The month before, the U.S. State Department had named Greece as “one of the weakest links” in Europe’s defenses against terrorism. It counted 20 attacks against American targets in Greece last year –a toll second only to Colombia’s, and attributable largely to November 17. Named for the day in 1973 when the Greek Army killed dozens of students protesting a U.S.-backed junta, the group has since murdered 22 people, including four Americans, two Turks and many wealthy Greeks. For years now American and British officials have suspected that Greece’s governing Socialist Party is less than eager to pursue terrorists who are its distant ideological cousins, but they may have to scrap ideology for pragmatism. With Athens’ blessing, Scotland Yard dispatched agents to join the hunt. And Foreign Minister George Papandreou promised a “most merciless” pursuit of Saunders’s killers.
This would be new. November 17 represents the violent fringe of a left-wing nationalism that has deep roots in Greece –and may help explain why the terrorist cell has evaded capture so brazenly for so long. Police ballistics tests show the shells that killed Saunders were fired by the same .45 used in five other attacks, including the 1989 murder of Pavlos Bakoyannis, son-in-law of a former prime minister. The corner where Saunders died was the scene of the ambush slayings of a U.S. Navy captain in 1983 and a Greek businessman in 1988. Yet, after all these years, the police say they have compiled only a vague description of one suspect: a man about 30 years old with blood type B. In a 13-page communique claiming responsibility for the “execution” of Brigadier Saunders, November 17 members mocked their pursuers and boasted that they’d never be so “stupid” as to leave a trail of clues.
Their rhetoric is easier to follow. November 17 said it killed Saunders because of his role in the “Nazi-like bombardment” of Serbia by NATO. That’s not particularly radical in Greece, a NATO state that sees Serbia as a fellow Christian Orthodox nation, not an aggressor. During the war in Kosovo, group members struck five times at NATO targets in Athens –yet inspired little outrage in Greece. They launched a rocket at the German ambassador’s residence, set off a bomb at the Dutch Embassy and inspired copycat attacks on U.S. car dealers and banks. Now they claim to have killed Saunders for his “important role” in an unjust war. “That is a load of crap,” says British Foreign Office spokesman Nev Johnson, his voice shaking with rage. “There was no moral value in killing him. He had no key role. It is just an excuse: let’s hang it on the Kosovo coat-peg.”
Greek Prime Minister Costas Simitis can’t afford the label “soft on terror.” Heavily dependent on the tourist trade, Greece will play host to the 2004 Summer Olympics. Just four days before Saunders’s murder, a U.S. congressional subcommittee had recommended sanctions against Greece for its weak record against terror. And last week former CIA director R. James Woolsey told NEWSWEEK and others that, in his judgment, Greek government officials have been sitting on “substantial information about November 17” that could have broken the group years ago. The Greek government curtly replied: “It would be nice if he could provide that knowledge to our authorities.”
Yet many Greeks are eager to shed a lingering image as an unstable stepchild of Europe. Michalis Chrysochoidis, the minister of Public Order, said Friday that while the “political climate” wasn’t right in the post-junta years for a war on November 17, it is now. He stopped short of accepting a U.S. invitation to sign a joint police cooperation accord, which socialists see as a U.S. bid to dominate their affairs. Still, suspicion of the United States is giving way to anger at November 17. “I don’t care if Greek police catch them or American cowboys or Chinese,” so long as they’re caught, wrote columnist Yannis Pretenteris in the daily To Vima. In a public plea, Heather Saunders urged witnesses to her husband’s murder to come forward “for the sake and future of Greece within the European Community.” And she’s right: Greeks will keep quiet at their own risk.
