers then fired three more shots into his chest with the Welch .45 — the same pistol used to kill CIA station chief Richard Welch and, per Kiriakou, in most of the group’s subsequent killings; the gun was never recovered.[11][12][13]
A taxi driver and a motorist in an adjacent car pulled Saunders from his vehicle, placed him in the taxi, and rushed him to the Red Cross Hospital, where he died 45 minutes later.[14][13] Later that day, Saunders’s wife gave an interview to the Greek media in which she said, “This was not an attack on my husband. This was not an attack for political reasons. This was a criminal act, and it was an attack against every Greek.” Kiriakou says her dignified framing of the killing as an assault on the entire Greek nation, rather than a political act against her husband, shifted Greek public opinion — which for 27 years had regarded 17 November’s killings with indifference — into genuine outrage.[15]
Kiriakou as witness
Kiriakou, en route to the embassy through the same traffic, reached Saunders’s stationary white Rover before the British Embassy had been informed of the attack. Observing the YBH plate, the shot-out window, and “so much blood in this car he couldn’t have lived,” he telephoned his CIA station to report the death. “There’s so much blood in this car — he couldn’t have lived.”[11][16]
Manifesto and consequences
Several months after the killing, 17 November mailed a manifesto to a Greek left-wing newspaper claiming responsibility. The manifesto disclosed that the group had identified John Kiriakou — “the big spy” — as the day’s original target, but had elected to kill Saunders instead because Kiriakou was in an armored car and known to be armed:
We saw the big spy, but he was in an armored car and we knew he was armed, so we elected to carry out the revolutionary sentence on the war criminal Saunders.[1]
Within hours of the manifesto’s publication, Kiriakou and his family were exfiltrated from Greece. One car took Kiriakou to the airport; a second car collected his wife from home and his children from school. The family departed Athens on the noon Delta flight to New York. An embassy team subsequently entered the Kiriakou residence, packed the household possessions in boxes, and shipped them to the United States.[17][18] In a separate telling, Kiriakou put it simply: he had to leave Athens that same day for his own safety.[19]
The unknown observer
Among photographs developed by Kiriakou after the family’s exit from Greece was an image taken approximately a week before Saunders’s killing, during a visit from Kiriakou’s parents. In the background of the photograph — a candid of Kiriakou’s mother holding his two young sons — was a red car parked across from the residence containing an unidentified man looking directly into the camera. The license plate, run through Greek services after the fact, turned out to have been stolen.[20]
The working hypothesis adopted by CIA personnel was that 17 November had been surveilling Saunders — who was publicly visible at diplomatic events and on television, and a newly arrived one-star Brigadier General — when they noticed the YHB-prefix American embassy plate on the neighboring armored vehicle and identified it as a CIA target of opportunity, before shooting Saunders dead in broad daylight.[21][22][23] The morning of the killing, Kiriakou himself had overslept and skipped his usual surveillance-detection route; had he kept to it, some accounts suggest he would have been on the road at the moment the group struck.[24][25][26][27] Kiriakou has said he has no idea how the group found him despite his own careful surveillance-detection routine, and thinks they probably spotted him in the neighborhood while watching Saunders.[28]